AGHA SHAHID ALI

1. EVEN THE RAIN: -

Ali’s first thought is the grief of a lost love. As he shared in an interview: “At a personal level the rain
brings so much memory back to me, especially of some very important love relationships I have had.”

Not surprisingly, his third couplet is about death. In April 2001, after some fourteen months of
treatment for a malignant brain tumor, he was aware of his approaching death, after which even the
importance of rain in our lives becomes meaningless.

After we died – That was it! – God left us in the dark.

And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

In his fourth couplet, after the dry season or drought, rain quenches our thirst. Rain is the life-giving
force.

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.

For mixers, my love, you’d poured – what? – even the rain.

Shahid Ali loved cooking for his friends. He spent his last days entertaining his friends – poets, students,
writers, and relatives – at his Brooklyn apartment.

To me, his eight couplet expresses his longing for his mother who died from a brain tumor in 1997. The
thought of reuniting with her after death gave him solace.

After the bones – those flowers – this was found in the urn:
The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain?

Ali’s penultimate couplet takes us to New York, his beloved city during the last years of his life, where
the rain links the beginning of life in India with his final resting place in his adopted homeland.

New York belongs at daybreak to only me, just me –

to make this claim Memory’s brought even the rain.

“Even the Rain” evoked the myriad ways, both good and bad, that the rain has touched my life,
connecting me to people, places, and events.

The ghazal is an ancient and popular structure in Arabic poetry dating back to the seventh century. Its
subject matter is usually melancholy, loss, love, and beauty. This is an excerpt from a modern ghazal by
the poet Agha Shahid Ali. The second line of each couplet ends with the words “even the rain,” though
Shahid Ali clearly plays around with the meaning of these three words together (for example, the third
couplet in this excerpt uses the word “even” in a different way than the other two couplets). Each
couplet contains its own meaning, yet the way in which Shahid Ali builds the theme from one couplet to
the next is masterful.

2. A HISTORY OF PAISLEY: -
3.  A Pastoral

Though most of Agha Shahid’s poetic works orbit around Kashmir and its worsening conditions,
through his poem, A  Pastoral, he brought forth the motherly love of a Kashmiri towards his/her
motherland. This poem not only reflects his love for Kashmir and its people, but he also shows his
deep love towards his mother. In the poem, he has been shown missing his lost and migrated
friends, and in the very first line of the poem he says, “We shall meet again, in Srinagar, by the gates
of the Villa of Peace.” Being a resident of Kashmir for long, Ali had witnessed the devastating socio-
political condition of Kashmir and always wished that the day will come when the peace will be upon
it, and its dwellers will take a sigh of relief from ongoing violence and massacre of the innocent
people.

Ali has dedicated A Pastoral poem to his friend “Suvir Kaul” who had spent much time with him. But
the separation of his friend and his other childhood friends shattered Ali intensely and internally and
led him to pour out his pangs through a poem called A Pastoral. In the poem, the poet has also
brought into light the migration of Kashmiri pundits and his Muslim friends.

The poem A Pastoral is ironically titled to invoke the stark desolation of a place that boasts of an
admiring tradition, thanks to its everlasting beauty. When the poem starts it shows how hopeful the
poet is about the peaceful future of Kashmir. The poet sends an invitation to his friends, try to
convince that yes, they will come again and meet in  Srinagar when “our hands will blossom into
fists till the soldiers return the keys and disappear”.

Style, Themes & Imagery

Agha Shahid Ali is well-known to write poetry in both traditional forms and free verse,
experimenting with verse forms, like the canzone and sestina. While almost all of his writing and
poetic works were immensely influenced by the Persian-Urdu tradition, yet he chose to pen down
his poetic work in English language, in place of Urdu. His is ghazalesque style, using which he blends
the forms and rhythms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to
storytelling. A large number of his poems don’t abstractly consider the love and longings, but they
concretely detail about the events that are fully personal, and sometimes even political. Since the
poet also had interest in geography, so he mixed the landscapes of America with those of his native
Kashmir. His work blends the American and Kashmiri landscapes with the clashed and conflicted
emotions of immigration, exile, while in his subsequent works, his poetic works have been around
loss, illness and mortality. But remember, the credit to introduce and popularize Ghazal form in
American poetry definitely goes to Agha Shahid Ali.

