Sahitya Akademi Indian Literature: This Content Downloaded From 220.227.97.99 On Wed, 28 Sep 2016 08:15:15 UTC

Sahitya Akademi
Scholarship With Wings: The Poetry and Prose of A.K. Ramanujan

Author(s): Rabindra K. Swain
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 47, No. 5 (217) (September-October 2003), pp. 156-168
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23341495
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Scholarship With Wings:

The Poetry and Prose of
A.K. Ramanujan
Rabindra K. Swain
"Butcher's Tao" in Black Hen is emblematic of A.K.Ramanujan. This

poem suggests a sculptor's way. First of all, a sculptor imagines a
shape, say, of Ganesh in a piece of rock. Then he starts taking away
all those unnecessary pile-ups till the desired shape emerges. So, the
process of creation is also a procession of elimination. Of unnecessary
words. A.K.Ramanujan is like a sculptor, in that he does not allow
a word into the body of a poem unless its presence is welcome. He
is specific about his use of words. Precision is his hallmark. "The
Butcher in China" skinning a bull is none other than A.K.Ramanujan
himself:
The butcher in China
looks long at a bull till he sees
the bull and how
the beast is jointed,
then moves his knife
in the spaces
he has learned
by heart with his hand

moving on the bull
and the bull
is now sirloin,
tenderloin, prime rib,
dogbone, two horns
for weddings or combs,

sandals for the pedestrian
peasant, saddle and rein

for horse, thong and head
for kettledrums to scare away
eclipses from the sun,
ghosts from processions,
or summon cities
to banquets, friends and

enemies to battle,
the blood in the bucket
ready for sprinkling
on children with polio

and village borders.
("Butcher's Tao")
Such visual effects abound in his Uncollected Poems and Prose. This
essay develops on Ramanujan's two posthumous collections, Uncollected

Poems and Prose and The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan.
A -Ct -it
A. K. Ramanujan passed away in 1993, at the age o

where he served at the university as William E. Co
was there for the last thirty years of his life, yet
living presence with us. This sense of belonging to
in one of his interviews which is included in this book where
one finds him talking in the plural: "In India today we do share,
entirely unawares, a great stock of symbolism and mythology." It
is because of his involvement in Indian culture and literature,
because of his engagement in the translation of classical Tamil and
medieval Kannada poetry - as well as collecting folktales which he
brought out in a book, titled The Folktale of India - that Ramanujan
matters.
His constant preoccupation with Indian literature, both written

and oral, has also been a guiding factor in determining the course
of his own poetry. As his working place was the United States, his
poetry has the tension of a poet who belonged to two hemispheres.
Therefore, the predominant role the critic can play is to see how
Rabindra K. Swain / 257
the poet resolves this tension.

Any poet writing from his native place would not have to be
vociferous about his notions of - and attitude towards - his place.
Although Ramanujan stayed away from his land, in a sense he carried
it with him. His rootedness in Hindu culture, supplied by his research
in the field, shaped his sensibility tremendously. He is one of those

rare breeds in whom scholarship and creativity have dovetailed won
derfully. With the digestive power of an ostrich, Ramanujan blended
different sources of his poetry so well that his poems hardly sound
ostentatious. In poems like "Farewell" and "Lying" the two opposite
worlds are held in contrast and contest, but at the end his ancestral
world triumphs. It is ultimately, as Philip Larkin put it, love that is

going to survive us and this spirit we find in "Farewells," where an
enduring filial relationship wins out against a world of lies. The poet's
sarcasm has no veil:
Yet this beauty throws pots and pans
whenever she is in a rage

Doesn't wake up till noon, does not
wash between her legs and her ruby lips
open only
to speak unspeakable obscenities
("On Julia")
or in this:
She told the man in her bed
he was the best lover she'd ever had
and he told her she was beautiful.

