Poem Postcard From Kashmir

Postcard from Kashmir

 

By Agha Shahid Ali

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,

My home a neat four by six inches.

 

I always loved neatness i always hold

The half inch Himalayas in my hand.

 

This is home and this is the closest

I will ever be to home. When I return,

The colours won't be so brilliant,

the Jhelum's waters so clean,

so ultramarine. My love

so overexposed.

 

And my memory will be a little

out of focus, in it

a giant negative,black

and white,still undeveloped.

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir,He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that Ali’s poetry swirls around insecurity and “obsessions [with]…memory, death, history, family ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self-consciousness about being a poet.”

Summery

In Agha Shahid Ali's poem named "Postcard from Kashmir," the speaker portrays getting a postcard from his local land, "Kashmir," a district of the Indian subcontinent. Portions of Kashmir are constrained by India, Pakistan, and China, and as a matter of fact debates among India and Pakistan about the region are well established and have frequently prompted equipped struggle.

In the initial two lines of the sonnet, the speaker demonstrates that the postcard contains a photo of (part of) Kashmir, a spot the speaker actually thinks about his "home" (2). Clearly he is topographically far off from Kashmir, a reality that utilizes "home" unexpected. He might have been brought into the world in Kashmir and may have lived there for quite a bit of his life, however presently he is clearly living elsewhere, maybe even in some Western country like the United Kingdom or the United States.

Regardless, the speaker next specifies that he "consistently cherished tidiness" - a characteristic that underscores the incongruity that he can now hold "the half-inch Himalayas in my grasp" (4). The huge mountain range has been decreased to a little, clean picture, which is clearly not the sort of tidiness the speaker really wants. One of the most amazing parts of his country has subsequently been contracted and made to appear to be undeniably less noteworthy and huge. Albeit the speaker holds the postcard, he has in additional exacting ways moved away from the land he cherishes.

Maybe the most interesting and confounding lines of the sonnet are these:

This is home. And this is the closest.

I'll ever be to home. . . . (5-6)

Does the speaker imply that Kashmir is home? Provided that this is true, for what reason does he say that "this" is the nearest he will at any point be to home? One could expect that he implies that he can't get back to Kashmir, thus the postcard should do the trick as an unfortunate substitute for a real visit. In the exceptionally next express, be that as it may, the speaker appears to consider an unavoidable "return" (6). Thusly, when he says "This is home," does he mean the anonymous spot where he presently lives, which appears to be an unfortunate fill in for his genuine home of Kashmir? The stating of lines 5-6 isn't completely clear and contributes an intriguing vagueness to the sonnet.

The speaker expects that when he truly does really get back to Kashmir, (in actuality, and not just in his creative mind), the genuine sights of the spot won't live up neither to the image of them introduced in the postcard nor to the glorified memory of them in the speaker's brain. In the sonnet's end lines, the speaker proposes that his memory of Kashmir is untrustworthy and that Kashmir itself might be like

. . . a giant negative, dark

and white, still undeveloped. (13-14)

These lines - and particularly the final word - are interesting. They might suggest that Kashmir is still during the time spent improvement as a spot, that it is at present still excessively enraptured to live up either to its speaker's romanticized memory or to the postcard's glorified show of its excellence.

Critical Commentary:

Kashmir is the most inflammable part between the India and Pakistan. Because of the debate numerous local individuals of the district moved from that point, Kashmir is the paradise of the earth still there are away from their country. Through this sonnet artist attempts to zero in on the feeling of individuals of the Kashmir. Sentimentality for the country is the focal subject of the sonnet. Artist is looking for the mission for personality.