Detailed Analysis

Ali uses elegant, reflective and lyrical voice, which gets augmented by the repetition of words, half-
rhymes, and culturally specific imagery. As you go through the complicated terrain of his poems, you
come to know the intricacy of his language and thoughts.

Stanza 1

We shall meet again, in Srinagar,

(…)

our last world, the first that vanished

Right from the very first stanza of this poem, which can be read in full here, it becomes evident that
how much love the poet has towards Kashmir, and Srinagar, where he promises to meet again his
friend or friends who were compelled to migrate due to continuous violence Kashmir, or who lost
their lives during any violence or massacre in Kashmir.

He says, comes what may, we will meet again and get united, we shall again get into the world that
got barren without our presence. He sees hope of peace and prosperity and wishes today’s Kashmir
will be completely different from the future Kashmir. Here, “by the gates of the Villa of
Peace” symbolizes that the peace will prevail, and we shall meet again. We shall fight till soldiers
surrender and leave us to live in peace.

Stanzas 2-3

in our absence from the broken city.

We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets

(…)

in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer

opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence—

Agha Shahid Ali has kept many of his poems around Srinagar. Through these poems, the poet has
praised the city, mourned it, longed for it and even remembered its nostalgia. Most of the time, he
even synonymizes Srinagar with Kashmir, and words used for the city even grieves for its sad state.
He knows under what turmoil the city has gone through, and is even today going through, but he
also knows that how resilient Srinagar has been.

Expressing the same feel, in the second stanza, the poet says that, we shall meet again, in Srinagar,
and fight for the revival of Kashmir. We are ready to bear everything to help it gain its glorious past.
The fundamental rights of human beings will be restored and reinstituted. The rampant sadness will
not live for long, it will some or other day be restored with the independence of the Kashmiri
people. The city may be sad today, but we will challenge the sadness, negotiate it, and resist it. We
will continue to do so as our elders or ancestors have been doing it for long. Through our struggle,
we will be able to succeed in paving peaceful ways for our future generations. I know Srinagar
remains alive when it is sad, I know the city can survive even during tough time, and I know the city
will be so unless it gets freedom. Yes, the day will come when we will turn ivy into roses, the day will
come when we would hear the gardener’s voice, play as we used to in our childhood. The day is not
far when the peace will prevail, and our future generation will live as peacefully as ever.

Through the poem, A Pastoral, he has introduced several themes. He has portrayed the city’s sad
state and the fighting spirit of its people who never gave up. The poet also portrays the natural
beauty spread in the city that also sends the message of fighting till independence, and the role of
its elders and ancestors who sacrificed their lives for its revival and prosperity. Moreover, the use of
words like tourniquets, thorns, ivy, roses and pomegranate, all indicate the fighting spirit of the
people living in Kashmir.

Stanzas 4-5

“and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.”

Will we follow the horned lark, pry

(…)

rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie,

then carry it, limp from the talons.”

In these stanzas, the poet asks should we follow the horned lark; search the cemetery, the dust still
lying uneasy on the graves that were built in hurry without any names. He further says, “Yes, we will
surely hear our gardener’s voice again, but for that, we will have to struggle. Just as the bird remains
silent in winter, and comes back in spring, we too shall have to tighten our belts and restart the fight
to gain independence from the violence that has snatched our peace and left us in the fetters of
massacres and violence. So, the gardener will come again with his voice, and we shall again chirp like
birds among the trees, but to achieve all that we shall have to struggle, struggle and struggle.

Stanzas 6-7

Pluck the blood: My words will echo thus

at sunset, by the ivy, but to what purpose?

(…)

scripts: “See how your world has cracked.

Why aren’t you here? Where are you? Come back.

In these stanzas, the poet says that when we will step into our old place or territory, we will find the
letters that mailman might have left for us. The latter knew that we would definitely return them. It
would be better if the postman speeded those letters to death. He further asks why you are not
here, where have you gone, and plead him to come back so that we can relive our old days, and
breathe free. As we know Ali’s poem, “The Country Without a Post Office (1997)” gained him a lot of
recognition and appreciation. And the same scene of mailman the poet has used and described in,
“A Pastoral”, whereby the poet wants to show the importance of post offices and postmen.

Stanzas 8-9

Is history deaf there, across the oceans?”

Quick, the bird will say. And we’ll try

(…)

will say) that to which we belong, not like this—

to get news of our death after the world’s.

