Agha Shahid Ali's Cultures of Memory

With Agha Shahid Ali, Memory always occupies a prime position words and sentences are picked up with utmost precision from various corners of oral and textual traditions and these excursion are carefully treated and put into his writings as displace of memory cultures, becoming scathing critiques of the atrocities committed on people. Agha Shahid Ali is well known for his experimentation and adoption of various forms of writing, specially, classical urdu forms like the Gazal. His poetics is also form from his association with Kashmir and its yearning from far away. The retelling of stories in his poems, ranging from instances from world mythology to contemporary political events, accessed through memory, stand firmly against the power centres voicing the suffering of the marginalized. What drives Shahid is the need to remember against forgetting. Cultures of memory has been defined as the cultures of the past situated in the poems of Agha Shahid Ali.