INTRODUCTION

“Indian verse in English did not seriously begin to exist

until after the withdrawal of British from India.”
(R.Parthsarthy: 1976:3)

The renaissance in modern Indian Literature begins with Raja

Ram Mohan Roy. The infiltration of western culture, the study of English
literature, the adoption of western scientific techniques, gave a jolt to
India's traditional life. It shocked us into a new awareness, a sense of
urgency, and the long dormant intellectual and critical impulse was
quickened into sudden life and the reawakening Indian spirit went forth
to meet the violent challenge of the values of modern science and the
civilization of the west. Ram Mohan Roy's interests and inquiries ranged
from the rights of women and the freedom of the press to English
education, the revenue and judicial systems in India, religious toleration
and the plight of the Indian peasantry. He could be named as the first of
the Indian masters of English prose. In this way, he had contributed his
writing and thoughts in the foundation of Indo-Anglian literature and
prepared pathway for his successors and contemporaries like Henry L.
Derozio, the Cavally Brothers, Kashiprasad Ghose, Hasan Ali, P. Raja
Gopal, Mohanlal, and Michael Madhusudan Dutt etc. are considered as
the first Indo-Anglian writers of verse and prose.

Thus, Indian Poetry in English is nearly 200 years old. It

began with the first Indian English poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio

1
(1809-1831), in the first half of the nineteenth century. He became a
teacher of English literature at the Hindu College, Calcutta. A teacher as
well as a poet, Derozio had expressed nature in his poetry like Keats. The
flavour of Romanticism is found in his poetry as he was highly
influenced by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott and Moore. Derozio's most
ambitious work was ‘The Fakir of Jungheera’. His love for India and its
past is revealed in several of his poems from the collection Poems
published in 1827. He died at a very early age due to cholera in 1831.
Preceding Derozio the British servicemen in India are said to have laid
the foundation stones for this genre. Today, Indian Poetry in English has
been exported back to the West, in the form of Indian poets living in the
West.

Kashiprasad Ghose (1809-1837) was one of the first Indians to

publish a regular volume of English verse. ‘The Shair and Other Poems’
(1830) is a great contribution to the level of 'Gorboduc' in English
literature. He also has the distinction of being the first Hindu to write
original English verse. Though his ‘The Shair and Other Poems’ was
blamed by critics for the lack of originality. John B. Alphanso Karkala
comments on his verse collection as: These immature verses, lacking
originality and sincerity only indicate to what extent he was influenced
by the minor love poets of the late Elizabethan age” (1970:43). He is
counted as one of the founder pillars of indo-Anglian literature. His
contribution in Indian English literature is as equal as Henry Derozios.
Ghose edited an English weekly ‘The Hindu Intelligence’. His poetry is
counted as moralizing and as good texture of originality and conventional
descriptions.

2
 Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873) was equally a talented
writer and poet. His Meghanad Badha is a great Bengali epic and is
considered as his all-time masterpiece till today. Written in blank verse,
this epic was based on the Ramayana but inspired by Milton's Paradise
Lost. Here Madhusudan has transformed the villainous Ravana into a
Hero. This grand heroic-tragic epic was written in nine cantos which is
quite unique in the history of Bengali Poetry. Meghnad-Badh Kavya was
Bengali literature's first original epic and gave Madhusudan the status of
an Epic Poet. He also produced ‘The Captive Ladie’ in English.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt began writing while he was at

Hindu College. He won several scholarships in college exams as well as
a gold medal for an essay on women's education. While a student at
Hindu College, his poems in Bengali and English were published in
Jnananvesan, Bengal Spectator, Literary Gleamer, Calcutta Library
Gazette, Literary Blossom and Comet. Lord Byron was Madhusudan's
inspiration. Dutt was particularly inspired by both the life and work of
the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. The life of Dutt closely parallels
to the life of Lord Byron in many respects. Like Byron, Dutt was a
spirited bohemian and like Byron, Dutt was a Romantic, albeit being
born on the other side of the world, and as a recipient subject of the
British imperialist enterprise, Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and
polyglot. Besides Indian languages like Bengali, Sanskrit and Tamil, he
was well versed in classical languages like Greek and Latin. He also had
a fluent understanding of modern European languages like Italian and
French and could read and write the last two with perfect grace and ease.

3
 After M. M. Dutt, the two minor voices of Bengal viz. Shoshee
Chunder Dutt and Hur Chunder Dutt explored the glorious past of India
to regenerate national confidence among the Indians and thereby to
promote the spirit of nationalism and renaissance. Shoshee Chunder Dutt
in his collection ‘A Vision of Sumeru and Other Poems’ asserts the
legendary and historical past of India. The collection deals with the
heroic deeds of Shivaji. The historical consciousness operates in the
poem as:-
“They led him to the stately hall,
Before the royal throne,
Where, towering in the pomp of power,
The tyrant sat alone,
And knights and nobles stood around.”
(Gokak: 1985:68)

Hur Chunder Dutt’s ‘Tarra Bai’, again recreates historical

consciousness in the mind of readers. The purpose of this poem is to
glorify the history and thus to promote Indian sensibility, patriotism and
the decadent life of Bengalies.

There followed a number of writers. These were the ‘Derozio's

men' who aspired to become eminent in this field. Besides writers,
political leaders and religious men also wrote in their own way for the
enlightenment of the public. For instance, Dada Bhai Naoroji was a
teacher turned political leader and a good orator, produced many good
poems. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda

4
were great orators and their speeches carried the essence of truth.
Vivekananda essayed English verse too eg:- ‘Kali’, ‘ The Mother’,
‘The Song of the Sanyasi’, ‘My Play is Done’ etc. are some of the best
examples to denote his poetic talent.

The Dutts - Toru, Aru, Abju were very important people in

Indo-Anglian poetry. Among them, Toru Dutt (1856-77) is most
important. She is counted as the first poetess in Indo-Anglian literature.
She had English education and a rich and respectable ancestry. Her father
Govind Chunder Dutt was a good linguist and a civilized man with
literary eye. The Dutt family moved to Cambridge in 1871 where she had
attended lectures. In 1875, she had translated French writing into English
with the title ‘A Sheaf Gleamed in French Fields’. She had learned
Sanskrit and translated ‘Ramayana’, ‘Mahabharata’ and ‘Sakuntala’ into
English verse. She had attained command over Sanskrit language and
transformed her interest from French to Sanskrit and translated a number
of Indian mythological works into English . She died very young, at the
age 21, of consumption. Her Sanskrit translations – ‘Ancient Ballads and
Legends of Hindustan' (1882) came posthumously. This work expresses
her great reverence for ancient Hindu past. Her translations are
marvelous and beyond comparison for a young sick girl.

Her greatness as a poet was that she touched the chord of our
racial and religious ethos by rendering of those deathless stories from the
Indian classics. Her efforts in poetry were complementary to the efforts
of social and religious reformation initiated by the early stalwarts of the
Indian renaissance.

5
 Another contributor of literature from Bengal, a land of arts, is
Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909). He was Toru Dutt’s cousin and
forwarded her writing at height. He had passed Indian Civil Service
Examination in 1869 and served at various capacities in India. He had
also devoted much time for literary creation in Bengali and English.
Romesh Dutt had written novels in Bengali and translated two of these
novels into English named – ‘The Lack of palms’ (1902) and ‘The Slave
Girl of Agra’ (1909). He had narrated historical surveys in a large range
like–‘A History of Civilization in Ancient India’, later ‘Hindu
Civilization’, ‘India in the Victorian Age’, ‘The Economic History of
British India’ , and ‘A brief History of Ancient and Modern Bengal’.
Apart from this, his greatest achievement was the Bengali translation of
Rig Veda. His translation in to English verse from Ramayana,
Mahabharata, Rig Veda, The Upanishads, Buddhist literatures,
Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava and Bharavi’s Kiratarjuniya – is most
creditable contribution. Iyengar writes the turn from Toru Dutt to
Romesh Chunder Dutt as:-

“To turn from Aru and Taru Dutt to Romsh Chunder Dutt is
like passing from the bud the flower to the ripened fruit;
from Erato and Melpomene to Clio and Calliope; from
Ushas; rosy- fingered and short-lived, to the toiling Sun on
the ascendant; from infinite promise to impressive
achievement.”
(Iyengar: 1995:44)

6
 Another sparkling star of Indian literature is Manmohan Ghose
(1869- 1924). He was an elder brother of Sri Aurobindo. He had English
education at Manchester and Oxford. His first poem collection –
Primavera (1890) was appreciated by literary scholars and classmate at
Oxford. Like Derizio, Manmohan Ghose became professor of English at
the Presidency College, Calcutta. In 1898, he published collection of
poems – ‘Love Songs and Elegies’ and also wrote five act play- Perseus
the Deliverer. His wonderful sense of the beauty of English words and
rhythm made him notable literary craftsman in eyes of English scholars
of England. His poetry was considered much intellectual thoughts and
rhythm in his poetry is outstanding feature. Manmohan Ghose was born
in 1869, the second son of an illustrious surgeon, Dr. K. D. Ghose.
Together with his brothers, Binoy Bhushan and Aurobindo, he studied at
Loreto Convent, Darjeeling. In 1879 Manmohan Ghose went to England
where he remained until 1894, completing a professional qualification of
Bar-at-law at Lincoln’s Inn. On his return to India, he joined Patna
College as professor of English; later on, he was appointed professor at
Presidency College, Kolkata and worked as Inspector of schools.

Manmohan Ghose began writing poetry when he was in

England and some of his poems were published in Primavera, an
anthology which also contained poems by Laurence Binyon, Arthur
Cripps and Stephen Phillips. Oscar Wilde, reviewing the volume, wrote
of Manmohan Ghose: “The temper of Keats and the moods of Matthew
Arnold have influenced Mr. Ghose, and what better influences could a
beginner have ?” Manmohan Ghose’s poetry in many ways broke with
the earlier school of Orientalist poetry. His poems often spoke of a

7
longing to return to England, where he had spent twenty two years of his
life. While his contemporaries in India, including his brother Aurobindo
Ghose, were writing on nationalistic themes and were drawing upon
ancient Indian culture, Manmohan Ghose turned to England for
inspiration.

Up to this time, Indian literature had flourished in its fullness

but it was Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who lifted Indian literature
at world level and gained for modern India a place on the world literary
history. He won Noble Prize for literature and gave recognition to India
on global scale. Rabindranath Tagore, the versatile personality of Indian
literary scholar is considered as – the Rishi, the Gurudev and the
Maharshi. He was a poet, dramatist, actor, producer, musician, painter,
educationist, reformer, philosopher, prophet, novelist, story writer and a
critic of life and literature. He wrote poetry since his childhood. He was
only fifteen when he published some of his poems. It was as a poet and
the author of Gitanjali he visited England in 1912, and met Rothenstein,
Yeats and others. In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He is well
known as the Founder of ‘Viswa Bharati University’ at Shantiniketan.

His most prestigious work Gitanjali (1912) is a sequence of 103

lyrics translated from selected lyrics in his own Bengali works. The term
'Gitanjali' rendered as 'song offerings' by Tagore. The main theme is the
relationship between the human soul and God. It is centered in life and
the Lord is not only within oneself though to seek whom one has to travel
far and knock at every door, but in the very midst of men and women

8
among 'The poor, lowliest and lost'. Nature and man to the poet are only
means of approaching. God and are not important for their own sake.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali and translated

many of his poems and plays into English. Before he was eighteen, he
had written more than 7000 lines of verse. For Gitanjali he won the
Noble Prize for literature and became poet of the world. After that his
other works and Gitanjali were translated by literary scholars into major
languages of world. To his credit, there is a long list of poems and plays,
both in Bengali and English which had made his place among the world’s
greatest writers. In Iyengar’s words:-

“As the years passed, he became more and more a

legendary figure; in his flowing bead and immaculate
white robes he was truly in the line of the great Rishi of
Upnishadic times, and indeed he was truly in the line of
the great bearing witness to the triune Reality, seeing the
way showing it to others.”
(Iyengar: 1973: 103)

The fertile soil of Bengal has given one more shining star to the
world in the form of Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950). He is the one
uncontestably outstanding figure in Indo-Anglian literature. Though he
came out successful in the Indian Civil service examinations, he did not
join the service, but decided to devote himself to the task of freeing India
from foreign yoke, making revolutionary speeches and hinting at armed

9
rebellion as a means of attaining it. Songs to Myrtilla, Urvasie, Love and
Death, Savitri, Bhavani Mandir, The Life Devine, The Synthesis of Yoga,
Essays on the Gita, The Secret of Veda, The Future Poetry, The
Foundations of Indian Culture, Renaissance in India, and Heraclitus are
some of his major works.

The most outstanding work of Indo-Anglian literature is

Aurobindo’s Savitri which is in three parts, divided in to 12 books or 49
cantos which have total 23813 lines, on which the poet worked for fifty
years of his life. M. K. Naik observes in A History of Indian English
Literature that:-

“Savitri was continuously revised by the poet almost till

the end of his days and shaped into an epic of humanity
and divinity, of death and the life divine. A sort of poetic
philosophy of the spirit and of life, and an experiment in
mystic poetry cast in to a symbolic figure.”
(Naik: 1995:52)

To conclude, in brief about Savitri, Iyengar has used the words of

Prof. Raymond Frank Piper:-

“ Aurobindo created what is probably the greatest epic

in the English Language. I venture the judgment that it is
the most comprehensive, Integrated, beautiful and perfect
cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically
from a primordial cosmic void, through earth’s darkness

10
 and struggles, to the highest realms of super mental
existence, and illumines every important concern of man,
through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence,
and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most
powerful artistic work in the world for expanding man’s
mind towards the Absolute.”
(Iyengar: 1973: 206)

In the list of the path makers for Indo-Anglian poetry, Sarojini

Naidu (1879–1949) was the first female contributor who served Indo-
Anglian literature for her life time. She studied at London and Cambridge
where she had developed the lyrical art. She was multifaceted personality
and more than a poet as she had occupied some of the highest official
positions in the public life of India.
Her first volume of poetry The Golden Threshold (1905) was
followed by The Bird of Time (1912), The Broken Wing (1917) and The
Feather of the Dawn. These works made her greatest poetess of the age.
Her lyrics have a perfect structure and an exquisite finish and she handles
various meters and stanza forms in her poem perfectly. M.K. Naik
observes: “Her best poetry is not just a faded eco of the feeble voice of
decadent romanticism, but an authentic Indian English lyric utterance
exquisitely tuned to the composite Indian ethos, bringing home to the
unbiased reader all the opulence, pageantry and charm of traditional
Indian life, and the splendors of the Indian scene.”
(Naik: 1970:69)

11
 In India, she is recognized as the Nightingale of Indian song.
She became one of the foremost political figures as she was president of
the Indian National Congress and her oratorical mastery gave her fame of
national leader. She was a combination of a poet and a politician.

The Indian resurgence received a fresh impetus during the

Gandhian age (1920-1947), which witnessed a tremendous upheaval in
the political, social and economic sphere. The freedom struggle reached
its peak and there was an unprecedented awakening among sections of
society- women, the youth and the depressed classes – which had long
suffered from the weight of traditional authority. The time appeared to be
ripe for the flowering of romanticism as never before, but curiously
enough Indian English romantic poetry did not register any signal gains
during this period. There was more than one reason for this. First, the
major Indian English romantics, with the exception of Sri Aurobindo
(whose Savitri actually appeared in its final form after the Gandhian age
ended) had already produced their best work by this time and after the
high noon of romanticism, a twilight naturally set in. The minor
romantics that followed were, the disciples of Sri Aurobindo like K.D.
Sethana, N.K. Gupta and others; the academicians like B.N. Seal, G.K.
Chettur, Armando Menezes, V.N. Bhushan etc. and the rest like Manjari
Isvaran (a far more significant short story writer than a poet) and
Harindranath Chattopadhyaya- generally wrote a derivative verse and it
is mostly their work which has created the unjust impression that all
Indian English poetry before Independence is imitative and
inconsequential. Secondly, the political and social awakening made
conditions highly conductive to the growth of the novel; and what poetry

12
lost, fiction gained, for the major triumvirate of Indian English fiction –
Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao – began to write during
this period.

(A) Indian Sensibility as Reflected in Indo-Anglian Poetry -

Indian English poetry is an attempt to give a generic cover to

the Indian imagination seeking creative outlet in and through English.
Many Indian poets write in English because they think their creative urge
can be fulfilled in a better way in English than in the vernacular. Prof.
Srinivasa Iyengar rightly pointed out that Indian writing in English is a
novel experiment in creative mutation when he said: “To be Indian in
thought and feeling and emotion and experience, yet also to court the
graces and submit to the discipline of English for expression” (Iyengar:
1973:5) is something that the present writers aim at. The post-
independence Indian English verse, through the hand of various masters
has gained both strength, variety, and an appreciable position. It has been
said that it is Indian in sensibility, context and English, if we choose to
call it so, in language. It is rooted in and stems out from the Indian
environment and reflects its mores.

In spite of the differences between one medium and another,

there is a unity of supreme significance among Indian writers writing in
regional languages like Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu or Marathi.
The unity of Indianness, i.e., all transcending response to the physical,
idealistic, and intellectual personality of India, in them brings these poets

13
together. Thus, Indian sensibility is a quality, which must be present in
the great works of all Indian writers. Prof. David Mc Cutchion defines
Indianness as “life attitudes” and “modes of perception.” In this regard,
Prof. V.K. Gokak is of the opinion that “Indianness or Indian sensibility
is a composite awareness in the matter of race, milieu, language and
religion” (Gokak: 1975:11). Similarly, Paul Verghese says, “Indianness
is nothing but depiction of Indian culture.” (Verghese: 1971:22). In a
nutshell Indianness or Indian sensibility is the sum total of cultural
patterns of India, deep rooted in ideas and ideas which form the minds of
India.

The Indian English Poets, giving expression to the Indian expe-

rience in thought and imagery, are in the main stream of a tradition. A
cultural activity does not grow all of a sudden; it has an origin and a
development. It is pertinent to consider the tradition that has been built
up by this output and the impact of this tradition on the writers of today.
P. Lal remarks that “These poets are instrumental in rediscovering values
and techniques within one’s own tradition” (Lal: 1977:25) which is a
body of concepts and usages, ideas and feelings to be felt or thought, to
win acceptance and currency or to provoke dissent or modification.

The angle of the poet’s vision has been conditioned by his own
experience and temperament by the primary attitudes or modes of his
perception. “Language, Music, Form, Meaning, Style, Imagery, Inner
Meaning, Mood, Attitude and Vision: this is how we get to know a poem
in each stage of its creation, whatever the process of integration that goes
to make up the poem as a whole.” (Gokak: 1975:6) says V.K. Gokak.

14
 When we come to Indian English poetry, we find ourselves in a
world in which the response to Indian reality, the underlying sensibility,
the use of imagery, diction, etc. are strikingly different from that of the
European poetry. The great poet Sri Aurobindo describes the Indian
renaissance as “less like the European one and more like the Celtic
movement in Ireland.” (Aurobind: 1972:397). He defines it as “the
attempt of a reawakened national spirit to find a new impulse of self-
expression which shall give the spiritual force for a great reshaping and
rebuilding.” In Ireland, this was discovered by a return to Celtic spirit
and culture after a long period of eclipsing English influences. In India,
the course of renaissance led to new self-identification with ancient
cultural heritage. This “awakening of India”, as Jawahar Lal Nehru
observes, was ‘twofold’: “She looked to the West and at the same time
she looked at herself and her own past.” (Nehru: 1961: 330-31).

While Englishman were rediscovering India’s past, the gradual

spread of English education and western ideas brought forth a band of
earnest Indians who drank deep at the fountain of European learning. The
general awakening began with the introduction of English education.
Besides this, the pressure of supreme posed European culture made the
reawakening inevitable. The idea of liberty came through Renaissance
and thereby determined the future of India. The renewed interest in the
ideas of political liberty and Indian sensibility was the unmistakable fruit
of western education. One of the most important elements of this
renaissance was a dramatic change in the attitude to cultural life of
Indian. The new intelligentsia represented by Raja Rammohan Roy,

15
Dwarkanath Tagore and V. Baidyanath Mukharji advocated individual
freedom, self- identity and modernization.

The forceful writings of Raja Rammohan Roy were a shaping

influence on the body of Indian English poetry. In this regard H. M.
Williams observes: “His (Roy’s) influence extends through the Dutts,
Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and on Sri Aurobindo Ghosh.” (Williams:
1987:1). He further says, “This continuity I find strongly related to the
development of India self-awareness and national aspirations” (Williams:
1987:1). As he points out, the cultural response to the challenge of British
rule resulted mainly into ‘cultural nationalism’ and Indian sensibility into
Indian English poetry was a bold expression of this.

In its historical perspective, Indian English poetry reveals three

main stages in its growth and development. These three stages may be
indicated as– imitation, Indianization and individualization. Though these
are transition phases of Indian English poetry, the common thread that
links them together is the Indian sensibility. In the first transition phase,
the sensibility is weak. In the second, it is exhaustive and in the third, it is
precise, rich and truly indigenous. The growth of national character of
Indian English poetry seems to justify itself, indeed, this way.

The first group of poets – Henery Derozio, Michael

Madhusudan Dutt and Kashiprasad ghosh, the pioneers of Indian English
poetry and the representatives of the first phase of Indian English poetry
– asserted the spirit of nationalism as part of national awakening.
Obviously, the assertion of the self was to search for cultural identity and

16
thereby to confirm national identity or Indian identity. The urge for self-
assertion gets manifested in the poems like The Harp of India, To the
Pupils of the Hindu College, Song of the Hindustan Ministrel etc.

The search for identity is quite apparent in Derozio’s sonnet

The Harp of India. Here Derozio identifies himself with india’s great
poetic tradition. He boldly asserts his Indianness:

“(….) thy notes divine

May be by mortal wakened once again,
Harp of my country, let me strike the strain!”
(Derozio: 1980:1)

The second phase of Indian English poetry covers the period

from 1857 to 1920. The spirit of nationalism is more distinct and strongly
Indian in colour. The glorious aspect of Indian nationalism emanates
through the texts of poetry and spirit of it is more radiant and purely
Indian one. Here we find the shift in sensibility from rationalism to
nationalism. The rediscovery of Indian identity is purely Hindu in spirit.
The spirit of Hindu nationalism locates its roots in religious scriptures
and rich cultural life of India.

The poetry of Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo and

Rabindra Nath Tagore is more or less, manifestation of Hindu
nationalism. Toru Dutt expresses her great reverence for ancient Hindu
past in her works like Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882).
Here she deals with the popular stories from the Ramayana, the

17
Mahabharata and the Puranas. These ballads together aspire to promote
the sense of continuity, unity and integration in the Indian life. John B.
Alphanso Karkala emphasises the significance of these stories: “These
are not mere fancy tales. Though they were inventions of the poets of the
past, they had come down the ages as models of virtue meant to teach
and delight the collective conscience of Indian people.” (ibid: 122).

Again, when Sarojini Naidu addresses a sonnet to India, her

patriotic zeal is beyond all doubts and yet the actual product is too
heavily cultured with stock ideas and responses and stale expressions:-

“Thy Future calls thee with a manifold sound

To crescent honours, splendours, victories vast”
(ibid: 6)

The third phase of Indian English poetry covers the

period of India’s freedom struggle i.e. 1920-1947. During this time, the
struggle for freedom reached its height. In literature, some of the greatest
writers of the century were at their most productive. In the area of Indian
English poetry, this period gives no evidence of any new major voices.
Again we find the poets like Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore
who had consolidated their reputation before the advent of the Gandhian
age. In this regard M.K. Naik says, “The impact of the Gandhian
whirlwind produced no outstanding poetry of any kind” (1989: 140).
Though poetry failed to record the spirit of Gandhian age, fiction gave an
authentic expression of Gandhian Movement and the socio-political
realities of the contemporary period. However, the poets like Armando

18
Menzes, Humayun Kabir, V.N. Bhushan etc. were influenced by the
Gandhian whirlwind and naturally their poetry articulated the fervour of
freedom struggle and the spirit of the decades of freedom struggle.

The ethos of the post- Independence phase (1947- ) of India

English poetry is different from that of all the previous periods. Its
relationship to the nineteenth century is the same as that of the modern
age in British literature to Victorianism or of the Restoration to the
English Renaissance. When the ‘overwhelming question’ of political
independence was finally solved, the tensions of the Indian psyche
seemed suddenly to relax. Politics ceased to be an idealistic pursuit and
was reduced to a power game and the new gods of self- aggrandizement
and affluence easily dethroned those of selfless service and dedication to
a cause. The era of hope, aspiration and certitude was gone; an age of
merciless self-security, questioning and ironic exposure commenced. the
rightful assumption of a recognized national identity also gave the post-
independence poet greater self- confidence in his new role as the critic of
the present, the past and himself, while his nineteenth century
predecessor was generally a spokesman of his times and its dreams and
visions. In this new role, the post-independent poet found himself in line
with modern British and American poets and there was naturally much
inevitable borrowing as in the earlier phases. Besides, the scrutiny of self
and society has also taken various forms in modern Indian English
poetry.

Poets like A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthsarthy and Arun Kolatkar

are preoccupied with problem of roots. Their examination of their

19
indigenous ethos has been in several directions. Ramanujan conjures up
early familial memories with a remarkably total recall of the sense-
impressions of childhood. Determined to “seek….and find/ my particular
hell in my Hindu mind,” he is likewise keenly aware of his racial burden
also. His mind seems to be perpetually busy probing the areas of strength
and deficiency of his Hindu heritage. A fellow Tamilian, R. Parthsarthy
is equally obsessed with his native heritage. His ambitious Rough
Passage (1977) is a brave attempt to deal with the theme of identity
exposed to two cultures– viz., the Indian and the Western. In his Jejuri
(1976), which won The Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Arun Kolatkar
discloses the surrealistic similarities between an ossified Hindu religious
tradition and an equally rigid scientific civilization represented by the
railway station, and demonstrates the superiority of a value-system older
than both these– i.e. the primal Life Force – represented by the cocks and
the hens doing a ‘kind of a harvest dance’ in a field of ‘Jowar’.

Nissim Ezekiel, one of the most important fourth phase poet, is

acutely conscious of his alienation being further accentuated by the fact
that he has spent most of his life in highly westernized circles in
cosmopolitan Bombay.Though his moods vary from despair to
resignation (with an assumption of easy superiority occasionally breaking
in), in a poem like ‘Night of the Scorpion’, he becomes a detached but
highly sensitive observer of the characteristic Hindu response to evil and
suffering. Of the three leading Parsi poets, Adil Jussawala views the
contemporary Indian scene through the compassionate eyes of an exile
returning to India after a long sojurnin the affluent west, while continuing
his quest for the ‘Missing Person’– viz., his identity. Gieve Patel stands

20
in no need of a similar quest for he has already accepted “the ambiguous
Fate of Gieve Patel, he being neither Muslim nor Hindu in India.”

Many contemporary poets write in English about their

experience of today’s Indian milieu without losing their national identity.
Gouri Deshpande, Meera Pillai and other poets from writers’ workshop
rightly speak of the Indian background and they are not ignorant of the
shaping of a national consciousness by the environment of the country,
the climate, the background of tradition. But some of the new poets deny
any umbilical connection with their historical past. A tradition cannot be
wholly disowned. Amalendu Bose says that this denial “is a boisterous
proclamation that these writers are upstarts, and rootless.” (Sinha:
1979:64)

In a work of art, that is, a well-realised creative effort, presence

of Indianness is invariable expressed. It must be noted that within the
text, a good writer does not give direct indications of such a presence, but
that the operational response of the Indian writer could be deduced by the
sensibility working in it. What characterizes the Indianness in the writing
is finally ‘the mind behind the organization’ of the context, the life-
attitudes and modes of perception. C.N. Srinath aptly says, “The Indian
poet while using English as his medium should have his roots in his own
soil and yet be a part of the common culture of the English speaking
peoples, indeed of all mankind to the extent that it gives an edge to his
native vigour and sensibilities.” (Iyanger: 1973:206)

21
 Creative writing is an achievement of harmony between
concept and medium, between what is to be said and how it is to be said.
As for concept, the Indian poet is as capable in that area as any poet
handling from another language group. It is in respect of the handling of
the medium that the non-native poet’s ability has to pass through a fire
test. Several poets have the ability to control their medium and thus
achieve aesthetic success. The alien language does not necessarily
diminish or regard the writer’s sense of heritage. Toru Datt, Sarojini
Naidu, Nissim Esekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das and others have
been competent retaining their Indianness in full measure. To discuss and
evaluate the poets, the principal question will be the degree of their
Indianness culture and medium of their expression.

Unless the Indian poet’s experience is authentic and his own,

and not derivative and imitative of conventional modes of the way, the
mere choice of specifically Indian themes and settings would not make
for authenticity. The Indian poet in English can be a poet only by being
truly an Indian. For M.K. Naik, to be truly an Indian of modern times is,
“to constitute a synthesis of the age-old ethos of India and the culture of
the west which English literature and ideas brought to India; it is to live
and breathe the culture of India as it exists today a complex product
which has changed, matured over millenia, losing and gaining much in
the process; it is to write with Indian in one’s bones.” (Naik:
1980:37). This synthesis has clear glimpses in the works of modern poets
like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, etc. For example, Nissim Ezekiel’s Night of the
Scorpion ably illustrates the Indian synthesis in the work of modernists.
The contrast between the two attitudes to scorpion bite; the sceptic,

22
rationalist attitude armed with a little paraffin as a remedy and the
superstitious attitude fortified by prayers and incantations─ a contrast
typical of the modern Indian situation. The immediacy of experience is
couched by easy and colloquial style. Coolness, authentic and objectivity
are some of the marks of Ezekiel’s harsher notations of Indian life.

Ramanujan’s creative work, both as poet and as translator, has

drawn praise from the English-speaking world. Ezekiel is of the opinion
that Ramanujan has enriched the Indo-Anglican tradition of poetry.
(Sinha: 1979:121) Even the titles of some of his poems such as A Hindu
to his Body (The Hindu: he does not hurt a fly or a spider either), Small
Town, South India, Old Indian Belief, and Prayers to Lord Murugan
suggest Ramanujan’s Indianness. In Conventions of Despair, the poet
tells explicitly that he rejects the demands of the modern man such as
marrying again and again:-

“I must seek and will find

my particular hell only in my Hindu mind.”
(Parthsarthy: 1976:97)

Ramanujan’s Indianness in his poetry indicates a complex inter-

action or psychological forces kept under linguistic and formal control.
His poetry is essentially Indian with the modern connection vitalizing it
as in ‘A River’ he says:

“The new poets still quoted

the old poets, but no one spoke

23
 in verse,
of the pregnant woman drowned ...”
(ibid: 98)

Ramanujan finds his objective correlative in a family around

him. In the poem, ‘Obituary’ he recalls his father’s death, and uses the
occasion to comment ironically on ceremonies and rituals associated with
the dead.

There is a conspicuous craftsmanship, introspection and self-

analysis in Kamala Das’s poetry. Confessional tone is sharper in her
poems. If we look for her strength as a poetess, we must detect in her
poetry the dust, the heat, the crowds, the poverty of India combined with
misery and endurance of womankind. She tries to strike a sort of
synthesis between the changing reality of a private passion and the
apparently unchanging reality of the shining sun on Indian horizon. The
overtones of the poem Summer in Calcutta can be taken into account.
She is not alienated from the Indian landscape and its social milieu.

One of the Indian English poets who has emerged as a major

poet only recently is Shiv K. Kumar. Kumar gives in his poetry an
evidence of genuine poetic inspiration. His poetry has great precision and
the image glistens like polished brass though he has often been criticised
for his over refinement, a bizarre search for right word, right phrase, right
stance. Subterfuges, Cobwebs in the Sunshine are evasions or deceptions
that we encounter in our life. The cobwebs being swept away, the

24
subterfuges become visible to us. A Mango Vendor is an eloquent
metaphor:
“Through the slits
Of her patched blouse
One bare shoulder
Two white moons
Pull all horses
Off the track.”
(ibid: 54)

Kumar’s originality lies in the uniqueness of his imaginative

world. He grapples with abstractions and ideas, images of men and
women on the social scene, the complex of emotions centering round
human varieties like sex, love, companionship and problems relating to
art. Through powerfully evoked images the past is revealed. ‘My Co-
rrespondent’ is a fine example of how Kumar achieves an integrative of
idea and image, statement and drama to provide a wholly satisfying
experience.

Deeply involved in his immediate environment, Kumar

continues to strike a convincing note of contemporary life. Trapfalls in
the Sky is his fifth collection of verse that won Sahitya Academic Award
for 1987. The poems have flawless attention to detail, for instance, the
opening poem Mother Theresa feeds Leepers at her Home for
Destitutes, Calcutta, and An Indian Mother’s Advice to her Daughter
Before Marriage (Kumar: 1986:13-14) abounds with the deep Indian
sensibility.

