Agha Shahid Ali, a closer look

A new biography of the poet traces his friendships with figures like Begum Akhtar and the journey he charted from Kashmir to the US, delving into the life, concerns and politics that shaped his verse

Author Manan Kapoor whose debut novel, The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky, was published when he was only 21, remembers being drawn to literature and poetry early in life, his mother quoting poets like TS Eliot to him and her books covered with marginalia. He started writing in his teens and although realising that his interest and skills as a writer lay in prose, poetry, he says, has always had an important place in his life and thoughts. 

Kapoor had been reading Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry for a long time, but it was while studying for a Master’s degree at Ambedkar University in Delhi that he started looking closely at the poet’s life and was surprised to find, despite the poet’s renown, how little there was on it beyond the academic writing on his works. It was a gap he sought to fill, attempting the poet’s first conclusive biography with A Map of Longings: Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Penguin), to be released on June 7. “…I really felt that he had lived a life that deserved to be celebrated, that deserved to be written about. In a way, I ended up writing the book that I wanted to read,” says Kapoor in an email interview with mid-day.

Over the last four years, Kapoor travelled to various cities and spoke to many of the poet’s friends, family, students and acquaintances and recalls his meetings with writers like Amitav Ghosh and Kamila Shamsie whom he has read and admired for long as particularly memorable. He also mentions his interactions with Shahid’s brother Agha Iqbal Ali at the India International Centre in Delhi and his walks with him around Srinagar, discussing the poet and visiting his old haunts. He points out that the only real hurdle he faced at this time, which he also writes about in the introduction, is when in the summer of 2019, he decided to visit the Agha Shahid Ali archives at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. This being the time of Trump’s presidency, he was denied a visa. While he received documents from the archives, he never got the chance to visit himself—something that will always haunt him.

Manan Kapoor

Shahid’s life and works have been a source of continued fascination for Kapoor who has written several essays, including his dissertation on his poetry. But research for the book brought forth new facts. “Anyone who has read [Shahid’s] poetry knows that he really admired Begum Akhtar since she comes up so often. But it was only after speaking to his friends and family, reading some of the unpublished materials and entries from his journals that I realised how close they were, all that he learned from her and to what extent she influenced him. The same goes for his friendship with James Merrill,” says Kapoor.

Among the things that has fascinated the author the most is Shahid’s single-minded commitment to his craft. In A Map of Longings, Kapoor writes about the poet’s relentless zeal towards his work and its improvement, and cites a famous story, which he believes reveals much about him: “Once, at Barcelona Airport, the woman at the security asked him what he did. He said he was a poet. She then asked him what he was doing there. ‘Writing poetry,’ he replied. Frustrated, the woman asked him if he was carrying anything that could be dangerous to other passengers and Shahid placed his hand over his chest and said: ‘Only my heart’… Like Begum Akhtar, who he admired so deeply, Shahid too was an embodiment of his craft,” says Kapoor.

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