The poet is
known for his rather atavistic poetic arguments — arguments
which disrupt common expectations. Ramanujan is not a poet of
easy moral expectations. Where conventional morality
collapses, poetry takes off. In Ramanujan’s quirky universe,
excellence in human affairs is more a product of one’s
compulsions or handicaps rather than one’s innate genius.
In his poem
"Figures of disfigurement" he reveals how some
underlying handicaps, physical or mental, bring grace to the
so-called graceful. This is how he accounts for the graceful
movements of a traffic constable: "Sick, disabled,
twisting/through the bright days/the constable/of the market
traffic/moves only his left hand/in sheer agony/Men in cars,
women on bikes/Admire the grace of his movements." Grace
is an outcome of some internal sickness.
Creativity is
attributed to physical disorder that an artist suffers from:
"Arthritic, the painter/Makes new kinds of strokes/From
his shoulder/Keeping wrist and elbow rigid:/The exhibit of his
latest pictures/Opened yesterday./The critics raved/About his
technique."
Sickness is
the mother of invention. Disease is strength. Those who suffer
from epilepsy undergo moments of ecstasy: "Amensia
may/open memories of the past"; "The dyslexic
suddenly makes a reputation/deciphering a medieval
dairy."
In the
nihilistic vision of the poet, future belongs either to the
diseased or to the deceased: "Timely death/may give away
a heart/or an eye." Metaphysics is one casualty of
post-modern playfulness. The high ideal of "being"
is shunned in favour of more pragmatic "becoming",
even this becoming is highly topsy-turvy. Ramanujan questions
the humanly plausible enterprise of "becoming".
Becoming is not an upward movement of self-realisation, it is
more a movement of self-caricaturisation. The contemporary
forces of commercialisation have reduced man to a commodity.
"... Men and women run/races in faraway places like
Seoul/and Munich, make four-minute miles/beat their own
records, to become videos/and photographs that sell
shoes."
In the same
poem, the poet invokes a series of images that show how
premature and catastrophic the end is: "On the grass of
sloping hills/a scatter of white sheep,/unravelling already
like the balls/of wool they are going to be." "Balls
of wool" is what the project of becoming ultimately
culminates into. This sudden transformation of a living being
into a commercial product constitutes one of the major
strategies of parody in Ramanujan’s poetry.
There are a
number of other poems, which through a series of playful
juxtapositions bring forth the ambivalences, the duplicities
and the paradoxes of average human existence. In such poems
Ramanujan does not employ any sustained metaphor to expose the
hypocrisies of ordinary living, the parody itself becomes a
metaphor. The poet-persona lives by contraries. Lies assure us
more than truths. Parody is as much truth of the lie as it is
lie of the truth.
In a poem
entitled "Lying", Ramanujan juxtaposes truth with
lie to underline how in desperate situations deliberate lying
redeems us from the starkness of reality: "When the
patient has cancer,/they tell him: Patience/is the answer, it’s
a boil/that will heal." Lying is etiquette: "The
newborn was ugly, moist,/Hairy all over like a wet rat:/Every
visitor said/She was a beauty, Had her mother’s eyes."
Power
perpetuates itself through lies. Religion is lying about god:
"turning around, he prayed to his god,/Saying he’d like
to see him:/All he wanted was to be able to say/To everyone he’s
seen Him,/So he could start an ashram."
Institutionalised
religion with all its promises of formulaic salvation is
nothing but a grand scandal which parody as the poet’s
chosen strategy of subversion threatens to expose. Ramanujan’s
poetic landscape is crowded with family members, including
dead and "unborn". All members are caricaturised
except his mother. The poet’s otherwise rather unceremonious
attitude is somehow checkmated by the presence of his mother.
In "Returning", the poet away from his motherland,
in some moments of nostalgia looks for his mother who had died
years ago. The ending of the poem is really poignant:
"Where are you? I’m home! I’m hungry! But there was
no answer, not even an echo/ In the deserted street blazing
with sunshine/Suddenly he remembered he was now sixty-one/And
he hadn’t had a mother for forty years."