25
 Thus, the poetry of these and other modern Indian English poets
suggests a case for exploring Indianness in terms of not only the authen-
ticity of their locale and culture, but the medium of their expression.
They regard English language as one of the many Indian languages, and
their exploration of it to its fullest possibilities, both in range and depth
produces some of the best poetry. Their poetry is lyrical poetry which is
unique in that the weight of intellect never overburdens their authentic
feelings.

(B) A.K. Ramanujan and His Contemporaries-

Since the end of World War II, there has been a visible stir
everywhere. A new generation comes up with a striking individuality of
its own, a sharpness in its features, an angularity in its gestures, a tone of
defiance in its speech, a gleam of hope in its eyes. The Indo-Anglian poet
also strived for self – expression in English. Several of the poets in the
various regional languages - Balamani Amma, K.M. Panikkar,
Umashankar Joshi, Sri V.K. Gokak, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Amrita
Pritam - are efficiently bilingual. In the post 1947 period, Indo - Anglian
poetry acquired a newcurrency and even respectability. One grew
familiar with the names of Nizzim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Leo Fredricks,
A.K. Ramanujan, Shiv K. Kumar, Arun Kolatkar, Keki Daruwalla and a
few others. The most successful of the New poets, Dom Moraes has
published five volumes - A Beginning, Poems John Nobody, The Brass
Serpent and poems and excellent biographical works Son of My Father
and Never at Home.

26
 Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)

Nissim Ezekiel, who has been called ‘the father of post-

independence Indian verse in English’, is the foremost among the
Indian-English poets. He is the pioneer of modernity in Indian-English
poetry. The Age of Ezekiel in Indian-English poetry started with his
creative oeuvre. He was also an art-critic and playwright. In 1952,
Fortune press (London) published his first collection of poetry, A Time to
Change. He published his book The Unfinished Man in 1960. He co-
founded the literary monthly Imprint, in 1961. He functioned as art critic
of The Times of India (1964-66) and edited Poetry India (1966-67). From
1961 to 1972, he headed the English Department of Mithibai College,
Mumbai. The Exact Name, his fifth book of poetry, was published in
1965. During this period, he had short tenures as visiting professor at
University of Leeds (1964) and University of Chicago (1967). In 1969,
Writers Workshop, Calcutta published his The Three Plays. A year later,
he presented an art series of ten programs for Mumbai television.

On the invitation of the US Government, he went on a month-

long tour to the US in November, 1974. In 1975 he went as a Cultural
Award Visitor to Australia. In 1976, he translated poetry from Marathi,
and co-edited a fiction and poetry anthology. Ezekiel received the
Sahitya Akademi award in 1983 and the Padma Shri in 1988. He was
Professor of English at University of Mumbai during the 1990s. He
functioned as the Secretary of the Indian branch of the international

27
writers' organization PEN. After a prolonged battle with Alzheimer's
disease, Nissim Ezekiel died in Mumbai, on 9 January 2004. His works
include A Time To Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The
Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), The
Three Plays (1969) and Hymns in Darkness (1976). When he began his
creative course of life in the late 1940s, his adoption of formal English
was controversial, given its association with colonialism. Yet he
naturalised the language to the Indian situation, and breathed life into the
Indian English poetic tradition.

Ezekiel’s poetry describes love, loneliness, lust, creativity and

political pomposity, human foibles and the "kindred clamour" of urban
dissonance. Over the course of his creative years, his attitude changed,
too. The young man, "who shopped around for dreams", demanded truth
and lambasted corruption. By the 1970s, he accepted "the ordinariness of
most events"; laughed at "lofty expectations totally deflated"; and
acknowledged that "The darkness has its secrets / Which light does not
know." After 1965, he even began embracing India's English vernacular,
and teased its idiosyncrasies in Poster Poems and in The Professor. He
acted as a mentor to many younger poets - Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla,
Gieve Patel and several others. In the last few years of his life, he was
deeply involved in helping younger poets, especially those based at
Mumbai, his advice being forthright, but seldom blunt.

Ezekiel's poems are lucid, and are splendidly evocative and

satisfyingly sensuous. The recurring note in Ezekiel's recent poems is the

28
hurt that urban civilization inflicts on modern man dehumanizing him,
and subjecting his virtues to population and devaluation.

He is a painstaking craftsman in whose poems we find form.

His poetry is simple, introspective and analytical. He is highly disciplined
and unpretentious. His skilful use of prosody, his restraint, conversational
style, his mastery of irony, his purity of diction and perfect control over
his 'emotions place him on the top of the modern, Indo-Anglian poets.
The Night of the Scorpion is one of his best poems-A simple narrative
poem in which superstitious practices still out grown one juxtaposed with
the scientific developments.

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993)

Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan is perhaps one of the most

versatile poets and translators that post independence India has ever
known. He was born and educated in Mysore, India. He completed
Bechelor’s and Master’s degrees at Maharaja’s College, Mysore, and for
some years taught English in Kerala, Poona and Baroda. In the year
1958, he left for Indiana University, U.S.A., as a Fulbright scholar to
study folklore and linguistics at Indiana University. He obtained his
Doctor’s Degree in Linguistics (generative grammar of Kannada) in
1963. He taught at the University of Chicago for more than three
decades, where he served as the Chairman of the Department of South
Asian Languages and Civilizations. During those three decades of
committed academic pursuit, he inspired a whole generation of scholars
in Indian literature, folklore and linguistics, while as a poet, translator

29
and humanist he fostered a broad understanding of Indian culture all over
the world. He died at the age of sixty four on 13 July 1993 while
researsing Girish Karnard’s Nagamandala.

Ramanujan is the author of eighteen books and many influential

essays. His volume of poems include His works include Fifteen Tamil
Poems (1965), The Striders (1966), The Interior Landscape (1967), No
Lotus in the Navel (1969), Relations (1971), Speaking of Siva (1972), The
Second Sight(1987), Collected Poems, The Black Hen (posthumously in
1994) and Uncollected Poems and Prose in 2001. The poems in the
earlier volumes have, as S. Nagarajan puts it, “their origin in recollected
personal emotion. They deal with the poet’s memory of his relations and
the ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers. (Peeradina:
1972:18)

Ramanujan was honoured by Government of India with the Padma

Shri in 1976. He earned a Mac Arthur Fellowship in 1983. In recognition
of the excellence of his translations, the South Asia Council of the
Association for Asian Studies has established the A.K. Ramanujan Book
Prize for Translation. A posthumous Sahitya Akademi award was
announced (1999) by the National Academy of Letters, India for The
Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan.

The dominant theme of Ramanujan's poetry is his preoccupation

with the past, his personal as well as racial. He is one of the most talented
of the new poets. ‘The striders’, a collection of poems in Tamil and
Relations, (poems) are some of his great works. He settled in Chicago,
and his 'exile' there has made him consider 'a search for one's roots' an

30
integral part of his poetry.his theme is announced in the epigraph poem, a
translation from Tamil,

“Like a hunted deer

On the wide white

Salt sand,

A flayed hide

Turned inside out,

One may run,

Escape.

But living

Among relations

Binds the feet.’’

(Collected Poems: 1995:56)

There is an awareness of the presence of the past in the present,

and of the strength of a rich culture and tradition, informs the poetry of
Ramanujan. His poetry is an attempt to repossess the usable past at
personal and racial levels. 'Snakes, River, Conventions of Despair, Small
Scale Reflection are some of his beautiful poems. Authentic poetic
language is the hallmark of Ramanujan's poetry. He has an enduring
concern with Tamil classical poetry and medieval Kannada literature, his

31
poetic technique has absorbed the motifs and stylistic devices of both. All
this results in a forceful, meaningful, personal voice and Ramanujan has
established himself as one of the most talented of the new Indo-Anglian
poets.

R. Parthasarathy (1934- )

Of the poets who cultivate an extreme austerity in style,

Parthasarathy is probably the most successful. 'The first step-poems,
1956-66, is his poetic collection. His best poems reveal an uncommon
talent and a sensibility that deliberately puts shackles on itself. His most
ambitious effort is Towards an Understanding of India. He is a
conscientious artist with a scrupulous aesthetic taste. His poetry is the
articulation of his predicament, of an exile who has alienated himself
from his culture. His poetry is an intense search for identity, a search for
roots in his nature, culture environment and language. The search is
realised by an objective probing of the personal as well as the historic
past. The inner conflicts that are inherent in such a search provide the
basic tension of his poetry.

Kamala Das (1934- )

Kamala Das was born in Punnayurkulam in Southern Malabar.

She was educated mainly at home and spent most of her years in

32
Bombay. Her works include Summer in Calcutta (1965), The
Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), The
Anamalai Poems (1985) and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996).
Among her prose works in English are her fictional autobiography, My
Story (1976), the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), a collection of short
stories called Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992). She
identifies herself as Kamala Suraiyya after her conversion to Islam.
Kamala Das is perhaps the most interesting and appealing among
Indo-English poets. Both her life and her works are so controversial and
unconventional as to invite comments and criticism from readers and
critics. Kamala occupies a position of considerable importance in post
independent Indian writing in English. Ever since the publication of
Summer in Calcutta in 1965, her first volume of poetry in English, She
has wielded great influence as a leading poet constituting the modern
trend of Indian poetry in English. Sheis a confessional poet speaking out
her intimate private experiences with astonishing honesty and brutal
frankness. She began writing under the pen name Madhavikutty, a
bilingual writer. She has written 30 novels in Malayalam. Her poetic
collections, Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, The Old Play House
and Other Poems, short story collection A Doll for the Child Prostitute
and Other Stories' and My Story her autobiography. Her skill as an artist
perfectly matched with her deep insight into human predicaments - social
and psychological. She is basically a poet of love, an emancipated poet,
feminist, and an iconoclast.

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-)

33
 Jayanta Mahapatra was born in Cuttack in 1928, was educated
there and in Patna. After his Master's Degree in Physics, he joined as a
teacher and served in different Government colleges of Orissa. He
retired, on superannuation, from the academic profession in 1986 when
he was in Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. He started writing poetry in his
late thirties. But this late beginning signifies his 'ripe advent'. His works
include Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other
Poems (1971), A Father's Hours (1976), A Rain of Rites (1976),
Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Life
Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden
of Waves & Fruit (1988), Temple (1989), Shadow Space (1997), Bare
Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005). He turned bilingual and has
published a few works of poetry in Oriya including Bali (The
Victim), Kahibi Gothie Katha (I Will Tell a Story) and Baya Raja (The
Mad Emperor). During 1976-77, he participated in the University of
Iowa's International Writing Programme. He received the prestigious
Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award (Chicago) in 1975. He is the first
Indian-English poet to have received, in 1981, the award of the Sahitya
Akademi (National Academy of Letters, India) for his Relationship.
Other awards and honours include First Prize in Scottish International
Open Poetry Competition, Second Prize for International Who's Who in
Poetry, London, Gangadhar Meher National Award for Poetry,
Ramakrishna Jaidayal Harmony Award and Vaikom Mohammed Basheer
(1997) Award.

Mahapatra is a very subjective poet, draws his images from his

experiences in life which makes him difficult to interpret. His four

34
volumes of verse are titled Close The Sky, Ten by Ten, Swayamvara and
Other Poems, Counter Measures, A Rain of Rites. Silence is the most
important concept in Mahapatra's poems. Some of his poems are the
genuine products of his imaginative apprehension of evil in the Indian
society.

Keki N. Daruwalla (1937- )

Keki N Daruwalla was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan. His

education was at Ludhiana. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958
and, on retirement, he lives in Delhi. A recipient of Sahitya Akademi
Award (1984) and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has
published several books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of
fictional works. His works of poetry include Under Orion (1970),
Apparition in April (1971), Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter
Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A
Summer of Tigers(1995), Night River (2000) and The Map-
Maker (2002). Swords and Abyss (1979) and The Minister for
Permanent Unrest & Other Stories (1996) are his works of fiction. He
also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry.

Dom Moraes (1938-2004)

35
 Dominic Francis Moraes, popularly known as Dom Moraes,
was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Beryl and Frank Moraes, former
editor of Indian Express. He spent eight years in London, and most of his
life in Mumbai. He edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New
York. He became the editor of The Asia Magazine in 1971. He scripted
and partially directed over 20 television documentaries for the BBC and
ITV. He was a war correspondent in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam. From
1973 to 1977, he was chief literary consultant for the United Nations
Fund for Populations. His works include A Beginning (1958), his first
book of poems, Poems (1960), his second book of poems, John
Nobody (1965), his third book of poems, Beldam and Others (1967), a
chapbook of verse, Absences (1983), book of poems, Collected
Poems (1987), Serendip (1990), poems, Out of God's Oven: Travels in a
Fractured Land (1992), The Long Strider (2003), Never at Home,
memoir, My Son's Father, memoir, A Variety of Absences: The
Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes (2003), Typed With One
Finger (2003), Collected Poems 1954-2004 (2004). Honours and awards
he received include Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the
imagination, 1958, for the book of poems A Beginning, Autumn Choice
of the Poetry Book Society for Poems (1960) and Sahitya Akademi
Award (1994) for his Serendip.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947-)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore. He was educated

at the Universities of Allahabad and Bombay and has been teaching

36
English Literature at the University of Allahabad. His works include
Bharat Mata: A Prayer (1966), Woodcuts on Paper (1967), Poems|
Poems|Poems (1971), Three (1973), The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love
Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala (1991). He is also
the editor of Twenty Indian Poems (1990), The Oxford India Anthology
of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) and Periplus: Poetry in
Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) (1993). In 1995, he won the
Gettysburg Review Award in non-fiction prose.

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi. He grew up in

Kashmir, and was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar and
University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania
State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in
1985. His volumes of poetry include Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of
Ghazals (2003), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without
a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A
Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow
Pages (1987),The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum
Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also
the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's
Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor
of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Ali received
fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf
Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, The New York
Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was

37
awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of
Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton
College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson
College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

Bibhu Padhi (1951- )

Bibhu Padhi was born in the ancient town of Cuttack in Orissa. He

was educated there at the Ravenshaw Collegiate School, Ranihat High
School, and Ravenshaw College. He has been teaching English literature
in Government colleges. He started writing seriously around 1975 and his
poems were published in all the major Indian literary journals, Debonair,
The Illustrated Weekly, Imprint, Indian Literature and Quest. Outside
India, his poems have been published in, amongst others, Encounter,
Orbis, Outposts, New Letters, Southwest Review and The Toronto South
Asian Review. A selection appeared in New Voices: Eight Contemporary
Poets (Anvil Press, 1990). He has edited a number of poetry anthologies
and is a Counsellor in Creative Writing with the Indira Gandhi National
Open University, Delhi. His critical writing, on D.H.
Lawrence andIndian Philosophy and Religion: A Reader’s Guide (co-
written with his wife), has been published in the USA. His own first
collection, Going to the Temple was published in 1988. Lines from a
Legend, which brings alive the world of Cuttack, was published by
Peepal Tree in 1993. Other works include A Wound Elsewhere, Painting
the House, Games the Heart Must Play (a trilogy of love poems)
and Living with Lorenzo (a series of poems on D.H. Lawrence).

38
 Meena Alexander (1951-)

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India. She is

currently a Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York and still takes trips back to Kerala annually.
Her first book, a single lengthy poem, entitled The Bird's Bright Wing,
was published in 1976 in Calcutta. Since then, Alexander has published
seven volumes of poetry, including River and Bridge; two novels:
Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a collection of both
prose and poetry, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial
Experience; a study on Romanticism: Women in Romanticism: Mary
Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley; and her
autobiography, Fault Lines. In 1993, she was the recipient of a Mac
Dowell Fellowship.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1952- )

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English in

the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute
of Technology, Delhi. She has a Bengali father and a Goan mother. She
obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge in 1982. In
1990, Nair received the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British
Council competition. She has published three volumes of poetry: Yellow
Hibiscus, The Hyoid Bone and The Ayodhya Cantos (Penguin, 2004,

39
1999 and 1992). Her research interests are in the areas of literary and
postcolonial theory, cognitive linguistics, the philosophy of language and
the relationship between technology and cultural text. Nair's books
include Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (Oxford
University Press, 2002 and Routledge, 2003); Lying on the Postcolonial
Couch: the Idea of Indifference (Minnesota University Press and Oxford
University Press, 2002); Technobrat: Culture in a Cybernetic
Classroom (Harper Collins, 1997); as well as the edited
volume, Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India (Sage,
2002).

Imtiaz Dharker (1954-)

Born in Lahore, Imtiaz Dharker grew up in Glasgow and now

divides her time between London and Mumbai. She works as a
documentary film-maker in India. She is also an artist, and conceives her
books as sequences of poems and drawings. She has written three books
of poetry, conceived as sequences of poems and drawings. Home,
freedom, journeys, geographical and cultural displacement, communal
conflict, gender politics – these remain the recurrent themes in her
poetry. Purdah (1989) is Dharker’s first book; Postcards from
God (1994), her second book; and the most recent book is, I Speak for
the Devil (2003).

E. V. Ramakrishnan

40
 E.V. Ramakrishnan is Professor of English in the Department
of English, South Gujarat University, Surat. Born in Kannur, North
Kerala, Ramakrishnan was educated at Tellicherry, Calicut and
Hyderabad. He worked as a Lecturer at Jalna in Marathwada in
Maharashtra. Then he moved to South Gujarat University, Surat. E.V.
Ramakrishnan has authored three books of poems, including Being
Elsewhere in Myself, in English, one collection of critical essays in
English and four in Malayalam. He edited Narrating India: The Novel in
Search of the Nation (for the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi), Tree of
Tongues, An Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry and Making It New:
Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry.

Jeet Thayil (1959- )

Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New

York and Bombay. In 1998 he went to New York where he received an
MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the
New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in 'Stand',
'Verse', 'Agenda', 'London Magazine', 'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and
'Kavya Bharati', among many other journals. He is an editor with
'Rattapallax' and a contributing editor with 'Fulcrum', and is currently
based in Bangalore and Delhi. He is also known for his performance of
his poems, With or Without his New York-based band, Bombay Down.
His works include Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992), Apocalypso
(London, Mark Arts. 1997) and English (New York, Rattapallax
Press/New Delhi, Penguin India, 2003). Besides the three poetry

41
volumes, he has edited two anthologies of short stories, Vox: New Indian
Fiction (Sterling, 1996) and Vox 2: Seven Stories (Sterling, 1997).

C. P. Surendran (1959-)

C. P. Surendran was born in Kerala. He took his Masters in

English from Delhi University, and was, for a short while, a Lecturer of
English at Calicut University. He resigned from his academic job in 1986
to become a journalist. At present, Surendran works with the Times of
India. Penguin India has published his collection of poems
titled Posthumous Poems. The other books of poetry published by
Surendran include Gemini-II and Canaries on the Moon (Yeti Books,
Kozhikode). An Iron Harvest (India Ink/Roli Books) is Surendran's first
novel.

Makarand Paranjape (1960- )

Makarand Paranjape is a Professor of English at Jawaharlal

Nehru University's Centre for Linguistics and English at the School of
Language, Literature and Culture Studies. A widely published poet,
novelist, critic, and columnist, he is the author of The Serene Flame,
Playing the Dark God, Used Book and Partial Disclosure (poetry); This
Time I Promise It’ll Be Different and The Narrator (fiction); and
Mysticism in Indian English Poetry, Decolonization and Development,
and Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel (criticism). The books
he has edited include Indian Poetry in English, Sarojini Naidu: Selected

42
Poetry and Prose, Nativism: Essays in Literary Criticism, The Best of
Raja Rao, The Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader, and In Diaspora:
Theories, Histories, Texts.

Rabindra K. Swain (1960- )

Rabindra K. Swain had his Master's degree in English Literature
in 1983 and a Ph.D on the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra in 1995 from
Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India. He has published three
books of poetry, Once Back Home (Har-Anand, New Delhi, 1996), A
Tapestry of Steps (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1999), and Severed
Cord (Indialog, 2002). Severed Cord is a poignant collection of poems,
which deals with the emotions underlying every aspect of life and its
subtle relationships. He has also published a book of translation from
Oriya, Rajendra Kishore Panda's Bahubreehi. He is a cotranslator of J. P.
Das’s Dear Jester and Other Stories (2006). Besides, he has a critical
work, The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study (Prestige
Books, New Delhi, 2000). His poetry has appeared in The Kenyon
Review, Shenandoah, Verse, New Letters, and Quarterly West, among
others.

Tabish Khair (1966-)

Tabish Khair is Associate Professor in the Department of

English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Born in Ranchi and educated
mostly in Gaya, India, he is the author of various books, including the
poetry collections, My World and Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin,
2000), the study, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English

43
Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador,
2004). His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize
(awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary
fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong
Kong. Other Routes is an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by
Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword
by Amitav Ghosh) and published by Signal Books and Indiana University
Press.

Arundhati Subramaniam (1967-)

Arundhati Subramaniam is a poet, dance critic, a freelance
journalist on the arts and in charge of an interactive arts forum at
Mumbai's National Centre for the Performing Arts. As poet, she has been
published in several journals. She is also on the committee of the Poetry
Circle of Mumbai. As journalist, she has written extensively for leading
publications in the country, such as The Times of India, The Hindu,
among others, and now writes for several culture portals on the web. As
arts administrator, she heads a forum called "Chauraha" that promotes
dialogue betweeen practitioners of various artistic disciplines. She is the
author of two books of poems: On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I
Live. She has also published a book on Buddha and his role in shaping
and transfiguring the course of history: The Book of Buddha.

Ranjit Hoskote (1969-)

44
 Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator
of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of
poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographer’s Apprentice (2000)
and The Sleepwalker’s Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant
Dahake’s Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992)
and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen
Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical
biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (1998) and a monograph on the
painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary
organizer, Hoskoté has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay,
since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997.
Hoskote was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing
Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at
the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for
Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in
2004. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay. Vanishing Acts (Penguin
Books India 2006) brings together some of his best poetry, drawn from
his three published collections, along with a substantial body of new
poems.

Thus, Indian Poetry in English is nearly 200 years old. It began

with Henry Derozio in the first half of the nineteenth century. Preceding
Derozio, the British servicemen in India are said to have laid the
foundation stones for this genre. Today, Indian Poetry in English has
been exported back to the West, in the form of Indian poets living in the
West. Indian Poetry in English reflects regional variations such as
language, ethnicity and culture. It should also be noted that Indian

45
English poets belong to different races, cultures and traditions yet the
same Indianness or the Indian sensibility is the key characteristic of
Indian English poetry.

Looking at the multicultural angle of Indian Poetry in English, one

can clearly spot the difference in Western multiculturalism and Indian
multiculturalism. In the West, multiculturalism is a recent phenomenon,
while in India it is an accepted way of life. Western multiculturalism
portrays resistance against cultural hegemony, search for identity and
struggle for the recognition of difference. In India, the phenomenon is
more assimilatory, than subversive. In spite of the cultural, religious,
social and geographical differences, there seems to be an integration, a
Unity in Diversity. The Indian identity can be called confluent.
This confluent identity is aware of the differences and at the same time,
maintains its own integrity. This identity negotiates a space for itself in
the multicultural congregation that is India. This aspect is evident in not
only Indian Poetry in English but also in other genres of Indian English
Writing. As the confluent Indian identity migrates West, the trends range
from assimilatory to reactionary, perhaps in response to the trends in
Western multiculturalism which incorporates different ethnic identities,
from many parts of the World and as a result face resistance from the
host communities.

▬◙▬

46
 References
Gokak, V.K., An Integral View of Poetry: An Indian Perspective, New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975.

Iyengar,K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling

Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995.

----------Indian Writing in English, New Delhi Asia Publishing House, 2nd

Edition, 1973.

Kulshrestha, Chirantan, (ed.) Contemporary Indian Verse; An Eval

47
uation , 1980.

Kumar, Shiv, K., Trap Falls in the Sky, New Delhi: Macmillan, 1986.

Lal, P., quoted by Linda Hess in Meenakshi Mukherjee, Consid

erations ,Bombay: Allied, 1977.

Naidu. S, "If You Call Me"; V.K.Gokak (Ed.) the Golden Treasury of
Indo-Anglian Poetry, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992.

Naik, M.K., A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya

Akademi, 1995.
------------“Echo and Voice in Indian Poetry,” in Contemporary Indian\
Verse, (ed.) C. Kulshrestha, New Delhi: Sterling Publishing House, 1980.

Parthasarathy, R.,(ed). Ten twentieth Century Poets New Delhi: Oxford,

Crown Series, 1976.

Peeradina, Saleem, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, (ed.)

Bombay: Macmillan, 1972.

Sinha, Krishna, Nandan (ed.) Indian Writing in English, New Delhi:

Heritage Publishers, 1979.

▬◙▬

48
Representation of the Traditional Indian Family

(A) Family as a Theme:-

Ramanujan has evolved as a very important Indian poet through

his collections like The striders, Relations, Selected Poems, The Second
Sight and The Black Hen and Other Poems, written over a period ranging
more than three decades. In spite of his constant exposure to American
beliefs and culture, he has consistently written about India― not as an
obsession, but as a source of inspiration. One observes in his writings a
possibility that an artist as an individual is capable of restructuring a
personal (Indian) past and nourishing the same as insulated from the

49
ideological oppositions that effect the time and space in which his text is
written.

While recreating the Indian settings—both rural and urban, he

seems to be unaffected by the objects and images of his American
surrounding because the life he captures looks so original and just not a
memory game. "His exile in Chicago only strengthened his sense of the
Indian past: his disturbingly vivid and agile poetic articulations both in
English and Kannada are deeply rooted in the myth, folklore, history,
culture and ethos of his native soil,” (Satchidanandan:1994:6), says K.
Satchidanandan in his editorial comment in a commemorative volume on
Ramanujan. While recreating the human situations and details of Indian
life the image of family appears as a key image. It helps the reader
understand and appropriate the meaning and beauty of such poems. R.
Parthasarathy, another important Indian poet writing in English suggests,
"the family, for Ramanujan, is in fact one of the central metaphors with
which he thinks and writes.” (Parthasarathy: 1976:95)

Most of his poems, though intensely personal, have a universal

dimension of their own. The main themes of Ramanujan’s poetry are
family, love, despair and death. They are full of irony, humour, paradox
and sudden reversals. However, the archetypal theme of Ramanujan’s
poetry is family and its relationships viewed from different angles. In these
relationships, we find nostalgia, pathos, irony, humour and sympathy. His
poems reveal an assured identity of the poet with the family, which he very
much needed after he settled down in Chicago. The linking of familial

50
experience with history and tradition is a feature which runs through the
poetry of Ramanujan.

The theme of love, an indispensable part of family relationship, in

its various aspects ranging from frustration, infatuation, alienation to
ultimate understanding, is daringly portrayed through effective
imagery. Still Another View of Grace, is regarded as one of the finest love
poems, a passionate poem of intensity showing the poet caught between
the clash of diverse traditions and back-grounds. Like metaphysical poets,
he succeeds in combining emotion with reflection. The poet’s severe angry
reprimand to his desire “do not follow a gentle man’s morals” at last ends
up with surrender to love and crossing the barriers of his orthodox
tradition. The transformation of sensual passion into gentle love is
beautifully suggested in the last lines:-
“------I shook a little

And took her, behind the laws of my land”.

(Parthasarathy: 97)

In his poems, the drama of love takes place in thought and in action
accompanying that thought simultaneously.

Looking for a Cousin on a Swing, included in his collection The

Striders refers to a village swing shared by cousins, a girl of four of five
years and a boy, six or seven years of age. The idyllic rural backdrop
with the swing is treasured in the shared memory of both the cousins to
mature into a romantic longing afterwards when they grow away from

51
each other. There is no hint of incest as marriage between cousins is a
social practice. Against this familial possibility the intimacy of
cousins/the shared innocence transforms into an aspired romantic
experience. The poem can be read as having two parts: the first one
up to the fourteenth line as a song of innocence and the rest as a song of
experience. The sweet innocent intimacy of the cousins is built up with
"every lunge of the swing." The "lunging pits of feelings" of a small girl
keep in store the touch of "innocence" to be contrasted with that of
"experience" later. The poet says:-
“When she was four or five
She sat on a village swing
And her cousin, six or seven,
Sat himself against her;
With every lung of swing
She felt him
In the lunging pits
Of her feeling;
And afterwards
We climed a tree.”
(Collected Poems: 1995:19)

The intimacy is intensified as the poet makes them climb a

tree, not very tall but full of leaves like those of a fig tree. As they climb
up they symbolically gain heights where they are no longer innocent. The
image of the adolescent pair associated with the fig tree reminds one of
Adam and Eve depicted in old drawings where the genital organs are
conveniently concealed by fig leaves. The swing that keeps them

52
alienated from the ground and lifted towards the sky through a tension of
upward and downward movements anticipates a sensuous experience
beyond the boundary of childhood innocence.

The second part of the poem presents a contrast. The rustic, folk
touch gives way to a cityscape where the genesis of a relationship as
innocent as childhood is lost and longing for the same is futile. The little
girl is no more a child and:-
“Now she looks for the swing
In cities with fifteen suburbs
And tries to be innocent
About it.”
(Collected Poems: 1995:1 9)

A city with fifteen suburbs and the remote Indian village are
poles apart as far as the look and outlook of woman is concerned. The
relationship between the cousins suffer from an estrangement and that is
effectively communicated through the image of "the crotch of a tree."
The fig leaves are no more the images of innocence at the end of the
poem. The leaves change colour and turn scarlet. The leaves act as a
camouflage to conceal lust. K.N. Daruwalla writes; "His poem 'Cousin on
a Swing' is bursting with sexual imagery, yet almost hidden under a
cover, just as his cousin hides her sexual feelings” (Daruwalla: 1994:22).
Ramanujan has bought in the city as a matter of contrast, so that he can
capture the contour of the country with more clarity and precision.

53
 Obituary, another significant poem included in Relations, depicts
middle class life in the context of the male dominated Indian family.
Since the father is the major (male) figure who burdens himself with all
responsibilities in the family, things come to a stand still with his passing
away. He leaves a changed wife who has become a widow and the
daughter whose marriage becomes difficult without him. The father's
liabilities are left for the sons to be settled and the little grandsons grow
again this setting. In the poem the poet presents in an ironical vein the
tragic effect on the family due to sudden death of his father, causing
repercussions on or affecting the whole family set-up:-

“The father bequeathed to his son

Dust on a table full of papers
Left debts and daughters,
A bedwetting grand son
Named by the toss
Of a coin after him a house that leaned
Slowly through (our) growing
Years on a bent coconut
Tree in the yard.”

The poet’s play of words in the lines:-

“Being the burning type

He burned properly
At the cremation
As before, easily

54
 And at both ends.”
(ibid: 88)

It evokes sarcastic tone mixed with tears and helper’s smiles. The
ritualistic ceremonies and mixing of the dead person’s ashes in Holy
River etc. seemed meaningless to the poet who experienced a void that
nothing can fill in. His father’s hopes and aspirations too died. No
memorial was set up to record his achievements which are almost
insignificant. Yet the poet anxiously tried to find out the two lines written
about his father in the obituary column in scraps of news paper.