In the last two stanzas, the poet curses the history, and asks are you deaf to our concerns and the
pitiable condition of Kashmir and Kashmiris. Don’t you see the atrocities the Kashmiris are facing for
years, don’t you see why they are compelled to leave their motherland. If no one comes to our help,
we will ourselves make use of the keys; open the door of our drawing-room. As we move ahead, we
thought would be engulfed by the dust that has textiled the entire home, and its every possible
corners and articles, such as mirror, table, and all. But we will surely light oil lamps; we will definitely
go past our elders and ancestors, and hold their wills close to our heart, following what they have
been directing us for years. We will surely fulfill their wish and return our home for always. In all, we
will revive our Kashmir, and fight till it achieves its goal, and will pave violence-free and peaceful
ways for our future generations.

Agha Shahid Ali dedicated his poem A Pastoral to one of his Kashmiri Hindu friends, named Suvir
Kaul. This is a poem of hope and exuberant future that the poet expects to prevail in Kashmir.
However, in view of the condition of today’s and then Kashmir, this has just been a hope, and no
concrete solution has been brought about so far. The situations have been getting worst day by day.
The state has become a source to take political mileage, and no government seems to be seriously
interested in having peace and brotherhood between the two communities – Hindus and Muslims.
However, the poet of the poem hopefully says, “We shall meet again, in Srinagar, by the gates of the
Villa of Peace.”

4. The Ghazal “In Real Time” By Agha Shahid Ali

‘The Ghazal “In Real Time”’ by Agha Shahid Ali intertwines pain, suffering, and injustice. The
powerful poem creates meaning within the complex structure of a ghazal.

A ghazal is a poetic form that consists of rhyming couplets and a refrain with each line sharing the
same meter. The refrain for this In Real Time ghazal poem is the phrase “In real time,” and it
is repeated at the end of its every couplet. Ali takes that structure and applies it to a poem that
reveals, through short eleven-syllable lines, the hellish nature of life in India, Ali’s home country.
Pain, suffering, and injustice have all been intertwined very skillfully and carefully to create powerful
meaning within the complex structure of a ghazal, which relates directly to the complicated social
structure that is central to the underlying meaning of the poem.

First developed in the 6th century in pre-Islamic-Arabic verse, this style of poetry has very personal
ties with Ali as it pays homage to his Hindu and Muslim heritage. Concurrently many of his themes
that Ali uses correlate with that heritage, as well. “Exile, nostalgia for lost or ruined landscapes, and
political conflict” inform Ali’s all poetic works and expose his heritage. In this ghazal poem, all of
these themes are evident.

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In the second line of the first stanza, the word “refugee” brings the themes of exile and political
conflict to life. Ali could have chosen to use “wanderer” or “migrant” which have similar if not
identical denotation. The connotation of “refugee,” however, is much more powerful and directly
refers to exile and political conflict. A refugee is defined as a person who is forced from his home or
exiled. The connotation of the term refugee also consists of political significance. Refugee often
alludes to a person displaced or dislocated by an armed conflict within his own country. Ali makes
use of this politically-charged word in order to evoke not only the exile but governmental turmoil as
well, and at the same time also emphasize the emotions as well as situations of people around the
globe.

The Ghazal In Real Time, which can be read in full here, begins with a quote about hope by James
Merrill who says, “Feel the patient’s heart / Pounding—oh please, this once—” Through this quote;
the poet wants to present the idea of hope – and false hope – as well as the idea of a near future,
which has a very important role to play in the poem ahead though this weak wish finds itself denied
or granted. The quote is pessimistically optimistic, and right from this point, it becomes more and
more pessimistic as Ali continues to depict how worse our life has become. It is completely different
from what see on the surface. Though the context of this quote helps in establishing the significance
of the poem, in the second stanza, Ali starts employing many different types of literary skills to
specifically provide, more deep meaning to the poem.

Lines 1-4

I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.

(…)

A former existence untold in real time …

These lines of the poem work as a window for the entire poem. It establishes the meaning of the
whole poem. And with the frequent use of a term like ‘real time, which occurs on the second line of
each stanza for the rest of the poem’ the poet wants to describe the near future, which means the
near future of the speaker’s decision to do whatever he wants to. But remember, each of the
intertwined stanzas in the poem describes why we should behave warily in our everyday lives.

