SUMMARY

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 in the first half of the nineteenth century. 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
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be fulfilled in a better way in English than in the vernacular. The postindependence 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 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. Similarly, Paul Verghese is of the opinion that, Indianness is nothing but depiction of Indian culture. Thus, 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. 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
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various

regional

languages-

Balamani

Amma,

K.M.

Panikkar,

Umashankar Joshi, Prof. V.K. Gokak, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Amrita Pritam - are efficiently bilingual. In the post 1947 period, Indo - Anglian poetry acquired a new currency 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 N. 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. 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 Bechelors and Masters degrees at Maharajas 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 Doctors 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 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 Karnards 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), Relation(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, their origin in recollected personal emotion. They deal with the poets memory of his relations and the ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers. 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. 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 reposs the usable past at personal and racial levels. Snakes, River, Conventions of Despair, Small Scale Reflection, Of Mother, History etc. 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 poetic technique has absorbed the motifs and stylistic devices of both. All this results in a
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forceful, meaningful, personal voice and Ramanujan has established himself as one of the most talented of the new Indo-Anglian poets. The main themes of Ramanujans poetry are family, love, despair and death. They are full of irony, humour, paradox and sudden reversals. However, the archetypal theme of Ramanujans 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 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. One of the distinguishing features of Ramanujans 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 itDear 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 hands. A.K. Ramanujan gives 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 comes rushing to him. In these recollections of the poet, one is able to get a glimpse of his associations with women at different planes. 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
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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. 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. Thats why Parthasarathy was prompted to remark that, the family for Ramanujan, is one of the central metaphors with which he thinks. No doubt, Ramanujan to be ever inspired in the face of his relations his mother, father, wife, children, uncles cousins and his other 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 opinion of S. Nagarajan, the poems in the volumes of Ramanujan have their origin in recollected personal emotions. They deal with poets memory of his relations and the ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers. Memories play a decisive role in Ramanujans 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
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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. Amongst the distinctive Indian-English poets of the postIndependence 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 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. Ramanujans 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
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proficient in Tamil, his mother tongue, and Kannada, the language he grew up with and studied, his poems were predominantly written in English. Ramanujans translations of classical Tamil poetry and the Kannada Vacanas in English helped to propagate Tamil and Kannada in the West. Like 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 consciousness of being Indian marks the expatriate poets. Ramanujan, too, is an expatriate Indian English poet. His poetry oscillates between the east and the west. Sometimes he feels seduction to the west and sometimes finds solace in his own traditions. Thus, tradition and modernity can be seen going side by side in the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan. Bruce King refers to Ramanujans 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. 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
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always with us. It is what gives us the richness of -- what you call it -- the richness of understanding. And the richness of expression. In fact Ramanujans 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. 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 rootlessness, which is a predominant factor in the works of the unity of his migration Thus, Ramanujan 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 modernists. 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 modernity. Ramanujan is actually a gifted Indian intellectual who has savoured of both the eastern and the western cultures. Of all his contemporaries, Ramanujan has the finesse and expert craftsmanship of an authentic creative writer. He does not lapse into romantic clichs or
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derivative models. His poems are remarkable for their deep emotion, and insights into the trauma of everyday existence. 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.

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