This shows his unbroken blood relationship or the last thread of

attachment in spite of his ironic digs at the negative achievements of his
father. The changed mother, a relic of his father’s death is indeed a sad
remembrance of this tragic event that upset the whole family.
Generally poems written on death, end with a philosophical
resignation. But Ramanujan just presented the situation as it is, affecting
the relationships in a realistic manner. There is a poignant undertone
suggesting his father’s miserable position who left nothing to his son
except debts, responsibilities and expenses for performing annual
ceremonies.
The process continues as naturally as a coconut tree bends with the
passing of years. The old house leans on the same tree. Time passes with
the death and the cremation of the father. The Indian life continues
meaningfully through rituals. The rhythm of continuity is maintained.
Life does not end with the death of an individual. If the corpse is burnt
properly, it offers a good sign. The bones left in the ashes after the

55
funeral are treated as sacred objects to be picked by the sons to be thrown
into the holy river. The ritual is a Hindu way of connecting life with
eternity, the soul with God after it leaves the body. The priest supervises
the age-old rituals and the sons obey his instructions. Ramanujan not only
explores the Indian life- rhythm through this Hindu ritual but seems to be
quite aware of the secular world that Hindus inhabit. Hence the railway
station is chosen as a locale to denote the meeting point of three rivers.
No headstone on the grave is erected to bear the name and the dates
of birth and death of the poor dead father. Nobody bothers to note that
the man died of a heart attack in the fruit market. Nobody knows about
the difficult caesarian birth that had brought the man to this earth long
ago. Old age is like ripe fruit and must rut or be consumed. However, the
son comes to know of some lines published about his father as an
obituary in a Madras newspaper. He searches to find a copy but fails. The
old papers are sold to street hawkers who sell the same to grocery stores.
The son searches for the obituary on the paper cones that contain salt,
coriander of jaggery while buying things from the grocery shops. But the
search remains funny and vain. The poem suggests the fact that one does
not live in obituaries in print nor the lines on the headstone. While
attempts of this kind belong to more or less a western method of
documenting and preserving the memory of the dead the Indian way is
more human and warm. Because it involves more than one annual ritual
and the renewal is more than mere reminiscence.
Another poem entitled Small Scale Reflections on a Great House
included in the same anthology is yet another poem on the family theme.
It records the poet's attitude to the Indian joint family system tinged with
irony. The "great house" is the central focus of the poem that absorbs

56
everything that enters into it. And not only that, but anything that goes
out of this house also comes back. This absorption signifies resilience
unique to Indian joint family despite the limitations of the system:
Things comes in everyday
to lose themselves among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago; (Collected Poems: 102).
Things that come into the house are used, consumed and become a
part of the household. They do not go away. The gain or loss of things
happens in the boundary of the great house. It is a world in itself. But
Ramanujan understands the forces of social change that has already set in
through globalisation of culture. He hints at the remnants of past passing
from the older generations to the new in terms of religious rites and
social habits in Indian families.
The items that have their access into the house include the living
and the non-living. The entry of 'lame wandering cows,' 'servants,' 'sons-
in-law,' 'wives,' 'library books,' 'sweet dishes' from neighbourhood,
phonographs,' or hereditary diseases through marriage like epilepsies are
to stay permanently under the same roof. But the tinge of irony reveals a
critical point of view of the narrator. That is why the cows are 'lame.' The
way the arrangement is monitored to let the cow be pregnant signifies a
vulgarity about the whole process of maternity perpetuated in the joint
family under the dominance and supervision of the elders. The young
girls learn to accept their role as future-mothers in a cryptic manner
'behind windows with holes in them.'
The library books are borrowed and not read and the fines multiply
in the ledgers of the library. The books, the papers and records of the past

57
century become a breeding ground for the silverfish. Neighbours
celebrate wedding anniversary of 'god' with pomp, not as a pious
religious rite but for impressing others with an exhibition of sweet dishes
prepared through sleepless nights. Sons-in-law forget their mothers and
prefer to stay with their wives in this great house of their fathers/mothers-
in-law as parasites. And daughters-in-law who come subjugate
themselves to the order of the family as the 'hanging banana leaves' yield
to the hazards of monsoon. It is a point of no return for these women who
leave their own houses, their past and their freedom.
Ramanujan, through a brilliant simile describes how things that go
out also come back, but in a changed manner. Those who go out of the
house for greater opportunities back come disillusioned with more
liabilities to the house. The return of the native is not a homecoming for
jubilation but like the kind of Indian cotton processed as muslin at
Manchester to be sold in India at a high price. Return of things no doubt
suggests a centripetal force of the Indian home but there is nothing much
positive to be happy about it. The poet adds a lot of instances. The letters
mailed also come back as the addressee is not found at the other end.
Ideas, too, that evolve in this house to be mentioned casually 'somewhere'
come back as rumours come back to their source in a more distorted
manner. The closed system of the family runs itself unaffected by
intrusion or expulsion. The ideals of the new generation are more or less
a repetition of the old. Ideas return like prodigies to prodigal fathers.
The daughters who go away from this house after marriage, too
come back. The span of their marital life is short-lived. They return as
widows or deserted by the idiot husband. The sons who go away return in
some cases being reborn as grand children. The so-called uncles who

58
have penchant for be betel nuts visit the house to amuse the
grandchildren with anecdotes of their unseen fathers. The fatherless
children grow under roof with grandparents who encourage them to recite
Sanskrit verses and the old rhythm of life continues. The young bring the
holy Ganges water to be given to the dying old who is hardly able to gulp
through the rattling throat. The rite is an ancient one and connects the old
with the new, the myth with the here and now.
Even through death people return. The nephew gone abroad as a
soldier probably in the world war comes back. He comes back dead,
killed in the war. The plane, the train and the military truckbring him
back to disturb a ‘good chatty afternoon’.
The stratification of Indian family and the presence of old rites and
habits are reflected adequately by Ramanujan in this poem. The greatness
of the great house is ultimately questioned. The reflections however are
not done is small scale in the poem.

The disintegration of such house and the joint family system as

depicted in his 'Love Poem for a Wife,’ reveal how the abandonment of
tradition has resulted in the decadence of the institution of marriage. The
non-resident Indian couple in Chicago reconstructs their unshared Indian
past and magnifies the invisible space and the sense of apartness between
them. The reminiscence appears to be a conscious attempt at projecting
illusory past images of each to the other so as to hide the incestous and
other sexual affairs of their pre-marital period. India remains in the
blurred memory of expatriates in Chicago as a reference to the jackfruit
tree in one's father's house in Alleppey.

59
 Though Ramanujan has discussed the theme of love in his
poems, he does not appear to be romantic in the conventional sense. As
elsewhere, here too, he has a firm grip over his emotions and in his love
poems to his wife; he tries to take a realistic view of things. A superficial
reading of the poem entitled Love Poem for a Wife convinces the reader
that Ramanujan is consciously anti-romantic. However, on a deeper
plane, it reflects the intensity of the poet’s feelings. He resents the fact
that he had no part to play in his wife’s childhood. He feels that their
unshared past has alienated them from each other. Probably, he is
threatened by a sense of emotional insecurity. Thus, he writes:
Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years in unshared childhood.
(Collected Poems: 65)
In fact, Love Poem for a Wife - I enacts the short anecdotes of
domestic nature arranged in a criss cross order. The lack of emotional
integration between the poet and his wife was traced back to
lack of sharing each other’s child-hood experiences. Both of them were
eager to know each other’s past. The poet gives details of two different
family backgrounds juxtaposing one against the other. His wife is curious
to know his past through family rumours and brother’s anecdotes and
through albums showing the
“Picture of father in a turban
Mother standing on her bare
Splayed fee, silver rings
On her second toes”; (C P: 65)
The poet feels a streak of jealousy for not sharing his wife’s part.
“I envy you your village dog-ride

60
 and the mythology
of the seven crazy aunts,”(CP:66)
The poet’s father-in-law never cared to remember the past and
never bothered to think about his young daughter’s wanderings. The
hiatus between the attitudes of the poet and his wife is shown even in the
present when she started a heated argument with her brother James about
the location of bathroom in her grand father’s house, even betting on her
husband’s income ignoring her husband’s presence.
“Sister-in-law
and I were blank cut-outs
fitted to our respective
slots in a room”.(ibid)
Ironically, the poet suggests that to solve this problem of alienation,
one may follow the Egyptian custom of brother marrying his own sister
or the Hindu custom of arranged child marriages. In other words, for a
happy married life, mutual understanding and sharing of each others
experiences are indirectly suggested. This love-hate-relationship is
briefly shown in “Routine Day Sonnet” where the poet says:
I wake with a start
To hear my wife cry her heart
Out as if from a crater
In hell; she hates me, I hate her
I am filthy rat and a satyr. (ibid)
There is, however, a discernible streak of tenderness in the poem,
Love Poem for a Wife- II. Here, he seems to have come to terms with the
fact that he cannot relive the past with his wife. Shunning aside his
feelings of resentment, he tries to comment on his relation- ship with

61
his wife. So, with spirited enthusiasm, he takes an interest in everything
associated with his wife’s childhood. He shares her feelings with her as
she goes down the memory lane recalling bits and pieces from the tale of
childhood. He listens to her intently as she rattles on:
.....rubber plant and pepper vine
frocks with print patterns copied locally
from the dotted butterfly,
grandmother wearing white
day and night in a village
full of the color schemes
of kraits and garter snakes.
(Collected Poems: 83-84)
One can almost feel the poet-persona warming up to the tender glow of
love in his fond reminisces of his wife who was fast asleep:
My wife’s face still fast
asleep, blessed as by
butterfly, snake ship rope,
and grandmother’s other children,
by only love’s only
insatiable envy.
(ibid: 85)

A sense of reconciliation is experienced as envy and resentment

are sacrificed at the altar of acceptance. The past no longer poses a threat
to the conjugal relationship between the persona of the poem and his
wife. A careful study of Ramanujan’s love poetry reveals the fact that

62
though not possessing an overtly romantic sensibility, the poet definitely
betrays the prominent strains of love.
Love poem for a wife - 2, shows the mature aspect of love with a
compromising approach. The family relationship is explored upto the
root level tracing back his wife’s Keralite origin to dense green forest
habitation filled with rubber plants, pepper vines, and her granny wearing
white in a rural dwelling – “full of the colour schemes of Keralites and
garter snakes.” The scene shifts to crater-township Aden, where her
ancestors and spent precarious days among stabbing Arabs “betrayed and
whipped yet happy”. The poet employs dream technique in which he
identifies himself with his wife physically
“I dreamed one day
that face my own, yet hers
with my own nowhere
to be found; lost; cut
loose like my dragnet
past.” (Collected Poems: 84)
He thinks of his situation like that of androgynous God Nataraja
(“half woman half man contained in a common body”) balancing stillness
in the middle of dynamic dance (a duel as the poet calls). The poet finds
himself in a similar state balancing himself between diverse backgrounds
of his own and his wife, the present and the past (“still there a drying net
on the mountain.”).
Coming back to reality and world of wakefulness, he finds his wife
sleeping calmly undisturbed by her past.
“My wife’s face still fast
asleep, blessed as by

63
 butterfly, snake, shiprope
and grandmother’s other children,
by my only love’s only
insatiable envy.”(ibid)
A blessing indeed indicating a similar approach for the poet also to
follow. Real love transcends differences and affords calm composure.
Of Mothers, Among Other Things is one of the most touching
poems that deals with the significance of family and mother in the life of
a person. The poem brings out the poet’s enduring relationship with his
mother. The pitiable condition of an aged mother is impressively
presented with the deft touch of an imagistic painter.
“Her hands are a wet eagle’s
two black pink-crinkled feat,
one talon crippled in a garden-
trap set for a mouse. Her sarees
do not cling; they hang, loose
feather of a one time wing.” (ibid: 61)
The poet’s nostalgic memory, dried up like a “twisted blackbone
tree” recalls the rosy picture of his mother in her youth, active and caring
for her children.”
“From her earnings three diamonds
splash a handful of needles
and I see my mother run back
from rain to the crying cradles.”
The rain broke the tree-tasseled light into rays. The rain may
suggest the changing fortunes of life. The effect of age enfeebled his
mother who looked like a lean wet eagle. Her fingers became disabled

64
and too weak to pick up a grain of rice from the kitchen floor. This
pitiable condition affected the poet so much that he felt his tongue dried
up like a parchment tasting of bark in his mouth.
The expatriate and the local dichotomy disappear as the poet
discovers the same unchanging motherhood among other things, among
opposing cultural contexts and in the non human animal world. The poem
evokes the ideas of birth, survival and death. The personal tone in the
first person depiction of the mother image merges into the impersonal
world of reality. The youth and the age in the life of a woman are for the
most part consumed in rearing the children. The mother is like a bird
trying to protect the nestlings in the face of heavy rains. As an eagle
cripples a claw in a garden trap while picking a mouse for its nestling a
woman is trapped by other things of the world. She has to barter her
youth for the ones she brings to the world.
One thing becomes obvious from Ramanujan’s poems centred
round women, that is, the poet’s ungrudging acknowledgement of the
powerful role played by women in shaping the personality of a man. In
between the lines of his poems, featuring a matriarch one can almost
catch a glimpse of the proverb, which states that the hand that rocks the
cradle, is the hand that rules the world. In Extended Family, the poet
says that even in far-off America, he cannot rid himself of the habits
inculcated in him by his mother. Like his mother, he too listens to songs
(probably devotional) early in the morning.

Like mother,
I hear faint morning song
(though her it sounds Japanese). (ibid: 169)

65
 Thus, Ramanujan's poetry abounds in family themes. Family
images not only recreate the Indian cultural contexts but evoke in the
readers universal human urges responsible for meaningful relationship.
He shows us our own photographs, taken in India and processed in the
United States. Ramanujan, in his quest for culture, tradition and Indian
sensibility explored the theme of family relationships in multifarious
ways, which gave him a base for creative use of English as well as for
study of human psyche in various contexts.
In brief, Ramanujan is like a cater pillar on the family tree.he lives
on its leaves and finally is being eaten away by the tree. As the tree for a
caterpillar remains its cradle, its alter of growth and finally its pyre
similarly Ramanujan finds his fulfillment in his family. The family can
even expand its circle of meaning, encompassing both the worlds and
forms- the inner and the outer.
And even as I add,
I lose, decompose,
into my elements,
into other names and forms,
past and passing, tenses
without time,
caterpillar on a leaf, eating
being eaten. (Second Sight: 13)

(b) Familial Figures with Special Reference to Women

Ever since thoughts came to be expressed in the form of verse,

women have occupied a place of prominence in the realm of poetry. It is

66
true that the treatment meted out to women has varied down the ages.
Nevertheless, a poet has not been able to obliterate the presence of
woman from his poetical compositions. While some poets have placed
woman on a pedestal-fit to be worshipped as a goddess, others have made
them their targets of ridicule.
In the field of Indian English poetry too, there has hardly been a
poet who has left the subject of woman untouched in his poetry. Starting
from Derozio whose unfulfilled love affair found an outlet in his love
poems, we have others like Toru Dutt, who wrote on the silent suffering
of the exiled Sita in her poem 'Sita' and Sarojini Naidu who has painted a
gaily, colourful picture of women in her poem Bangle Sellers. In the
poems of Tagore, one sees a glowing tribute paid to womanhood in
general with his emphasis on the varied parts played by a woman. The
works of later poets shed light on the diverse facets of a woman's
personality—woman as the epitome of endurance; woman busy in
household chores, woman as the embodiment of self-sacrifice; woman as
the epitome of love and compassion. In short, a woman is expected to fit
into the shoes of any role assigned to her.
A.K. Ramanujan is no exception in giving due emphasis to women
in his poetry but he is unique in the subtle handling of his subject. Not
only has he painted the archetypal image of woman but simultaneously
there is a realistic portrayal of the modern woman whose roots are ground
in the present day culture. Many of Ramanujan's poems are personal in
nature. As he takes a peep into his past, a flood of memories come
rushing to him. In these recollections of the poet, one is able to get a
glimpse of his associations with women at different planes.

67
 The first woman that one comes into contact is one's mother. A
mother plays a pivotal role in one's life. Ramanujan too has several
reminiscences of his mother which surface in his poems. In the poem
entitled OF Mothers among Other Things, he gives a pen picture of his
mother. Always alert to her numerous duties, she is a model of selfless
service. She has no time to spare for herself. She has neither the time nor
the inclination to pamper herself a little. Youth and beauty are sacrificed
at the altar of homely duties and responsibilities. Beautification, being an
incentive to vanity holds no temptation for the mother. Her careless
attitude towards her appearance is revealed in the following lines:
.....her hands are a wet eagle's
two black pink-crinkled feet,
one talon crippled in a garden
trap set for a mouse. Her sarees
do not cling; they hand, loose
feather of a one time wing.
(Collected Poems: 61)

The poet almost laments the loss of his mother's youth. The
mother loses her individual identity amidst her humdrum jobs throughout
the day. She has her hands full with sewing, looking after babies and
keeping the house immaculate—a fusion of many roles rolled into one.
Speaking in a similar vein as Ramanujan is Jayanta Mahaptra in his
poem entitled A Missing Person. Here he gives the archetypal image of a
woman with the oil lamp which may symbolically be interpreted as the
woman's quest for identity.
Thus, he writes:
In the darkened room
a woman
cannot find her reflection in the mirror.
Waiting as usual

68
 at the edge of sleep.
(Mahapatra: 37)

However, Sri Aurobindo gives an entirely different picture in his

poem entitled To his Mother. Unlike Ramanujan who talks of his mother
as he remembers her, Sri Aurobindo pays a glowing tribute to
motherhood in general and his mother in particular. So he says:
August! Dearest! Whom no thought can trace,
Name, murmuring out of birth's infinity,
Mother! Like heaven's great face is thy sweet face,
(Aurobindo: 14)

Elevating his mother to the status of a goddess, he further writes:

Goddess, at whose dim heart the world's deep charms
Tears, terrors, sobbing things, were yet be?
She, from whose tearing pangs in glory first
I and the infinite wide heavens burst?
(Ibid: 14)
Here, the personal and the impersonal are merged into one.
Ramanujan’s poems which are dedicated to his mother do not border on
the philosophical.
While on the subject of his mother, another feature to be noted in
the poetry of Ramanujan is his apparently unsentimental attitude. In the
poem entitled Still Another for Mother, a sudden encounter with an
unknown lady who unconsciously reminds him of his own mother and he
identifies the young man with his own self. Though he has no
conversation with either of them, he conjectured that the handsome/short-
limbed man (Still Another for Mother: 15) was the elderly lady’s son. He
tried to move on casually pretending to be unmoved by the sight before
him but for some inexplicable reason, the mother-son- duo arrested his

69
attention. The mother found it difficult to go away from the spot as even
a glimpse of her son could be seen. The poet too intently watched her :-
And she just stood
there, looking at his walking to me
looking at her looking on. She wanted then
not to be absent perhaps on the scene
if he once so much as even thought of
looking back.
(ibid: 16)

The incident has aroused the poet’s curiosity so much that he tried to
imagine what has taken place between them;
Perhaps they had fought.
Worse still, perhaps they had not fought.
(Ibid: 16)

Though the pet tried to be non-chalant about the entire episode, he admits
that it had aroused certain recollections in him:
Something opened in the past....
(Ibid: 16).
Despite his pragmatic approach to life, a woman’s faint
resemblance to his mother jolts him a little, stirring certain memories
within him which he probably finds difficult to repress.
Like a typical modern poet, Ramanujan is consciously anti-
romantic. He does not go overboard in the glorification of love nor does
he invest his beloved with a luminous halo. Before the advent of the
modern age, poets by and large, were emotionally overwhelmed while
writing on the theme of love. While some poets solemnize their beloveds,
others heaved wistful sighs at their unfulfilled love affairs. Wordsworth
mourned the loss of Lucy in The Last Love while in ‘She was a Phantom
of Delight’ he solemnized his beloved as an ethereal spirit endowed with

70
exquisite physical beauty. Rober Burns compared his lady love to a
beautiful red rose and a lovely, lilting, melody. The earliest Indian
English poets were influenced by their British counterparts of the 19 th
century in their composition of love poems. In Song of the Hindustanee
Minstrel, Derozio attributed an enriching beauty to his love, Dildar and
hailing the permanence of love, he writes:
Our hearts the same, through worlds may change,
We’ll live, and love, Dildar!
(Derozio: 3)
While some poets wrote their love poems with their beloveds in
mind, there were others like the Italian sonneteers who dedicated their
poems to imaginary lady loves.
Pragmatism, a pre-eminent feature of Ramanujan’s poems is
evident everywhere, even while the poet deals with the subject of
women. In Routine Day Sonnet, he makes no attempt to present a facade
of conjugal bliss. In the earlier part of the poem, he enumerates a list of
things which form an inseparable part of his daily routine and have no
novelty about them. Perhaps, the relationship with his wife has also
reached a state of “stale familiarity” (Hardy: 1939:3) (to borrow an
expression from Thomas Hardy). It is this mundanity which results in
emotional unfulfilment and alienation. Thus, he writes towards the
conclusion of the poem:
But I wake
with a start
to hear my wife cry her heart
out as if from a crator
in hell; she hates me, I hater her
I’m a filthy rat and a satyr.
(Collected Poems: 68)

71
 Ramanujan’s down-to-earth treatment of marriage bordering on
mundane realism reminds us of Nissim Ezekiel’s poem named Marriage.
In the opening stanza of the poem, he paints an idyllic picture of
marriage. To the lovers marriage is an eternal union which was already
fixed in heaven and merely 72olemnized on the earth. He says:
Lovers, when they marry face
Eternity with touching grace
complacent at being fated
Never to be separated.
(Ezekiel: 32)

There is an undercurrent of boredom as he speaks of the stereotyped

aspects of wedding. The poet also focuses on the physical side of
marriage.
The bride is always pretty, the groom
A lucky man. The darkened room
roars out the joy of flesh and blood.
(Ibid: 32)
The bitter sweet relationship that exists between the two partners as
delineated by Ramanujan is reiterated by Ezekiel:
However many times we came
apart, we came together. The same
thing over and over again.

(Ibid: 32)

Actually, the modern poets believe in the actualities of living,

rather than dwelling in the world of dreams. A.K. Ramanujan makes no
attempt to steer clear of the basic tenets of modernity in literature. There
have been several poems in literature where the poet personae have fallen
victims to the irresistible sensual appeal of women. In their eagerness to

72
emphasize the physical appeal of the fairer sex, the Metaphysical poets,
particularly, have at times paints slightly disturbing images of women.
Donne, for example, has described a woman as a bracelet of hair wrapped
around the bone. Ramanujan too talks of sensual fulfillment in his poem,
Still Another View of Grace. The first part of the poem deals with the
poet’s inner struggle to keep all temptations at bay. He was determined
not to malign his clean image of a gentle man by any licentious
behaviour:

…..Beware
Do not follow a gentleman’s moral
With that absurd determined air.

(Collected Poems: 45)

But his wall of self-imposed code of morality soon begins to crumble and
before long, he makes an absolute surrender at the altar of physical
gratification:

Commandments
Crumbled
In my father’s past. Her tumbled hair
Suddenly known
As silk in my angry hand, I shook
A little
And took her, behind the laws
Of my land. (Ibid : 45)

Thus, morality too begins to waver before the irresistible attraction

of a woman. If one compares Ramanujan to Tagore, one finds that both
are widely divergent in the treatment of their subject. Unlike Ramanujan,
Tagore would crave for emotional fulfillment, rather the gratification of
physical desires, even if it meant a willful creation of tangible material

73
distance. Ramanujan’s admittance of the fact that a man can be swept off
his feet (even to the extent of compromising with his moral standards) in
the face of feminine charm is a downright and realistic portraiture of
human relationships. In this particular poem, ‘Still Another View of
Grace’, the poet persona finds fulfillment beyond the threshold of
marriage, providing that modern poetry is not divorced from the actual
conditions prevailing in society. The Archetypal image of the woman, as
a torchbearer of idealism, receives a severe blow.

“Frailty thy name is woman,” (Shakespeare :14) wrote

Shakespeare in Hamlet insinuating at an extra-marital affair, in The
Hindoo: He Doesn’t Hurt a fly or a Spider Either, Ramanujhan makes a
dig at the woman who is dissatisfied with her conjugal life tries to derive
the joy of sexual fulfillment outside wedlock. The poet gives the concept
of the new liberated woman who instead of living for others, lives for
herself. However, the joy of this forbidden pleasure does not drift into
eternity and is rather short-lived as is obvious from the lines:

….one day, spider-

Fashion, she clamped down and bit
Him while still insider her,

(Shakespeare: 14)

Perhaps, the wife regards herself as a failure in upholding the sanctity of

marriage and spurns her lover brusquely terminating the relationship.
Though the cuckolded husband here is a mute spectator of his wife’s
adulterous relationship and does not give vent to his displeasure in any
way, the wife chooses to put and end to this liaison on her own. Here,

74
does the poet hint at the fact that a woman’s conscience, which though
may be dormant for a time, is reawakened sooner or later?

Having a comprehensive grip over the Indian psyche, the poet is also
aware that in most Indian households, unmarried sisters are a
responsibility to be dispensed with, so, he writes in Obituary.

Father, when he passed on,

left dust
on a table full of papers,
left debts and daughters,

(ibid: 5).

Placing ‘debts’ and ‘daughters’ on the same plane hints at the

unpleasant reality that both are a burden on the shoulders to be off-loaded
at the earliest opportunity. Thus, a sister’s company is not only a source
of happiness but it also enjoins with it a sense of duty. The fact that a
sister’s marriage is of prime concern to the poet is amply borne by the
lines, which occur in A Leaky Tap After a Sister’s Wedding:

Our sisters were of various sizes,

one was ripe for a husband
and we were not poor. (11)

One gets a glimpse of his intimacy with his sister towards the
conclusion of the same poem:

My sister and I have always wished a tree

could strike or at least, writhe
like that other snake
we saw
under the beak
of the crow. (9)

75
Ramanujan’s poems also reveal the pre-eminent role played by his sister
in his childhood. In later years, he vividly recalls the little anecdotes
centered round her.

While on the theme of women, Ramanujan takes care to include the

subject of daughters as well in the poetry. In Routine Day Sonnet, he
appears quite the doting father as he meticulously mentions the daily
activities he enjoys with his daughter.

A walk before dark

with my daughter to mark
another cross on the papaya tree;
dinner, coffee, bedtime story
of dog, bone and shadow. (Ibid: 78)

In the poem entitled On the Very Possible Jaundice of an Unborn

Daughter, he casually mentions with the help of natural imagery, the
colour of his daughter’s eyes.

…..how can my daughter

help those singing yellows
in the whites of her eyes? (ibid: 68)

In Extended Family, the poet denotes the similarly between him and his
daughter.

Like my little daughter

I play shy (ibid :14)

The first sub-title of the poem Some Relations is Nursery Turtles. Here,
he described the pet turtles, which are tended by his daughter.

My daughter’s turtles try

76
 To hibernate in the jar,

very far from the ocean. (ibid: 170)

While discussing the varied roles of women, Ramanujan graduates

from writing about his immediate family to an extended one. Thus, aunts,
girl- cousins and grandmothers regularly feature in his poems. The poem
titled History delineates an interesting anecdote, which, apart from
centering round a particular incident also sheds light into the inner
recesses of a woman’s mind. The poem begins with the description of a
somber incident—the death of a relative. In a matter of fact tone, the poet
describes how after the death of his great aunt, her two daughters instead
of mourning their mother’s loss, vied with each other, secretly removing
the ornaments from her body.

Her two daughters

one dark one fair,
unknown each to the other
alternately picked their mother’s body clean
before it was cold
or the eyes were shut
of diamond earrings,
bangles, anklets, the pin
in her hair,
the toe-rings from her wedding
the previous century
all except the gold
in her teeth and and the silver g-string
they didn’t know she wore
her napkins on
to the great disgust
of the orthodox widows
who washed her body
at the end. (ibid :101)

77
It was only after the accomplishment of the task that the aunt appeared
satisfied:

And the dark

stone face of my little aunt
acquired some expression
at last. (ibid: 108)

A woman’s natural fondness for jewellery, here takes an unpleasant

turn changing into an almost insatiable thirst for gold. As greed raises its
ugly head, a mother’s bereavement also fails to inflict any visible pain.

Being close to the roots of his native culture despite his long stay
abroad, Ramanujan is aware that the word ‘family’ has a broader
significance in Indian than anywhere else in the world. The orbit of
siblings is not limited to one’s own brothers and sisters but it includes a
wide gamut of cousins as well. Looking for a Cousin on a Swing is one
such poem which paints a picture of an enjoyable experience of a
common place incident of sharing a swing with a girl cousin. The
swinging delights experienced by the cousins were too deeply imprinted
to be erased. It was an innocent fun-filled experience and the close
proximity of a girl did not kindle any carnal instinct. According to the
poet, it was one of those rare untainted experiences in life wherein the
little boy and girl (because of their ages) are looked upon as playmates
and nothing more.

When she was four or five

she sat on a village swing
and her cousin, six or seven,
sat himself against her;
with every lunge of the swing

78
 she felt him
in the lunging pits
of her feeling;
and afterwards
we climbed a tree, she said,
not very tall, but full of leaves
like those of a fig tree,
and we were very innocent
about it. (Ibid: 108)

Any mention of the word ‘grandmother’ immediately conjures up an

image of boundless love and affection— an affable old woman with an
unending reservoir of fascinating tales. Understanding the psyche of little
children who huddle together at a grandmother’s knee, craving to bask in
her exuding warmth, perhaps prompted Ramanujan to write the poem
entitled ‘Lines to a Granny’. Here the grandmother patiently answers all
questions pertaining to the tale of the sleeping princess who was
awakened from her hundred-year slumber by a prince who braved all
odds to reach the forgotten castle. An age-old story retains its freshness
of appeal because of the grandmother’s deftness in the art of story telling.
The poem begins with the child’s enthusiastic queries about the story of
The Sleeping Beauty,

Granny,
tell me again in the dark
about the wandering prince;
and his steed, with a neem leaf mark
upon his brow, will prance
again to splash his noonday image
in the sleep of these pools. (Ibid: 19)

The child had heard the story so often from the grandmother that it
rattles off the entire story but wants to hear it all over again. The story is

79
told and re-told by grandmothers down the ages but its timeless appeal
remains intact. As the poem draws to a close, the child wonders whether
the story is a figment of the imagination or an experience in truth.

But tell me now: was it for some irony

you have waited in death
to let me learn again what once you learnt in youth,
that this is no tale, but truth? (ibid: 17)

Today, there are no children pestering the grandmother for stories. She
does not need to constantly replenish her stock of tales for inquisitive
listeners. However, her priority in life remains the same—the desire to
see her loved ones happy.

Her heart throbbed

“Tonight I can sleep
Sans pills.”
She heaved. (ibid: 38)

Ramanujan does not confine his depiction of women to the web of

personal relationships alone. Many of his poems mention women outside
the gamut of personal relations. The poem, Son to Father, for instance,
describes the vulnerability of a woman very succinctly.

It is no dream
to see a son skewered
or a daughter lowered
like a match
into a sulphur mine
of hungry men. (ibid: 135)

In the poem Difference, the poet gives a vivid account of how

women work shoulder to shoulder with men to produce finished works of
clay. The beads of perspiration are not only visible on the men’s faces but

80
the women too slog equally hard while making picture- perfect clay
models of men, women, toys and animals.

The women mould a core of clay and straw,

wind around it
strings of beeswax on which the men
do the fine work of eyes and toe nails. (ibid: .171)

A streak of feminism is evident in Ramanujan when he champions

the cause of women in poems such as The Guru. In this poem, he resents
the unrelenting attitude of the world at large to women in general.

Forgive the weasel his tooth

forgive the tiger his claw
but do not forgive the woman
her malice. (ibid: 251)

He does not regard in favourable light the fact that a woman’s

independence is greatly curbed. In fact, her will is often regarded as
subservient even to that of animals. Thus, in a sarcastic tone, he writes:

Give the dog his bone, the parrot

his seed, the pet snake his mouse
but do not give the woman her freedom. (Ibid: 251)

The broadened outlook of the poet persona, however, does not allow
him to stand the humiliation of a woman much longer. So, at the end of
the poem, very unceremoniously, he leaves the service of his master as he
recalled his own bonding with a woman.

For I remembered I was a man born of woman. (Ibid: 251)

81
 In the poem named On Not Learning from Animals, the poet
realizes that it is not only among human beings that women are snubbed
but among the animals too, the female of the species are regarded as an
inferior lot. Actually, whether among men or animals the females have
always been dominated by their male counterparts. Thus, the persona of
the poem while empathizing with his mother who does not have the
freedom to exercise her will realizes that she is not alone in her
predicament. Not only a woman but a female animal too is a victim of
male Chauvinism. So he says:

But then
I forgot how troubled I was when I saw,
at seventeen, after quarrelling
a female ape with a black stiped snout
sort out patiently with her long hands, then
sniff, and lick lettuce leaves clean for her lord
and master while he growled all through.

(Collected Poems:217)

Though not overtly sympathetic, Ramanujan is definitely aware of

the fact that women have been helpless victims of the atrocities
committed by men down the ages. In The Opposable Thumb, the poet
mentions the grandmother who is bereft of one finger—a standing
testimony of her husband’s uncontrollable temper.

Just one finger left of five, a real thumb

no longer usual, casual or opposable
after husband’s

82
 knifing temper one Sunday morning
half a century ago.(ibid :6)

While speaking on the subject of women, one thing is clear in

Ramanujan’s poetry, that is, his consciously unromantic attitude in
general. Though a streak of fondness may be discernible in a selected few
poems, but by and large, he does not fashion his thoughts in the romantic
mould. In A Rather Foolish Sentiment Said of Course to a Girl
Sometime Ago, he admits his inability of a romantic courtship. He
asserts:

I have no head for tunes,

so into the dark I can carry
no singing voices, no flutes,
no eye for colours either,
so no pigments for my cave men painting,
nor even the gold and the silver filaments-
that lanterns are said to throw upon you hair. (ibid: 18)

In the opening lines of the poem Not Knowing, the poet confesses
that he is at a loss of words when he sees a young lady in the park. It is
perhaps the lack of verbosity on his part that the possible friendship is
nipped in the bud itself.

Not knowing what to say to her

I walk into the park
and watch the sparrows
she is sitting on a green bench
watching sparrows. (ibid: 216)

83
It is perhaps the physical aspect that matters to him more than the inner
sensibility. But here too, he appears to be confused. While jostling his
way through a crowd, he suddenly stumbled upon the girl in question.
Thus, he writes:

but only the passing touch

of people whom I once touched
in passing when they let me
pass. Perhaps it will not pass,
for in that touch I think I stumbled
on a pulse, and wondered like a fool
who has no proper sense of body
if it were yours, or mine,
and wondered if you wondered too.(Ibid :18)

In many of the poems, the poet persona view woman as an instrument of

gratification of the senses, rather than as a companion for a lifetime. In
the poem entitled The Day Went Dark, he delineates the physical appeal
of the woman in the following words:

I loved a woman,
with turquoise eyes,
navel like a whirlpool
in a heap of wheat
and the day went dark
my hands were lizards
my heart turned into a hound.(ibid :232)

84
 In the given poem, it appears as if the persona of the poem
stubbornly refuses to penetrate the exterior of the lady in question and
discover her inner beauty. Love 5 is another such poem that focuses on
the carnal aspects of the relationship between a man and a woman. The
poet leaves little to the imagination as he gives a bare and rugged picture
of the anatomical details of a woman’s body.