Ali succeeds in showing why wariness is necessary when he is seen discussing the way irrationality
and rage “clawed off” reason and logic. The clawing off of evidence as one would rip off a burning
shirt leads to the idea that human flesh is being destroyed to hide inhumane and illegal acts of
human beings. Technically speaking, the human body isn’t a landscape, but it is yet a naturally
occurring form. Later in the poem, this idea of ruin and loss reappears when Ali describes a “body
(lying) buried.” Once again the loss of the human figure as a result of fire brings about a powerful
image, which begs to be explained. Here Ali throws a ball into the court of his readers, allowing the
unique and potentially biographical experiences that he has turned into verse to be applied to any
person in any place in life. This could be India, but it could also be innumerable other places around
the globe.

Lines 5-8

The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?

(…)

The funeral love comes to hold in real time!

In these lines, the poet makes use of strong and detailed word selections to highlight the foolishness
that humans do while selecting their leaders. Though they know their selected leaders would later
create problems for them, and cause more harm than any good, they continue to repeat this
foolishness. The poet further says that in today’s wild goose chase, no one thinks of worrying about
others. Today’s man is very selfish and self-centered.

This is the reason why the poet has used phrases like “The waves of our earth,” which means human
nature and the fast-paced, egocentric, day-to-day lives of people in a ‘fend-for-yourself’ world that
gobbles up the pleas as well as ideas of others. He says the world is harsh not just in public, but also
in the more secreted lives of its people.

Lines 9-12

They left him alive so that he could be lonely—

(…)

It’s hell in the city of gold in real time.

In lines 9-12 of the poem, the poet wants to show the inhumane aspect of human beings. He wants
to show how ruthless and cynical humans have become over time. He says that to make him suffer
more and more somebody left “him” alive so that he goes on suffering. The image shown here
brings forth the sorrowful and horrible things taking place behind the curtain of life. The readers
here are again introduced with the themes of hope and lack of hope, especially when the poet
mentions “the god of small things.” The poet says this god, who represents those who are
concerned about and have trust on the small things for happiness, doesn’t provide any comfort to
the needy.

He says there is no place for small things in “real time.” Though we remain focussed on the little
things for the least and greatest joy they bring for us, in actuality, they have no such power to do so,
taking into account the tyranny and awful aspect of this world. By virtue of his careful selection of
words, Ali creates an amazing picture of how the world’s inhabitants put an end to their and other’s
happy lives. The hopelessness of god and the suffering of others exist due to the inhumanness of
humans. Life does appear wonderful, but in actuality, it isn’t.

When Ali says, “Please afterwards empty my pockets of keys,” this depicts that the world is full of
brigands and thieves, and there is no such place in the whole world where our valued possessions
could be safe and sound. The speaker of the poem himself says why we shouldn’t confide others for
our secrets. If there were existence of a generous and kind world, we could have trusted one
another. Today, Ali says, we are surrounded by the non-trustable people. In order to support his
warning, the poet provides facts and evidence. In fact, the sixth stanza of the poem helps in holding
Ali’s essential and actual warning, which goes like: “It’s hell in the city of gold in real time.”

Lines 13-16

God’s angels again are—for Satan!—forlorn.

Salvation was bought but sin sold in real time.

And who is the terrorist, who the victim?

We’ll know if the country is polled in real time.

Ali makes a very captivating selection in the seven and eight stanzas. The careful and entrancing use
of these words shows what he actually means when he says, “It’s “hell.” The use of this imagery in
the seventh stanza also creates emotion in the poem. We (as readers) can almost notice the angels
weeping while Satan takes away their hope for the people. Ali says, “God’s angels again are—for
Satan!—forlorn.” He means that people today have been empowered by Satan, and all the angels on
this earth are now hopeless and sad. It is almost a win-win situation for Satan. Explaining clearly, Ali
says that we ourselves surrendered this power to Satan, and led our nation to corruption.

Further in the second line of the seventh stanza, the poet says, “Salvation was bought but sin sold…”
He asks how sin can be sold while salvation is bought. There is a double standard in this stanza.
Hypocrites try for their sole salvation; still they keep on selling sin to others, as a result thoughtlessly
taking others into an even further corrupt nation.

In the eighth stanzas, when the poet says, “And who is the terrorist, who is the victim? We’ll know if
the country is polled in real time,” he means we, as a society, are unable to differentiate between
the villains and the heroes because a lot of people in and around us have disguised themselves as
good, but in actuality, they are a wolf in the skin of a tiger. These are the very people who raise their
fingers just to show themselves victim, but in actuality, they aren’t.

