More than any other Kashmiri, Agha Shahid Ali captured the spirit of his land and his people with the power of his writing. Across a life that spanned five decades and ended too soon on 8 December, Agha Shahid transcended imposed identities and wrote with a simple morality about life and love and their various intersections in Kashmir. He died away from his home in an American hospital, but with the comfort of his immediate family.
Born in New Delhi on 4 February 1949, Agha Shahid grew up as a Muslim in Kashmir, and served as a poet-witness to the travails of the troubled land. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi, before earning a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University (1984) and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona (1985). A prolific writer, Agha Shahid published hundreds of poems in his lifetime, including such wellregarded collections as Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). In addition to his creative work, Agha Shahid was also a celebrated scholar who specialised in the works of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 1986, he published T. S. Eliot as Editor, and later translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz's The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems (1992), and edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).
A popular professor and friend to his students, Agha Shahid made a reputation early on for his knowledge of Hindustani music, Urdu verse, and the Modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry. While teaching at Hindu College in Delhi, he was much in demand throughout the Subcontinent, and he frequently visited other institutions to share his ideas and writings. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi and, later, at many of the most prestigious universities in the United States.
In remembering him, his friend, the editor and publisher Rukun Advani, wrote, "We are all narcissists in some way, but Shahid had perfected the art of narcissism. He displayed it unashamedly and was universally loved for the abandon with which he could be so unabashedly and coyly full of himself. He was just so disconcertingly free of pretence in this respect, so entirely unique just for this reason." Advani recalls a conversation with Agha Shahid in which the poet faced the inevitability of death. "I don't want immortality through my works," Agha Shahid said. "I want immortality by not dying."