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Metaphors of Home and Exile: An Observation on the Floating Poetic Self in the Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan

 


Metaphors of Home and Exile: An Observation on the Floating Poetic Self in the Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan

 

Dr. Mujaffar  Hossain

Assistant Professor (Guest)

Dept. of English

Indira Kala Sangit Vishwavidyalaya (C.G)

Khairagarh, Chhattisgarh, India

 

Abstract: Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (1929-1993), is a significant figure in the world of Indian English Poetry. He was a poet, translator, playwright and folklorist.  He was a trilingual writer who wrote in English, Tamil and Kannada. He had four poetry collections to his credit: The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), Second Sight (1986), and The Black Hen (1995). Indian diasporic poetry is a treasure of metaphors that explore the complexities of home and exile. This work is characterized by a sense of displacement and longing for a lost home. This study highlights the struggle between traditional Indian culture and modern Western society present in the select poems of A.K Ramanujan. Ramanujan’s poem expresses his love and respect for Indian culture while also exploring the challenges of adapting the practices of new Westernised world. In this research, I analyse Ramanujan poems those portrayed the tension between traditional and modern societies. It also reflects the emotions and attachment of expatriate writers to their country. It explains how poets like Ramanujan are the voice of Indian expatriates, and how their poems have blended Indian and Western perspectives of life, culture, religion and philosophy. I will investigate the spirits of nostalgia, exile, hybridity, cultural amalgamation, and floating existence found in the poetry of Ramanujan.

 

Keywords:  Home, Exile, Tradition, Hybridity, Floating Existence

 

Introduction

 

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan is a Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet from Mysore of South India. He was a lecturer in English Literature and a professor of Dravidian studies and Linguistics in which he had good command. He was a multilingual poet and essayist, well versed in English, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Sanskrit. Knowledge of different languages made him familiar to different customs, culture, tradition and walk of Indian as well as Western lives. Language acquisition is natural to him and with this skill his poetic mind has been influenced by Tamil and Kannada poets and the thoughts and philosophy of the western. The presence of the two conflicted subject the Indian past and the present western identity construct a sense of hybridity, nostalgia, and expatriate those are vividly reflected in his works of poetry and essays.  As in an interview with Rama Jha he claims, “My knowledge of English has been deeply affected by my knowledge of Indian Literature and Indian Poetics” (Jha 7).

 

A man rooted in the Indian culture cannot feel at home in the western atmosphere and, Ramanujan is therefore, sometimes beset with doubts about his origin. He feels insecure and is scared of losing self-identity. Ramanujan is a distinct Indian poet who had spent thirty years of his life in Chicago for whom the significance of “home” in his poetry are crucial. Ramanujan’s feeling at “home” in exile problematises his identity and make him a hybrid character. His self is equally constructed by his western education and his Indian experiences. Ramanujan experienced many postcolonial aspects, and the partial westernisation of his self started at home. In his essay “Is there an Indian Way of Thinking?” Ramanujan speaks of his father as a hybrid subject:

 

He was a mathematician, an astronomer. But he was also a Sanskrit scholar, an expert astrologer...In answer to how he could read the Gita religiously having bathed and painted on his forehead the red and white feet of Vishnu, and later talk appreciatively about Bertrand Russell and even Ingersoll, he said, “The Gita is part of one's hygiene. Besides, don't you know, the brain has two lobes?” (Collected Essays 36)

Like his father Ramanujan himself was living a life of hybridity. His poems reflect such a coexistence of Indian and western systems of observing and apprehending the world or, as Ramanujan would say, that of his “outer” and “inner” forms. The “hybridity” in Ramanujan's poems is not a post-exile phenomenon. The intermingling of “western” and “Indian” ways of perceiving can be traced back to some of his earliest poems which were written in India. In “On Memory,” a poem published in his first anthology The Striders, he writes:

 

Ask me:

nursery rhymes

on Tipu Sultan or Jack and Jill:

the cosmetic use of gold when

the Guptas ruled:

an item of costume in Shakespearian times;