And this could be the reason why we are unable to distinguish between a victim and a terrorist. As
said in the poem, “We’ll find out if the country is polled,” which means that we will come to know
when the people make their decision.

Lines 17-20

“Behind a door marked DANGER” are being unwound

(…)

the Street of Farewell’s now unrolled in real time.

Ali has written these two stanzas in different ways, as compared to the previous ones. In these lines,
he has capitalized on each letter of the word: “DANGER,” whereby he wants to make his readers
understand that danger is not always where it is expected by us. All throughout the poem, the poet
wants to warn his readers about something that would take place in the future. He says, “Behind a
door marked DANGER are being unwound / the prayers my friend had enscrolled in real time.”

People are silent. Ali asks the question: ‘what do they need to worry about?’ Unless they come out,
the danger neither can be defined nor faced. Though everyone needs to get worried about this
unknown danger, he has many other businesses to take care of, and his past is one of those things
that he has to handle first of all. The stanza ten of this poem tells that this haunting person (poet)
has been swallowing him up for long. Ali here makes use of several metaphors that also abets the
imagery of the poem. For instance, he says, “The throat of the rear-view and sliding down it…” The
meaning of which is that while looking at the mirror, the poet is thinking about his past, and
recollects what all things he did in his past, what all he missed out. Things in our lives are like the
things in the rearview of our cars that though look far in the mirror, in actuality are very close to us.
Our past actions affect our future, and this has been best defined and presented by Ali in this stanza.
In the same stanza, the poet also talks about “the Street of Farewell,” which means a street of
goodbyes. The future has both death and tragedy for us, and Ali has made it quite clear by
employing exact detail.

Lines 21-27

I heard the incessant dissolving of silk—

I felt my heart growing so old in real time.

(…)

Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words—

Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time.

(for Daniel Hall)

Continuing his warning by virtue of his beautiful use of metaphor and poetic skills as well as tools, Ali
says in the eleven stanza of the poem, “I heard the incessant dissolving of silk.” This means that the
person in the poem heard an awe-struck sound of something beautiful, which is dissolving into
nothing. This is magnificent imagery because we, as readers, can notice a man engulfing his ears and
just crying as the sound is too loud to hear. The poem further reveals the heart of the poet is getting
old day by day, “I felt my heart growing so old in real time.” Similarly, the poet is also getting aged
and old and is now too exhausted to wait for the future to come. But being still hopeful, he remains
stuck and tries to discover something to live for.
The stanzas twelve and thirteen of the poem hold a lot of significance in the poem. Here in the
twelfth stanza, the readers are introduced with a woman, who was nowhere to be heard about and
found out in the above stanzas of the poem, but we as readers can guess that she has been burned
and her heart remains as ash. This woman could be thought of as the people’s hope. Being a citizen
of this horrifying world, we must grip hope as and when we get an opportunity. This can be best
done by living in and for the moment as we hardly know when it’s our last.

On the other hand, stanza thirteen of the poem is poet’s goodbye, when he says; “Now Friend, the
Belovèd has stolen your words—” The Beloved in this quote introduces the muse of the poem. This
may also mean that he is unable to express himself now. Thus, having gone through all of the
sufferings of the world, in addition to the loss of the muse, Ali sends one last warning through his
poem about the future to come. He says, “Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time,” which
implies that we are not left with much time, and we even can’t do much as the life itself has written 
“The plot,” which will unfold in the near future. We don’t have much time left to change the future
because there is always an upsurge of a new problem waiting for us as soon as we think of doing
something to get rid of our previous problems. Thus, through this warning, Ali gets succeeded in
conveying what he feels.

Final Commentary

Through In Real Time ghazal poem, Ali simply basks: ‘what kind of world do we live in?’ His intention
by asking this (these) question (s) he simply wants to provoke his readers and make them think
more deeply about the shallowness and hollowness of the human race. He says that the human race
is a very self-centered and egoistic race. Without worrying about others, we just care about our
pain. Sufferings of other people don’t matter for us unless we ourselves get into these pains.
However, this way, we bring ourselves closer to disaster, and dig deep around us for our future
wherein we will fall into some or other day.