All his life her bastard son wet his bed.
("Lying")
Ramanujan's Hindu world is a world of clairvoyance, of

oracular insight, of reaching out to the stage of conception where
"fingers and toes (are) not formed." In "Twenty-four Senses" we have
"Hindus speak of twenty-four senses. / We have eyes and eyes behind
eyes / ...ovaries moving / in whalesongs in the middle of the Atlantic."
One is not sure if Ramanujan is being ironic here in his observation

of the extra-sensory perception of the Hindus, yet this mode of
relying on the inconceivable to conceive is evident in "Figures of
Disfigurement":
158 / Indian Literature : 217
Epilepsy may confer

powers of ecstasy
sometimes; amnesia may

open memories of past
lives.
Some kind of resolution of the conflict between these worlds
occurs very often in this posthumous collection. A strong metaphor

of this is drawn between the world of a snake and that of the poet
in "1951." The poet had seen "a snake" crossing "a village road in
Dharwar." That sight later strikes the imagination of the poet when
he suddenly realizes that his world is no safer than that of the snake
who "moves in no hurry from safety to danger / to safety / from
the camouflage of the green tree / to the dangers of being seen". The
poet takes a lesson from it:

Maybe a lesson there, but
I don't learn it as I scurry
from safety to safety, camouflage
to camouflage in sun, shades, curtains
of rain, newspaper
silence, traffic....
That's the poet's world! No more safe than a snake's, and no

more dangerous. But a poet is not confined to any single world.
To go back to the metaphor of the snake, the poet soon leaves the
skin of his Hindu world to enter a wider world where his worries
multiply.
Ramanujan was very fond of "Oranges". In this poem, an orange

is left on a fridge acquiring bacteria which, as the poet says, "thrives
in the kissing mouth, / the dying brain." These disturbing insights

sometimes put one off. It leaves us in a world of sadness, however
inevitable it may be in one's life. And this collection contains one of
the most disturbing poems I have ever read. Ramanujan discovers that
Twenty years ago
the saints who sang
ten centuries ago about Siva
without any thought of me
I didn't have any

thought of a young man
in Madras Ten years ago
who would read them
through my words
night and day
his hand toying with pills
his eyes with colours
turning on a wheel
Swallowing them
with the poems
that had no thought
of him or me who had
no thought of him
gasping in the mist
between day and the needles
in the wrist between
to be or not to be
And then there is the poet's note at the end of the poem:
I was translating last week the Tamil poems of
Atmanam. He had attempted suicide in 1983.1 thought
he hc'.d the best of the poems in Tamil. While I was
translating, it occurred to me to read the biographical
note at the end of the book. To my shock, I read there
that he was reading night and day my Speaking of

Siva just before he attempted suicide. I had some
connection with him that I couldn't quite define.
Along with thirty-one poems, there are two interviews and two
prose pieces in this collection. In the interviews - which could be taken
as the poet's prose since it has been put so finely - Ramanujan speaks
of his reasons for writing in English, his constant preoccupations, and
his worldview. He defends the oral tradition as being equally authentic
as the written one in India; he also discusses the tradition of languages
used other than Sanskrit. Here is a classic example of Ramanujan's

penchant for the elemental India which has been upheld by common
people, and which forms the oral tradition. The world of the common
people is a world of intimate relationships, which excludes the big

games of the rulerslike war and expansion:
ALB: It seems very complementary to the poetry that
you translate.
AKR: Yes. In the classical Tamil texts, the household
world and the outside world are distinguished. War
is a part of the outside world. The language of the

household poetry is the language of love, the language
of intimate relationship. All the problems between a
man and a woman are part of this, the interior poetry.
In terms of genres, the folktales live out of the interior

language. Mythologies are part of the outer world. They
have to do with wars. All the gods have a great many

wars. They construct cosmologies and deal with social
issues. In the folktales, everything is interiorized. You
don't see the big social issues except through the detail
of intimate relationships.
AAA
A.K.Ramanujan
was
translations
an
but
poet
extension
monks who could do multip