 Memory, in a crowd of memories, seems

to have no place

at all for unforgettable things. (Collected Poems 21)

 

The poem seems like a critique of memory itself that holds place only for the forgettable moments of experience. However, how can one talk about "unforgettable things" if they have actually been forgotten? Memory for the poet is a space that holds together disconnected knowledges. These disconnected fragments of knowledge come from the different levels of experience of the postcolonial subject—the Mother Tongues and the Father Tongues. In the essay “Telling Tales,” Ramanujan speaks about the three levels of his house which symbolise different levels of experience: downstairs where the languages are Tamil and Kannada, upstairs where his father speaks to them in English and the terrace where his father would show them the stars and tell them their names in Sanskrit and English. It deserves to be quoted at some length:

 

We ran up and down all these levels. Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West, which also served as a disruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealed us (in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother-tongues, the most comfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women, playmates, children and servants. Each was another to the others, and it became the business of a lifetime for some of us to keep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and make something of them. (Collected Essays 450)

 

Here we see the making of the hybridity the creative coming together of different levels of postcolonial experience. In this postcolonial world each of the components which initiate the making of the “hybrid” acts as a sobering “other” to the others. It is important to note that these elements do not just carry out a dialogue with each other, but also wrangle with each other making a disagreement with concept of “hybridity” suggested by Homi K. Bhabha in his seminal work The Location of Culture which erases the violence of the colonial encounter. According to Bhabha, postcolonial identities articulate a space; cultural space, national space, where both the wrangling spaces, through a mutual assimilation process formulate a third space of belonging. And in this space of cultural and national amalgamation, there is no place for “Home” and “Exile” feeling.

 

Even when he is living in Chicago, Ramanujan continues to write poems about his village, his deep childhood fears and anxieties and perceives his experiences of Chicago through the optical devices of an Indian scholar. In Chicago, he writes about a wrestler in his village in the poem “At Forty”; a series of poems on well-known Indian myths “Mythologies!”, ; poems “No Amnesiac King, “No Fifth M an: After an Old Sanskrit Parable” based on Indian writings and folk elements, and poems which are written in the manner of Tamil Cankam poetry  such as “Love 1: what she said”, “Love 2: what he said, groping”, “Love 3: what he said remembering”. It is observed that there is intertextuality with both the Great as well as the little traditions of India in Ramanujan’s poems like “Conventions of Despair”, “Snakes”, and “Anxiety”.

 

There is an inner Indian world in his poems which seems not just to “erupt into” (as Bruce King suggests) but to permeate Ramanujan's writing in Chicago (King 66). In Ramanujan's poetry, the past is not past yet, it continues to present itself to the poet's mind. The past is not just “re-presented.” There is a “presencing” or bringing into being of the past in all these poems. Unlike for writers like, say, Rushdie, India is never (in) the past for Ramanujan. However, as I have already indicated, there is no nostalgia for India in Ramanujan's poems. This is not just because India is a continuing presence for him in Chicago—he translates the poems of Tamil and Kannada saint poets while he is there and anthropology brings him back to the Kannada oral folktales of his childhood—but also because Ramanujan is well aware of the dangers of such a revivalist longing for an India that never was. In “A Report” he writes:

 

Hitler, housepainter who painted Warsaw

Red, rumored alive in Argentina,

is dead...

Yet what can I do, what shall I do, O

god of death and sweet waters under or next

to the salt and the flotsam, what can I do

but sleep, work at love and work, blunder,

sleep again refusing, lest I fall asunder

to dream of a blue Mysore house in Chicago? (Collected Poems 249)

 

It is not accidental that a poem that begins with Hitler ends with the cautious warning against dreaming of his Mysore house. The nostalgia or desire for a "home" in Mysore while he is in Chicago is what Ramanujan refuses to entertain. “Home” for him is not a place to go back to, but a place where one is. Remembering a conversation with Ramanujan, Keki Daruwalla says, “He never felt cut off from home. From a personal preoccupation, his interest in the two languages (i.e., Tamil and Kannada) grew into a professional concern...And since he was living with the two languages that he loved (here Daruwalla means Tamil and English), he felt at home in America” (18). U. R. Anantha Murthy too says, “I met him often in Chicago. Each time it struck me that the space around him was either a small town in Tamil Nadu or a village in Karnataka” (10).