In the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, particularly in his treatment of

women, one at times finds an echo of the novelist George Bernard Shaw.
Like Shaw, Ramanujan too seems to select woman as an agent of the Life
Force (a power working upon the minds and hearts of individuals
seeking to raise them to a higher level of life). The poet regards woman
as an instrument required for the continuation of procreation. So in
Looking and Finding, he writers:

Looking for a system, he finds a wife.

Was it Vallejo who said,
How anger breaks down a man into children? (ibid: 179)

In the poem titled, Why I Cannot Finish This Book, the poet
reaffirms the strong influence of a woman through a personal experience.
The fairy tales which he had savoured in infancy remain firmly itched in
his memory long after the blissful days of childhood are over. Thus, he
writes:

Letting so
of fairy tales
is letting so
of what will not
let go:

85
 mother, grandmother

the fat cook

in widow’s white
who fed me
rice and ogress. (ibid: 169)

Thus, it becomes clear that the women not only looked after his physical
well being but also enriched his mind in their own way.

The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan focuses not only on the women of

the material world but it also throws light upon those ethereal female
deities dwelling in the celestial spheres. Thus, a number of his poems
mention the goddesses of Hindu mythology. In the poem ‘A Devotee’s
Complaint’, the poet talks of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and
Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. It is not very pleasant to incur the
wrath of these goddesses:

Try to curry favour

with Lakshmi
you lose an eye-tooth
Saraswati, she slaps you hard
and where her fingers touch
your cheek, you have no hair
so you have to shave close
or bear her four finger mark
on your face. (ibid: 237)

A.K. Ramanujan, the poet, noted for his philosophy of detached

sensibility appears to have made not only a comprehensive study of
woman as a whole but also an in-depth analysis of the secret chambers of

86
a woman’s heart. A careful study of his poems thus provides a
psychological insight into a woman’s mind. The poet pens down with
great precision the almost accurate characteristics of a woman’s nature.

In The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare had written

—“Love is blind, yet lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves
commit.”(Shakespeare: 1990:208) Ramanujan too thinks that at least as
far as women are concerned, love definitely does not take recourse to any
logic. In the poem Love 1: What She Said, the young lady in question is
so smitten by the charms of her lover that she stubbornly refuses to see
the darker aspects of his personality. In the very first stanza, she admits
that her green-eyed lover does not possess a heart of gold.

His eyes are moss green

His blood is cold
His heart is a piece of lead.

(Collected Poems: 219)

Her subsequent findings about him are even more alarming. But
surprisingly, his rapacious behaviour too does not disturb her in any way.

His face is razor clean

His liver is on old
He raped his niece
She’s dead. (Ibid: 219)

The man she loved not only had robbed a woman of her virginity but was
also responsible for her death. The besotted young woman was oblivious
to his other discrepancies also. The fact that his mother has not a nice

87
woman or that they did not earn their livelihood honestly did not turn her
away from him.

His mother’s mean

they’ve stabbed and sold
puppies and monkeys
for bread. (Ibid: 219)

The lady consciously chooses to turn a blind eye to his faults, so smitten
is she, by the charms of his love. She feels fully gratified even if he so
much as casts a look at her.

Yet I grow lean

his heart is gold
to my greed. My eyes
are fed
when he turns his head.(Ibid: 219)

The woman is so much infatuated with him that the ignoble tendencies of
his nature do not have any adverse effect on her. So, his heart which is
actually of lead, appears to be of gold of her ensnared being.

Ramanujan, who is well aware of the feminine psyche, knows that

a woman is not comfortable with the idea of getting old. In fact, one of
the best compliments that can be paid to a woman is that she looks
younger than her actual age. Keeping this in mind probably, the poet has
composed the poem Love 4: What He Said to His Daughter. Here, he
has mentioned that women do not like to cross the threshold of eighteen
years. In the first stanza, the poet persona is taken aback that his teenaged
daughter should fall in love with a seventy year old man.

I love him, she said

88
 at eighteen.
But he’s seventy,
I said, ...... (ibid: 227)

As a sixty-three year old man, he has come to the conclusion that women
like to remain young forever.

That all the women

I’ve ever loved
Have stayed eighteen
Forever. (Ibid: 228)

He goes on to give the example of Pierre Bennard, who always portrayed

his wife as a woman of thirty-six years in his painting. She remained
thirty-six years old for over a period of three decades.

Pierre Bennard
always painted his wife
as thirty six
getting in and out
of bathtubs, sleek,
naked on diamond
squares of blue tile
till she was seventy three. (Ibid. : 228)

Not only did her age remain static but her beauty and glamour too did not
diminish in the portraits.

If a man views a woman as an object of his passion, a woman too

seeks physical gratification. The only difference perhaps is that while a
man openly admits his desire for sexual fulfillment, a woman, more often
than not, pretends to be disinterested. She also forcefully tries to keep all
carnal desires at bay. In a humorous vein, the poet describes in
Mythologies 3 how a newly wedded bride pretends to be indifferent to a

89
physical relationship with her husband. Considering herself an ardent
devotee of Lord Shiva, she spurned any kind of union with a mortal
being. In the first stanza, she threatened her husband with dire
consequences if he dared to touch her.

Keep off when I worship Shiva

Touch me three times, and you’ll never
See me again’, said Akka to her new groom.
Who couldn’t believe his ears? (228)

Here whole body echoed with the intonation of ‘Om’. Her husband,
however, refused to see her as a spiritual being and craved for a physical
union.

‘Om, Om!’
she seemed to intone in bed with every breath
and all he could think of was her round breast,
her musk, her darling navel and the rest.

Finally, when he did muster,

enough courage to touch her against her
will, she did succumb to his temptations.
So he hovered and touched her, her body death—
by cold to mortal touch but hot for
God’s
first move, a caress like nothing on earth.
She fled his hand as she would a spider.
Threw away her modesty, as the roods
and cones of her eyes gave the world
a new birth. (Ibid: 228)

Thus, despite her initial reservations, the young bride shoved aside her
self-imposed celibacy and proceeded to enjoy the fruits of conjugal bliss.
Now, she beheld the divine image of Shiva in her earthly husband. She
also felt that the vehicle of Shiva, Nandi, the celestial bull and the

90
 ordinary bull grazing in her house were one and the same. All differences
were resolved and there was a merger of the body with the spirit.

She saw Him then, unborn, form of forms, the Rider,

His white bull chewing cud in her backyard. (Ibid: 228)

In the poem, Any Cow’s Horn Can Do It, the poet takes a peep into
a woman’s heard and paints her as a deeply sensitive being. Here, he
does not talk of a particular woman or a female relative but of women in
general. A woman is naturally blessed with the gift of empathy. So, she is
easily affected by the happenings around her. Moreover, she also got a
sharp memory. The minutest details of everyday incidents are carefully
preserved in the store house of her mind.

The opening lines of the above mentioned poem depict how a

woman is deeply pained by the death of a cousin. She cannot suppress
her sorrow within herself and must give vent to it by weeping loudly.

Mention any cousin’s death

in the walled redfort city,
she’ll weep aloud with not throught
of neighbours. (ibid : 93)

A sudden recollection of an embarrassing experience of her girlhood days is

enough to make her blush as she relives the incident once again.

Any reminder
of her youth’s market places
crawling with feeling hands, eyes
groping for the hidden hooks
that hold together little girls
and she will glow green fire
from all nine walls of a woman’s shame.(Ibid: 93)

91
The day she had been taken to task by her parents for having deviated from
the code of conduct set before her is too strongly embedded in her
subconscious mind to be forgotten. Not only had she been severely
reprimanded by her father when he caught her in the lobby of a hotel but her
mother too expressed her disapproval very strongly. Even after having
matured into womanhood, she still shudders to think of this unpleasant
incident.

She’ll grow cold remembering what is not forgotten:

getting belted by father
standing on a doorstep
with a long strip of cow hide
and the family idiom
the day he caught her
in the hotel lobby,
mother’s mouth
working red over betel leaf
and betel nut, the clove ground
into the nutmegs of satisfaction
seeing a disobedient daughter
brought to her senses. (Ibid: 93)

Though the mother did not voice aloud her thoughts but her betel stained
mouth betrayed the approval of seeing her daughter’s freedom curbed.

A woman is very easily disturbed by the slightest hint of discord. No

sooner is she distressed by something than she forgets even her daily
household chores. The cooking may get burnt and the children may go
about presenting an uncared for appearance but the woman remains
oblivious to the lapse of duty on her part.

Any old quarrel over novel,

movie, or a suspicion of pregnancy is enough

92
 to make wife, sister or girl friend
walk silent from room to room
smouldering with no care for burned
rice or the black nails of children
before visitors; a soreness
on two granules of her throat
will do it. (Ibid: 93)

More often than not, a woman falls victim to insomnia. Pre-occupied

with her own thoughts, she spends many sleepless nights lying awake.
Any disturbing incident robs a woman of her peace of mind and often she
lies awake at a stretch till the wee hours of the morning when it is time to
get up.

Any number of things

can make a woman lie awake
and watch window-squares crawl out,
grow oblong and vanish
all night long with every car
in the street till morning’s small
shadowless hour.(Ibid :93-94)

A woman’s heart is so tender that it reaches out to an unknown child who

many have been hurt in any way, say, even by a cow’s horn. However,
despite the inherent tenderness and her naturally empathetic nature, a
woman is immune to anything that is not tangible. In other words,
according to Ramanujan, she refuses to be emotionally stirred by any
piece of creative writing. Closely woven in the web of human
relationships, a woman cannot empathize with an imaginary situation.
For instance, she remains unmoved by the emotions expressed by a
poem:

but nothing you say with words

93
 in a poem will make her scream,
get sick, or go grey in the face
You’ll never do it, for poems
cannot fly like yes or hurt
like a fall on the side walk
cannot replace the panic
runs for imaginary
children in the middle room
of a house with the porch
on fire. (Ibid:94)

The poet feels that a woman cannot feel the pulse of a poem unless she
can identify with the characters or incidents described in it. A woman is
moved by a particular poem only if she does not feel alienated from its
content. Even if she can relate it to a distant relative, she feels she is a
part of the poem.

Poems aren’t even words

enough to rankle, infect
or make the smallest incisions
unless wife, girl friend or sister
and I’m not talking of strangers
or the unborn—
somehow are made to think it’s all about
their shame in the market, or
and elegy on the death
of a far off cousin.(Ibid : 78)

It is strange but true nevertheless that a mother’s image is so

deeply rooted in the subconscious mind of a man, that even in his wife,
he unconsciously looks for the image of his mother. In the poem, titled
‘Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees’, the poet draws a parallel between
the woman and his dead mother. So, in the very first stanza, he writes:

Dear woman, you never let me forget

94
 what I never quite remember:
You’re not Mother,
certified dead but living on, close
to her children. (Ramanujan :180)

The poet persona not only reminds himself that the woman in question is
not his mother but he has to forcefully remember that she is not his
daughter either:

Dear woman, you remind me again

in unlikely places like post offices
where I lick
your stamps, that I must remember
you’re not my daughter, unborn may be
but always present. (Ibid:181)

At the conclusion of the poem, he delineates the complete picture of

a woman. He depicts the multi-various roles she is expected to play. The
varied roles played by a woman are finally merged into a comprehensive
whole. The man views the woman as a merger of a mother, daughter,
sister, wife and companion.

Yet I know you’ll play at jewish mama,

sob-sister, daughter who needs help
with arithmetic,
even the sex pot next door, topless
tree spirit on a temple frieze,
or plain Indian wife
at the village well, so I can play son,
father, brother, marcho lover, gaping
tourist, and clumsy husband.(Ibid:183)

The wife, according to the poet, cannot be singled out to play an

individual role. She is expected to enact the parts of caring mother, a
sympathetic sister (who weeps at the slightest provocation), a daughter

95
depending on her father for help, an attractive consort and at the same
time a dutiful wife. It pampers a man’s ego to feel that a woman looks up
to him for protection and needs help at every step of her life.

Thus, an in-depth analysis of A.K. Ramanujan’s poems centred

around women calls to mind a poem entitled ‘Woman’ composed by
Teresinka Perara of Bluffton (USA) published in The Quest.

You are resignation

you are the rush to help
those who in the afternoon
have longing eyes
and ancient sorrow.

Woman, you are a city

where all the men
live and breathe
and name you as they would a place
when they reach their homes

Woman, you are regression

History, terminal, melancholy
you are a way of dying slowly,
of moving eternally,

you are habit, panic, fear

resignation
but always, along with all of this
you are all heart.(Pereire.)

▬◙▬

96
 Reference
Daruwalla, K. N. Ramanujan, The Expatriate Local, Indian Literature,
162(July-Aug.) 1994.
Hardy, Thomas. The Life and the Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge,
Macmillan and Co. Ltd.1939.
Mahapatra, Jayanta. ‘A Missing Person’ An Anthology of Indian English
Poetry,Edited by a Board of Editors, Orient Longman.
Parthasarathy, R. A. K. Ramanujan, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets,
Delhi:OUP,1976.
Pereira, Teresinka. Woman, The Quest- A Bi-Annual Journal of Indian
Writing in English, Vol.xi, June, 1995, Ed.Ravi Nandan Sinha.
Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan- Molly
Daniels-Ramanujan(Ed.)New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Satchidanandan, K. Reflections: The World Mean, Indian Literature, 162,
(July-Aug.) 1994.
Shakespear, William. Hamlet, (Ed.) A. W. Verity, Radha Publishing
House, Calcutta, 1990.

97
Wordsworth,William. Tintern Abbey, An Anthology of Poems for
Degree Course, (Ed.) David Green, Macmillan India Ltd., 1979.

▬◙▬

Chapter III
Nostalgia as the Backdrop
(a) Memories and Relations
Ramanujan is basically a poet of experience and memories.
Taken altogether, his poetical collections display his unflagging interest
in and enthusiasm for his family connections, relatives and memories of
his childhood. His relations and the memories of his childhood and
youth, as it is the case with all of us, never leave him alone, and he
usually writes about them with a sense of nostalgia and reminiscence and
relation. This also enables him to establish his contact with the land and
the people of his worth and education and to continue his relentless
search for ‘roots.’ all of his volumes abound with his memories of the
past. That’s why Parthasarathy was prompted to remark that, “the family
for Ramanujan, is one of the central metaphors with which he thinks.”
(Parthasarathy: 1976:95)
No doubt, Ramanujan to be ever inspired in the face of his
relations─ his mother, father, wife, children, uncles cousins and his other

98
unforgettable relatives. They are the people who generate immense poetic
heat in him, and he can not rest until he has locked up his pent-up
feelings and thoughts about them. In the words of S. Nagrajan, “the
poems in the volumes of Ramanujan have their origin in recollected
personal emotions. They deal with poet’s memory of his relations and the
ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers.” (Saleem: 1972:
18)
Memories play a decisive role in Ramanujan’s poetry. It is through
memory that he communicates his ideas. Since the poems have not been
arranged methodically, it is necessary to find a key poem to which the
other poems can be related. Self Portrait is the poemin this instance
which provides the central theme. This poem provides an insight into the
reality behind the mask which the persona of the poems wear. Torn by
the opposing values, the poet reveals his helpless position in Self Portrait.
I resemble everyone
But myself. (Collected Poems: 23)
To overcome this problem in an align land the poet takes shelter in the
storehouse of his childhood memories and other relations.
His poem from the collection, Looking for a Cousin on a Swing, is
lyric poem. The poem preserves the poet’s childhood memory of a cousin
who was his play-fellow when they were children. They would sit
together on a swing and move rapidly. Experiencing the innocent
physical touch they also used to climb a tree with dense foliage. The girl,
grown up and probably married is unable to forget the pleasure of the
swing. She looks for the swing in the cities with fifteen suburbs where
she is settled after marriage. She longs for the same physical touch,
physical pleasure.

99
 When she was four or five
she sat on a village swing’
and her cousin, six or seven,
sat himself against her;
with every lunge of the awing
she felt him,
in the lunging pits
of her feeling;
And afterwards
we climbed a tree she said,
not very tall but ful of leaves
like those of a fig tree,
and we were very innocent
about it. (Collected poems: 19)
The childhood innocence no doubt is lost and maturity has stepped
in. It brings a lot of difference in the relationship. She desires for a
relationship and yearns for her past days. The nostalgic longing for
childhood days are expressed in this poem. The mood of nostalgia is
evident throughout the poem.
Ramanujan’s A River is one of the best poems to be dealt in regard
to this aspect. The river which flows through the city of Madurai is a
symbol of timelessness. It represents the central flow of culture, the
culture of his father. Madurai, earlier, was the city of temples,
symbolizing the spiritual culture of man. By remembering this river, the
poet remembers his father who belonged to this highly spiritual,
conservative and traditional background. It is this culture which has been
inherited by the son. To the poets who sang of cities and temples,

100
spiritual attainment was considered the highest mark of civilization. But
now,
Every summer
A river dries to trickle
In the sand, (Collected Poems: 38)
Modernism results in disintegration. The once stable values give
way under the onslaught of Westernisation. In this way the poem also
presents a harsh criticism on the old and the new poets. The poem is a
piece of cynical criticism aimed at poets who force themselves to look
only at the beautiful things in life and involuntarily ape the same lines
quoted by the poets for ages together. The poets write about the
sensational themes but are not moved by the tragic and pathetic sights.
They see around, a river in the poem is Vaikai which flows through
Madurai. The poet remembers the city and the river. The river is
described in the first stanza. It is just like a trickle.
In Madurai,
City of temples and poets
Who sang of cities and temples:
Every summer
A river dries to a trickle,
In the sand
Baring the sand-ribs,
(ibid: 38)

The women’s hair and straw clog the flow of the water. The images of
rusty bars of the bridges, stones looking like crocodiles, dry stones

101
looking like the shaven water-buffaloes and vivid and pictorial quality to
the poem.
The wet stones glistening like sleepy
Crocodiles, the dry ones
Shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun.
(ibid.)

Contrasted to his picture is flooded river in the rainy season. Nature

has creating and destroying power. The flood carries away three village
houses, two cows and a pregnant woman. Neither the new nor the old
poets seem to be sensitive and responsive to suffering. The callousness of
the modem poets to the suffering is irritating. The destruction caused by
flood is not poetic at all. For the poets the river becomes subject of poetry
only when it is flooded. The new poets were indifferent to the human
suffering.
The next poem Of Mothers, Among Other Things, is a remarkable
poem dealing with the poet’s nostalgia of his past. The poet remembers
his mother and recalls her youth, middle age and old age. He describes
his mother in youth as beautiful and delicate like silk and white petals of
a flower.
I smell upon this twisted
Backbone tree the silk and white
Petals of my mother’s youth.
(ibid: 61)

He remembers his mother’s three diamond earrings that glittered

like sunlight. In the middle age, his mother used to run to the cradles to

102
calm the crying baby. The rain stands for the years of misfortunes, She
faced tackling and sewing.
Splash a handful of needles,
And I see my mother run back,
From rain to the crying cradles,
The rains tack and sew.
( ibid.)
She grew old and withered. Her hands became wrinkled like and eagle’s
feet. In her old age, her sari hung loose around her like broken feathers of
a wounded bird. Thus, the poet becomes nostalgic about his mother’s
memory. He says:
My cold parchment tongue licks bark,
in the mouth when I see her four
still sensible fingers slowly flex,
to pick a grain of rise from the kitchen floor.
(ibid)
Another poem which reflects the mood of nostalgia is Love Poem
for a Wife. The poem is about the unhappy married life, its conflicts and
problems.the poet uses ‘a wife’ instead of ‘my life’ this kind of use hints
at the slight alienation of the two as life-partners. In the first poem the
poet suggests that the main cause for this alienation is their “unshared
childhood.” (65) The poet in a nostalgic mood says,
Really what kept us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood. You cannot for instance,
meet my father. He is some years
dead. Neither can I meet yours:

103
 he has lately lost his temper
and mellowed. (65)
He did not find emotional fulfillment in his relationship with his
wife. The emotional detachment, alienations has resulted from the fact
that they have not been able to share each other’s childhood experiences.
There is no spiritual and emotional unity. Physically they are one but
emotionally they are not. The poet seeks to find the emotional fulfillment
in the relationship. The whole poem is geared up to highlight the hiatus
underlying the relationship of the poet with his wife, who is directly
addressed as ‘you.’ Commenting on the poem, Dr. Chirantan Kulshrestha
writes that it “ends with the problematic uncertainty with which it
begins…” (Self in Ramanujan’s poetry: 1978-79:115)
In the second love poem, the poet becomes even more nostalgic
and attempts to strike a note of compromise between him and his wife.
the poem is divided into two sections,- the first section introducing a
number of incidents, people and places associated with his wife’s past,
while the second alluding to a serious crisis for the poet as the wife loses
her temper at trifles. The poem expresses poet’s mood in the following
lines,
I dreamed one day
That face my own yet hers,
With my own nowhere
To be found; lost; cut
Loose like my dragnet
Past. (Collected Poems: 68)
Ramanujan’s Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House, is a
poem of the nostalgic memory of his childhood. The poet gives a long list

104
of things that enter the great house but never leave the house. Things
such as cows, books, sweet dishes, daughters-in-law and even the song of
a beggar enter the house. His nostalgic memories of the ancestral house
and the joint-families are revived in this poem. The things lost long ago
revive in the speaker’s memory. He says:
Sometimes I think that nothing
that ever comes into this house
goes out. Things come in every day
to lose themselves among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago;
lame wandering cows from nowhere
have been known to be thethered,
given a name, encouraged
to get pregnant in the broad daylight
of the secret under the elders’
supervision, the girls hiding
behind windows with holes in them.
( ibid: 97)
The poet intermingles comic, tragic touches together. The widowed
daughters, the dead soldiers, the sons-in-law are a part of the poem. In a
way, the poet makes an exposure of the great ancestral house having, “a
vast digestive and assimilative power.”(Dwivedi: 1995:90) The poet
remembers some of the events of his life in this great house. Obviously, it
is a large house still following the traditional Hindu joint-family system
and having the wonderful capacity to all in-coming things and persons.

105
 Ramanujan’s poetry is a recollection of emotions. Memory
unfolds itself in his mind. He has the memories of the south Indian family
life. Indian sensibility is present in almost all things. The “Outer” forms
and “Inner” forms suggest the linguistic situation and cultural
determinates respectively, which act upon him simultaneously. His
poetry is the outcome of the interaction of these two forces. He has to
convey the psyche of one culture in an alien language. Praising
Ramanujan as the best of Indo-Anglien poets. R. Parthasarathy wrote:
“Both The Strider (1996) and Relations (1974) are the
heir of an interior tradition, a tradition very much of the
subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and
Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English.
Ramanujan’s deepest roots are in the Kannada and Tamil
past and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it
available, in English language. I consider this a
significant achievement, one almost without a parallel in
the history of Indian English verse. Ramanujan has, it
seems to me, successfully conveyed in English what, at
its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in
another linguistic tradition.” (Parthasarathy: 34)
A.K. Ramanujan taught Dravidian linguistics at Chicago in America
for twenty years but he mentally lived in India. His collected poems
create a jaunting effect because he is a sensitive expatriate who has not
forgotten his own soil. He nostalgically remembers:
In Madurai
City of temples and poets who sang of cities
And temples.

106
 (Collected Poems:19)
In this way, Ramanujan makes a conscious effort to be Indian in his
sensibility in spite of his prolonged stay in the West.
Ramanujan also presents a pleasant picture of Chicago just as he does
that of Alleppey:
In Chicago it blows hot and cold
Trees play fast and loose.
Small flies sit on aspirin and booze.
Enemies have guns.
Friends have doubts.
Wives have lawyers. (ibid: 103)
Ramanujan presents quixotic picture of Chicago as compared to that of
his native Karnataka. These two selves continually interact in the poetry
of Ramanujan. Ramanujan is a typically Indian when he recalls that his
patterns of sorrow are his own, inherited from his own collective Hindu
unconscious:
And when I burn
I should smile dry-eyed
And nurse a martinis, like the marginal man,
But sorry, I cannot unlearn
Conventions of despair.
They have their pride.
But I must seek and will find
My particular hell only in my Hindu mind.
(ibid: 34)
The Conventions of Despair is a poem written in the tone of John Donne:
Yes, I know all that, I should be modern.

107
 Marry again. See trippers at the tease. (34).
The casual tone is reminiscent of the great metaphysical poet.
Ramanujan had an unusual ability to bring alive the picture of the
object before the mind’s eye. In the following passage, he recreates the
familiar picture of snakes:
A basketful of ritual cobras
comes into the tame little house,
their brain-wheat glisten ringed with ripples.
they lick the room with their bodies, curve
uncurling writing a sibilant alphabet of panic
on my floor. (ibid: 4)
The phrase “a sibilant alphabet of panic” provides the
characteristic quidditas of snakes, whereas ‘ripples’ gives the idea of
fluidity and suppleness of the movement of snakes. For this reason,
Ramanujan is predominantly an imagist poet. Dom Moraes has great
praise for the way Ramanujan says things: Ramanujan’s technique was a
natural one: he used assonance, off rhyme, internal rhyme, shifts of
metre, from very early on in his career.” (The Times of India: June 18:
1995). It is because of this quality that there is fine starling fusion of
form and content in the poetry of Ramanujan.
Ramanujan expresses his nostalgic feelings with fierce originality.
He believes that grace can come not only through religion, tradition and
culture but also through sex. He writes with blatant frankness:
Commandments crumbled in my father’s past.
her tumble hair suddenly known as silk in my angry hand,
I shook a little and took her,
behind the laws of my land

108
 (Collected Poems: 45).
This comes very close to W.B. Yeats’ lines:
That some streak of lightning
From that old man in the skies
Can burn out the suffering
No right-taught man denies
But a course old man am I
I choose the second best
And forget it all a-while
Upon a woman’s breast.
Ramanujan’s poetry is a fine integration of India and America.
P. Mallikarjuna Rao has rightly said: “While the influence of the West is
evident in his many-faceted irony, the impact of the native culture is
borne out by his imagery, setting and milieu and nostalgia.” (Bhatnagar:
59) Ramanujan’s strong point is the frequent use of powerful images.
These images give exposure to his nostalgic passions. This can be well
seen in his poems. While using this technique, Ramanujan prefers the
precise, the particular and the concrete to the vague, the general and the
abstract. This can be seen how Ramanujan brings alive the striders before
the mind’s eye. He describes with sensitivity how striders balance
themselves in water. This brings to mind the picture of Christ in
“Lycidas”: “Him who walked the waves.” In Ramanujan this sentence
becomes:
No, not only prophets/walk on water.
(Collected Poems: 3)

109
Thus, he describes the amphibian quality of striders who move with equal
ease on land and water. In “Striders”, powerful Gods are pitted against
the “weightless” insects of New England.
Another important cause of nostalgia in Ramanujan’s poetry is his
excessive pre-occupation with family. This is this theme that recurs in
many poems. It is obvious in his description of ancestral house.
Some time I think that nothing
That ever comes into this house
Goes out, things come in every day
To lose themselves among other things
Lost long ago among
Other things lost long ago-----(ibid :96).
Thus, many of Ramanujan’s poems reflect the fact that his roots bind him
to the early years of his childhood. Though memories constitute a major
section of Ramanujan’s poetry, he does not draw any succor by falling
back on these reflections. At times, he has a skeptical attitude even
towards the nature of memory. The poem entitled ‘Lines to a Granny’
can still be regarded bordering on fond remembrances. Ramanujan has a
great regard for his grandmother for she is a symbol of past glory. Here,
the poet vividly recalls the breath-taking fairy tales savoured by him long
ago at his grandmother’s knee. The fact that he yearns to relive those
moments once again is a prominent streak of sentimentalism in his
otherwise detached sensibility. The poem begins with these lines :
Granny,
tell me again in the dark
about the wandering prince;
and his steed, with a neem-leaf mark

110
 upon hi brow, will prance
again to splash his noonday image
in the sleep of these pools. He will break
with sesame words
know only to the birds,
the cobweb-curtained door; and wake
the sentinel, the bawdy cook;
the parrot in the cage
will shout his name
to the gossip of the kitchen’s blousy flame.
(Collected Poems: 17)
Ramanujan continues the tale of ‘The sleeping Beauty’ in the same
dream like vein :
Let him, dear granny,
Shape the darkness
and take again
the princess
Whose breath would hardly strain
the spider’s design. (ibid.)
As the poem draws to a close, the poet seems to overpower memory
by obliterating its negative aspect. Thus, he quizzically asks his
grandmother
But tell me now : was it for some irony
you have waited in death
to let me learn again what once
you learnt in youth,
that this is no tale, but truth ? (ibid: 17)

111
 Ramanujan’s pre-occupation with familial memories is so great that
a poem entitled “History” tells us about his aunt. He remembers the death
of his aunt nostalgically;
Which usually
changes slowly,
changes sometimes
during a single conversation:
the petite little aunt
in her garden of sweet limes
now carries a different
face, not merely older or cooler
or made holy
by deaths and children’s failures.(ibid:107)
The poet does not want to forget or miss any minute detail about his
past and about himself. His self is the only medium that makes him aware
about his real past. Thus, self occupies an important place in
Ramanujan’s poetry. This can be seen in his brilliant poem Self-Portrait:
I resemble everyone
But myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father. (ibid: 23).

112
Man puts on many masks and sometimes, it is difficult to know his true
identity. Man is not only his father’s son but other thing too.
Self in Ramanujan’s poetry has many facets. It goes on multiplying in
reflected mirrors:
No knowing who I am or what I want
I roam the city walk into movies
hurtle down a roller coaster
till mirrors in a mirror shop
break me up into how many I was
show me in profile and fragment (ibid:216).
The passage shows the multi-faceted personality of the poet which is the
result of his rich past.
Ramanujan’s not only remembers his personal relations but also
he remembers the surroundings of his Indian past. In this regard, his
technique is unique for its achievement of unexpected effects for he
intermingles his memories as well as his interest in anthropology. Cows
are encouraged to get pregnant in broad-day light, while a man defecates
between two rocks, showing the symmetry of his buttocks. Ramanujan’s
interest in anthropology and folklore is also responsible for his love of
astonishing details:
Probably
Only the Egyptian’s had it right,
Their kings had sisters for queens
To continue the incests
of childhood into marriage
or we should do as well-meaning
Hindus did,

113
 Betroth us before birth,
forestalling separate horoscopes
and mothers, first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage back into
the namelessness of childhoods (CP:67).
Akshaya Kumar rightly sums up Ramanujan’s poetry in the
following words: “The excremental images of pissing and defecation
surface on his creative landscape as frames of that metaphysical
exhaustion and rabid nihilism which informs the very impulse of his
creativity. No wonder if there is any “iridescence” in his poetry, it is the
iridescence of horsepiss after rain”.. If there are any smells, these are
smells of “urine on lily” or “woman’s odours in theatre”… The interior is
exteriorized through brazen rocky images. “A little girl’s underwear”
therefore, befittingly becomes “warm and secret place” for “a pregnant
scorpion”. (New Quest: January-February, 1998: 13-14).
Ramanujan has written few Hindu poems too denoting his
nostalgia for his religion. A typical Hindu remains indifferent to good
and evil. This is the theme of The Hindoo: he reads his Gita and is calm
at all events. The idea of this indifference is expressed in startling image:
I do not marvel
when I see good and evil: I just walk
over the iridescence
of horsepiss after rain. (79).
Here the thing said and the thing meant do not seem to merge into
each other. This is related to another Hindu poem. “The Hindoo: he does

114
not hurt a fly or a spider either.” Here sexual jealousy hurts the calm
composure of grandfather:
Watching as only husband will
a suspense of nets vibrate
under wife and enemy
with every move of hand or thigh:
Watching, watching like some
spider-lovers a pair
of his Borneo specimens mate
in murder, make love with hate,
or simply stalk a local fly. (Collected Poems: 63)
Ramanujan’s collected poems show his major concern for his
family, relations as well as his oscillation between his present and
glorious past. Vinay Dharwadkar has rightly said: “These formal and
thematic elements now alter our understanding of what the poet felt and
thought, why he chose certain voices, images and metaphors, what his
conceptions of nature and culture were, how he re-imagined time and
human history, where he located the conflicts and interdependence of
society, family, and self, or how he resolved some of the ethical
dilemmas of poetry in the late twentieth century.” (ibid: 17)
Thus, Ramanujan is chiefly concerned with memories and the
way they finalise or falsify human contacts in a changing world. But
Ramanujan can not be termed as a conventionalist or an advocate of
modernization and westernization. He is the product of both and his
poetic output mirrors him as a poet aware of change. In the poetic cosmos
of Ramanujan memories are often pleasant. They provide strength and
vigour to his poetry.