cites an example in his essa
He
was
able
to
do
the
follo
taneously: he repeated witho

recited to him by one perso
tions in philosophy, arithme
put
to
him
by
three
other
with another, completed a h

by a seventh person and fini
us the count of pebbles that
while on his bareback.
Ramanujan was one such literary figure who could do his job
of a poet, translator, essayist, etc. equally well.
Now The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan bears testimony
to his scholarship. Emphasizing the beautiful endings of the folktales
from Indiathe endings which sever an amorphous cord between the
fictive world and the real world and bring the listeners back
from the olden days to the present day - A.K. Ramanujan says in his
introduction to Folktales from India,
In many languages folktales have characteristic endings.
In Assamese a folktale ends with, 'we had to send
our clothes to the washerman, so we came home.' In
Telugu, they say, 'The story went to Kanchi, and we

came home.'...The charming closing sentence in an Oriya
tale says very well what I wish to say about breaking

the link with the fictive world, a world that seems quite
real while it lasts, though it is not. At the end of a

romantic king-and-queen story, the Oriya teller says,
'I saw the prince the other day in the market, but he
wouldn't talk to me.'
Being an Oriya, I can very well share this feeling, for, any tale
my grandmother had to tell me in our mother tongue, Oriya, had this

characteristic ending: "I saw the prince the other day in the market,
but he wouldn't talk to me." Now, three decades after my listening

to the folktales from my grandmother, I read her concluding words
in Ramanujan's translation. Like me there are any number of readers
from any state in India who can find for himself a tale in Ramanujan's
documentation of this vanishing art of oral story-telling from India.
As to why should he translate folktales but not the ancient Sanskrit

texts/says Ramanujan, "I have never translated the Vedas. My interest
has always been in the mother tongues, not Sanskrit because I have
always felt that the mother tongues represent a democratic, anti
hierarchic, from-the-ground-up view of India. And my interest in
folktales has also been shaped by that. I see in these counter-systems,
anti-structures, a protest against official systems."
The Collected Essays of A.K.Ramanujan is a veritable mine of such
wisdom. "For starters," says Ramanujan, "I for one need folklore as
an Indian studying India. It pervades my childhood, my community.
It's the symbolic parts of the non-literate parts of me and my culture."
Thus, Ramanujan tries to find out an answer to the general apathy,

"who needs folklore?" in the chapter titled after this question. Folktales
have so much elements in them that they are bound to have an universal
appeal. For that matter, folktales from all over the world are bound
to meet at certain points; the basic human conditions being the same.
The same is the human instinct, basically. That's why the archetypes
in love and suffering, in birth-pang and dying are common. It would
be no coincidence therefore for Ramanujan to find in Indian folktales
Cinderellas and Oedipuses. They are like "Hanchi: A Kannada Cinderella"
and "The Indian Oedipus." From his systematic studies in this field
Ramanujan has drawn similarities and variations between the Greek
Oedipus and the tales with the same theme from India. The Indian
Oedipus tales are not tragic, nor are they staple theme for literary
discussion.In some tales of such kind, Ramanujan finds out, the erring
mother gets over her incestuous relationship and happily lives ever
after with her husband, with the son having no need to kill his father.
Such complex relationships raise many equally complex questions in

Ramanujan's mind that he tries to analyze with the clues from Freud
and Kluckhohn:
We may explain away the Indian pattern as only a

projection, a reversal, a transformation of the Greek
one; or assert that Indian tales manifest a cultural
repression (if one may speak of such) so deep that the

killing of the father is entirely absent... One is often
struck by the impression that Indian males repress
their 'independence' as American males repress their

'dependence.' So the predominant kinds of neuroses
may be quite different in two cultures and may need
different emphases in therapy.
"Essays on Folklore/' a section introduced by Wendy Doniger,

which contains about a dozen of Ramanujan's writings in this field,
constitutes only a quarter space of his Collected Essays. The other three
sections are ''General essays on Literature and Culture," "Essays on

