[Reader-list] on Agha Shahid Ali, 26 march IIC

[Inder Salim]

Chaired by Shahid Amin

on Wednesday, 26 March 2014, 6 pm
at Lecture Hall 2, India International Centre Annexe, New Delhi


Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), who was born in Delhi and raised between there
and Srinagar, is arguably the most important Anglophone poet of his
generation from South Asia. A cartographer of intimate emotions in
exquisite detail, he also invented a poetic language for exploring the most
intractable political conflicts of our region. At the heart of his agonized
and ecstatic language is the meaning of Kashmir - the place as well as the
myth. He took a tender interest in the lives of women in the traditional
sectors of society in the subcontinent. And he insisted that English as a
language of poetic expression take account of its indigenous and vernacular
environment. This talk will examine the main preoccupations of Shahid's
verse and focus on his most audacious experiment - to stage a poetic
encounter between two different languages. We might say that here he
essayed the impossible: attempting to write Urdu poetry in English.

Aamir R. Mufti was born and raised in Karachi and studied anthropology and
literature, doing a Ph.D. at Columbia University under the supervision of
Edward Said. His book, *Enlightenment in the Colony*, is a re-examination
of the crisis of Muslim identity in colonial and postcolonial South Asia,
comparing it with the question of Jewish identity in western Europe in the
nineteenth century. Another book, *Forget English!*(forthcoming), is a
historical and critical examination of the idea of world literature. He has
published widely on modern Urdu literature, postcolonial secularism,
minority cultures, Palestinian dispossession, and the history of
Orientalism. He teaches comparative literature at UCLA.