115
(b) Native Themes
One of the distinguishing features of Ramanujan’s poetry is its
autochthonousness. Indian myth and history, her people and customs, her
rich cultural and spiritual heritage etc. form the dominant themes of his
poetry. Even a cursory glance at his poetry convinces the reader that
Ramanujan has not severed his associations with India despite his long
residence in the United States of America. He rather frequently resorts to
native themes and traditions. His three Hindoo poems The Hindoo, he
does not hurt a fly or spider either, The Hindoo reads his Gita and calm
at all events, and The Hindoo, the Only Risk are essentially Indian in
background and treatment. These poems also ascertain his attachment for
his religion. They take the readers to the core of Hindu philosophy,
namely to the Gita. The poem A River focuses our attention on the role of
the river Vaikai which flows through Madurai, particularly in its
destructive role. Another poem A Hindu to His Body, shows that the body
is as important to a Hindu as the soul; the phrases and expressions
confirm it—“Dear pursuing presence, dear body’ and ‘do not leave me
behind’, “Poona Train Window” brings out the observations of a train
traveler looking out of the window. Some Indian Uses of History on a
Rainy Day, which keeps on shifting scene from Madras to Egypt and to
Berlin almost in a cinematic fashion, forcefully satirises the visiting
professor of Sanskrit. Some other poem like Small-town, South India,
Old Indian Belief and Prayers to Lord Murugan have also a direct
bearing on Indian ways of living, Indian beliefs and prayers. The last
named poem is dedicated to Lord Murugan, the ancient Dravidian god of
fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war and love, having six faces and twelve

116
hands. The Indianness of Ramanujan’s poetry is to be marked also in a
poem like Conventions of Despair, wherein the poet says:
But, sorry, I cannot unlearn
conventions of despair,
They have their pride.
I must seek and will find
my particular hell only in my Hindu mind. (12)
Even his poems dealing with family relationships reveal a good
deal of Indian life and atmosphere. The family, for Ramanujan, is “one of
the central metaphors with which he thinks,” (Parthasarathy: 1976: 95)
says the noted Indo-Anglian poet Parthasarathy. Ramanujan depicts his
family life almost untiringly, as is clear from the poems collected in the
second volume, Relations, Of Mother, among other things, Love Poem
for a Wife- 1, Love Poem for a Wife- 2, and Small-Scale Reflections on a
Great House. The family relations always haunt the poet, and there are
many good poems which own their origin to the re-collected personal
emotions. These poems deal with the memory of his relations and the
ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers. The sense of loss
is most poignantly connected with the reminiscence of the mother.
Viewed in this light, Of Mother, among other things, is a soft, soothing
poems which encompasses the mother’s youth, her unerring care for the
‘crying cradles’, her devotion to her work, unmindful of the rains and the
fluttering loose saris, and her painstaking domestic responsibility. The
stanza which works is the last one:
My cold parchment tongue licks bark
in the mouth when I see her four
still sensible fingers slowly flex

117
 to pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor.
The metaphors in first two lines emphasise the futility of the poet’s
language to express ‘the rough, bitter taste of the memory, and the last
two lines provide an irresistible ‘objective correlative’ of the emotion. It
is not that poet deliberately intended to illustrate the inadequacy of poetic
language but that the simple picture of the last two lines makes the
previous imagery of the poem seem laboured and incoherent.
Love poem for a Wife -1 highlights the poet’s sense of
estrangement from his wife, and the reason for this is indicated in the
very first stanza:
Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood. You cannot, for instance
meet my father. He is some years dead.
neither can I meet yours:
he has already lost temper
and mellowed.
(Collected Poems:38)
The ‘shared childhood’ should have added spices to their sentimental
attachment, and the want of this writhes the poet’s heart. In some of
translations too, Ramanujan airs out a similar concern, such as in “What
he said”:
What kin was your mother
to mines? What was my father
to yours anyway? And how
did you and I meet ever? (ibid: 40)

118
 But Love Poem for a Wife -2, there is no such writhing of the heart
and the tone has softened considerably in portraying the lean, lovely face
of the wife”
my wife’s face still fast
a sleep, blessed as by
butterfly, snake, shiprope,
and grandmother’s other
children,
by my only love’s only
insatiable envy. (ibid: 42)
The poem Small-scale Reflections on a Great House tells us about
the wonderful assimilative and digestive powers of the house which
absorbs not only good things but also bad things. On the one hand, it is
very warm to guests, sons-in-law, wives coming from poor houses,
daughters married to short lived idiots, sons returning in grand children,
nephews killed in the war in the borders; on the other, it tethers others’
cows, matures ‘unread library books’ in two weeks, does not return
‘neighbours’ dishes brought up with the greasy sweets’. The pretentious
shame of the girls of the house is beautifully brought out in the first few
lines:
Sometimes I think that nothing
that ever comes into this house
goes out. Things come in everyday
to lose themselves among other things
lost long ago among
other things lost long ago;
lame wandering vows from nowhere

119
 have been know to be tethered,
given a name, encouraged
to get pregnant in broad daylight
of the street under the elders’
supervision, the girls hiding
behind windows with holes in them.( ibid: 56)
The expression ‘with holes in them’ speaks more than what actually
meets the eyes.
Apart from the above-mentioned native themes, Ramanujan
explores certain other too in his poetry, such as childhood, the experience
of love, and the exposure to contemporary urban life. In truth, some of
the poems pertaining to his family life concentrate on the recollections of
childhood. Love Poem for a wife -1 is one such poem. Looking for a
Cousin on a swing also recalls the innocent days of a premature girl of
four or five and a little bigger boy of six or seven. The swing having
created a sensation in them inspired them to climb a small fig tree full of
leaves. Children and their happy state of existence come to the fore in
Love Poem for a Wife- 2. In another poem, Entries for a Catalogue of
Fears, he writes:
I’ll love my children
without end,
and to them infinite harm
staying on the roof
a peeping-tom ghost......(ibid:67)
The poem “History” mentions children thrice and tells us about the
change wrought on ‘the petite little aunt’ by death and children’s failures.
He says:

120
 Which usually
changes slowly,
changes sometimes
------------------------
the petite little aunt
in her garden of sweet limes
now carries a different
face, not merely older or colder
or made holy
by deaths and children’s failures. (ibid: 107)
Ramanujan’s best love poem is perhaps Still Another View of Grace,
which successfully captures the heat of passion in the heart of the poet.
Looking for a Cousin on a Swing is also a pleasant love poem. The
following lines in it are specially arresting:
Now she looks for the swing
in cities with fifteen suburbs
and tries to be innocent
about it. (ibid:88)
The tone becomes ironical here, and the girl now having grown
into a mature woman on the look out is taken to task for perpetrating her
initial corrupt impulse and practice. The two pieces on his wife are really
delightful to read. The two dominant stains of love-union and separation,
attachment and alienation are marvelously depicted in them. Hatred is the
occasional feature of love, and this is what we find in “Routine Day
Sonnet”: ‘She hates me, I hate her/ I am a filthy rat and satyr. (28). True
love is not to be found in the traffic of flesh, but in the concord of souls.
If a man cherishes the former sort of love, he is sure to be fear-ridden,

121
say at the age of seventy, for the dwindling physical strength and for his
utter futility in the face of ‘the fascination/of passing/old women’,(ibid.)
and he will be left with no option but to handle his thing helplessly- this
is precisely what we find in the sixth stanza of Entries for a Catalogue of
Fears. The predicament of the helpless lover reminds us of that of
Prufrock in Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with
difference of age no doubt.
The exposure to contemporary urban life is to be witnessed in the
poem Still Another View of Grace, which recounts the painful hesitancy
on the part of the poet and the upright boldness on the part of the
Christian lady in their approaches to love. The poems Still Another for
Mother and Conventions of Despair handle this subject in one way or
the other. In the first, we have:
And that women
beside the wreckage van
on Hyde Park street: she will not let me rest
as I slowly cease to be the town’s brown
stranger and guest.(34)
And, in a second the poet decides to be modern and says,
Yes, I know all that.
I should be modern.
Marry again.
See strippers at the Tease.
Touch Africa.
Go to the movies.
Impale a six-inch spider
under a lens. Join the Test-ban,

122
 or become the Outsider. (ibid.)
Of the two passages quoted above, the first demonstrates that one
can hardly attain the peace of mind in the midst of metropolis like
London, and the second that one has to be mobile and modern to fit in the
present-day world and to avoid the bitter sense of agony and frustration.
Much of Ramanujan’s poetry is based on recollections of the past
and women occupy a pre-eminent place in these reminisces. Ramanujan
has made a detailed analysis of the varied roles played by women. His
poems mention a string of relationships revolving round women. If his
poetry reflects the image of mother and wife, the portraits of a sister and
girl cousin too fit into their own slots. In more than one poem, the poet
cherishes the companionship shared with his sister. In the poem, ‘Snakes’
he remembers his sister’s rippling long tresses. He somehow finds a
resemblance between her neatly braided plaits and glistening snakes.

Sister ties her braids

with a knot of tassels
but the weave of her knee long braid
has scales,
their gleaming held by a score of
clean new pins.
I look till I see her hair again.

For I remembered I was a man born of woman.

(Ibid: 251)

Apart from these familial themes, the poet deals with the historical
themes also. In No Amnesiac King, the poet deals with the legend of King

123
Dushyanta. Here the poet chastises the attitude of the forgetful king
Dushyanta who left poor Shukuntala to her fate after wedding her
secretly in the sacred precincts of a hermitage. Holding as an example his
own attitude towards his wife he feels that the husbands of today are far
better than the so-called idealistic ones of the past who are still held in
such reverence. He recalls this incident as he waits (what seems to him)
endlessly for his wife at the market place.

As I wait for my wife and watch the traffic

in seaside market place and catch
my breath at the flat-metal beauty of whole pomfret,
round staring eyes and scales of silver
in the fisherman’s pulsing basket,
and will not ask, for I know I cannot,
which, if any, in its dead white belly
has an uncooked signet ring and a forest.
Legend of wandering king and waiting
innocent, complete with fawn under tree
and inverse images in the water
of a stream that runs as if it doesn’t.

(ibid: 126)

The sight of the gleaming fish thus brings back to the poet’s mind
the rather shameful incident which is often re-told with vigour to each
succeeding generation. The poet’s educated mentality, however, cannot
sing praises of a king who seems to take a woman for granted. One can
almost hear the poet’s unspoken queries to the writers who since time
immemorial have glorified such a man instead of admonishing him.

124
 The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan focuses not only on the characters
and legends of the material world but it also throws light upon various
ethereal deities dwelling in the celestial spheres. In his poetry, he talks
about Lord Vishnu, Shiva, Murugan, Lakshmi, Saraswati etc. A number
of his poems mention the goddesses of Hindu mythology. In the poem ‘A
Devotee’s Complaint’, the poet talks of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth
and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. It is not very pleasant to incur
the wrath of these goddesses:

Try to curry favour

with Lakshmi
you lose an eye-tooth
Saraswati, she slaps you hard
and where her fingers touch
your cheek, you have no hair
so you have to shave close
or bear her four finger mark
on your face. (ibid: 237)

Apart from goddesses, Ramanujan also deals with the she-demons

in his poems, thus shedding light on both the aspects of womanhood—the
benevolent and the malicious. Since, A.K. Ramanujhan is a poet of
realism he not only draws the reader’s attention to the better side of a
woman’s nature, but also to the bitter. In Mythologies 1, Pootna, the
female demon or ‘Rakshasi’ offered her poisoned breast to the baby
Krishna in an attempt to kill the lord. People were deceived by her
overture of affection and her honey sweet tongue did not betray the evil
within her,

125
 The breast she offered was full
of poison and milk.
Flashing eyes suddenly dull,
her voice was silk. (ibid: 221)

The poet goes on to describe how the all knowing and merciful lord
Krishna took pity on this wicked demon and killed her as a means of
saving her. Thus, finally, bereft of her guise as a beautiful woman, the
demon found her redemption in death.

The child took her breast

in his mouth and sucked in right out of her chest.
Her carcass stretched from north to south. (Ibid: 221)

The devilish woman not only failed in her mission but she was also
redeemed by the grace of the celestial child.

She changed, undone by grace,

from deadly mother to happy demon,
found life in death.(Ibid. : 221)

A.K. Ramanujan, the poet, noted for his philosophy of detached

sensibility appears to have made not only a comprehensive study of
woman as a whole but also an in-depth analysis of the secret chambers of
a woman’s heart. A careful study of his poems thus provides a
psychological insight into a woman’s mind. The poet pens down with
great precision the almost accurate characteristics of a woman’s nature.

In brief, it can be said that the constant use of native themes and
nostalgic utterances make his poetry essentially Indian. Ramanujan

126
proves himself as a distinguished poet of contemporary India who largely
concentrates on his family and relations, his Indian associations, India’s
glorious cultural heritage and its various ways of life.in this regard Surjit
S. Dulai rightly points out:
“It is certainly true that Ramanujan’s harking back to
Indian experience has always played a fundamental role
in the shaping of his poetic sensibility and the content of
his poetry.” (Dulai: 1989:151:

▬◙▬

References
Dulai, Surjit, S., First and Only Sight: The Center and the Circles of a.
K. Ramanujan’s Poetry, Journal of South Asian Literature,
Vol.24,No.-2, Summer, Fall, 1989.
Dwivedi, A. N., A. K. Ramanujan and his poetry, Delhi:Doaba
House,1983.
Manmohan K. Bhatnagar, (ed.) Indian writings in English, Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers 2000.
Kulshrestha, Chirantan. The Self in Ramanujan’s Poetry, The Indian
Journal of English Studies, xviii, 1978-79.
Parathasarathy,R.(ed.) Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, Delhi:Oxford
University Press, 1976.

127
Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan- Molly
Daniels-Ramanujan (Ed.) New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2005.
Saleem, Peeradina, (ed.), Contemporary Indian Poetry in English,
Bombay: Macmillian, 1972.

▬◙▬

CHAPTER – IV
Indian Cultural Sensibility
(a) Indianness:

Amongst the distinctive Indian-English poets of the post-

Independence era, A.K. Ramanujan is unquestionably an outstanding
name. One of the most charming features of his poetry is its Indianness.
Though he was far removed from the land of his birth and though he
lived in ‘land of plenty’ for a long period of time, he never severed his
associations with his friends and relatives and with his Motherland. This
fact is majestically borne out by his poetry and translations. We come
across a number of myths and legends, various Hindu gods and

128
goddesses, customs and rituals, fads and fashions, saints and seers, in
them. If his poetry establishes his claim as a ‘genius’ ─ luckily he was
honoured so by the McArthur award in 1983─ his translations clearly
display his abiding concern for the enrichment and propagation of the
hoary wisdom of ancient India. In this regard a noted British scholar,
William Walsh declares that, “the future of Indian poetry in English lies
safe in the hands of Ezekiel, Ramanujan, and R. Parthasarathy.” (Walsh:
1973:28)
Some poets of this era may have merely marginal significance in
the growth and expansion of this genre, but Ramanujan adds a great
vitality to it by virtue of this remarkable command of the English
language, his wide-ranging poetic sensibility as well as his unlimited love
for his native land. Not too many Indian poets in English come anywhere
near him in the present day fast changing literary scenario which seems
to be somewhat muddled with the number of mediocres rising everyday.
Only a few poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes
and Keki N. Daruwalla can be singled out to measure up to international
standards, and of them Ramanujan has been singularly competent to
“Forge .... and obligue, elliptical style all his own”, thereby showing “his
scrupulous concern with language”. (Parthasarathy: 1976: 195-6) Ezekiel
and Ramanujan have stood the test of time. As for Ramanujan, he has
brought out three volumes of English poetry during the span of two
decades, and deserves our serious consideration. All his poetical works
are OUP publications, and some of his best poems in the firth two
volumes are put together in Selected Poems (Delhi: OUP: 1976). Taken
together, his poetical collections display his unflagging interest in and
surging enthusiasm for his family and relations as well as his adequate

129
awareness of India’s rich cultural heritage as reflected in her myths and
legends and history and in her ways of life.
The terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indiannes’ must be clearly understood
before we start examining cultural sensibility in the poetry of A.K.
Ramanujan. he does not leave us in the lurch with regard to a plausible
connotation of these terms, and he subtly suggests in the title-piece that a
Hindu, which is equivalent to an ‘Indian’, is supposed to have ‘second
sight’, to have a moral, spiritual and mystical version of life. This is what
he makes a foreigner to observe about a Hindu:
‘You are Hindoo, aren’t you?
You must have second sight.’
(Selected poems: 1986: 89)
The observation comes to the poet as a bolt from the blue, reminding him
immediately of the high expectations of the people abroad. Whether he
has that ‘Second Sight’ or not is a different question, though we assure
him that he possesses plenty of it and that he has done a good deal
towards its extension and popularisation through his poems and
translations. To possess ‘second sight’ has something to do with ‘dwij’
which means ‘twice-born’. An orthodox Hindu brahmin is supposed to be
a ‘dwij’ or ‘twice-born’ by undergoing the pious ‘upanayan’ (holy
thread) ceremony for the sake of unbreakable self-control. The quality of
‘self-control’ is unsurpassable, and this has been underlined in our
Shastras, in our Vedas and other relevant philosophical treatises. Even ‘a
famous poet and student of Sanskrit” (Yeats: 1938:11) as T.S. Eliot has
been alluded to by another contemporary poet W.B. Yeats, speaks highly
of this quality in the Waste Land (1922). Eliot goes to the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (5.1-3) in order to re-inforce the teachings of

130
‘Prajapati’ to his sons-cum-disciples consisting of men, demons and gods
in the present-day context when the humanity at large is threatened with
an acute moral and spiritual crisis. Giving his thought to the question of
‘Indianness of Indian writing consists in the writer’s intense awareness of
his entire culture.”( Gokak: 1978: 24) Another thoughtful professor of
English, Dr. K.R. Srinivas Iyengar, has recognized certain well-marked
areas of operation for what is ‘Indian’ or ‘Indianness”, and these areas
include “the choice of subject”, “The texture of thought and play of
sentiment”, “The organization of material”, and “The creative use of
language”.( Iyengar: 1975: 8)
Ramanujan’s volumes of poems and specially the Second Sight deal
with Indian familial themes and relations. Of such poems, Extended
Family and Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees are to be specially
marked, though family connections are also traceable in a lesser degree in
Elements of Composition, Ecology, and Son to Father to Son. Indian
legends also find a place here. In No Amnesiac King, the poet gives an
account of the legend of King Harishchandra. Poems like A River and A
Hindu to His Body deal with Indian cultural symbols and their
significance in life. Again as the roos of Indianness lie in its strong
family system, the poet a special account of Indian family. The poem
Extended Family reminds one of the epigraph appended to Relations,
which runs thus:
Like a hunted deer
on the wide white
salt land,
a flayed hide
turned inside out,

131
 one may run,
escape,
But living
among relations
binds the feet. (Collected Poems: 55)
For the reason specified above—that “living/among relations/binds the
feet”, that it offers one a sense of belonging, a sense of rootedness—
Ramanujan fondly remembers his family and relations in so many poems.
The poet reserves his softest feelings for his mother and grandmother
(‘granny’, as he lovingly calls the latter). Though The Striders does not
have many poems on family and relations, it does mention mother,
‘granny’, and wife in sweet terms. In this volume, mother figures in
Snakes and Still Another for Mother, and ‘granny’ in The Opposable
Thumb and Lines to a Granny, and wife in Still Another View of Grave,
and father in Excerpts from a Father’s Wisdom. The second volume,
Relations, contains a number of poems on family and kith and kin. The
poems like Of Mothers, among other things, Obituary Love poem for a
wife- 1, Love Poem for a Wife- 2, History, and Small-Scale Reflections
on a Great House are all composed on this native theme. In Second
Sight, extended family continues that effort of the poet and opens with a
description of his grandfather, whom Ramanujan imitates in point of
bathing before the village crow. Then it proceeds to describe other
members of the family, and the poet informs us that he resembles his
father in slapping soap on his back and in thinking in Sanskrit proverbs.
True to himself he wipes himself dry with a Turkish towel. Like his little
daughter, he plays shy, and like his small son he holds his “peepee” and
plays garden hose in and out the bathtub. Like his grandson, he looks up

132
unborn at himself, and like his great great-grandson he is still contained
in the wombs of Futurity. The poem ends on a note of hope for the
extension of his family ad infinitum:
my future
dependent
on several
people
yet
to come. (Collected Poems: 65)
In a way, the poem combines past, present and future in its simple-
seeming yet subtle texture, and thus squeezes time and universe, as
though, into a ball. Such a vast functioning of a poem was envisioned
only by Shakespeare when he spoke of “the poet’s fancy in a fine frenzy
rolling / doth glance from earth to heaven” etc. ( A Midsummer Night’s
Dream), or by Donne when he composed immortal verses like the
following: “Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove/ Into the
glasses of your eyes /..../ countries, towns, courts.” (“The Canonization”)
Amongst others, perhaps Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth could have
composed such verses, but they are definitely beyond the reach of
ordinary poets. Kudos to Ramanujan that he comosed such verses with
utter simplicity comprehensiveness and clarity of vision.
Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees is divided into four parts and
serves as a link between the first two volumes and Second Sight. In truth,
all the three volumes have something to say about the poet’s wife and her
mercurial temperament. In The Striders, we have Still Another view of
Grace, wherein we find a beautiful marriage of “thought” and “feeling”
and a good deal of dramatic suspense, (Dwivedi:1983: 73)and in

133
Relations we come across the two lovely poems about his wife. Love
Poem for a Wife and Her Tress is verily a continuation of the same
subject, and it unmistakably brings out the poet’s soft feelings and
reasonable thoughts towards his Christian wife. He thinks that she is still
young and charming though she is now a mother—“certified dead but
living on.” (ibid.) She has been living with her children behind the
glittering curtains having peacock pattern on them. The Brahmin poet is
irresistibly attracted towards her, though her family trees are not in line
with his own. He thinks that it is just a mere coincidence that he is born a
son and she is a daughter to someone. She haunts his mind everywhere,
even in unexpected places like post offices. As she happens to be the
daughter of someone else, it is none of his business to protect her from
the ravishing gaze of the world, from the undesirable advances of that
muscular and bearded person who would be son-in-law in due course,
even from her own heart’s madness, from all things “messy and futile”,
and even from himself. Instead, he would rather like to entangle her in
his strong arms and do the rest in a multi-storeyed building. Out of this
contact with her, a second tree symptomatic of a new generation will be
born, sending waves of pain and shock to her:
Out of touch,
deprived of traffic, now an ant-world
down below, seen from a fortieth floor,
nose pressed to window,
in the safe custody of an anti-
septic bubble, your spinal cord
will wither— (Collected Poems: 77)

134
The third part of the poem, which is the tenderest of all, highlights and
poet’s weakness for his wife at night while at dawn next day he
remembers her as his better-half— as “the faraway stranger who’s
nearby” (78)— who after occupies him totally. The poet compliments her
for being a woman of the practical world, for being one—
that knows that I’ll never know :
languages of the deep south, weathers,
underground faults
in my own continent, mushrooms
for love and hate, backrubs and sinister
witchery... (ibid: 79).
She is one who shows great understanding and wisdom in buying
“the perfect pomfret for dinner” and in plucking the right “red apple in
garden for dessert.”(ibid.) The fourth and last part of the poem displays
this wonderful woman in her different roles— a Jewish mama, a sub-
sister, a help-needing daughter, a sexpot next door, a towering tree-spirit
with a cold body, a plain Indian wife at the village well. while the poet
himself appears in the varying roles of a son, a father, a brother, a macho
lover, a gaping tourist, and a clumsy husband.
Taken as a whole, the poem highlights Ramanujan as a soft and
sensitive person who can fully appreciate his birth and parentage,
physical and mental charms, and the practical wisdom of his wife. It is at
least one poem where the poet does not indulge in word- jugglery or in
undue imagistic details. The image of ‘tree’ is remarkably worked out
herein.
Apart from these poems, we have a host of them in the three volumes
of Ramanujan that concentrate on various other members of his family:

135
on grandparents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, daughters, and
sons. These family members are not mere his family members, they are
the very representatives of the Indian ethos that lurks everywhere in his
poetry. Through such poems, the poet unfurls the variegated pictures of
the Hindu family system, which does not break up with marriages (as in
the West) but gets consolidated with the induction of each new member
(as in India). Some of the poems that fall under this category are:─ A
Leaky Tap After a Sister’s Wedding, On the very Possible Jaundice of an
Unborn Daughter (its title is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy’s poem “To
An unborn Pauper Child”), and Looking for a Cousin on a Swing (all
from The Striders), Real Estate, Small-Scale Reflections on a Great
House, and History, and son to Father to Son (all from Second Sight). As
our purpose holds to examine the poems in the third and latest volume
only, we shall confine ourselves hereafter to a consideration of them.
Indian mythology lays stress on the composition of human body as the
result of the union of five elements viz. air, water, earth, sky and fire.
Elements of Composition, threats of the various elements that go into the
making of human body. Being subjective in content and form, the poem
graphically details the decomposition. Like others, the poet is made of his
“father’s seed and mother’s egg” (Collected Poems: 121) as well as of
earth, air, fire, and largely water. The poet says,
Composed as I am, like others,
of elements of certain well known lists,
father’s seed and mother’s egg
gathering earth, air, fire, mostly
water into a mulberry mass,
moulding calcium. (ibid.)

136
 The poet then mentioned “uncle’s eleven fingers” which produce
shadow plays of rajas and cats before becoming fingers again. He also
mentions “the look of panic on sister’s face/an hour before/her wedding”
and “a dated newspaper map” of an unseen place being carried by a
friend in his passport. He then evokes the picture of “the lepers of
Madurai” (the place being a famous seat of Tamil cultural and of
Meenakshi temple), who are “male, female, married, with children.” For
a moment, he appears to feel for them:
I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving
affections, seeds, skeletons......
(ibid.)
But hurriedly he shifts his attention to insects, mayflies, and a legend of
the half-man. At the close of the poem, we witness the image of the
“Caterpillar on a leaf, eating, /being eaten.” The image is highly
suggestive of the man’s fragile living condition in the present-day
tension-ridden world.
Ecology deals with the change of season and atmosphere in India and
therewith the flowering of the three Red Champak trees, giving the poet’s
mother “her first blinding migraine/of the season” (ibid:124) and
rendering the poet furious. The poet actually wants to cut down those
trees, but his mother does not permit him to do so. After all, the trees
were the source of supplying sweet-smelling flowers of her gods and her
daughters and her daughter’s daughters, but for cousins they also
necessitated “a dower of migraines in season” (ibid: 124). The ‘season’
referred to here is the rainy season in India. The poem serves as a very

137
good connective between this volume and the first two volumes where
the poet’s mother is seen in Snakes, Still Another for Mother (both in The
Striders), and Of Mothers, among other things (in Relations).
The poem Son to Father to Son, a compact piece no doubt, projects
the poet as a boy of five, dreaming of his father who has a beard
resembling “a hanging hive”. The boy cries aloud at the mere touch of
“the hair/on his hands” and at seeing his toes like “talons” ( 48) The
second part of the poem informs us that the same body now having
grown up becomes a father of his son and daughter. And the son
resembles him closely — “I wake with a round/shadow for my head” (
49) — and is greatly surprised to discover him so fully developed. The
poet starts ruminating over the revolving rounds of human lot and over
the continuing changes wrought in man’s age and personality. It is a very
thoughtful poem indeed.
Looking at the poem having examined so far, we can say that
Ramanujan adds a touch of intimacy and authenticity to his Indianness by
dwelling largely on his family and relations. Hence the poet
Parthasarathy rightly remarks that “The family, for Ramanujan, is one of
the central metaphors with which he thinks.” (Perthasarathy: 1976:95)
Also, the joint Hindu family system comes alive in them with all its
flexibility and rigidity, with all its good and bad points. Obviously, a
house cannot be built on shifting sand dunes, and Ramanujan has built
his artistic house on a solid foundation of concrete and mortar. His poems
of family and relations and Indian associations are derived directly from
his experience and knowledge, and they ensure “the continuity of a rich
traditional culture.” (ibid: 192)

138
 There is also a cluster of poems in Second Sight dealing with
Indianness in the form of Hindu myths and legends, Hindu gods and
goddesses, and with India’s colourful spectacles and her ways of life.
These things are to be found in Ramanujan’s all poetical collections, but
in the latest collection they come out with a bang. In The Striders, poems
like Snakes, A River and A Hindu to His Body are significant, unfurling
as they do the variegated pictures of Indian life and culture. Briefly to
state, A River brings into sharp focus the river Vaikai flowing through
Madurai and causing havoc and suffering to the people during the floods.