Classical Literature" and "Essays on Bhakti and Modern Poetry," each
of them introduced by Vinay Dharwadker, John B. Karman and Stuart
Blackburn and Alan Dundes respectively

A.K. Ramanujan's scholarship is tested best in his translation
related works. He is the only Indian poet in English who has contributed
so substantially to the field of translations from the ancient classics,

and it is for this that he will be remembered most. For, it is not
just his astounding translations but what goes behind itthe schol
arship. The Interior Landscape (1967) was his first step, in a big way.
With it, the Tamil terms akam and puram for interior and exterior world
respectively came to be used in literary discourses. Then he went

on to publish three other books of poetry, Speaking of Siva (1973),
Hymns for the Drowning (1981) and Poems of Love and War (1985) from
ancient Tamil and Kannada, and of course a great Indian modern novel
Samskara from Kannada by U.R.Anantha Murthy. Collected Essays also
contains a chronology of Ramanujan's select essays and books. Although
his translations are neatly done and read like originals they would
not have registered in one's mind so much as it has done had Ramanujan
not annotated them heavily, introducing them in a scholarly fashion
for the non-Tamil readers. His exhaustive introductions and afterwords
to his books of translation deal with the period in which those ancient
poems were written, the interesting lives of the poets, some of whom
were said to have 'died into the oneness' of the God, the religious
movements taking shape then and finally his insightful analyses of
the poems themselves. The sharp, incisive poetry of the saints who
were also activists as well are captured by a mind like Ramanujan,
in whose crystal language their poems are filtered to a modern time,
in a modern diction.
Ramanujan believes that a translation should not only "rep

resent" but also "re-present" the original. In this, a translator does
the tightrope-walking job. "If the representation in another language
is not close enough, but still succeeds in 'carrying' the poem in some
sense," says Ramanujan, "we will have two poems instead of one."
Here he cites a befitting Chinese parable to substantiate his statement:
A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored

through a great mountain.The engineers decided that
the best and the quickest way to do it would be to

begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise
measurements. If the measurements were precise enough,
the two tunnels would meet in the middle, making a
single one. 'But what happens if they don't meet?'

asked the emperor. The counsellers, in their wisdom,
answered, 'if they don't meet, we will have two instead
of one.'
("On Translating a Tamil Poem")
Besides, in the context of translating the ancient Tamil and Kannada

poems Ramanujan has also laid emphases on their visual effect on the
page. One such example is the following short poem of Basavanna
- mostly the poems in Ramanujan's selection are short, and the bhakti
poems, "sayings" as they are, are characteristically short with a

point of annotation by the poet in it:
Don't you take on
this thing called bhakti:
Like a saw
it cuts when it goes
And it cuts again
when it comes.
If you risk your hand

with a cobra pitcher*
will it let you
Pass.
The reference (*) to this poems in 'Notes to the Poems' reads: "Love
of God, like liberty, is a matter of eternal vigilance. The traditional Indian
metaphor for 'the straight and narrow path' is asidharavrata, 'walking
on the razor's edge.' Here the bhakta being sawn by the saw of bhakti
is obverse of the traditional 'walking on the razor's edge'. The cobra

in the pitcher is one of many ordeals or truth-tests to prove one's
trustworthiness, chastity, etc. Other such tests are walking on fire,
drinking poison, etc." (Speaking of Siva, Penguin Books, Maryland, 1973,
pp. 191) But essays like the one from which the above-mentioned quotes
are taken are not included in Ramanujan's Collected Essays. Instead,

it gathers together his scattered essays on his translations, which he
delivered as speeches, reworked them later for publication in journals.

