Representation of Kashmir: A Diasporic longing/mourning for Homeland in Agha Shahid Ali’s Poems

Abstract

Home land, for Agha Shahid Ali, like any other emigrant, is a point of focus in diaspora. When people in diaspora encounter a new environment, they react to it depending upon the temperament and socio-cultural gap between their home country and host country. There encounter leads either to assimilation or integration or separation or marginalization. These are the particular feelings of the people in diaspora; however, the experience of diaspora is relative: everybody has his own particular experience. As Amato says, “All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way” (Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History;2002). Agha Shahid Ali’s engagement with his home land (Kashmir) is twofold: one, like any other diasporic writer he longs to return home; and second, it is his mourning of violence and terror in his homeland, Kashmir. All of the Ali’s collections of poetry deal directly or indirectly with the theme of diasporic consciousness about Kashmir like Bone-Sculpture (1972), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), The Country without a Post Office (!997), Rooms are Never Finished(2002) and other poems.