The lost Kashmir: Home, memory, and affect through the material in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry

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ABSTRACT This article explores the references to material markers in the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali like the Kashmiri shawl and saffron, the letter and the picture postcard, to unravel how the material becomes a complex, fraught repository of diasporic memory and affect in his work, affording a range of affective responses, involving both meaningful resonances and ruptures. Ali’s poetry articulated the angst of a conflict-torn Kashmir in the 1990s, revealing the interplay of his entangled emotions surrounding home, loss, violence, and memory. His poetry shows scattered yet sustained references to material objects, which signify a distinctive Kashmiri culture and ethos, and also encrypt narratives of violence and loss, unfolding through the avenues of colonial and global consumption and political and cultural appropriation. This article posits that, through the evocation of these Kashmiri material objects, violence in Kashmir is both historicized and mapped onto the contemporary Kashmiri everyday in Ali’s poetry.