The poet says:

In Madurai,
city of temples and poets
who sang of cities and temples:
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
(ibid: 38)
A Hindu to his Body emphasises the importance of body to a
Hindu (who is supposed to attach greater importance to soul) because
body is the medium for him to attain his ultimate aim, i.e. salvation.
Hence the poet celebrates the need of body and says,
Dear pursuing presence,
dear body you brought me
curled in womb and memory.
(ibid: 40)

139
 The poem Snakes, however, is quite memorable in that it throws
light on one of the prevalent Indian customs and rituals— that of offering
the milk to nagas (cobras or snakes). The reverential attitude of the
poet’s mother towards “a basketful of ritual cobras” is clearly expressed
in the following extract:
Mother gives them milk
in saucers. She watches them suck
and bare the black-line design
etched on the brass of the saucer.
The snakeman wreathes their wreathing
round his neck
for father’s smiling
money. But I scream.
Sister ties her braids
with a know of tessel.
( ibid: 2-3)
The Hindus observe this ritual on the Naga-panchami day, which
invariably falls in the month of Shravan (the fifth month in the Hindu
calendar).
The second collection, Relations, is richer in the matter of
presenting certain unmistakable Hindu ( Indian ) myths and customs and
gods and certain significant historical events. It will be remembered for
its three Hindu poems, namely The Hindoo: He doesn’t Hurt a Fly, or a
Spider Either, The Hindoo: he reads his Gita and is calm at all events,
and The Hindoo” the only Risk. The Gita is one of the invaluable
philosophical treasures of the Hindus, and it has been highly valued in
the West. A. K. Ramanujan gives several references to this great Hindu

140
scripture in his poetry. Again, Indian history finds an outlet in poems
like Some Indian Uses of History, Some Relations, and The Last of the
Princes. Hindu myths and legends, gods and goddesses, are
accommodated in such poems as One, Two, Maybe Three, Arguments
Against Suicide (which directly mentions Kamasutra, the Treatise of
Love, and the legend of burning Kamadeva, the God of Love or Passion,
by Lord Shiva). Compensations (which makes a reference to the Tandava
dance of Lord Shiva on the Doomsday), and Prayers to Lord Murugan
(which offers fervent prayers to this ancient Dravidian god having six
faces and twelve hands). This is how the poet invokes the blessings of
Lord Murugan:
Lord of headlines,
help us read
the small print.
Lord of the sixth sense,
give us back
our five back
our five senses.
Lord of solutions,
teach us to dissolves,
teach us to dissolve
and not to drown.
(Collected Poems: 61)
According to the belief of the masses and the poet, Lord Murugan is the
“god of fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war, and love.”(ibid: 57)
Second Sight, which is amply rich in the depiction of Hindu myths
and legends, gods and goddesses, and Indian ways of life, opens its

141
account with O Amnesiac King. This poem records the well-known
legend of Raja Dusyanta and forest-beauty Shakuntala (the adopted
daughter of Kanva Rishi). What the poet suggests here is that King
Dusyanta actually committed an act of crime in forgetting all about his
beloved Shakuntala and in not recognising her even when he came to his
court in a state of worry and expectancy. The “amnesiac king,” i.e.
Dusyanta, could not recognise her because she had lost he wedding ring
gifted to her by him while she was bathing in a river. The ring was
swallowed up by a fish which was later caught by fishermen and brought
to the royal cook, who cut it open and to his great surprise discovered the
ring in its belly. The ring was restored to the king who recovered “at one
stroke all lost memory” (16). He immediately recollected is Gandharva
marriage with Shakuntala in the forest and grievously repented for his
misbehavior towards her. Then, in a swift transition of thought, the poet
reverts to his own wife and suggests that he cannot forget about her even
for a while when she goes to the marketplace to buy fish from the
fisherman in the gaze of all. He also suggests that in such matters even a
commoner is much better than a king like Dusyanta. Thus, the old legend
has been embued with a modernistic touch and Ramanujan is well-known
for his modernistic touches and ironical attitudes.
Another poem which is no less significant for its use of Hindu(Indian)
myth and legend is A Minor Sacrifice in five parts. It brings to the fore
the story of Raja Parikshit and his son Janmejaya. The myth relates to the
killing of a snake by King Parikshit in a forest in order to “garland a
saze’s nech/with the cold dead thing”, which promptly earns the sages’
curse—“an early death by snakebite” (35) The king’s son, Janmejaya,
does all possible to forestall his father’s eventual death, and he —

142
 ....... performs a sacrifice,
a magic rite
that draws every snake from everywhere,
till snakes of every stripe
begins to fall
through the blazing air
into his altar fires.
(Collected Poems: 35)
So miraculous is the power of his “magic rite” that all kinds of
nagas (snakes) come hurtling and fall headlong into his sacrifice (yajya),
but one poisonous snake known as Takshak remains stuck to the leg of
Lord Indra’s throne and somehow survives. That Takshak ultimately bites
the king who dies resigned to his lot. After introducing the legendary
story of Raja Parikshit, the poet tells us about the killing of a poisonous
scorpion by his uncle with the ivory dragonhead of his walking - stick in
order to save his loved son Gopu. His uncle shows the children the ripe,
yellow poison-bead of the scorpion just behind its sting. Meanwhile, his
grandmother also arrives there and she starts telling them that a pregnant
scorpion generally hides in a warm secret place and that it bursts its back
to bear a umber of baby scorpions and thereafter it dies instantly. The
uncle then informs them that the baby scorpions are quite red at birth but
later they change their colour and grow gray with their growth. That very
afternoon, the superstitious Shivanna proposes to the boy-poet to get rid
of the world of scorpions of all colours and kinds by the powers of
witchcraft and black arts. The scorpions, according to him , will come
rushing at their bidding into the bole of the sighing neem tree if a minor
sacrifice is perfomed hen the sun is in Scorpio (the eighth sign of Zodiac

143
which operates during the months of October and November). First, they
will have to feed and satisfy “the twelve-handed god of scorpions” who
demands “one hundred live grasshoppers/caught on a new moon
Tuesday” (37). Secondly, they will have to acquire “three jars” to put the
grasshoppers in. With these arrangements, the children go out on a
catching spree, and by evening they are able to catch ninety-nine of them,
but the hundredth eludes them for some time. Suddenly Gopu pounces in
the dark and completes the tally. Immediately the boys come back to
their homes and clean their hands in bathrooms. They do not eat anything
or sleep hands in bathrooms. They do not eat anything or sleep well that
night. The supervision of the jars falls to Gopu’s lot who keeps them safe
under his bed and dreams dreadfully all night. Next morning, all the boys
go to see Shivanna, the planner of the whole scheme, and carry the jars
on their backs, but to their shock and amazement they are informed by
his mother that—
he is in the hospital
taken sick the some strange
twitching disease. (40)
Later on, the mischievous Shivanna is reported dead, and on his death the
poet’s uncle informs all the children that on Tuesday Shivanna “clawed
and kicked the air” like some bug on its back.
The poem has a sub-title, and it is “remembering the dead in My Lai
4.” The sub-title suitably associates the senseless killings of grasshopers
by Shivanna & Co. with the massacres of Mai Lai rendering thousands of
Vietnamese maimed and dead. The American soldiers were at the back of
purposeless killing of Vietnamese. In a review of Second Sight, Elizabeth
Reuben comments that this poem in particular is “terse with

144
understatement” and that it narrates “a stroy of childish cruetly and
retribution worthy of that ugly Biblical incident of Elisha and the bears.”
The poem as a whole is immersed in a superstitious atmosphere, and
conveys a clear-cut message to readers — that humanity should love all
creatures, big or small, and should not kill them violently out of blind
belief.
There are, then, some poems in Second Sight which draw the sketches
of the Hindu gods and goddesses in unmistakable terms. Of such poems,
mention may be made of Zoo Gardens Revisited, The Difference, and
Moulting. In the first-named poem, the poet invokes various gods of the
Hindus to protect different kinds of animals to be found in the zoo —
animals like flamingoes, monkeys, orangutans, giraffes, ostriches, tigers,
tigresses, and chimps. The last lines of this prose- poem are very
pertinent to quote here:
Lord of lion face, bar snout, and fish eyes,
killer of killer cranes, shepher of rampant
elephants, devour my lambs, devour them
whole, save them in the zoo garden ark of your
belly.
(ibid: 47)
A number of manifestations of Lord Vishnu (whom T.S. Eliot
alludes to as “Preserver” in his Four Quarters) have been recalled in this
quoted passage. “Lord of Lion face” is Nrisingh, who relieved the world
from the clutches of Hiranya- Kashyapu, the tyrannical father of the boy
Prahlad, a great devotee of the Lord. “Boar snout” refers to his assuming
the shape of Varaha, who lifted the stolen earth from the waters of the
deep and thus freed it from the demon-thief. Lord Vishnu also appeared

145
as Matsya — “fish eyes” — in order to save Manu, the progenitor of the
human race, from a great deluge.
According to an Indian myth, the Lord rushed to the rescue of
Gajendra from the jaws of a powerful crocodile. He is also represented in
our mythology as Kurma, the Tortoise, sitting on whose back he
recovered some valuable things lost in the deluge. The Kurma back also
served as the pivot of the mountain Mandara during the churning of the
ocean in a tug-of-war between gods and demons. The Lord is also
depicted as Kalki, the White Horse, who purged the creation. The “zoo
garden ark of your belly” pointedly alludes to the Biblical story which
tells us that the almighty God saved two of every kind of creatures in
Noah’s ark when the entire creation was to be destroyed due to its
criminal or immoral activities. In this way, the poet has marvelously
combined the Eastern and Western mythology in a harmonious while,
and thereby has transcended the local for the universal and the familiar
for the mythical.
The Difference is a poem which mentions “The Hindu soul at death,”
(66), the “tiny Taj Mahals for tourists” (67) and brings into sharp focus
the myth of Lord Vishnu who assumed the shape of “the Dark One”—
i.e., the Vaman God — and who appeared before king Moradhvaj as a
dwarf-beggar to test the latters’ world-renowned generosity and
charitable nature and who demanded of the king just three steps of earth.
With his three steps, the Lord measured “heaven and earth” (68) as well
as the underworld (which is not mentioned herein). But the testing of the
noble king was still not over, for the lion on whom the Lord rode had
eaten nothing so long and was terribly hungry. The king and his obedient
spouse had nothing to feed the lion, as they were mere paupers presently.

146
The Lord added to their misery and helplessness by pointing out that his
chariot could eat nothing but the fresh flesh of their only lovely son, and
that the son should be slashed into two halves by the royal couple without
shedding even a drop of tear.
The King now knew that it was a severe test for them, yet he could
not allow anyone to go hungry from his door. Therefore, he and his wife
took up the saw in their hands and moved it over the head of their son
blinding their eyes. Instantly, Lord Vishnu appeared in his true mettle
and caught holds of the hands of the dumbfounded royal pair and
pronounced glory and lasting fame for the King, who had come with
flying colours through the test. The Excellent poetic use to which
Ramanujan has put this unforgettable Hindu myth of Lord Vaman and
King Moradhvaj speaks volumes of his grounding in the quintessence of
Indian culture and wisdom.
Moulting is a small prose poem, the last paragraph of which is quite
important from the viewpoint of the application of Hindu mythology by
the poet. This paragraph runs as follows:
Lord of snakes and eagles, and everything in between,
cover my son with an hours, shade and be the thorn
at a suitable height in his hour of change. (71)
Here the poet invokes the blessings of Garuda, the Lord of snakes and
eagles, for the protection of his loved son, especially in his hour of
change.
Indian philosophy and ways of life also find expression in the poetry
of A. K. Ramanujan. Thus, the poem Questions derives its epigraph from
one of the well-known Upanishads, namely the Mundaka (3.1.), where
we have the description of two birds sitting on the self-same tree, one of

147
them eating the fruit of the tree while the other simply watching. The
pertinent question is: which of the two birds acts in the right manner?
The first one which is “eating” and in turn is “being eaten”, or the
second one which does not burn with the desire the bird which is “eating”
the fruit of the tree is doing so in utter ignorance, but the second one
which abstains from “eating” is full of wisdom and has discarded the
ways of the world. The second bird has controlled its desires, and
therefore, it is wiser than the first one. Through the image of “the bird,”
the poet has set at rest all “questions,” all doubts and distractions, about
the purpose of human life on earth.
The variegated pictures of Indian life come alive in such poems as
Astronomer, Death and The Good Citizen, etc. Astronomer graphically
portrays a fatty Indian astronomer whose eyes are always fixed on the
planets and stars in the sky, through he himself lives on earth—“Sky-man
in a manhole” (24). He is full of Sanskrit proverbs, and keeps his
almanac spread before him. Though he always moves in “Sanskrit
zodiacs,” He is forever troubled by the twitching in his kidneys.
Apparently, he is a Tamil Brahmin—“The kidneys/in his Tamil flesh”
(24)—who is constantly swayed by that “honey” called “woman”. The
poem has become somewhat satirical in tone, but its Indian background
can hardly be questioned.
Death and The Good Citizen presents the condition of the good citizen
after his death in a hospital, and in the fourth and penultimate paragraph
speaks about the typical Indian method of the burial of the dead:
they’ll cremate
me in Sankrit and sandalwood,
have me sterlized

148
 to a scatter of ash.
(ibid: 26)
The poem also obliquely suggests that this method of burial is quite
contrasted with that in the West, where people usually take to a “steel
trap” or coffin method.
Pleasure offers a pen-portrait of a “naked Jaina monk” (30) who is
ravaged by “spring fever” caused by “the vigour of long celibacy”. He is
now overpowered by the passion of a “mango bud” (which is symbolical
of a beautiful virgin), and all his philosophy seems to have been
consumed. He is described sarcastically thus:
his several mouths
thirsting for breast,
buttock, smells of finger,
long hair, short, hair,
the wet of places never dry,..... (30)
To such a monk, the cool Ganges turns sensual, smearing his private,
pars, and he stands on an anthill of red fire ants to feel the “pleasure” of
sex-hunger and is eventually eaten away by them, limb by limb. The
poem is a forceful dig at the forced celibacy which lands one in great
misery and sadistic pleasure.
The poem At Forty brings out the living picture of a common sight in
India—that of a wrestler like Jatti, who teaches wrestling to his disciples
at the gymkhana of the Mysore palace. After giving a minute description
of Jatti’s physical make-up, the poet informs us that he is well-fed and
massaged, but no sex is permissible to him lest he should lose his energy.
The palace people are very proud of him, but one day he is taken to the
Town Hall for a trial of strength and is thrown there by ‘a black hulk”

149
round after round (p. 54). After this shameful and ignoble defeat, Jatti
returns straight to the gym to bury his head in the ground and to be
attended by five diciples. He then leaves for his home in a huff, never to
return there. Later he becomes “a sulphurous foreman/in a matchstick
factory” (55). Perhaps the subtle suggestion of the poet is that one should
built no merely one’s body but also one’s mind.
It has to be mentioned in passing that Looking and Finding, a prose
poem, is full of topical allusions, especially in the fifth paragraph, which
runs thus:
Having no clear conscience, he looks for one in the
morning news. Assam then, Punjab now, finds him
guilty of an early breakfast of two whole poached eggs.
(ibid: 74).
Obviously, the earlier insurgency in Assam and Nagaland and the present
violent militancy in the Punjab have been alluded to in this short para.
In a nut shell, Ramanujan is a distinguished poet of contemporary
India who largely concentrates on his family and relations, on his Indian
associations, on India’s glorious cultural heritage, on the Hindu myths
and legends, on the Hindu gods and ways of life, for his poetic utterance.
This tendency of the poet clearly demonstrates that he has not naturalized
the Western themes and traditions so much as the Indian ones. His
unflagging Indianness is undoubtedly one of his irresistible charms for
us, and it speaks voumes of his cretive talent and poetic power. Prof.
Iyengar, therefore, rightly remarks that Ramanujan has “stabilized as one
of the most talented of the ‘new’ poets”, K.R. Srinivas Iyengar (671).
Speaking of his own poetic art, Ramanujan once obrserved thus:

150
 English and my disciples (linguistics, anthropology) give
me my ‘outer’ forms—linguistic, metrical, logical and other
such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years
in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and
professional preoccupations with Kannnada, Tamil, the
classics and folklore give me my substance, my ‘inner’
forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each
other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where.
(Cited from Parthasaratrhy: 96).
The ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ forms combinedly constitute “the linguistic and
cultural determinant of a poet’s imagination”,( Kulshrestha:1978-79:
110). and the cultural determinant” of Ramanujan’s imagination puts a
seal on his being autochthonos and indigenous in content and thought.
This fact is amply evidenced in his Second Sight. Hence, we agree with
Nissim Ezekiel, an established Indian poet of our day, when he remarks
in a brief essay that ‘Ramanujan has enriched the Indian-English tradition
of poetry in a perceptible way. Though living and teaching in America
for a long time he is essentially an Indian poet.’
(b) South Indian Ethos:
Ramanujan’s poetry is a clear evidence of his deep awareness of Indian
myths and legends, Indian history, her varied customs, rituals and her
philosophy. As an expatriate, his overwhelming concern with his South
Indian past speaks of an intellect and a soul that is extricably bound and
sustained by a tradition that is enriching and fulfilling. Though proficient
in Tamil, his mother tongue, and Kannada, the language he grew up with
and studied, his poems were predominantly written in English.

151
Ramanujan’s translations of classical Tamil poetry and the Kannada
Vacanas in English helped to propagate Tamil and Kannada in the West.
Speaking of his poetic art, Ramanujan remarked,
“English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology)
give me my ‘outer’ forms ─ and my first thirty years in
India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and
professional pre-occupations with Kannada, Tamil, the
classics and folklore give me my substance, my inner
forms, images and symbols.”
(Parthasarathy: 1976:96)
According to Ramanujan, the study of Indian folklore has never
been a sharply defined field. Overshadowed by Indology, it has a
distinguished intellectual history. (Blackburn:1986:1) in his collection of
essays entitled Another Harmony, he says that folktales in several Indian
languages like Hindi, Telugu and Kannada are part of complex
civilization and they are related to the more immediate social and
performance contexts. Ramanujan maintains that Indian culture is, “a
composite of classical, folk and popular streams.” (ibid: 26) In his note to
The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology,
he says,
“Anyone translating a poem into a foreign language is,
at the same time, trying to translate a foreign reader into
a native one.”
(Ramanujan: 1967:11)
To translate is to “carry across” not merely one language to
another but from one mode of thinking to another, and one native culture
to another culture. The purpose of translation is to translate a foreign

152
reader to a native one. To “carry across” is the fundamental motivating
principle of translation. A translator crosses the chasms of language. A
translator has to use both the halves of his brain to get close to the
original he has to let poetry win without allowing scholarship to lose.
The greatest contribution made by Ramanujan to world literature
was his translations and transcreations from the classics of Kannada and
Tamil. These translations are a storehouse of the South Indian ethos that
lie scattered in his poetry. Fifteen Poems from a Classical Tamil
Anthology (1965), The Lotus in the Navel (1969), Vacanas, Speaking of
Siva(1972) (from Kannada), Samskara (1976),The Interior Landscape
(1967) (from Tamil ‘Akam’ Poetry), Poems of Love and War (1985)
(Ettuttokai Pathupattu) and The Hymns for the Drawiung (1981)
(Thiruvaimozhi) are the finest in the genre. They stand as a testimony to
Ramanujan’s scholarship and creatively, a combination which is rare to
great men of literature.
While translating he makes explicit typographical approximations
to the inner form of the poems concerned. In his Afterwards to the
Interior Landscape, the translator says that the Cankam poetry is
classified by theme into two kinds: poems of akam (the inner part or the
interior) and poems of puram (the outer part or the exterior). Akam
poems are love poems: puram poems are all other kinds of poems,
usually about good and evil, action, community, kingdom etc.” (ibid:
101)
He has a great admiration for the Tamil Sangam poetry. At the end
of “Afterword” to The Interior Landscape he says:
“In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity there is
not much else in any Indian Literature equal to these

153
 quiet and dramatic love poems. In their values and
stances they represent a mature classical poetry. Passion
is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and
naunces of designs, impersonality by vivid detail
leanness of line by richness of implication.”
(Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil: 1985:54)
The richness and newness of Sangam poetry are chewed and
digested only by a few scholars of Tamil. Ramanujan is one who delves
deep into the ocean of this Sangam poetry and comes up with gems of
translation into English. There is formalism to Sangam poetry. It is
classified by there into two kinds, namely, ‘akam’ the inner part and
‘puram’ the outer part. ‘Akam’ is love poetry and ‘puram’ is war and
other kinds of poetry. The following is an ‘Akam’ poem from
Ramanujan’s Interior Landcape.
What she said:
People say, “You will have to bear it”
Don’t they know what passion is like or
is it that they are so strong? Ask for
me, if I do not see my lover grief drowns
My heart like a streak of foam in high
waters dashed on the rocks little I ebb
and become nothing.
( Krishan:1992:2)
S. Krishnan says that there is a curious resonance between the
above kind of ‘Akam’ poem with the medieval Japanese poems such as
Rihaku’s (This poem was translated by Ezra Pound) “The River
Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” This is how it concludes:

154
 The leaves fall early this autumn in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow
With August over the grass in the west garden:
They hurt me, I grow older.
(ibid)
S. Krishnan finds the resonance of passion and separation of lovers
in the ‘Akam’ and the medival Japanese poem of Rihaku. He also finds
and echo of the Alvars (in their worship of Lord Vishnu) in Gerard
Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Wreck of the Deutchland.”(ibid)
It appears that Ramanujan’s scholarship and Sangam poetry’s
contemporary potentiality go hand in hand. One critic points out that
Ramanujan chose not the works of the Great Tradition with their roots in
Sanskrit, but works of Little Tradition, with their roots in the local
languages. A translator has been defined as bilingual mediating agent
between monolingual communication participants in two different
language communities, and it is the translator who decodes messages
transmitted in one language and recodes them in another. But A.K.
Ramanujan is entirely different from this conventional view of
translation.
In poems of Love and War, Ramanujan translates old Tamil poems
selected from anthologies compiled over two millennia ago. The poems
of this book are selected from the Eight Anthologies and The Ten Long
Poems; sections of the Tolkappiyam are used to develop a commentary
on Tamil poetry and poetics. The poems are classified by their themes as
akam and puram. Each section contains poems that evoke a particular
landscape: hillside, Seaside, forests, cultivated fields and the wilderness
(or desert). Each landscape with the mood it represents, and the poems

155
that evoke it, is called by the name of a flower or plant of that region:
Kurinki, a mountain flower; Palai, a desert tree; neytal, blue lily; mullai,
jasmine. In puram poems, certain situations (e.g. a siege), persons (e.g. a
chieftain), and themes (e.g. ideals of good life) appear to be more
important than landscapes. Thus, Ramanujan has presented South Indian
ethos in these poems by arranging them into five themes i.e. Kings at
war, Poets and Dancers, Chieftain’s Lessons, War and After.
The third and fourth books consist of a few late classical poems
(fifth to sixth century) with a different subject. The third offers some
comic, even bawdy poems, poems of love’s excess in contrast to the
decorum of the previous sections. The fourth and the last book includes a
long hymn to Vishnu, one of the earlier examples of its kind in Indian
literature, and two pieces from the long poem, A Guide to Lord Murugan.
The erotic and the heroic motifs of both the akam and puram poems are
imaginatively reworked in these early important religious poems.”
(Poems of Love and War: 1985:14-15)
A. K. Ramanujan’s Hymns for the Drowning, poems For Vishnu
(trans.) from Tamil, contain some of the earliest religious poems about
Vishnu, or Tirumal, the Dark one. The author is an ‘alvar’ “(one)
immersed in god” the root verb al means “ to immerse, to dive, to sink to
be lowered, to be deep.”the title plays on the meanings of such an
immersion for poet and reader. These poems written by Nammalvar
between AD 880 to 930 represent the most early bhakti texts in any
Indian language. Early bhakti movements were devoted to Shiva or
Vishnu. Hymes for the Drowning is chiefly concerned with poems related
to Vishnu, and his incarnations. The poem Zoo Garden Revisited has
remarkable parallels with the Vishnu portrayed in the Hymns for the

156
Drowning. In the last line of the poem the poet prays to Vishnu to protect
all the birds and the animals in the zoo which include flamingoes,
ostriches, monkeys, giraffes, tigers, tigresses and many more, from the
cruelty and callousness of man.the poet appeals to the lord Vishnu:
Lord of lion face, boar snout and fish eyes, killer of killer
Cranes, shepherd of rampant elephants, bebou my lambs,
Devour them whole,save them in the zoo garden
ark of you belly
(ibid: 154)
In the poem the Man Lion the poet describes Vishnu’s Manifestation in
the form of the man- lion (Narsimha) as:

At the hour of sunset,

there was blood
on the heaves and the eight directions.
Our lord
plunged the demon into despair
and slaughtered him:
a lion
tearing open
a mountain under his claws.
(Hymns for the Drowning: 1993:9)
In the poem, The Boar Rescues the Earth the poet deals with the
story of the demon Hiranyaksa who abducted the earth and kept it under
the ocean. Vishnu became the boar, slew the demon after a thousand year
war and lifte d the earth from the waters with his tusks.
The seven icelands of the earth,

157
 They stayed in place:….
Miraculously,
That day
Our Lord pitchforked them out
With his tusks
From the deep.
(ibid:42)
Again in the poem Before I Could Say the poet talks about the
Matsya incarnation(Fish) of Lord Vishnu,who appeared as Matsya to
save Manu, the ancestor of all human beings from the great flood. The
poet says,
Before I could say,
“he became cowherd
Fish
Wild boar,”
(ibid: 49)
Another poem that can be analysed in a similar manner is the Difference.
Here the poet says,
When Vishnu
Came to mind,
The Dark one you know
Who began as dwarf
And rose in the world to measure
Heaven and earth with his paces.
(ibid: 172)
Here, there is a reference to Vishnu, the Dark one as Vamana, the Dwarf,
who measured the earth in three steps.

158
 Speaking of Shiva is a book of Vacanas or religious lyrics in
Kannada free verse. The Vacanas were written between the tenth and
twelfth century in India by the Virasaiva saints. The spontaneity of
worship that is characteristic of the ‘bhakti movement’ advocated total
surrender to god. In Speaking of Shiva, Ramanujan translated into
English some of the Vacanas of the four great mystic poets of the period:
D Basavanna, Devara Dasimayya, Mahadeviyakka and Allama Prabhu.
In this way through his translations Ramanujan depicts the South Indian
ways of living, thinking and working.
Ramanujan’s four volumes of English poetry reveal a certain
degree of indebtedness to his translations from Kannada and Tamil. The
methodology used by the Tamil poets in his translation entitled Poems of
Love and War reveal a correspondence in the structural and thematic
design of his poems. “The collective consciousness’ as conveyed through
creative expression, can be identified with the help of various parameters
such as the linguistic structure, genres and styles, themes, cultural milieu,
philosophical vision, ideology and geophysical space.”
(Khubchandani: 1989:107) the content of Ramanujan’s poetry is
essentially Indian. These poems can be arranged in a particular sequence
for interpretive purposes. They resemble the ‘Interior Landscape’ of
Tamil poetry mediating between an individual and the large social world.
The akam and puram definitions of the structure of classical tamil poetry
can be extended to Ramanujan’s poetry.
The Black Hen offers a redemptive vision in spite of the
disintegrating values of our times as is evident in the last poem entitled
Fear No Fall. There are innumerable references to Lord Murugan in his
poetry. Lord Murugan is the Asian Dravidian god of fertility, joy, youth,

159
beauty, war and love. He is represented as a six faced god with twelve
hands. Prayers to Lord Murugan in Relations has six sections. In the first
section, Lord Murugan is greeted thus:
Lord of the new arrivals
lovers and rivals:
arrive
at once with cockfight and banner
dance till on this and the next three
hills
Women’s hands and the garlands
On the chests of men will turn like
chariot wheels. (ibid: 113)
In A Guide to Lord Murukan, “the guide poem and the heroic
praise poem have become devotional. The subject is a god instead of a
hero. The motifs, the landscapes, the moods of awe, love and
supplication, are directly in the classical Tamil heroic (puram) tradition.
Murugan is both lover and chieftain. The interior (akam) and the exterior
(puram), love and war, meet in him.”(Afterwards: 1993:112)
In the religious poems in Poems on Love and War, the poem
Murukan: His Places has remarkable parallels. When Lord Murukan
arrives:
this cock- banner is raised
in the festival of festivals
for many towns around;
wherever devotees praise
and move his heart;
where his spear- bearing shamans

160
 set up yards
for their frenzy dance.
(Poems of Love and War: 215)
Eventually, the search for the self which serves as the subjective centre of
experience ends on a metaphysical note. It combines both the Upanishads
and bhakti poetry with the Virashaiva tradition in Kannada and the
Shrivaiahnava tradition in Tamil.
Again, Speaking to Shiva is a book of Vacanas in Kannada free
verse. Vacana literally means ‘saying, thing said’. In the Vacanas, the
Virasaiva saints speak of Shiva and speak to Shiva. To the bhakti poets,
true religion was the religion of the soul, unencumbered by dogmas and
rituals. The bhakti poet was a visionary and a seer, a mystic of a high
order. He was one who revealed his own self-realization so that others
could transcend the limits of their finite self to attain a state of bliss. In
this regard Ramanujan observes, “living in history, time and cliché, one
lives in a world of the pre-established, through the received (Sruti) and
the remembered (Smriti). But the experience when it comes, comes like a
storm to all such husks and labels.” (Introduction, Speaking to Shiva:
1973:31) the Virasaiva saints rejected both the Sruti and Smriti. They
were concerned with the experience of the ‘Now’. So, their compositions
were Vacanas or ‘What is Said’. It was not concerned with what is
remembered or received, but what was experienced now. Mahadeviyakka
is one such poet saints translated in this volume. Ramanujan makes a
mention of her in his poem Mythologies 3 and says:
‘Keep off when I worship Shiva.
Touch me three times,and you will never
See me again,’said Akka to her new groom

161
 Who could not believe her ears.
(Collected Poems: 228)
Again the poem Fear No Fall deals with the same bhakti; it has
even greater overtones of a greater insight, an intuitive power, and an
extra sensory perception. In the last stage, there is no worship anymore,
‘for who is out there to receive such worship? This is oneness or
aikyasthala. Like space joining space, water water, the devotee dissolves
nameless in the lord, who is not another.
Thus, Ramanujan has effectively demonstrated the supreme
significance of his roots that are so deeply tucked in the south Indian
traditions. Ramanujan has derived his poetic technique the ancient
Kannada and Tamil verse his technical accomplishment in inconstable
and his thematic strategy is precisely the right one for a poet in his
position. He has completely exploited the opportunities his material
offers him in this regard M.K. Naik opines, “Of all his contemporaries,
Ramanujan appears to have the surest touch, for he never lapses into
romantic cliché. His unfailing sense of rhythm gives a fitting answer to
those who hold that complete inwardness with language is possible only
to a poet writing in his mother tongue.” (Naik: 1982:201)
In his poetry the Indian sensibility and indigenous ethos gets it’s
more genuine and potent expression. He observes the inalienable link
between life and art and tries to touch the life into art. To him as
Chirantan Kulshrestha assumes, “life and art must connect at some
point.”(Kulshrestha: 1981:181)

162
 ▬◙▬

References

Blackburn, Stuart H. and A. K. Ramanujan, (eds.). Another Harmony:

New Essays on the Folklore of India. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1986.
Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems: 1909-1962, 5th impr. (London: Faber &
Faber, 1970.
Ezekiel Nissim , “Two Poets: A.K. Ramanujan and Keki N. Daruwalla”,
The Illustrated Weekly of India (June 18, 1972),
Khubchandani, M. Lachman, The Bonds and Bounds of a Literary
Tradition, Comperative Literature: Theory and Practice, (ed.)
Amiya Dev, Sisir Kumar Das, Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1989.
Kulshrestha Chirantan, “The self in Ramanujan’s Poetry”, The Indian
Journal of English Studies, XVIII (1978-9).

163
-------------------------A.K. Ramanujan:A Profile, Journal of South Asian
Literature, 16.2, 1981.
Iyengar,K.R. Srinivasa, “Indian Writing in English : Prospect and
Retrospect”, Indian Writing in English, ed. Ramesh Mohan,
Naik, M.K., A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1995.
Ramanujan, A. K., The Interior Landscape, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1967.
-----------------,Second Sight (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).
----------------,Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and
the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, New Delhi: OUP, 1985.
-------------------Introduction, Speaking to Shiva, trans., A.K. Ramanujan,
New York: Penguin, 1973.
-------------------,The Striders (London: Oxford University Press.
Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1971),
----------------,Translator’s Note, Poems of Love and War, Selected and
translated by A. K. Ramanujan,Delhi:OUP,1985.
-----------------,Hymns for the Drowning, Poems for Vishnu by
Nammalvar, Trans. From Tamil by A. K. Ramanujan, N.Y.:
Penguin, 1992.
R. Parthasarathy, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary: The Poetry of A.K.
Ramanujan”, The Literary Criterion, XII, Nos. 2 & 3 (1976),
R. Parthasarathy, ed. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (Delhi:
Oxford Univesity Press, 1976), p. 95.
_____________, The Literary Criterion, p. 192.
Reuben, Elizabeth, ‘Cautious Wisdom”, The Indian Express Magazine
(Nov. 9, 1986)

164
S. Krishan, The Interior Landscape, The Hindu, October4, 1992, ii.
V.K. Gokak, “The concept of Indiannes with reference to Indian
Writing”, Indian Writign in English, ed. Ramesh Moham (Madras:
Orient Longman, 1978).
W.B. Yeats, “Introduction”, Aphorisms of Yoga by Bhagvan Shree
Patanjali (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), p. 11.
William Walsh, “Introduction”, Readings in Commonwealth Literature
(Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1973).

