DefinePK

Abstract

Acclaimed, at the turn of the millennium by Indian poet and critic Vinay Dharvadkar for his style as the “enfant terrible of contemporary Pakistani Poetry in English” (245), and acknowledged as “The most widely published and well-known English -Language poet from Pakistan” (Coppola 214), Alamgir Hashmi has come to be recognized as “a major world poet…a cosmopolitan writer”(Goodwin vi). A close reading reveals that Hashmi’s poetry is replete with spaces which are layered in terms of historical and cultural inscription, erasure and reinscription. The discussion focuses on this Pakistani poet’s palimpsest reading of inscriptions on the Subcontinent by various conquerors such as the Aryans, Ashoka, Tamerlane, Alexander the Great and Muhammad Bin Qasim in order to illustrate the cultural accretion which has made the Sub continent such a rich area of historical study. This paper seeks to explore how Hashmi blends the accuracy of a historian and the skills of an archaeologist with the rich metaphors of a poetic consciousness, The result is a reconstruction of the multilayered socio cultural experience of the Subcontinent and a restoration of the historical erasure of culture and civilization wrought by conquest and colonization.