Such moments
of poignancy are rare in Ramanujan’s weird universe. Maybe
towards the last phase of his life, Ramanujan turns more
subdued and sombre. In "Farewells", the mother’s
rather tacit and well-meaning farewell to his departing son
has been juxtaposed with formulaic and verbose farewells of
colleagues and friends: "Mother’s farewell/Had no
words,/No tears, only a long look/That moved on your body/From
top to toe/With the advice that you should/Not forget your oil
bath/Every Tuesday/When you go to America."
Ramanujan has
a special penchant for the non-serious which he employs rather
well in the serious to generate a double-edged poetic
discourse. The comic is more serious than the serious in the
poetic world of Ramanujan.
Ramanujan,
who had a special fascination for romantic sonnets of
Shakespeare, suddenly realises in the 10th sonnet on love that
love is an exhausted sentiment. Love poems can no longer be
written as all metaphors of love have lost their urgency:
"Words play dead. The seasons are trite." His
"Love 10" is more a dirge on love than its
celebration: "Love poems are not easy to write/for the
dead: after the sting of sorrow,/ironies of relief, one’s
stricken with blight".
The anthology
carries two interviews of Ramanujan — one with a young
Indian scholar Chirantan Kulshreshtha and other with two
American anthropologists, A.L. Becker and Keith Taylor. In
these interviews, Ramanujan addresses to a wide range of
issues such as identity, nationalism, nativism, translation,
culture, etc. His answers to tricky problems are terse and
witty. When asked about the choice of medium in poetry, he
answers: "The language of a poem is not a matter of
conscious problem solving and New Yearresolutions." When
he is asked to express his "opinions", on his dual
identity of a native Indian and expatriate American, he takes
the interviewer to task on the very use of word opinion thus:
"Opinions are only a small expression of one’s
attitudes. They are an uncertain, often rigid, expression. One
is more, and often less, than one’s opinions. And they don’t
often match other things in oneself. So please read them as
gestures."
Ramanujan
employes interesting coinages/metaphors to account for his
relationship with English, on the one hand, and native Tamil
and Kannada, on the other. He describes English as
"father-tongue", an "upstairs language",
the native tongues are termed as mother-tongues and
"downstairs languages". The interviews carry many
loaded statements such as, "The folktales are a counter
system to the ideology of epics."; "In the
mythologies, one hears the official views."; "It
(translation) is the art of the imperfect."
The only
essay included in the anthology derives its title "The
ring of memory" from Kalidasa’s famous play Shakuntalam.
In this essay Ramanujan dwells on a host of philosophical
positions within the Indian tradition on the twin themes of
memory and forgetting. He explains how in Hindu, Jain and
Buddhist conceptions of karma, unacknowledged past actions
have a way of imposing their structure on the present. The
process is spelt out thus: "Deeds leave behind traces
called samskaras, which persist in future lives, and vasanas
or smells of the past".
A number of
poems from Tamil classics and folk tales have been deployed to
underline the significance of the trope of memory in Indian
literature. The essay evinces Ramanujan’s strong
foregrounding in Indian thought, both in its marga and desi
traditions.
The book is
not just a supplementary addition to the already published
collected prose and poetry anthologies of Ramanujan; it, in
fact, brings to light some of the unseen aspects of Ramanujan’s
creative and critical acumen. Ramanujan’s rejection of
Sanskritic tradition in favour of his native Tamil and Kannada
cultures is a revelation for those who have misread him so far
as a Brahmin poet of the deep South without much critical
suspicion.
The poems are more American
in terms of their imagery and tone than the poems published
earlier. Chicago as a cultural influence seems to make inroads
into the native consciousness of the poet. In this anthology,
Ramanujan emerges more as a hyphenated Indo-American, than as
a chaste insular native Indian.
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