 

Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture addresses those who live “border lives,” on the margins of different nations. Living at the border, at the edge, requires embracing the contrary logic of the border and using it to rethink the dominant ways in which we represent history, identity, and community. For Bhabha, the border is the place where conventional patterns of thought are disturbed and can be disrupted by the possibility of crossing. Bhabha urges that we must “think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and...focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain of elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity” (1). The “in-between” space of Bhabha, as we have seen, is also that of the postcolonial writers who are not necessarily migrants. “Hybridity”, for Ramanujan, we have looked at, is the condition of their existence even at home. In Bhabha's thinking, the disruption of received totalising narratives of individual or group identity made possible at the border can be described as an unheimlich moment where all those forgotten in the construction of the identity of the nation return to haunt such exclusionary ways of identity formation. For Bhabha this is where literature plays an important part. He suggests that literature concerning "the migrant, the colonised or political refugees" could take on the task of “unhousing” received ways of thinking by the use of “hybridity” (12). For Ramanujan “hybrid” space is not the space of eruptions of the unheimlich (unhomely), but a space within home itself. India is conceived of by the poets as always already conducive to “hybridity;” this is what Ramanujan symbolises in the three levels of his home where different languages and knowledge systems are adopted. India is the home where many identities co-exist. It is like the house in Ramanujan's poem “Small-scaie Reflections on a Great House:”

 

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... (Collected Poems 96)

 

The house where everything that comes in ends up staying could be a metaphor for India itself. India is the house where all communities who enter find a home. Ramanujan who says that the Indian way of thinking is “context-sensitive” as opposed to the “context-free” or universalistic western way of thinking, means precisely this: that India can produce someone like his father whose two lobes of the brain house astronomy and astrology at the same time (Collected Essays 34-50). India can house many different identities not by subsuming them, but by adopting a “context sensitive” perception towards disparate identities. Home itself is the “hybrid” space. In both Bhabha and the revivalists, “home” is conceived of as a monolithic, unified location. It is because Bhabha thinks of “home” as monolithic that he has to speak of a “third” space of the “hybrid” who is at home in neither of the two cultures it is shaped by.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

From the beginning of his poetic career to the conclusion, A.K. Ramanujan has established himself as a diasporic poet through his poetry and writings. His early poetry, which is comprised of The Striders (1966) and Relations (1971), is characterised by haunting memories and nostalgia as well as the trauma of uprooting and identity crisis, which manifests as his “striders” like floating existence in the diasporic position as a displaced person. The poetics of return, which incorporates excessive use of memory and nostalgia for one’s original home and cultural heritage, is the instrument used by the poet as resistance to that prevailing sense of loss and dejection. The experience that results from that poetics of return, however, is not the comforting reinstatement of an essential cultural identity but rather hybrid identities and “diasporic intimacy,” which manifest as deep uncertainty and split-consciousness embodied with the diasporic location. The poet’s double vision, which reflects his split awareness and arises from the legacy of the past and the impression of the substantial things of the present environment of living, traces the strategic edge of such situations. Ramanujan’s lost selfhood, identity, and belonging were not resolved by the underlying tension between these two forces, which was overpowered by the sense of loss and the desire to create new identities. Instead, it made his poetry a frequent metaphor of Home and Exile that reflected the sensibilities of the diaspora.

 

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Blackburn, Stuart H., and Vinay Dharwadker. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Jha, Rama. "A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan" The Humanities Review. 3. 1. 1981.

King, Bruce Alvin. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Oxford Univ. Press, 2006.

PATTNAIK, MINATI. “Between Two Worlds: Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan.” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2011.

Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1995.