I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight Poem Agha Shahid Ali Analysis

      I see Kashmir from Delhi at Midnight

 

Agha Shahid Ali's "I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight" is maybe one of the most notable investigations of the unending battle that has been a piece of the existences of individuals of Kashmir since Indian autonomy. Roy's novel, as well, is such an investigation. Both abstract works utilize the city of Delhi (New or Old) as a focal point to basically see the situation in Kashmir which, tragically, have just decayed further in the delay between the distribution of these two works.

The initial segment of Roy's novel is an experience through the city of Shahjahanabad, the capital of the head Shah Jahan during his rule, referred to us now as Old Delhi. The city, whose assorted and syncretic legacy can't be unacknowledged, is rejuvenated by Roy's idyllic portrayals. Portraying Delhi's change into the "supercapital of the world's beloved new superpower [India]," Roy composes,

    Dark flyovers wound out of her Medusa skull, tangling and unwinding under the yellow sodium murkiness. . . Old mysteries were collapsed into the wrinkles of her free, material skin. Each kink was a road, every road a festival. . . [T]his was to be the beginning of her restoration. . . It was the mid year Grandma turned into a prostitute.

The clever not just crosses the actual space of the city—the planned domain—yet in addition includes the "rhythm and beat of the [Old Delhi] area" exemplified by the becoming aware of a surge of Urdu denunciation "that was interfered with five times each day by the call to petition from the Jama Masjid. . . ." The spaces of the Khwabgah (where "Sacred Souls caught in some unacceptable bodies were freed") and Jannat Guest House (situated in the cemetery and occupied by individuals from varying backgrounds, associated past the personality markers that partition them) remain contrary to the Duniya, the universe of numerous detestations.

The second piece of the clever dives solidly in the center of one of the best of these repulsions, Kashmir, where "the dead will reside perpetually; and the residing are just dead individuals, imagining." The image of Kashmir introduced in The Ministry is downright somber, absolutely reality. The incongruity, composes, Roy is that

    . . . in the event that you put four Kashmiris in a room and request that they indicate what precisely they mean by Azadi, what precisely are its philosophical and geographic forms, they would likely wind up cutting each other's throats.

About fights, Roy composes that the thinking, at the degree of government, is that

    . . . allowing the populace to vent its sentiments and yell its trademarks every once in a while would keep that outrage from aggregating and incorporating into an unmanageable bluff of fury.

How to recount a broke story?
It is this "broken story", an account of savagery and fear, that Roy should tell through The Ministry. Nearly expecting the analysis in regards to the manner by which she decides to recount to these accounts—the too thick political critique fit more for verifiable, the dispersed story that made Jerry Pinto remark that the clever peruses like a first draft and required publication mediation, the offhanded, snide, take-it-with-a-kilo-of-salt method of composing, and the utilization of different story gadgets and storytellers as though incapable to settle on one tone or surface as Somak Ghoshal comments—Roy composes that one can just tell them by "becoming everything."

This way of portrayal is likewise exemplified in the novel by S. Tilottama's (Tilo's) diary named The Reader's Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children. Tilo winds up heading out to Kashmir "fanatically, after a seemingly endless amount of a large number of months, after a seemingly endless amount of many years, like she was looking for something she had abandoned." Soon she starts a course of apparently arbitrary documentation:

    She gathered pieces of stories and puzzling memorabilia that seemed to have no reason. . . Throughout the long term, her unconventional, battered chronicle became especially perilous. It was a document of recuperations, not from a flood, but rather from one more sort of calamity.

In this documentation, Tilo is the same as Dr Azad Bhartiya. At the point when the police removes his papers and duplicates of his News and Views, Dr Azad Bhartiya won't lose a second and promptly sets to work, "beginning the relentless course of documentation without any preparation."

Roy perceives the significance of writing in fundamentally captivating with the social, social, and political situations around oneself; she won't express "refined stories in which despite the fact that not a lot occurs there's parts to expound on." Tilo says that this is impossible in Kashmir as there is "a lot of blood for great writing." Through Tilo, Roy brings up a significant issue, which might fill in as a reaction to the previously mentioned analysis,

    What is the OK measure of blood for great writing?

