The Map of Longings with No Limits: Agha Shahid Ali’s “The Country Without a Post Office” and Political Protest in India

This article argues that Agha Shahid Ali’s poem “The Country without a Post Office” (1990) uses the epistolary—as both form and content—to tell the silenced stories of Kashmiris and of the devastation wrought on the Valley since the advent of Indian colonialism. The article argues first that the poem draws on epistolary tropes in Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s (1797–1868) poetry to link the material devastation of Kashmir to the epistemic erasure of its history; second, that the poem translates epistolary metaphors from Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s (1911–1984) prison poems to give voice to the Kashmiri imprisoned by the state; and finally, that the poem uses British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry to make poetry rather than prayer a means of redemption for Kashmiris. The voicing of the poem in public draws on an oral tradition of reciting Urdu poetry and makes the poem as recited text an alternative public sphere for talking about the destruction of Kashmir in contradistinction to the silences of the Indian state.