READING POETRY LESSON 15: POSTCOLONIALISM THE DACCA GAUZES BY AGHA SHAHID ALI Read the poem and note down your thoughts on it before proceeding to the analysis....for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Those transparent Dacca Gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. "No one now knows," my grandmother says, "what it was to wear or touch that cloth." She wore it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother's dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all six yards, through a ring. Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History of little use to her, my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring. ANALYSIS Have you spent some time thinking about this poem? If not, go back and do so before you read on. The poem begins with an epigraph from Wilde s The Picture of Dorian Gray: for a whole year he sought/ to accumulate the most exquisite/ Dacca gauzes. Significantly, the title of the poem also uses the same spelling of the city as Wilde s story does: Dacca rather than Dhaka. Dacca was the British name for Dhaka, changed in 1982 to the more phonetically and culturally accurate spelling. By referencing the colonial name for the city in the title of his poem, Ali makes it clear that he is engaging with history by reflecting on the representation of the South Asian city in the colonial imagination. The epigraph also reveals the sense of the exotic that was associated with the East, as Wilde refers to the gauzes as exquisite. The Dacca of the poem is not the city itself, but an adjective that qualifies the possessions that were taken from the colonised regions.
The opening stanza creates a sense of the mythical by describing the fabric in fantastic terms, another indication that something empirical and tangible is given an air of the exotic and the unreal: Those transparent Dacca gauzes known as woven air, running water, evening dew: The thin fabric is referred to as woven air, running/ water, evening dew, all references to the elements. The terms in which it is described suggest an othering of a foreign culture by creating a sense of the exotic and the unfamiliar; the transparent gauzes are created with such skilled craftsmanship that they seem almost magical to those who are not familiar with the process of creating them. Having established the mastery of the weavers over their craft, Ali goes on to describe how the art is now lost: a dead art now, dead over a hundred years. No one now knows, my grandmother says, what it was to wear or touch that cloth. She wore it once, an heirloom sari from her mother s dowry, proved genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring. There is an immediate sense of being physically distanced in time that is created by Ali s reference to how even his grandmother had only worn the cloth once; the art has truly been lost for generations. A significant detail is added in the form of the test of authenticity for a genuine work of Dacca gauze: it is so fine that all six yards of it can be pulled through a finger ring. The term heirloom sari also suggests that art is a legacy, and the Dacca gauzes are an art form that is a legacy that should not have been lost. As the speaker s grandmother says no one now knows what it was to wear or touch that cloth. The description using the words wear and touch indicate that the art has been lost since there is now no empirical referent for what the cloth had felt like when experienced through the senses. The image of the cloth being pulled through a ring also sets up an antecedent for the magic realist image that the poem ends with, and introduces an image in real and tangible terms to set up an image that cannot be experienced in the same way. Ali continues to write of the general in terms of the particular by describing the fate of the heirloom sari that had been worn by his grandmother: Years later when it tore, many handkerchiefs embroidered with gold-thread paisleys were distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law. Those too now lost.
The cloth is thus transformed from a whole into fragments that are distributed among the nieces and daughters-in-law of the family: it is the women who seem to take on the task of preserving the art form. The fact that the sari is transformed into handkerchiefs reveals a way of converting one art into another, for the handkerchiefs are not just cut and sewn from the sari, but also ensure that the cloth retains its original decorative function: they are embroidered with gold-thread paisleys. The sari is therefore transformed into several different miniature pieces of work that are new forms of art in their own right, although their purpose is to preserve the artistry of the original piece. The line Those too now lost reveals the failure of the attempt to preserve the gauze; its fragmented form has no more hope of surviving than the original had. The conversion of the sari into handkerchiefs has an echo of the idea of partitioning a country as the ruling government collapses and the country gains independence: even though the idea seems well-intentioned, it leads to loss and the original can never be reclaimed in its fragmented form. In the subsequent stanzas, Ali turns from the personal to the political, broadening the scope of the gauzes history by recalling what historians say about the death of the art: In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated, the looms of Bengal silenced, and the cotton shipped raw by the British to England. History is full of facts about various artisans in different time periods and locations having their hands amputated so that they cannot produce similar works of craftsmanship for
anyone else. In this instance, the fact that the cotton is shipped raw seems to be an indication that the British saw the material itself as more valuable than the art that was produced from it. The tendency to do so suggests that colonisation is an act that prioritises material possessions over the artistic merit and cultural value of things. Finally, Ali contrasts the historical sense of factual detail with his grandmother s experiential sense of the past: History of little use to her, my grandmother just says how the muslins of today seem so coarse and that only in autumn, should one wake up at dawn to pray, can one feel that same texture again. One morning, she says, the air was dew-starched: she pulled it absently through her ring. History is of little use to the woman who has actually lived through the past that is now reduced to objective facts that are disinterestedly studied by those who have no actual experience of the past. The speaker s grandmother seems to be one of the few who is actually qualified to compare the muslins of the modern era with the gauzes that were
made in the past. Significantly, she compares the gauzes with dew-starched air, an image that reflects how the gauzes have vanished into nothingness with the passage of time and the death of the art. The last stanza contains a striking image that combines a sense of the real and the imagined, of history and myth. The grandmother, reminded of the gauzes of old by the autumn morning air that is heavy with dew, pulls the air absently through her ring. The poet plays on the word absently by suggesting that it is both that his grandmother is performing the action absent-mindedly and that the air itself is an absence that takes the place of the missing gauzes. There is also a hint of the magical about the idea that air can be pulled through a ring like a tangible thing. The poem leaves the reader with the idea that the myth-making power of the imagination is more potent than history, and that while history may outline factual details about events in the past, it is the imagination that can truly make the past come to life. By juxtaposing historical details with his grandmother s stories, Ali suggests that old wives tales have more truth in them than they are usually considered to have.