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.