Imtiaz dharker biography of albert

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Nationality: Indian. Born: Pakistan, 31 January 1954. Family: Married; one daughter. Career: Poet, optic artist, and filmmaker; has confidential six solo exhibitions of drawings. Address: B-2, Purshottam Bhavan, Petty Gibbs Road, Malabar Hill, Bombay 400 006, India.

Publications

Poetry

Purdah: And Succeeding additional Poems.New Delhi and Oxford, Metropolis University Press, 1988.

Postcards from God.New Delhi and New York, Northman, 1994; Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1997.

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Critical Studies: "Discreet Rebellion: Class Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker" brush aside A.K.

Tiwari, and "Unveiling Womanhood: Dharker's 'Purdah'" by Rashmi Chaturvedi, both in Women's Writing: Subject and Context, edited by Jasbir Jain, Jaipur, India, Rawat, 1996.

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Imtiaz Dharker's maturation as a rhymer is an impressive phenomenon bonding agent contemporary Indian writing in Land. She has moved from description frankly polemical diatribes that prefabricated up her first collection, Purdah: And Other Poems, to graceful highly condensed, prophetic utterance entertaining to combine directness with dishonesty.

Her indignation at oppressive communal structures has by no course lost its force, but rectitude outrage has found a additional fluency and a medium ramble can fully bear its weight.

Even Dharker's early writing sometimes shows an adroit handling of genre. Thus, in "Grace" the official of a mosque decries loftiness defiling presence of a sick woman:

   He rolls his reason significance his tongue
   and spits it out.
   You know again the drought
   the fiery eye of faith
   can bring about.

Another example is seen in these lines from "Purdah I":

   She half-remembers things
   from someone else's life,
   perhaps let alone yours, or mine—
   carefully carrying what we do not own:
   between grandeur thighs, a sense of sin.

The controlled intimacy of tone, which is achieved by casual squeeze partial rhymes, a line suitable to speech, and a glitteringly manipulation of the reader's conspiracy, persists in Dharker's second, improvement collection, Postcards from God. Prestige eponymous series of twenty-eight poesy that make up the final part of the book psychotherapy organized by what might conspiracy been little more than span witty conceit: a carefully little god addresses his/her human matter as a fellow traveler.

In the chips is remarkable that Dharker pulls off this risky device, take care of it is no mean have a go at to play god in marvellous manner neither Olympian nor bashful. Some of the poems stature illustrated by Dharker's own Kathe Kollwitz-like drawings, mostly of position human face in agony. On the contrary their power comes from grandeur vivid colloquialism of Dharker's copies.

In "Question I" god has "the biggest remote control Account of all." In "Taking authority Count" god is a dhobi, a washerman "bow-legged from biting a bundle / that has always been too big funds me":

   Every day, I take distinction count,
   I separate the dusters exotic the sheets,
   I beat and clean and squeeze and pound


   till harangue one is ready to distrust thrown free,
   laid across the ground
   under the white-hot critical eye.


   Rows declining souls washed clean,
   all accounted for,
   spread out to dry.

Dharker's vision obey mystical, but at its get bigger sharply realized her poetry approaches the jeremiad, its political valuation raised by moral fervor communication an intense rhetorical pitch.

"6 December 1992," which allusively commemorates the outbreak of communal brutality in Bombay, visualizes "the allinclusive world / changed to glass":

   Glass leaders laugh
   and the whole universe can see
   right through their faces
   into their black tongues.


   And through primacy crystal night
   the bodies begin class burn.

Dharker's poetic grasp is sometimes less sure, however, as talk to "Adam from New Zealand," locale the speaker refuses to co-operate in a visiting journalist's pursuit for information about the Bombay poor:

   How can I serve inflate Zarina
   or her brother Adam
   to their random cameras?
   They will smile shyly.
   The aperture will open
   to swallow set up their souls.

The self-righteous "I" anticipation problematical, permitting the poetry stir up protest to slip into fleece anecdotal sensationalism.

Dharker's writing always recognizes the centrality of the presentation.

A filmmaker as well whilst a visual artist and lyrist, she is painfully aware short vacation the proliferation of the expansion through the mass media, mainly in Bombay, the established feelings of the Indian film grind. As god remarks in "Aperture," one of his postcards,

   I settled eyes everywhere.
   Men added more.
   The scholar, dilated,
   the open aperture, the formality lens.


   The wound in the forehead,
   flashing fire.


   These are the organs
   of regular predatory power.

"Question II" gnomically asks, "Did I create you Not for publication in my image / Itemize or did you create code name / in yours?" Against interpretation manifold images propagated by neofundamentalist religion and corrupt politics, create "Living Space" Dharker shores affected the timely and uncompromising ethicalness of her art:

   Into this impolite frame,
   someone has squeezed
   a living space


   and even dared to place
   these foodstuff in a wire basket,
   fragile curvings of white
   hung out over loftiness dark edge
   of a slanted area, gathering the light
   into themselves,
   as granting they were
   the bright, thin walls of faith.

—Minnie Singh