About Agha Shahid Ali

Born in India in 1949, Agha Shahid Ali grew up as Muslim in Kashmir. He studied at the University of
Delhi and the University of Kashmir. He also earned a Ph.D. in English from Penn State in 1984, and
an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. Ali was a prolific poet and professor who taught in
the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at the University of Massachusetts, but unfortunately, he died
early on December 8th, 2001, due to brain cancer.

Themes in Ali’s Poems

The major themes in Ali’s poems include the past (fixation with ancestry and history), loss (of
culture, of home, of identity, of stability), separation (being away from home; home itself being
separated and disjointed), dislocation (feeling displaced; in cultural limbo: Kashmiri-American), exile
(loss of home: feeling like a foreigner no matter where you go).
 5. “Postcard from Kashmir”
(1989) is a 14-line lyric poem written in unrhymed, unmetered verse. Despite its
contemporary structure, the poem nevertheless pays homage to two traditional
forms: the Western sonnet and the Indo-Persian ghazal. While its 14-line-structure
is reminiscent of a sonnet, its themes of loss and longing are typical of a ghazal.
The melding of influences reflects the multiculturalism of the poet Agha Shahid Ali,
who was born in India, identified as Kashmiri, and emigrated to the United States
as a young man. Published in Ali’s second poetry collection The Half-Inch
Himalayas (1989), the poem is about the longing for a home the exile has left
behind. The poem’s speaker worries that their memories of this home are
becoming idealized and faded. Since they no longer reside at home, its reality is
becoming distant for them.

The tone of the poem is restrained and elegiac, with its themes of nostalgia and loss
dominating. Ali balances these with understated irony, giving the poem an ambiguous
edge. The poem’s conclusion is open-ended, mirroring the speaker’s uncertainty about
the future of Kashmir, their homeland. The speaker suggests their memory of Kashmir
is now forever imperfect, perhaps because of the conflict in the region. Kashmir is a
dominant motif in Ali’s poems, and the loss of his homeland colors his poetic
sensibility through and through. “Postcard from Kashmir” is considered an early poem
in the poet’s canon and prefigures the worsening of the violence in Kashmir. At the
time the poem was composed, India and Pakistan had fought wars over the disputed
territory, but the conditions on the ground were still not at their nadir. After 1989, the
violence in Kashmir began to escalate significantly. In “Postcard from Kashmir,” Ali
alludes to the loss of a peaceful idyll but makes no direct references to violence. This
changed in his later poems on Kashmir.

About the Poem

The poem titled ‘Postcard from Kashmir’  is a prologue poem in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, “Half Inch
Himalayas” which was published in 1987. The poem expresses the poet’s sentimental feelings for his
motherland. It shows how moved he was when he received a photograph postcard from Kashmir in
America. The poem establishes the volume’s theme by demonstrating the poet’s strong affection for
and nostalgia for his homeland. The poems in this collection are about his longing for his homeland, his
memories of it, and his exile. His homeland plagues his imagination, and he longs to experience and talk
about it in this poetry. Although the poem includes 14 lines, it cannot be classified as a sonnet since it
lacks the stanza form, metre, and rhyme that are essential to sonnets.

Summary of Postcard from Kashmir

The speaker in the poem expresses his sentiments after getting a postcard from Kashmir, an area of the
Indian subcontinent. place. The postcard features a snapshot of Kashmir, which the speaker claims to be
his home. The speaker, who lives in a western country and is geographically remote from Kashmir, looks
lovingly at this four-by-six-inch photograph.

The speaker asserts that he has always admired neatness, a quality he associates with Kashmir in his
childhood days. The irony of the situation is encapsulated in his claim that he now has the half-inch
Himalayas in his hand. The vast and gigantic mountain range is reduced to a compact, clean picture,
which the poet dislikes.

The most ambiguous sentence in the poem is “here is home,” which can refer to the poet’s incapability
to leave the location where he lives or to the poet’s sacrifice of it for his homeland.

It is apparent that the poem’s ultimate goal is to reflect the poet’s boundless patriotic love for Kashmir,
the region he is happy to call home.

Analysis of Postcard from Kashmir

The poem ‘Postcard from Kashmir’ reflects the poet’s feelings about his homeland Kashmir. It juxtaposes
the poet’s remembrance of his home with a photograph of some Kashmiri scenery. He is reminded of his
home in India when he receives the postcard. Obviously, he is not at home and is in a distant place.