Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

It was Shahid's mother who had introduced him to the music of Begum Akhtar: "With her I'd heard — on 78 rpm— Peer Gynt…/ and Ghalib's grief in the voice of Begum Akhtar." In Shahid's later poems, Begum Akhtar was to become an image for the embodiment of his own sorrow after his mother's death. Shahid's mother, a woman of striking beauty, happened to have a close, indeed startling, resemblance to Begum Akhtar. Shahid's walls were hung with many pictures of both, and I would frequently mistake the one for the other. What then of Shahid's belief that he resembled Begum Akhtar? There is a mystery here that I am content to leave untouched.

Shahid was born in New Delhi in 1949. Later, in one of the temporal inversions that marked his poetry, he was to relive his conception in his poem "A Lost Memory of Delhi":

I am not born

it is 1948 and the bus turns

onto a road without name

There on his bicycle

my father

He is younger than I

At Okhla where I get off

I pass my parents

strolling by the Jamuna River

Shahid's father's family was from Srinagar, in Kashmir. They were Shiites, who are a minority among the Muslims of Kashmir. Shahid liked to tell a story about the origins of his family. The line was founded, he used to say, by two brothers who came to Kashmir from Central Asia. The brothers had been trained as hakims, specializing in Yunani medicine, and they arrived in Kashmir with nothing but their knowledge of medical lore; they were so poor that they had to share a single cloak between them. But it so happened that the then maharajah of Kashmir was suffering from terrible stomach pains, "some kind of colic." Learning that all the kingdom's doctors had failed to cure the ailing ruler, the two brothers decided to try their hand. They gave the maharajah a concoction that went through the royal intestines like a plunger through a tube, bringing sudden and explosive relief. Delighted with his cure, the grateful potentate appointed the brothers his court physicians. Thus began the family's prosperity. "So you see," Shahid would comment, in bringing the story to its conclusion, "my family's fortunes were founded on a fart."

By Shahid's account, his great-grandfather was the first Kashmiri Muslim to matriculate. The story went that to sit for the examination, he had to travel all the way from Srinagar to Rawalpindi in a tonga. Later, he too became an official at the court of the maharajah of Kashmir. He had special charge of education, and took the initiative to educate his daughter. Shahid's grandmother was thus one of the first educated women in Kashmir. She passed the matriculation examination, took several other degrees, and in time became the inspector of women's schools. She could quote poetry in four languages: English, Urdu, Farsi, and Kashmiri. Shahid's father, Agha Ashraf Ali, continued the family tradition of public service in education. He taught at Jamia Millia University, in New Delhi, and went on to become the principal of the Teacher's College in Srinagar. In 1961 he enrolled at Ball State Teacher's College, in Muncie, Indiana, to do a Ph.D. in comparative education. Shahid was twelve when the family moved to the United States, and for the next three years he attended school in Muncie. Later the family moved back to Srinagar, and that was where Shahid completed his schooling. But it was because of his early experience, I suspect, that he was able to take America so completely in his stride when he arrived in Pennsylvania as a graduate student. The idea of a cultural divide or conflict had no purchase in his mind: America and India were the two poles of his life, and he was at home in both in a way that was utterly easeful and unproblematic.

Shahid took his undergraduate degree at the University of Kashmir, in Srinagar. Although he excelled there, graduating with the highest marks in his class, he did not recall the experience with any fondness. "I learned nothing there," he told me once. "It was just a question of ratto-maroing [learning by heart]." In 1968 he joined Hindu College in Delhi University to study for an M.A. in English literature. Once again he performed with distinction, and he went on to become a lecturer at the same college. It was in this period that he published his first collection of poems, with P. Lal of the Writer's Workshop in Calcutta.

Shahid's memories of Delhi University were deeply conflicted: he became something of a campus celebrity but also endured rebuffs and disappointments that may well have come his way only because he was a Muslim and a Kashmiri. Although he developed many close and lasting friendships, he also suffered many betrayals and much unhappiness. In any event, he was, I think, deeply relieved when Penn State University, in College Park, Pennsylvania, offered him a scholarship for a Ph.D.

His time at Penn State he remembered with unmitigated pleasure: "I grew as a reader, I grew as a poet, I grew as a lover." He fell in with a vibrant group of graduate students, many of whom were Indian. This was, he often said, the happiest time of his life. Later Shahid moved to Arizona to take a degree in creative writing. This in turn was followed by a series of jobs in colleges and universities: Hamilton College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and finally the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he was appointed professor in 1999. He was on leave from Utah, doing a brief stint at New York University, when he had his first blackout, in February 2000.

After 1975, when he moved to Pennsylvania, Shahid lived mainly in America. His brother was already here, and they were later joined by their two sisters. But Shahid's parents continued to live in Srinagar, and it was his custom to spend the summer months with them there every year: "I always move in my heart between sad countries." Traveling between the United States and India, he was thus an intermittent but firsthand witness ( shahid ) to the mounting violence that seized the region from the late 1980s onward:

It was '89, the stones were not far, signs of change everywhere (Kashmir would soon be in literal flames)…

The steady deterioration of the political situation in Kashmir — the violence and counterviolence — had a powerful effect on him. In time it became one of the central subjects of his work; indeed, it could be said that it was in writing of Kashmir that he created his finest work. The irony of this is that Shahid was not by inclination a political poet. I heard him say once, "If you are from a difficult place and that's all you have to write about, then you should stop writing. You have to respect your art, your form — that is just as important as what you write about." Another time I was present at Shahid's apartment when his longtime friend Patricia O'Neill showed him a couple of sonnets written by a Victorian poet. The poems were political, trenchant in their criticism of the British government for its failure to prevent the massacre of the Armenians in Turkey. Shahid glanced at them and tossed them off-handedly aside: "These are terrible poems." Patricia asked why, and he said, "Look, I already know where I stand on the massacre of the Armenians. Of course I am against it. But this poem tells me nothing of the massacre; it makes nothing of it formally. I might as well just read a news report."

Anguished as he was about Kashmir's destiny, Shahid resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his. Had he not done so, he could no doubt have easily become a fixture on talk shows, news programs, and op-ed pages. But Shahid never had any doubt about his calling: he was a poet, schooled in the fierce and unforgiving arts of language. Such as they were, Shahid's political views were inherited largely from his father, whose beliefs were akin to those of most secular, left-leaning Muslim intellectuals of the Nehruvian era. Although respectful of religion, he was a firm believer in the separation of politics and religious practice.