A missing fine equilibrium
The Ministry is, unquestionably, a significant book, a sharp analysis of present-day Indian governmental issues which has its foundations immovably in the political and financial errors of the past. Notwithstanding, actually, I observed the story and the characters compromised for its political plan. I wound up floating away while perusing the novel; the plot couldn't hold my premium for a really long time and I never ended up altogether put resources into the characters and their lives.

The novel has its snapshots of wonderful virtuoso, with a supported symbolism of birds of various types (the stripped hardback of the novel, curiously, has an emblazoned image of a vulture, for example, in the initial lines,

    At the point when the bats leave, the crows get back home. Not all the commotion of their homecoming fills the quiet left by the sparrows that have disappeared, and the old white-upheld vultures, overseers of the dead for in excess of a hundred million years, that have been cleared out.

Furthermore in the lines,

    It caused one to feel that Kashmir truly had a place with those animals. That not even one of us who were battling about it. . . reserved the option to guarantee the really brilliant excellence of that spot for ourselves.

In any case, (and there is dependably an exceptionally solid 'however' with this novel) regularly the symbolism appears to be constrained and the political analysis eclipses all the other things. A fine harmony between the beautiful and the political is, tragically, missing from the book.

To close, I am enticed to repeat an intriguing reality about Rooh Afza that Roy presents in the book. Rooh Afza, a well known brand of sherbet in India, implies the 'Mixture of the Soul' in Persian. It was established by a hakim and was intended to be a tonic. The beverage controlled the Indian market for a very long time before freedom however confronted a genuine mishap later segment. Notwithstanding, it before long opened a branch in Pakistan and later, in Bangladesh. Yet, as Roy tells us, "the Elixir of the Soul that had endure wars and the bleeding birth of three new nations, was, as most things on the planet, bested by Coca-Cola." The utilization of the action word "bested" here is maybe conscious and characteristic.

 

 

 Poem

 Jammu & Kashmir remains under lockdown with severe restrictions on communication and movement of citizens, ever since the government scrapped its special status on August 5. In such trying circumstances, Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight becomes all the more relevant. A video of the recitation of the poem is added above.

I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight

One must wear jeweled ice in dry plains

to will the distant mountains to glass.

The city from where no news can come

Is now so visible in its curfewed nights

that the worst is precise:

From Zero Bridge

a shadow chased by searchlights is running

away to find its body. On the edge

of the Cantonment, where Gupkar Road ends,

it shrinks almost into nothing, is

nothing by Interrogation gates 

so it can slip, unseen, into the cells: 

Drippings from a suspended burning tire 

Are falling on the back of a prisoner,

the naked boy screaming, “I know nothing.”

2

The shadow slips out, beckons Console Me,

and somehow there, across five hundred miles,

I’m sheened in moonlight, in emptied Srinagar,

but without any assurance for him.

On Residency Road, by Mir Pan House,

unheard we speak: “I know those words by heart

(you once said them by chance): In autumn

when the wind blows sheer ice, the chinar leaves

fall in clusters –

one by one, otherwise.”

“Rizwan, it’s you, Rizwan, it’s you,” I cry out

as he steps closer, the sleeves of his phiren torn.

“Each night put Kashmir in your dreams,” he says,

then touches me, his hands crusted with snow,

whispers, “I have been cold a long, long time.”

3

“Don’t tell my father I have died,” he says,

and I follow him through blood on the road

and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners

left behind, as they ran from the funeral,

victims of the firing. From windows we hear

grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall

on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames,

it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,

the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.

Kashmir is burning:

By that dazzling light

we see men removing statues from temples.

We beg them, “Who will protect us if you leave?”

They don’t answer, they just disappear

on the roads to the plains, clutching the gods.

4

I won’t tell your father you have died, Rizwan,

but where has your shadow fallen, like cloth

on the tomb of which saint, or the body

of which unburied boy in the mountains,

bullet-torn, like you, his blood sheer rubies

on Himalayan snow?

I’ve tied a knot

with green thread at Shah Hamdan, to be

untied only when the atrocities

are stunned by your jeweled return, but no news

escapes the curfew, nothing of your shadow,

and I’m back, five hundred miles, taking off

my ice, the mountains granite again as I see

men coming from those Abodes of Snow

with gods asleep like children in their arms.