Agha Shahid Ali wrote Dacca Gauzes, a very
beautiful poem full of lament and woe. Something that is rather infectious. His
poem on the "Dacca Gauzes" exemplifies Shahid's nostalgia, his sense
of history, his grace, a sensibility as fine as the gauze fabrics he describes
here. Grandmothers and their stories , the amazing ‘woven air’, the
texture of morning air in autumn and of course the tragic end of these muslins
and their weavers. It is near impossible to grow up in India, without
having heard about them – the fabled weave from Dacca.
Throughout the poem Agha Shahid Ali uses some images typical to the sub-continental context. Moreover, the poem reminds us the cruel colonial policy that the British colonizers exercised on the peasants of the Bengal.