▬◙▬

CHAPTER-V

Seduction to the West

(a) Confrontation between the East and the West:

While talking about the Indian expatriate poets, Bruce King aptly
remarks, “Indian expatriate poets do not write from the position of a
distinct foreign community, such as the exiled black or West Indian
novelists, but their writing reflects the perspective of someone between
two cultures. They may look back on India with nostalgia, satirically
celebrating their liberation or asserting their biculturalism, but they also
look skeptically and wryly on their new home land as outsiders, with a
feeling of something having been lost in the process of growth. The ability
to tolerate, accommodate and absorb other cultures without losing the con-

165
sciousness of being Indian marks the expatriate poets. (King: 1987:209 -
10)
Bruce King refers to Ramanujan’s ability to live peacefully in two
different worlds-- the world of his self and memory which is ‘within’ him
and the world of the present which is ‘without’ and explains that the core
of the essential self remains as an inner world, but this is modified by
changed circumstances and decisions. (ibid: 215)
A. K. Ramanujan himself endorses this view when he says, “you
cannot entirely live in the past, neither can you entirely live in the present,
because we are not like that. We are both these things. The past never
passes. Either the individual past or historical past or cultural past, it is
always with us. It is what gives us the richness of -- what you call it -- the
richness of understanding. And the richness of expression.” (Jha: 1981: 5)
To express it in the words of E. N. Lall, “Ramanujan’s poems take their
origin in a mind that is simultaneously Indian and Western -- Indian mode
of experiencing an emotion and the western mode of defining it.” (Lall:
1983:44)
A.K. Ramanujan is an expatriate Indian English poet. He grew up in
Mysore but since 1960 when he was about thirty years old he had been
staying in the United States as a professor of Dravidian Studies and
Linguistics. Though he lived in the States, far away from the Indian soil
but he had never forgotten the country of his birth and youth, the country
of strong socio-cultural heritage which nurtured Indian sensibility in him.
In fact through his works he tried to acclimatize an indigenous tradition i.e.
the Indian tradition with special reference to Kannada tradition. His works
exhibit a profound fusion of two cultural polarities. In this connection, E.
Narendra Lall opines:- “Both evaluations corroborate my thesis that

166
Ramanujan’s poetry is the expression of his poetic sensibility in which the
Indian subjectivity coalesces with the western objectivity. In other words,
his Indian heritage and experience inspire his poetry, which is given
speech and form based on English poetic tradition.” (ibid: 201)
As a third world expatriate poet, Ramanujan, unlike his western
counterparts who are keen to escape the society which has lost its’ values,
hails from a social background noted for its familial bonds, communal and
religious harmony– a rich tradition in fact. He has also carried with him his
cultural roots from India and therefore his works do not contain elements
of existential rootless ness, which is a predominant factor in the works of
the unity of his migration.
As Ramunajan was alive to the sharp difference between the
enriching culture and tradition of India and the west, his sense of nostalgia
got intensified with passing years. “The readers are driven to juxtapose the
“Spiritual community-oriented, tolerant value system of India and the
materialistic, individualistic, racist, power-hungry exploitative system of
the west,” (Kirpa1:1989:5) and hence, the poet goes back with renewed
spirit and vigour to his people and his country. Therefore, a major theme of
Ramanujan’s poetry has been his obsession with the familial and racial
past.
Ramanujan’s poetry written in English while he lived in the highly
westernized society of the States irrevocably impresses on the reader’s
mind the arresting images signifying poet’s irreversible bond with his past
in India. This is the only reason why various critics both from the western
land and his own country have expressed strikingly divergent responses to
his poetry. These critics have perceived a sense of nostalgia for the past
with the desire to re-create it in the present situation. There are some other

167
who speak of his rootedness in his Hindu experience. Paul Vergheese says
that his poetry expresses his “Indian sensibility sharpened and conditioned
by western education.”(Verghese: 1931:93) There is yet another group of
critics that opines that his poetry oscillates between the two worlds, the
country of his birth and the country of his domicile. Thus, if a western or
‘Westernized’ critic focuses his attention on the ‘Indian ness’ of
Ramanujan’s poetry, an Indian critic bewails his “disinclination to fully
explode his Indian experience.”(Naik: 1981:44)
The fact remains that he presents a torn mind which oscillates
between two cultural polarities. Ramanujman himself accepts – “English
and my disciplines (Linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’ forms –
linguistic metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience, and
my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal
and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the Classics and
folklore give me my substance, my ‘inner’ forms, images and symbols.”
(Parthasarathy: 1996:92) The perspicacity with which Ramanujan
delineates his subconscious preoccupations and urges that were formed
during his interactions with India and her culture speaks volumes of his
inalienable Indian mental make up. He tries to locate the influence of his
indigenous past as well as the influence of the modern western education
simultaneously. In a revealing interview that Rama Jha had with
Ramanujan in 1980, the latter explains the influence of English and
Kannada –
Yes, my knowledge of English has been deeply
affected by my knowledge of Indian literature and
poetics……If English cuts us from our culture, It
won’t get us very far…… Indian English, when it is

168
 good does get its nourishment… from each
Individual’s knowledge of Indian culture and Indian
languages. It certainly does for me.” (Times of India:
1980:13 )
Thus, Ramanujan’s responses to life in the States are moulded by the
emotional inputs that he gathered during the formative years in India.
These responses are well reflected in his poetry where he gives enough
evidence of the ‘fusion’ of his awareness of Indian sensibility and acutely
felt temper of western modernity. From this view point one can categories
Ramanujan’s poems into two separate groups. Poems like ‘Conventions of
Despair’, ‘Entries for a Catalogue’, Still Another View of Grace’,
‘Christmas’, Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day’ etc. belong to
the category of poems in which the conflict between Hindu heritage and
notions of modernity are the themes. In the second category fall the poems
like ‘Of Mothers, among other things’, ‘Love Poem for a Wife’, Small
Scale Reflections On a Great House, ‘Obituary’, ‘Reflections’, ‘Snakes’,
‘History’ etc. where family theme dominates.
Ramanujan’s sojourn in the States and other countries result in the
production of poems that record the recurrent phenomenon that his
responses to the environment in the Anglo-American set up irrevocably
stirs his memory to his Indian past. In the ‘Snakes’ (second poem in the
volume ‘The Striders’), the poet shows the same belongingness for his
past. When the poet moves in the museums or among stacks of books, his
subconscious remembers with tenacious fascination his early years in
India-
A basketful of ritual cobras
comes into the tame little house,

169
 their brown wheat glisten ringed with ripples.
They lick the room with their bodies, curves,
uncurling, writing a sibilant alphabet of panic
on my floor. Mother gives them milk
in saucers. She watches them suck
and bare the black-line design
etched on the bears of the saucer.
The snakeman wreathes their writhing
round his neck.
for father’s smiling
money. But I scream.
(Collected Poems: 1995:4-5)
Thus, the Indian past is recaptured in images that transform
themselves into metaphor to endow his poetry with a new tension between
the East and the West. For instance in ‘Still another for Mother’ he says –
Something opened
in the past and I heard something shut
in the future, quietly.
(ibid: 15)
The formative influence of religion which provided him a system to
know the meaning of life is rich in him because he grew up in a traditional
middle class Southern Hindu Brahmin family. He retained his faith in the
Hindu philosophy of the Unity Consciousness. His acceptance of the
oneness of all life is evident from his poem Christmas:
For a moment, I no
Longer know
Leaf from parrot

170
 Or branch from root
nor, for that matter
that tree
from you or me.
(Striders: 1966:30-31)
The man, the tree and the parrot possess identical creative
impulses and therefore they must be considered as expressions of the same
erective force. Though the western tradition also accepts God as the creator
of the universe, it seems to maintain the dichotomy between Man and
Nature and Man and lower creations like animals and birds. Though
Wordsworth could, for instance, find a “Lurking soul” within the “meanest
flower,” he could not equate it with the human soul. To him and to poets
like Robert Frost, the objects of nature, however closer they may be to the
life of man, cannot become ‘the man’.
This kind of difference between the oriental and occidental
traditions is also emphasized further through the tree image in the same
poem. The bare leafless tree standing outside his window in the USA and
the lively tree seen out of his window in India which is more than a mere
“stiff geometrical shape” are images that bring to his mind the two
different cultures. After his death the poet desires to “rise in the sap of
trees” and “feel the weight / of honey - hives in my branching / and the
burlap weave of weaver - birds in my hair.” (A Hindu to his Body: 9). The
oneness of life could be illustrated through the example of the sap. Though
the sap itself is a colourless pigment, it creates all colours and all colours
converge into one creative source.
Ramanujan is not blind to certain superstitious aspects of his
religion. The Hindu principle of non-violence sometimes reminds of

171
cowardice to the poet who has lived in a country known for rationality,
dynamism, fast scientific and technological growth and violence. There is
the danger of the principle degenerating into callousness and indifference
in actual practice. As the Hindu is not expected to hurt a fly or a spider, his
great grandfather remained a helpless victim of and silent spectator to the
adultery of his wife. (The Hindu: He Doesn’t Hurt a fly or a Spider either:
Relations) In his poem “Obituary” (Relations), he recalls his father’s
death, and comments ironically on rituals and ceremonies associated with
the cremation of the dead.
In Love Poem for a Wife- I Ramanujan, in a mock - serious tone
pulls up the Hindus who;
betroth us before birth,
forestalling separate horoscopes
and mother’s first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage into
the namelessness of childhoods .( collected Poems:64)
As an expatriate writer, Ramanujan is a ‘teacher’ and he does not
revolt against his society like the western counterpart. The revolutionary
zeal which permeates the poetry of the West like those of Shelley and
Byron, for instance, and the humanistic vision or the social concern and
commitment found in their poetry is totally missing in him.
Expatriation has not caused any setback in his growth as an artist
because he has not lost touch with his mother country. The mother figure
also remains a dominant figure. In Of Mothers, among other things he
depicts the bond between his mother and himself, which is prevalent in all
traditional societies. The poet “Smell (s) upon this twisted / back bone tree

172
silk and white / petal of my mother’s youth.” Suddenly, he realizes that
“the silk and white petal” of her youth has changed and now she has
become old and “her sarees / do not cling: they hang, loose / feather of a
one - time wing.” (Kirpal : 78), while writing about Third World expatriate
fiction says that Oedipal, incestuous impulses are implicit in the tug that
the son feels towards his mother and motherland. He has the usual love -
hate relationship with his motherland which characterizes intense
relationships. Some times, she is a figure of awe and authority; at other
times she is the mother, the only home and only companion as in the case
of A. K. Ramanujan. The journey motive that is predominant in Third
World expatriate writings could be perceived here at the level of the mind.
The poet’s mind often undertaking a ‘pilgrimage’ to the mother or
motherland. And the constant movement represents transition from one
mode of being to another.
Ramanujan’s confrontation between the east and the west includes
an objective and accurate portrayal of both countries - particularly the
native country. In his poem A River, he gives minute details about the
nature of the river and the condition of the bridge across it and so on.
While many poets of the past and present sang only about the floods and
presented a romantic and idealistic picture and called it a creative force
initiating life on earth, Ramanujan offers information about the other side
of the picture by explaining the destructive nature. While admitting that the
river in Madurai “has water enough / to be poetic / about only once a
year”, he is alive to the fact that,
it carries away
in the first half - hour
three village houses

173
 a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no mole on their bodies
with different - coloured diapers
to tell them apart. (Collected Poems:38)
By showing the river as a preserver and destroyer, the poet gives a
complete picture. The havoc caused by floods and drought suggested by
the “sand - ribs”, runs contrary to the poetic myth - making tendency of
Tamil poets who ignored reality and the poem itself, as Bruce remarks, is
an attempt to debunk the romanticisation of traditional Tamil culture.
(King: 210)
In the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan, we find coalesces of the East and
the West - the inner world of his Indian heritage and experience and the
objectivity and accuracy of the Western poetic tradition. Though his
memory is sharp and his vision of Indian society is comprehensive, he
cannot be called a nostalgic traditionalist. Though he was alive to western
modes of expression, changes and attitudes, we cannot conclude that he
accepted them fully and advocated modernisation and westernization. He
expresses his philosophical views thus:
“You cannot entirely live in the past, neither can you
entirely in the present, because we are not like that. We
are both these things. The past never passes― either the
individual past or historical past or cultural past. It is with
us, it is what gives us the richness of- what you call it-

174
 the richness of understanding. And the richness of
expression.” (Quoted in King: 214)
Again the poet declares, “I did not mean by religion, provincialism, nor did
I mean by it just the devotion to a particular region. What I was saying was
the particularity of the experience. Even when you are cosmopolitan, you
ultimately have to know something quite deeply.”(ibid: 14)
As in the case of several expatriates, Ramanujan’s works include
nostalgia, inwardness, and documentary realism; but there is no
idealization and the vision does not become dark inspite of the ironic and
satiric tone. His poetry is characterized with a fusion of the East and the
West ideology. It is due to his exposure to the rationalistic West and his
own roots lying deep in Indian nativity.
Though the poet’s sensibility is characterized by indifference, yet
when there is a confrontation between tradition and modernity, he
succumbs to the allure of Westrn modes. The poem Still Another view of
Grace dramatizes the conflict between the two sets of values. Here the poet
succumbs to the attractiveness of Westrn values, even though his brahmin
ancestry rebelled against it at first.
Ramanujan’s most popular poems, ‘Obituary’ and ‘Last of the
Princes’ reveal the same East vs. West tension. ‘Obituary’ portrays the
travails of a typical orthodox Hindu family trying to come in terms with
modernity. It tries to bring out the authority of tradition and the absurdity
of rituals. The ‘Last of the Princes’ focuses on the clash between tradition
and modernity. It dramatizes the mismatch between the decadent
aristocratic order and the demands of modernity. Again in ‘River’ the poet
introduces the motif of floods against the existing passivity and routine of

175
tradition. Floods symbolize the oncoming modernity and change with an
uncontrollable speed –
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising.
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
On the bathing places.
(ibid: 9)
The trauma of change creates an unprecedented chaos. At first, the
impact of change is felt at the lower strata of society represented by the
cobbled steps. It advances further at the bathing places where rituals are
observed, the flood later engulf the unaccomodated and the vulnerable
segments of society.
And the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of caws
named Gopi and Brinda, as usual.
(ibid:10)
Change, caused by modernity is so sudden that traditional human
values are carried off. The pregnant woman symbolizing creativity and
motherhood is undermined. Gopi and Brinda, the milk giving cows
carrying folklore and mythology are drowned in the floods of modernity.
Ramanujan attacks the poets who are not affected by the floods. They are
at a safe and respectable distance. He exposes the cruelty and indifference
of the poets towards human calamity and suffering. Thus the river
represents the clash between tradition and modernity.

176
 Again, ‘Conventions of Despair’ depicts a clash of Hindu
orthodoxy and western modernity. In the opening lines of the poem he
shows a strong awareness of the requirements of modernity but there is a
sudden realization that national heritage should always be maintained:-

But sorry, I can not unlearn.

Conventions of despair
they have their pride.
I must seek and will find
my particular hell only in my Hindu mind.
(ibid: 11)
Thus the syndrome of western modern sensibility is rejected in favour of
Hindu heritage, but he is not ready to accept its superstitions and so he
goes on to give a brief ironic description of the tortures to which sinners
are subjected in the Hell :-
must translate and turn
till I blister and roast
for certain lives to come; ‘eye deep’,
in those boiling crates of oil; weep”
iron tears for winning what I should have lost’,
See them with lidless eyes,
Saw precisely in two parts,
(one of the sixty four acts they leaving that place).
a once – beloved head,
at the naked parts of hair.
(ibid: 34)

177
 Both these examples are enough to prove that he is confronted by
the cleavage between the East and the West, tradition and modernity,
experiment and superstition. Modernity urges for experimental knowledge
but traditional heritage changes his perception of things, and then he
asserts that he has to work out his salvation in terms of his own religion,
tradition and his own nativity. Thus, the present environment in country
where he lives after he is thirty-one years old makes his recapitulation of
his Indian past not only insistent but also ironic in more than one sense.
His India is very much there in his poetry, but the images of India
projected by him turn into metaphor that acquire an inescapable undertone
of irony. Thus India is mirrored in Ramanujan’s poetry no doubt but his
watching eye do not gloss over the cracks in the mosaic of those images.
From personal experience the poet constantly passes on to a
depiction of shared or collective experience. He seeks comfort in the
communal past. He constantly goes back to Indian common heritage of
myth and tradition. His poetry reflects the predicament of one, who, while
intellectually convinced of the need for relating himself to history, through
tradition, is exposed to a milieu, the contemporary Indian one – in which
the models of continuity of tradition, myth literature family etc. are largely
sterile. There is, in short an acutely unnerving perception of the near-
complete demythicised reality of the present – a perception which cripples
creativity; as is found in the poem ‘Prayer to Lord Murugan’. Still he is
determined to seek his identity in India’s past,
I must seek
and will find
my particular hell only,
in my Hindu mind.

178
 (Collected Poems: 65)
The immediate consequence of this is to discover that the native
conventions can be meaningful not in the immediate present but in the
literary past which he wishes to relocate in the otherwise sterile present
symbolizing modernity.
In the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan, we find a coalesces of the East
and the West - the inner world of his Indian heritage and experience and
the objectivity and accuracy of the Western poetic tradition. Though his
memory is sharp and his vision of Indian society is comprehensive he
cannot be called a nostalgic traditionalist. Though he was alive to western
modes of expression, changes and attitudes, we cannot conclude that he
accepted them fully and advocated modernisation and westernization. As
in the case of several expatriates, Ramanujan’s works include nostalgia,
inwardness, documentary realism; but there is no idealization and the
vision does not become dark inspite of the ironic and satiric tone. His
poetry is characterized with a fusion of the East and the West ideology. It
is due to his exposure to the rationalistic West and his own roots lying
deep in Indian nativity. This paper is a humble attempt to explore the
cultural cross-currents i.e. fusion of the East and the West in A.K.
Ramanujan’s poetry.
In a nutshell it can be observed that A.K.Ramanujan is an
expatriate Indian English poet. As an expatriate he oscillates between two
worlds – the country of his birth and the country of his domicile. It is
rightly said that one may take a person out of his country but one cannot
take the country out of his mind. Even when one voluntarily leaves his
country for another his mind still harks back to the past. This is very much

179
true with Ramanujan. He infuses the Western ideology with the Eastern
one. In this regard Bruce King aptly remarks –
“Ramanujan is neither a nostalgic traditionalist not an
advocate of modernization and westernization. He is a
product of both and his poems reflect a personality
conscious of changes, enjoying its vitality, freedom and
contradictions, but also aware of memories which form
his inner self, memories of an unconscious
‘namelessness’ which are still alive at the foundation of
the self”. (King: 13)
(b)Tradition V/S Modernity
Literally speaking, the word ‘tradition’ means custom, opinion or
belief─ system handed down to posterity. It is a focused word in diverse
facets of learning. Philosophers down the ages have time and again
referred to tradition in their discourses. The word ‘tradition’ is not
exclusive to any particular field of study, be it philosophy or political
science, sociology or literature, tradition holds a position of importance.
Eminent thinkers of both East and West have aired their views on
tradition.
The notion of tradition constitutes a very significant element in
Indian thinking. The Indians are particularly proud of the cultural
heritage that has been inherited from ancestors. In this context, it would
not be out of place to quote Yogendra Singh who opines:
It is sometimes held that a continual re-articulation of
tradition in the writings of Indian sociologists, right from
the time of the ‘pioneers’ to the contemporary generation,
only reflects the perpetual quest for an Indian identity for

180
 sociology in the face of challenges from the western
paradigms both of science and society. (Singh: 1990: 32)
An Indian poet in English, who is well schooled in Indian
philosophy, folklore and religion (that is, Hinduism) is likely to
experience a cultural ambivalence. Ramanujan’s achievement lies in the
fact that he is able to fuse the two cultures together. Yet it is not
Tennysonian compromise; when taken in its essence, his work has
modernist’s temper. A.K. Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra often come
through as poets steeped in their cultural milieu despite the fact that
Mahapatra is a third generation catholic. Mahapatra deals mostly with
inner landscape therefore; there are fewer opportunities for him to
comment on out- moded social customs as Ramanujan has. His
comments on many traditional beliefs are caustic but this should not lead
the reader to imagine that A. K. Ramanujan rejects his Hindus (Tamil
Brahmanical) background. Despite his stay in the states for over thirty
years, he was no Michael Madhusudan Dutt to forsake his religious
heritage by embracing another faith. he can be regarded as a kind of
reformist but to say that he not proud of being a Hindus is to miss the
point of poetry completely.
It is perhaps, Ramanujan’s long sojourn abroad that explains his
persistent inclination with his Indian past-both familial and racial. The
past thus constitutes a major theme in his poetry. Speaking in the same
vein, R. Parthasarathy says, “There is something to be said for exile, you
learn your roots are deep.” (Naik: 14)
Despite being a modernist in essence, Ramanujan’s roots are too
deep to be amputated. It is true that he is exposed to a completely
different cultural environment for considerable period of time but

181
nonetheless, his links with his motherland are too strong to be severed.
Driving home this point, S. K. Desai claims that,
Ramanujan’s expatriation is a marginal affair and his
alienation is myth create by critics. Though he lives in
Chicago, he is all the time preoccupied with India, one of
his continuing projects being collection of folk tales,
proverbs, riddles which brings him to India once at least
in two years. (Kurup: 1991: 182)
A.K. Ramanujan's poetry exemplifies how an Indian poet writing
in the English language can derive strength from retracing his steps to his
roots. In poem after poem, he recalls the memories of his childhood and
his experiences of life in India. In these poems, one may discern an
enlightened intellect looking at things in a dispassionate manner.
Nevertheless, “there is no attempt to disown the richness of past
experience,” (Das: 1982:129) as Vijay Kumar Das very aptly comments
in ‘The Poetry of A.K Ramanujan.’ While going through his poetry
instead of looking for information or being judgmental, one must try to
re-live the experience of the poets.
Acute awareness of traditional social behavioural patterns is
distinctive feature of Ramanujan’s poetry. This encompasses the various
customs, the religious standpoint, the prevalent social hierarchy and the
cast distinctions widely rampant in different parts of India. Though
Ramanujan is consciously aware of his roots, he is not blind to the
discrepancies of his native culture. Small Town South India is a short
poem laying bare the narrow mindedness of certain section of people
who are afraid to discard the age-old superstitions beliefs, which have
become an inseparable part of their existence. In contrast, we have the

182
opinions of those broad-minded people who have ventured out of their
shell and have had a taste of the wide world beyond. Returning from the
West, the poet is at once conscious of the numerous restrictions imposed
by the South Indians in their day to day lives. To the poet recently
returned from the U.S.A. even the cows and buffaloes of the particular
town seem to be within the clutches of tradition.
The street cows have trapezium faces.
Buffaloes shake off flies
with a twitch of ripples.
(Collected Poems: 1995:100)
As the poet returns to South India after a long period of absence,
he experiences the suffocation of a drowning man. Sinking to the bottom
of the sea-bed in a barrel is an expression of the poet’s resentment at
these shifting restrictions. The sun dawns a pickled look through layers of
seawater, his toes appear greenish in colour as if affecter by mildew
while trees are ‘porous coral’. As if this is not enough, he is encountered
by the ‘city shark’ and ‘the wifely dolphin’. The poet expresses his
anguish in the lines.
I sink to the sea-bed in a barrel.
Water layers salt and pickle the sun
Toes mildew green, trees are porous coral.
Ambush of city shark and wifely dolphin”. (ibid: 100)
At this stage, he has no better company other than the “finless
slipper fish’ and has to make do with dense undergrowth for roof.
Obviously, he cannot enjoy a relaxing sleep:
I bed down with long finless slipper fish.
The ceiling has weeds the sleep is brackish. (ibid.)

183
 With the image of a drowning man who is incapable of adjusting with
his surroundings the poet gives us a subtle hint of the inadequacies he
observed when he stepped on to the South Indian soil. There is also a
sense of alienation in this poem.
The fact that Ramanujan is well versed in folk lore of mythology is
amply borne by the fact that in his poems he recalls these timeless tales
from time to time. In his poem Mythologies the poet gives us a
picturesque description of how Pootna’ the female demon was redeemed
by the divine grace of the celestial baby, Lord Krishna. As per the story,
the poet also describes how the she-demon lured the child into sucking
her poisoned breast:
The breast she offered was full
Of poison and milk.
Flashing eyes suddenly dull;
Her voice was silk. (Collected Poems : 221)
Failing in her deadly mission to kill the child, she was the one who
received redemption:
The child took her breast
In his mouth and sucked it right our of her chest.
Her carcass stretched from north to south. (ibid: 221)
Pootna being thus, cleansed of her sins received a new life of
eternal bliss: She changed, undone by grace, from deadly mother to
happy demon, found life in death. (221) Finally, the poet makes an
earnest plea to this baby-faced god of immense strength that he too may
be absorved of all evil and live life anew:
O Terror with a baby face,
Suck me dry. Drink my venom.

184
 Renew my breath. (221)
Another poem which reaffirms the poet’s strong grip on the Indian
mythological tales is ‘Mythologies-2’ Here Ramanujan recounts the age-
old tale of the wicked demon-king Hiranyakashyapu and his subsequent
defeat at the hands of Lord Vishnu. No metter how had he tried to evade
death, he could not escape the fatal blow dealt by the omni-potent lord.
Hiranyakashyapu was enmeshed by his own web, which he had weaved
round him. Thus, the poem runs:
When the clever man asks the perfect boon :
Not to be slain by demon, god, or by beast,
not by day not by night,
by no manufactured weapon,
not out of doors nor inside,
not in the sky
nor on earth,
Come now come soon,
Vishnu, man lion, neither and both , to hold
him in your lap to disembowel his pride
with the steel glint of bare claws at twilight.
(Collected Poems: 226)
Finally, the poem ends with the poet’s fervent prayer to God
almighty to obliterate all his doubts and reinstate him in the path of faith.
He acknowledges the omnipresence of God and prays to be blessed with
an enlightened sight:
O midnight sun’ eclipse at noon,
Net of loopholes’ a house all threshold,
Connoisseur of negatives and assassin

185
 Of certitudes, slay now my faith in doubt.
End my commerce with bat night owl.
Adjust my single eye; rainbow
bubble,
so I too may see all things double. (ibid: 226)
In poem like Convention of Despair, the poet makes it explicitly clear
that it is impossible for him to shun his root completely and step into the
shoes of modernity whole-heartedly. Ramanujan looks at traditions with
an unbiased criticism. Nevertheless, he remained loyal to the ideas,
which entered into the psyche during his formative years in India.
Staying in the U.S.A., he comes across motifs of modernity such as the
urge to seek an outlet for sexual fantasies, the need for entertainment
through the silver screen as well as the indifferent pursuit of science and
simultaneously protesting against nuclear tests. He is well aware of the
fact that if he fails to adopt the so-called westernised life style he will be
branded as a foreigner. Thus, he confesses:
Yes, I know all that. I should be modern.
Marry again. See strippers at the Tease.
Touch Africa. Go to the movies.
Impale a six-inch spider
under a lens. Join the Test-
ban, or become the Outsider.
Or pray to shake my fist
(or whatever you call it) at a psychoanalyst.
And when I burn-
I should smile, dry-eyed,
And nurse martinis like the Marginal Man. (ibid: 34)

186
 A deep analysis of his own personality convinces Ramanujan that he
cannot compromise with his identity in terms of his Hindu cultural
heritage. Therefore, he cries out emphatically: “I must seek and will find/
my particular hell only in my hindu mind. (ibid: 34) Here, we see that
alienation from his native soil does not sever the poet’s bond of
continuity with his older ideals. So rejecting the modern sensibility, he
makes a heart-rending plea at the end of the poem:
No, no, give me back my archaic despair;
It’s not obsolete yet to live
in this many lived lair
of fears, this flesh. (34)
One is inclined to agree with M.K. Naik when he says of
Ramanujan that, “the poet also appears to view favourably the great
absorbing power of his traditional culture.” (Naik: 19) In an interview
with Rama Jha, Ramanujan states: “The past never passes. Either the
individual’s past or historical past or cultural past”. (Jha: 1981:7)
P.K.J. Kurup has rightly pointed out that in the poetry of
Ramanujan, “The image of home becomes a unifying force among
individual and tradition, emotion and intellect, past and present. And
again the same image ‘home’ provides the poetic self of Ramanujan a
sense of affirmation in facing the actualities of modern living.” (Kurup:
1991:92)
Again, ‘A Minor Sacrifice’ is a poem that deals with a popular
India folk-lore coupled with an incident from the poet’s past. The poem
begins with a discussion of the well known tale of Indian mythology,
Parikshat and his son Janamjaya. The first two stanzas describe the king’s
encounter with sage having garlanded the saint’s neck with a snake,

187
followed by his curse and then the subsequent step taken by the king’s
son for the demolition of this poisonous reptile, thus trying to acquit his
father of the fatal prophecy of snake bite.
I’d just heard that day
Of the mischievous king in the epic
who kills snake in the forest
and think it would be such fun
to garland a sage’s neck
with the cold dead thing,
and so he does, and promptly earns a curse,
and early death by snake bite,
His son vows vengeance
and performs a sacrifice,
a magic rite that was draws every snake from everywhere,
till snakes of every stripe
begin to fall
through the blazing air
into his altar fires.
(Collected Poems: 144)
The poet relates this incident to similar one in his childhood where
in place of snakes; it was the scorpions who were on the verge extinction.
In this case, grasshoppers were made the sacrificial offerings to appease
the scorpion god. One day, in his childhood, as the poet recalls, his uncle,
a staunch believer in non-violence being driven to exasperation, was
forced to kill a scorpion.
Then that day, Uncle of all people,
a man who shudders at silk,

188
 for he loves the worm,
who would never hurt a fly
but catch it most gently
to look at it eye
and let it go,
suddenly strikes our first summer scorpions
on the wall next of Gopu’s bed
with the ivory dragonhead
off his walking stick
and show us the ripe
yellow poison-bead
behind the sting. (ibid: 144)
The traumatic experience caused by a scorpion’s sting is affectively
Portrayed in Nissim Ezekiel’s The Night of the Scorpion ‘. The sting of the
scorpion mentioned in this poem reminds us of the intense pain suffered by
the woman in Ezekiel’s poem. The intensity of her trauma can be felt in the
lines :
My mother twisted through and through
groaning on a mat. (Ezekiel: 1993:20)
To go back to Ramanujan’s recollection, he remembers vividly his
grandmother and his uncle enlightening the children on the subject of
scorpion:
Grandmother then tut-tutting
like a lizard,
tell us how a pregnant scorpion
will look for a warm secret place,
say, a little girl’s underwear

189
 or a little boy’s jockstrap,
and then will brust her back
to let loose in her death
a host of a baby scorpions.
(Collected Poems: 145)
Together with a lad named Shivanna, the poet hatches a conspiracy
to get rid of the scorpions’ ones and for all. Shivanna suggests that by
casting a spell on them they can lure them inside a tree and then set fire
to them en masse. To the poet’s inquisitive queries, Shivanna replies:
‘Witchcraft’, says he,
shining darker than an ebony turtle.
we can make them come at our bidding
when the sun is in scorpio,
like guests to a wedding,
into the hole of this very tree.
and they will burn in a bonfire
you and I will light. (ibid: 145)
In his eagerness, the poet wanted to begin the task immediately but
Shivanna calmed him down saying that at first they have to appease the
scorpion god with hundred wingless grasshoppers caught on a Tuesday
having the new moon. So, on the destined day the poet sets out along with
another accomplice named Gopu in his cruel mission of massacre. They
accomplish their task with surprising alacrity and deftness.
So we steal three pickles jar at down
on that breezy new moon Tuesday.
Leading and hopping all over the lawn,
we become expert by noon

190
 at the common art
of catching grasshoppers on the wing. (ibid:146)
As they proceed on their deadly act of genocide, they are able to observe
the agony of these mute creatures. The fear and pain of the victimised
insects are etched in their memories. Ironically, for them, the experience
is far from thrilling:
We unlearn
what we couldn’t have in years,
some small old fears
of other living things,
though we’re still squeamish
when we pull their wing
and shiver a bit
as we put away
hose wriggles in our bottles.
And we learn
as from no book,
the difficult art of our counting
little writhing objects
through glass walls
with flaws and bubbles. (ibid: 147)
By evening, their arduous task is over. They had to make a special
endeavour only in their last catch probably because the grasshoppers too
were becoming wary of their hunters. Then carefully guarding their
prized catch, they quietly sneaked into the house. After giving themselves
a hard scrub which almost tore off their skin, they drew lots to decide on
the keeper of the grasshopper for the night. The lot fell on Gopu. None of

191
 them really ate or slept well that night and Gopu was frightened by
nightmares :
That night we don’t eat or sleep too well.
We draw sticks and it falls to Gopu’s lot
to keep the jar of grasshopper cripples safe
under his bed
and even that savage innocent
dreams all night
of every punishment
in the narrow woodcut columns
of the yellowing almanacs of Hindu hells. (ibid: 148)
Shivanna the leader of the trio meets with an even more ghastly
fate, When the others go to meet him the next day, they find him on his
deathbed. Shivanna never recovers from his strange disease to which the
finally succumbs.
When we go to see Shivanna
on Wednesday morning,
the jars behind our back
………………..
Shivanna’s mother tells us
he is in the hospital
teken sick with some strange
twitching disease.
We never see him alive again. (ibid: 148)
The last part of the poem has direct bearing on the mythological tale with
which the poem begins. Like the king’s son in the story, Shivanna too
suffered from an inexplicable torture.

192
 Uncle says, later,
‘Did you know, that Shivanna,
he clawed and kicked the air
all that day, that new moon Tuesday,
like some bug
on its back’? (ibid: 148)
Was it merely co-incidental or as Graham Greene would have said, a form
of divine vengeance? The poet leaves it to us to decide.
‘A Leaky Tap After a Sister’s wedding’ is another poem set against
the Indian backdrop. In a matter of fact manner, the poet remembers his
sister, particularly the one who had matured into adulthood:
Our sisters were of various sizes,
One was ripe for husband
and we were not poor. (ibid: 9)
In later years, he recalls the dripping sound of defective tap after his
sister’s wedding, as he hears the sound of the woodpecker boring noisily
into the tree and sees a snake hanging helplessly from a crow’s mouth. The
poet and his sister had always wished the tree to be blessed with the power
expression:
It is a single summer woodpecker
peck-peck-peck-pecking away
at the tree
behind the kitchen.
My sister and I have always wished
a tree
could shriek or at least writhe
like that other snake

193
 we saw
under the beak
of the crow. (ibid: 10)
Although many of the incidents of the past find expression in
Ramanujan’s poetry through the medium of memory, the poet does not
harbour any sentimental feeling towards it. His poem ‘On Memory’ is a
case in point. He admits that he has the nursery rhymes and other fact and
figures and details of history at his fingertips:
Ask me :
nursery rhymes
on Tipu Sultan of Jack and Jill :
the cosmetic use of gold when
the Guptas ruled :
an item of costume in
Shakespearean times. (ibid: 21)
Simultaneously, he laments at the inability of memory to provide
an impetus to his creative genius. Thus, he has an ironic and cynical
attitude towards the nature of memory saying it has no place “at all for
unforgettable things.” (21)
We can safely conclude that although Ramanujan was consciously
aware of his roots, which were steeped in tradition, he did not lack the
ability to appreciate the modern out look towards life. All along, he has
been honest enough to acknowledge the total impact of influences that
have shaped his poetic genius. In a conversation with Rama Jha,
Ramanujan asserted:
Yes, my knowledge of English has been deeply affected
by may knowledge Indian literature and poetics….if

194
 English cuts us frim iur culture it won’t get us a very far…
Indian English, when it is good, does get its nourishment
… from each individual’s knowledge of Indian culture and
Indian languages. It certainly does for me. That is what
binds us back to our childhood and early years. (Jha:
1980:13)
As has been stated earlier Ramanujan does not encircle his Indian
heritage by a luminous halo. He is often critical of certain beliefs and
traditions, which have been handed down reverentially to the succeeding
generations. In No Amnesiac King, the poet explodes the Shakuntala myth.
He bristles at the callous manner in which Dushyanta treats his wife
Shakuntala. Having married her in the seclusion of a hermitage, the king
conveniently forgets his wife some time later. He regains his lost memory
only at the sight of the wedding ring he had presented to Shankutala, which
was accidentally discovered in the belly of a fish.
One knows by now one is no amnesiac
king, whatever mother may say or child believe.
one cannot wait anymore in the back
of one’s mind for that conspiracy
of three fishermen and a palace cook
to bring, dressed in cardamom and clove
the on well-timed memorable fish,
so one ca cut straight with the royal knife
to the ring waiting in the belly,
and recover at one stroke all lost memory,
make up for the years drained in
cocktail glasses

195
 among dry women and pickled men, and
give back
body to shadows, and unto the curse
that comes on the boat with love. (ibid: 126)
Here the poet highlights almost the unpardonable offence of the
king forgetting Shakuntala and making her life miserable. He has better
opinion of common people of the present time who are more humane and
considerate. Ramanujan’s broadened outlook resulting from his stay in
the West perpetuated him to question the untold reverence shown to a
king with such a derogatory flaw in his nature. He recalls the myth as he
waits for his wife endlessly at the sea beach. The sight of bright pomfret
fish probably reminds him of that fish of long ago which had swallowed
Shakuntala’s ring.
As I wait for my wife and watch
the traffic
in sea side market places and catch
my breath at the flat-metal beauty
of whole pomfret,
round starting eyes and scales of
silver
in the fisherman’s pulsing basket,
(ibid: 126-27)
We are inclined to agree with K.Venkta Reddy who remarks, “As a
modern poet Ramanujan shows no blind reverence for old myth and
tradition.” (Ready: 1994: 90) At times, the glory of the Hindu heritage is
overtly contrasted against the inglorious Indian present. Some Indian
Uses of History on a Rainy Day is one such example. It presents three

196
distinct pictures-each revealing the wide gulf between the past and the
present. The first picture is that of rainy day in Madras in 1965. The
clerks jostle with the porters for a lone seat in a bus:
Madras,
1965, and rain.
Head clerks from city banks
Curse, better, elbow
in vain the patchwork gangs
of coolies in their scramble
for the single seat
in the seventh bus.
(Collected Poems : 126)
Their conversation revolves round King Harsha’s reign when the
emperor made thousands of monks stand in a row and distributed
expensive gifts among them. They also mention the Chinese traveler
Hiuen-Tsang in the course of their talk. They get so carried away by their
conversation that the ultimately miss the eighth bus also. Then they have
to depend only on their own two feet to carry them to their destination:
They tell each other how
old king Harsha’s men
beat soft gongs
to stand a crowd of ten
thousand monks
in a queue, to give them
and the single visiting Chinaman
a hundred pieces of gold,
a pearl, and a length of cloth;

197
 so, miss another bus, the eighth
and begin to walk, for King Harsha’s
monks had nothing but their own two feet.
(ibid: 74)
In the above lines, we get a glimpse of the chaos and disorder,
which was steeped into the once disciplined Indian society.
The second picture provided through the poem is of well-dressed
fashionable Indians standing awestruck before the wonders of Egypt.
These wide-eyed Indians who are mesmerized by Egyptian antiquities are
hardly well-versed in the glorious heritage of their own motherland. They
are probably ignorant that the fine fabrics which are draping the
mummies have actually been imported from India. Thus, there is a
satirical description of the so-called Indian tourists:
Full bright Indians; tiepins of ivory,
colour cameras for eyes, stand every July
in Egypt among camels,
faces pressed against the past
as against museum glass,
tongue tasting dust,
amazed at pyramidfuls
of mummies swathed in millennia of
Calicut muslin. (ibid: 74-75)
The third section of the poem is a satirical description of an
Indian professor of Sanskrit in Berlin in 1935. The professor is totally
lost in an alien land. He struggles with the German language at every step
and is at his wits’ end trying to locate place and memorise landmarks.
Suddenly, the familiar sight of the ‘Swastika’ symbol drawn on the arm

198
of a stranger in a bus makes him to feel at home. The ‘Swastika’
interpreted at different levels by the Germans and the Indians ironically
strike a chord of familiarity. While the Hindus since the ancient times
regard the ‘Swastika’ as a good omen, the modern German holds an
entirely different attitude towards it:
1935 professor of Sanskrit
on cultural exchange :
passing through; lost
in Berlin rain; reduced
to a literal, turbaned child,
spelling German signs on door, bus , and shop,
trying to guess go from stop; desperate
for a way of telling apart
a familiar street from a stranger
or east from east at night,
the brown dog that barks
from the brown dog that doesn’t,
memorizing a foreign paradigm
of lanterns, landmarks,
a gothic lotus on the iron gate;
suddenly comes home
in English, gesture, and Sanskrit,
assimilating
the swastika
on the neighbour’s arm
in that roaring bus from a grey
nowhere to a green.

199
 (ibid: 75)
Thus, a comprehensive study of Ramanujan’s poetry reveals that
A.K. Ramanujan feels seducted towards west and oscillates between the
two shores i.e. the East and the West but soon returns towards his roots.
in the words of P.K.J Kurup,
His poetic self’s awareness of the need for relating
himself to history through tradition. It is here that he realizes
that the sense of alienation felt by the modern artistic self
from the immediate environment can in reality imply
continuity with an older ideal. (Kurup: 1991: 184)
Although Ramanujan does not reject his cultural roots and Hindu
heritage, he is essentially a modernist. He has a clear vision and makes
good use of his analytical bent of mind. In ‘Death and Good Citizen’, the
poet offers divergent solutions for the disposal of the human body after
death. From a modern and secular viewpoint of an environmentalist, the
human body originates from nature, is sustained by nature and after death
returns to nature. This return to nature is a fundamental principle of
conservation according to which everything in our environment should be
recycled. During one’s lifetime, the waste-matter excreted by the body
should be used as fertilizers to improve the quality of plants:
I know told me,
your night soil and all
your city’s goes still
warm every morning
in a government lorry,
drippy (you said)
but punctual, by special

200
 arrangement to the municipal
gardens to make the grass
grow tall for the cows
in the village, the rhino
in the zoo : and the oranges
plump and glow, till
they are preternatural. (Collected Poems: 126)
Similarly, from a modernist’s viewpoint, at the time of death, the
healthy organs of the body should be donated for transplants. For
example, at the time death, the heart and eyes can be of use to someone
else:
Heart,
with your kind of temper
may even take, make connection
with alien veins, and continue
your struggle to be naturalized:
beat, and learn to miss the beat
in a foreign body. (ibid: 135-136)
But from an orthodox Hindu viewpoint, an act like organ
donation at death would be regarded as blasphemous. The tradition
bound Hindus believe in the theory of re-incarnation and observe special
rites during cremation. So if the persona of the poem were to die in India,
his funeral would be treated almost as religious ceremony complete with
the chanting of devotional verses from scriptures :
But
you know my tribe, incarnate
Unbelievers in the bodies,

201
 they’ll speak proverbs, contest
my will, against such a degradation.
Hidebound, even worms cannot
have me: they’ll cremate
me in Sanskrit and sandalwood;
have me sterilized
to a scatter of ash. (ibid: 136)
The persona of the poem is aware that if he were to die in the West,
then also his views as a secular environmentalist would suffer a set back.
The pious Christians there would never allow his body to decompose into
the soil directly. His dead body would first be embalmed and then entombed
in accordance with their tradition before being finally buried in the earth.
Or abroad,
they’ll lay me out in a funeral
parlour, embalm me in pesticide,
bury me in a steel trap, lock
me out out of nature
till I’m oxidized by left-
over air, withered by may own
vapours into grin and bone. (ibid: 136)
So even in America, his wish to return to nature directly after death
would remain a mere dream. As a result of the predominance of Christian
rites and rituals, his wishes to be one with nature and be of service to
humanity even after death will remain unfulfilled:
My tissue will never graft,
will never know newsprint,
never grow in a culture

202
 or be mould and compost
for jasmine, eggplant
and the unearthly perfection
of municipal oranges. (136)
While on the theme of tradition and modernity, we can take the
example of Old Indian Belief, which as the very title itself suggest has a
direct bearing on Indian beliefs. Ants come nowhere within the vicinity of a
living cobra but the moment it is dead, they feast deliciously on its corpse.
Aided by natural agents in wearing down the dead skin of the snake, ants
soon tear down its flesh, baring its skeletal framework. The latter is then
accidentally discovered by a school girl or preserved in museums for
display.
No ant, red, white or black
can stand the smell
of a live cobra.
But they’ll pick
the flesh off dead ones
to the last ivory rib :
with a little help
from rain, sun and the natural
chemistry of recent flesh, they’ll
leave snake skeletons
complete with fang and grin
for school girl picnic
horror, and the local museum
collection of local celebrities. (ibid : 106)

203
 Ecology is another such poem where the poet cannot help expressing
his indignation at the stubborn refusal to do away with age-old familiarities,
even if they are flowering trees. The poet’s mother, allergic to the pervading
g fragrance of the champak flowers, found herself suffering from acute
migraine year after year. But she would brook no talk of having those trees
cut. She required the flowers for the performance of her daily ritualistic
worship. Moreover, being steeped in superstition, she could not bear to
dissociate herself from these champak trees, even if they caused her
unbearable physical suffering. This was a recurrent phenomenon every year
in the rainy season, which could be avoided, had logic and reasoning
prevailed :
The day after the first rain,
or years, I would come home in a rage,
for I could see from a mile away
our three Red Champak trees
had done it again,
had burst into, flower and given mother
her first blinding : migraine
of the season
with their street-long heavy-hung
yellow pollen fog of a fragrance
no wind could sift,
no door could shut out from our black-
pillared house…
(ibid: 120)
In the poem entitled The Guru Ramanujan established himself as
modernist who is not afraid to raise his voice against the flaws and

204
discrepancies in our societal structure. He makes no bones about his
disdain for the self-proclaimed god men who undertake the responsibility
of enlightening the ignorant people. While on one hand, the pseudo-guru
makes no mention of charity towards humanity in general, on the other,
he is meticulous about his own comforts:
Forgive the weasel his tooth
Forgive the tiger his claw
but do not forgive the woman
her malice or the man his envy
said the guru, as he moved on
to ask me to clean his shoe,
bake his bread and wash his clothes.
(ibid: 251)
The guru makes pretence of being kind and compassionate as he
preaches to show concern for animals. But he is completely bereft of as
Shakespeare coined the phrase “the milk of human kindness”.
(Shakespeare : 1997:96)
Give the dog this bone, the parrot
his seed, the pet snake his mouse
but do not give the woman her freedom
nor the man his mid-day meal till he begs
said the guru, as he went on
to order his breakfast of eggs and news
asking me to carry his hair to the dais.
(ibid: 251)
The persona of the poem, unable to compromise with the
hypocritical nature of the guru revolts against him and ultimately bids

205
goodbye for good. He cannot stand the latter’s irreverent attitude and
derogatory remarks against women. So, he says:
I have dog is the bone, the parrot
his seed, the pet snake his mouse,
forgave the weasel his tooth,
forgave the tiger his claw,
and left the guru to clean his own shoe
for remembered I was a man born of a woman. (ibid: 251)
Here we are inclined to agree with P.K.J Kurup who says about
Ramanjujan “With a great deal of skill he cold fuse the essential Indian
sensibility with the temper of modernity and rescued his poetry from
becoming merely nostalgic.” (Kurup: 181)
Despite being highly critical of many aspects of his Hindu culture
deeply steeped in tradition, A.K. Ramanujan is certainly not blind to
some of its stable virtues. The poem ‘Christmas’ clearly underline the
essential dis-similarities between the oriental and occidental cultures. The
tree shorn of all its leaves, standing bare outside his window in the
U.S.A. signifies only a Euclidean framework for him :
Here in dawn’s routine
rectalngle
my eastern window
frames a tree:
Euclid’s ghost
Arresting life for me. (Collected Poems: 32)
In contrast to this seemingly aloof tree, symbolizing all that is impersonal
is the tree outside his home in India. The tree in the East encompassed
nature in all its bounty within its widespread branches:

206
 But where I came from
thinking are timed
differently.
My window
Sometimes seems quite cunning
defining all at once
the abstact skies with a leftward
leep
of greens,
a shock of leaf
upon Christmas eyes.
And I am limed
On branches bare as roots
With that latest
hatch of birth-bewildered
parrots. (ibid: 32)
An analytical study of the poems of A. K. Ramanujan reveals the
poet’s strictly impartial mentality. His irreverent attitude to some of the
traditional beliefs shows his ability to transcend the traditional outlook
unflinchingly. Ramanujan is essentially a modern poet with a rationalist’s
approach. He is rightly called the product of the education of
enlightenment. To quote Taqi Ali Mirza:
R. parthasarathy is closer to the mark when he says that
Ramanujan’s poetry is “the product of a specific culture”
and that his real greatness lies in his ability to translate
this experience “into the terms of another culture.”
(Mirza: 160:1980)

207
 A.K Ramanujan is not tradition-bound poet in the sense that he
dies not accept unquestioningly whatever cultural furniture has been
handed down to him. At the same time, he dies not aspire to be a
modernist by rejecting his cultural roots. In his essay entitled ‘What is
Indian in Indo-English poetry’ Ezekiel highlights the blending of Indian
and European cultural elements in Ramanujan. Commenting on
‘Conventions of Despair’ he says that, “The poet tells us explicitly that
he rejects the demands of modernity such as marrying again as well as
age-old tenets of morality. (Ezekiel: 1993:39)
The symbols of modernity are equated with having no qualms with
regard to re-marriage or disregarding the age-old tenets of morality. The
poet’s brahmanical ancestry, however, forbids him from easily falling a
prey to the western allurements. Therefore, he decides to work out his
salvation treading on the path of his own religious traditions. As Rama
Nair points out, “There is an implied solution here In Hindu philosophy,
the classical theory of karma implies a pragmatic approach to life’s
problems.”(Nair: 1994:38) Quoting Kari H. Potter, she further says,
An effective experience is painful or pleasurable because
at least in part, karmic traces produced by bad or good
actions respectively play a part in the production of that
experience. Thus, since all effective experience, Sukha or
Dukha, are produced by our actions and so deserve, there
is no underserved Dukha. (Nair: 1994:38)
Thus, the poet realises that in no way can he snap his root from his
tradition and one of the ways of coming to terms with the onslaught of
modernity is to accept the philosophical concept of karma, which is an
inseparable part of the tradition bound Hindu religion. Ramanujan’s

208
poetry asserts his quest for interpreting the traditional from a modern
perspective. In order to bring home the point that despite his repeated
assertions of trying to “seek” (Ramanujan: 34) “his particular hell”
(ibid:34) only in the “Hindu mind,” (ibid: 34) thus, Ramanujan is
essentially a modernist.
To conclude, Ramanujan’s highly analytical mind prevents him
from romanticizing his past or aping the western paradigms blindly.
Ramesh.K Srivastava very succinctly points this out :
Ramanujan exposes the hard-heartedness of those people
who in the myths or in history have been considered great
for a long time. Having encountered “two cultures, one
ancient and the other modern, each illuminating and
enriching the other. Ramanujan does not accept the
mythological and historical characters through the
coloured eyes of several generations, but scrutinises them
afresh after removing the cobweb of traditional
impressions. He interprets the ancient from modern
perspective and the modern by correlating with the past.’
(Srivastava: 1984:167)
Thus, though Ramanujan seems to be sededucted to the West yet
he adopts a dispassionate and balanced attitude in his writing. He is a
man who has his head firmly fixed on his shoulders and does not allow
emotions to predominate his intellect. Following the path of the golden
mean, he has been able to paint an analytical picture of the two cultures
with which he has been so intimately associate. In other words,
Ramanujan is too sensible and wise a writer to be drawn to either
extreme of the cultural spectrum. He has accepted the presence of both

209
the shaping forces in his cultural background but has refused to identify
himself completely with any of them.

▬◙▬
References

K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, The Seventies and

After, New Delhi: Sterling, 1984.
Das, Bijay Kumar, The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, in Modern Indo-
English Poetry, Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1982.
Emmanuel, Narendra Lall, The Poetry of Encounter:
Three Indo-Anglian Poets ( Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan and
Nissim Ezekiel) New Delhi: Sterling, 1983.
Ezekiel, Nissim, What is Indian in Indo-English Poetry?’ Critical
Responses, Commonwealth Literature, New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1993.
Jha, Rama , A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan, The Humanities
Review. Vol. 3, No. 1, January - June 1981.
King, Bruce, Modern Indian Poetry in English, London: Oxford
University Press,1987.
Kirpal, Viney, The Third World Novel of Expatriation, New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1989.
Kurup, P.k.j., ‘The Self’ in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, Contemporary
Indian Poetry In English, New Delhi, Atlantic Publications and
Distribution, 1991.

210
Lall, E. N. “Beyond Poetry as Family History”, The Poetry of
Encounter. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1983.
Mirza, Taqi Ali, A. K. Ramanujan’s Particular Hell, Indian Poetry in
English : A Critical Aseessment, Shahane Vasant A. and M.
Sivaramakrishna (Ed.), Madras: The Macmillan Company of India
Ltd., 1980
M.K. Naik, A.K.Ramanujan and The Search of Roots in Humanities
Review’ New Delhi: Jan-Jun 1981.
Nair, Rama, A. K. Ramanujan : A Study in Psychological Realism, Indian
Literature Today , Vol. II, Poetry and Fiction, Dhawan, R.K.(Ed.),
New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994.
R. Parthasarthy, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
Ramanujan, A. K., Collected Poems, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
--------------------The Striders , London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
--------------------The Relations, London: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Ready, K.Venkata, Recollections Emotionalized in Un-tranquil Moments
: The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, Critical Studies in Commonwealth
Literature, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994.
Srivastave,Ramesh.K., Reflection of Growing Dehumanization in
Ramanujan’s Poetry, Contemporary Indian English Poetry, Atma
Ram (Ed.), Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1989,
Singh, Yogendra, Tradition and Social Structure, in Indian Sociology:
Social and Emerging Concerns. Vista Publications, New Delhi:
1990.
The Times of India, Sunday, Jan 20, 1980.

211
Verghese, C. Paul , Problems of Indian Creative Writing in English,
Bombay: Somaiya Publications 1971.
▬◙▬

CHAPTER- VI

Conclusion
An in-depth study of the poetical works of A.K. Ramanujan
establishes him as an outstanding poet who has carved a niche for himself
in the field of Indian English poetry. His poetry, translation, and his
rendering and interpretation of Indian folklore mark him as an
extraordinarily gifted poet and artist. If poetry is an interpretation of life,
then here is a man who through his art interpreted it richly, variously, and
deeply.
He is one of the most distinguished poets who bear the best feature
of his rich native sensibility and the detached outlook resulting from his
exposure to the western milieu for a considerable period of time. His
poetic self presents a unique amalgam of the traditional and the modern.
If his sensibility is rooted in the Indian heritage, his vision is definitely
that of a modernist’s. His credit lies in his remarkable ability to maintain
an appreciable balance between tradition and modernity, Eastern and the
Western world. While on one hand, his loyalty towards his cultural
heritage does not veil his progressive outlook, on the other, he does not
get swept away by the rising tide of the so-called onslaughts of

212
modernity. Ramanujan is actually a gifted Indian intellectual who has
savoured of both the eastern and the western cultures.
The foregoing analysis also shows how Ramanujan, responds
characteristically in his own way to certain Indian situations and
experiences, and how his Indian sensibility is peculiar and recognizable.
His intense involvement the in the Indian cultural milieu shows that his
roots have gone deep in his native tradition and culture. Being modern
Indian poet in English, he has shown a growing awareness of his
environment. His creative mind responds to the Indian reality and helps
him create a new, independent poetic tradition in Indian English
literature. One can easily discern the clear differences among in his
religious, linguistic, geographical and familial situations, yet the native
experience as expressed in his works is obviously related to the shared
conditions and the milieu. In this final assessment, one has to emphasize
that all through his poetic career, Ramanujan remained an NRI, but he is
firmly anchored in Hindu tradition and mythology. For his poetic
inspiration he goes back not to Sanskrit classics but vernacular South
Indian folklore and subaltern poets of Tamil Cankam and Kannada
Vacanas .
Again, a close study of Ramanujan's poetry confirms that he is
deeply associated with his intellectual background and involvement with
Indian culture. Ramanujan establishes his roots with his native land
firmly. Despite his expatriate status, he is deeply involved with both the
cultures, Eastern and Western. For him, the American environment acts
as the exterior and the Indian as the interior. They are the two lobes of
his brain as he has himself admitted. Ramanujan is anchored to his rich
literary and personal familial past, with a varying degree of emphasis on

213
the quality of Indian ethos. Still as a post-colonial poet, he focuses more
on the Indian reality than on an Arcadian past. I.N. Lall notices in his
poetry :
“a curious combination of East and West. The experience
of the emotion is Indian but the mode of defining it is
Western.” (Lall: 1983:43)
From a thematic and imagistic analysis of his poetry in English, it
is evident that Ramanujan’s works deal with the psychic problem of
adjustment between cultures, the Indian and the Western. The critical
mode of inquiry adopted is that psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is
primarily a way of the understanding man, and offering a possible ‘cure’
for his problems of maladjustment. The treatment aims to promote
‘insight’ or ‘self-understanding,’ and the ‘cure’ for which the patient
seeks analysis is supposed to flow from this understanding. Such an
understanding would involve confronting one’s feelings and inclinations,
and other dimensions of one’s personality. When these are taken into
account, then one can acquire a better appreciation of what one desires in
the preoccupations and activities that fill one’s life. A.K. Ramanujan’s
concern with his Indian past, his American present, and a return to his
cultural roots through the mode of translations, reflect the quest of the
self for an inner world of stability and harmony. His translations of the
religious Kannada Vacanas and the poems for Vishnu by Nammalvar
reveal that the quest for inner quietude can perhaps be realized only
through a spiritual reconciliation with his own Hindu heritage and
sensibility. Ramanujan’s poetry is a matter of experiencing an effect of
centripetality. As S. Chindhade comments:

214
 “Ramanujan's recurring themes are ... the problem of
belonging or rootedness and its consequent nostalgia,
recourse to personal familial past, and a conspicuously
strong response to certain Indian situations.”
(Shindhade: 2001:62)
A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry proves that he is essentially a great
modern poet with Indian sensibility. Of all his contemporaries,
Ramanujan has the finesse and expert craftsmanship of an authentic
creative writer. He does not lapse into romantic clichés or derivative
models. His poems are remarkable for their deep emotion, and insights
into the trauma of everyday existence. M.K. Naik observes,
“His unfailing sense of rhythm gives a fitting answer to
those who hold that complete inwardness with language
is possible only to a poet writing in his mother tongue.”
(Naik: 1982:201)
Ramanujan’s poetry is noted for its Indianness. His extensive
knowledge of Kannada folklore enriched his poetic vision and
interpretation. Though his earlier volumes of poetry dealt primarily with
the social plane of experience, The Black Hen evokes subtle resonances
of a metaphysical and spiritual reality. In his excellent essay on “Two
Realms of Kannada Folklore,” Ramanujan analyses the genre and system
of the Kannada folklore. He argues that it “is a system where each genre
is related to others, fitted, dovetailed, contrasted – so that we cannot
study any of them alone for long.” (Ramanujan: 1986:41) For Example
Kannada riddles complement Kannada proverbs in various ways. “The
riddles have no social themes, as proverbs have. The riddles concentrate
on familiar objects of nature (water, sun, eyes, trees, eggs etc.) or culture

215
(well, book, sickle etc.) and play poetic and logical games with
them.”(ibid.) A common Kannada riddles is: What has three eyes but is
not Siva?” The answer is ‘A coconut.’ Ramanujan uses this technique
very efficiently in his poetry and thus makes it charming and value
oriented.
Far away from the familiar surrounding of home, Ramanujan
arrests the steady flow of his thoughts in the form of verse. Multiplicity
of themes expressed in a deft style, that is characterised by a rich
storehouse of metaphors, images and symbols is a remarkable facet of his
poetry. He often appears to be obsessed with his past. But the past is
given a different dimension. Ramanujan does not recall the experiences
of his past in moments of tranquility. Rather, he recollects these incidents
at random. He makes no effort to seek solace from these recollections.
Memory, for him, is not an escape route into oblivion, taking him away
from the painful contradictions of the present. Thus, unlike Wordsworth,
who consciously draws succor from memory, for A.K. Ramanujan, the
“inward eye” (Wordsworth: 1990: 6) is not “the bliss of solitude.” (ibid:
6)
Another hallmark of Ramanujan’s poetry is his anti-sentimental
approach to life in general and personal experiences in particular. On the
one hand, he is a great Indian poet with Indian sensibility and on the
other; his poetry possesses characteristics of detachment. His poems
hardly reveal any sentiment bordering on tenderness. He can relate in a
calm and detached manner any of the grim realities of life. However, at
times, he resents this apparently cool demeanour to take everything in
one’s stride. This shows that he is not really unconcerned about human
misery. In fact, cruelty to animals also pains him deeply. The remarkable

216
thing is that he can express his emotions in a controlled manner. There is
a vast difference between the approaches of A.K. Ramanujan and P.B.
Shelley, with his sensibility rooted in sentiment, feels:
Our sweetest songs are those
That tell of saddest thoughts.
(Shelley: 357)
Ramanujan, however, does not draw any pleasure from dwelling in
melancholy. For pleasure and solace he again and again returns to his
indigenous past.
Again, Ramanujan’s poetry convinces one that A.K. Ramanujan
stands out as one of the most distinguished Indian English poets who
embodies the choicest elements of his rich native culture and the
detached outlook drawn from an intellect subjected to Western thought.
He preferred to describe himself as the hyphen in ‘Indo-American’. His
conscious attempt to appear as a detached observer is probably the result
of his quest for artistic perfection. He refrained from getting too much
involved with his subject possibly with the intention of not tainting his
poetic self.
Ramanujan may have written on the same themes as his
contemporaries or those chosen by the stalwarts of English poetry but it
is his treatment of these themes that places him in a different class of
poets. For instance, Nature has been a favorite subject of poets since the
dawn of literary writing. While Keats and Wordsworth have been faithful
worshippers of Nature, Ramanujan dies not hesitate in focusing upon
those aspects of Nature which are not so benign. The earliest Indian-
English poets too glorified the fathomless beauty of Nature and looked
upon it as a timeless healer like their British counterparts but Ramanujan

217
had the individuality to break free from these fetters of imitation. He too
dealt with Nature in his poetry but he has given it a completely different
dimension. Instead of drawing solace from the serene beauty of Nature,
in some of his poems, he has harped on its destructive aspects resulting in
heaping untold misery on mankind. He cannot be labeled as an escapist
whose vision is blurred with the idea of escaping from the stark realities
of life. Ramanujan, as an indigenous poet can best be summed up in the
following words:
“Ramanujan is neither a nostalgic traditionalist not an
advocate of modernisation and Westernisation. He is a
product of both and his poems reflect a personality
conscious of change, enjoying its vitality, freedom and
contradictions, but also aware of memories which form is
inner self memories of an unconscious ‘namelessness’,
which are still alive, at the foundation of the self.”
(Datta: 1994:131)
Like the noted literary critic T.S. Eliot, Ramanujan, too, believes in
continuity from tradition to modernity, a continuity between his poetry,
translation and scholarship. According to A.N. Dwivedi :
A modern poet shows a peculiar sensibility bordering
on complexity, variety and sophistication, and has
nothing to do with the Romantic or the Victorian
sensibility. He generally evolves a novel method of
writing, a peculiar tone of disillusionment, and a
diction charged with passion, pulse and power and
abounding in concrete images and striking symbols,
colloquialisms and slang.(Dwivedi:1979:291)

218
For A.K. Ramanujan confusion and chaos are all pervasive in the
cotemporary milieu. For instance we can take these lines from Bulls :
Bulls and bulldozers
block each other
on the road to Chidambaram.
Ravens, caw.
Fruitbats hang broken
umbrellas in the branches
of the giant tree.
Ambivalent as a man
married to two wives.
I walk through the holy place,
one eye wincing, fearing
beggars and leprosy,
another on temples, women.
(Ramanujan: Collected Poems: 246)
For him Indian reality is a favourite subject for contemplation. Indian
beliefs, situations and ancient confusions attract him most, and he
exhibits post-modern and post-colonial perspectives of contemporary
man as a rudderless boat. He deals with social injustice, economic
disparities, operative lawlessness, social disorderliness and, above all,
static tradition in a brilliant way and thus highlights those social
problems which have brought about the deterioration of human values. In
poems like “Lord Murugan” one can discern his awareness of the
injustice, cruelities and inhumanities which are rampant in Indian society.
His response to the landscape of India, sense of tradition and culture of
his land of birth, and aliveness to social and political issues of post-

219
colonial times, get a keener edge from his Sabaltern inclinations. When
Ramanujan emerged on the Indian literary scene in the sixties, Indian
English poetry had taken a very significant turn in form and content. The
principal development was the complete break from the Aurobindian
phase of romantic/lyrical poetry of the pre-Independence era. Romantic
and Victorian tradition in verse was giving way to a terse, ironic idiom as
discerned in the work of modernist poets in England and America.
Ramanujan’s poetry represents the synthesis of Western skepticism
and native culture in artistic terms. His four volumes of poetry,The
Striders (1966),Relations (1971),Second Sight (1986) and The Black Hen
(1995), exhibit a subaltern voice. He is quite alive to his Hindu
consciousness that colours his vision of life. To a large extent, the
Dravidian non-conformist schools of Cankam and Vacanas have shaped
his mind and determined his poetic mode. He has brilliantly fused the
South Indian tradition to a foreign medium to create a new structure and
texture of poetry. His poetic corpus reflects his favourite themes
including post-colonial morals and manners, family, relatives, love, death
and cultural discord. In spite of his thin poetic output, he is recognised as
a poetic talent who could interpret the reality of contemporary India to
the Western world. The extreme precision with which he combines the
ancient fables with the ironic, skeptical view of a rationalist is worth
noticing. Thus his unflinching re-evaluation of his native culture enables
him to reflect on the complexity of post-colonial India. Despite his
intense involvement with Indian cultural traditions, Ramanujan’s poetry
displays modem themes and forms. He achieves a rare amalgamation of
the ancient and the modem, the Indian and the American idiom.

220
 Against these touchstones, Ramanujan emerges as a truly modern
poet whose sensibility incorporates complexity, variety, and
disillusionment in a typically modern idiom. The curious blend of the two
diverse cultures, the two vitally different peoples and environs creates a
sort of complexity or tension in his poetry. Discarding the use of the
conventional rhyme and metre, he has adhered to the rhythms and stanzas
of classical Tamil poets. In his diction also he is quite modern and
chooses to be colloquial, scientific and harsh. His style is direct,
deliberate, stark and concentrated, and he derives his vocabulary from the
lowest to the most exalted regions. His discontentment with the existing
state of affairs and his alien status lie at the root of his chosen poetic
modes- irony, satire and mock-epic.
His thematic concerns display existentialist anguish,and post-
colonial angst. He is a social realist, having a keen eye on the social and
political developments around him. In fact, he takes poetry as a forceful
channel of expression which is more condensed, compact and
concentrated than prose. For him, communication is the soul of poetry,
but it should be conveyed in an oblique way. Direct statements and
didacticism are kept out of it. Suggestiveness and intensity are the prized
possessions of his poetry. Moreover, a thoughful poet without a sense of
music would look as dry and dull as wood. And music is not merely the
ability of the song; it rather sends a clear-cut signal about the emotion.
Thus, working on the manifold aspects of contemporary society, he
responds to some post-modern/post-colonial problems in his poetry. His
suggestive and symbolic creative faculty discloses very well some of the
rampant problems of the contemporary world.

221
 To conclude, A.K. Ramanujan stands out as an eminent poet with
Indian sensibility who has made an indispensable position for himself in
the realm of Indian English poetry. Despite his death in 1993, he will
always be remembered as a poet gifted with a varied poetic sensibility,
blessed with a treasure trove of memories which the passage of time
refused to corrode, a skillful technical artist and as one who maintained a
perfect balance between the traditional and the modern. He is credited for
having kept intact his originality despite being subjected to the onslaught
of various influences both Indian and Western.

▬◙▬

222
 References

Chindhade,Shirish, “Living Among Relations Binds the Feet : A. K.

Ramanujan”,Five Indian English Poets, New Delhi : Atlantic
Publishers, 2001.
Datta, Vandana, ‘ Expatriate in Indian English Poetry’, Commonwealth
Writing : A Study In Expatriate Experience, Dhawan, R.K. & L.S.R.
Krishna Sastry, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994, P.131
Dwivedi,A.N., Indo-Anglian Poetry, Allahabad : Kitab Mahal, 1979.
Lall, I.N.“Beyond Poetry as Family History”,The Poetry of Encounter
(New Delhi : Sterling Publishers, 1983) p.43.
Naik,M.K., A History of Indian English Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1982.
Shelley, P.B., ‘To a Skylark’, The Pocket Book of Quotations: A new
Collection of Favorite Quotations from Socrates to The Present, A
Cardinal Edition, Pocket Books Distributing Company, Fort
Bombay.

223
“Two realms of Kannada Folklore,” A.K. Ramanujan, Another Harmony,
ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A.K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1986.
Wordsworth, William, ‘The Daffodils’, New Intermediate Prose and
Poetry Selections, Bihar Intermediate Education Council, Patna:
Sunrise Publication.

▬◙▬

224