The General Editor, Vinay Dharwadkar, was a close friend of Ramanujan.
Both of them were co-editors of The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian
Poetry (OUP, New Delhi, 1994). Equally engrossing are the short
notes of Dharwadkar to the history of those papers, which are attempts
at mapping the mind of someone who was never satisfied, satiated

with any of his versions in "Notes and References," a chapter that runs
into 43 pages. Here is one such note on Ramanujan's "Food for Thought:
Towards an Anthology of Hindu Food Images:" This essay grew out

of a paper that Ramanujan wrote in late 1984 and presented in January
1985... He expanded and revised it for publication in a volume of

essays... The version here is reproduced from a typescript prepared
in 1988.
The essays included here that further dwell on his translated

works are "Classics Lost and Found," "The Myths of Bhakti: Images
of Siva" and "On Women Saints." Of the four books of translations,
I suppose, Speaking of Siva must have been closest to Ramanujan's heart.
In his prose pieces he has come back to.Bhakti poetry again and again.
Bhakti movement began in South India during the period between the
sixth and ninth century and later spread to the North and the work
of their exponents like Nammalvar, Allama Prabhu, Kabir and Tukaram
still sound contemporary, still shape our sensibility. Ramanujan pays

a rich tribute to the saint-poets, Basavanna, Dasimayya, Mahadeviyakka
and Allama Prabhu in Speaking of Siva:

For the first time in Hinduism, we begin to have,
on record, what may truly be called, a 'religious

movement/ both literally and metaphorically. The saint
poets move, the movement also moves, like a wave,
a transitive, often without actual population
moving. ("Men, Women and Saints")
All these poets moved, "unlike Budhha, in troves" but had their
own stamp of individuality in their same pursuit, that is attaining
the same God, Siva. And women poets were in no way handicapped,
although they had to be initiated by male saints, as it happened in
the case of Mahadeviyakka. She gave up her family life, she moved
about without clothes, just covering her body with the tresses of her
hair. When she was finally confronted by the saint Allama as to why
did she had tresses then, she answered, "Till the fruit is ripe inside/
the skin will not fall off." Such wit and conviction won her initiation.
As against the male devotees who sought the grotesque form in the
Lord Siva, she saw in Him the most beautiful form, Cennamallikarjana,
which Ramanujan translates as 'the Lord white as jasmine,' for her

'signature line in all her vacanas. Here is one:
Husband inside
lover outside
I can't manage them both.

This world
and that other,
can't manage them.
0 lord white as jasmine

1 cannot hold in one hand
both the round nut
and the long bow.
In the poems of all these saint-poets, says Ramanujan, we have "for

the first time, in an apparently ahistoric tradition, particular human
lives(which) become contexts for poems, and become exemplary as only
the gods' lives were. And it has been that way ever since." ("Men,
Women, and Saints")
"Is there an Indian Way of Thinking" is the best piece in Collected
Essays. It is but natural that this thought must have occupied the mind
of a creative writer who lived abroad. Here Ramanujan tries to find
out a way for himself out of the maze that this subject has become
in the hands of both the insiders and outsiders. He raises certain
misconceptions, which are nothing but sweeping generalizations like

"Indian trait of hypocrisy" as it was revealed by a poll conducted by
The Illustrated Weekly of India thirty years ago (as if this trait does
not exist elsewhere) or "they lose their nervethe British are only
the most recent example (according to Nirad Chaudhuri)" and waives
them off to go his way. And his way to this FAQ is, I find, akin to
one analysis of Christopher Ricks. Interpreting Philip Larkin's famous
line, the last one of "Arundale Tomb," "What will survive of us is love",
Ricks said that what we get from this line is what we want of it. If
we emphasize the first part "What will survive," it is classical, if it
is on "love", it is romantic. Likewise, Ramanujan throws before the
readers a question "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" and asks
them as to where should they lay stress: on the first word, on the
third, on the fourth, or on the last. However, Ramanujan seems at
last to have accepted, among others, 'inconsistency' as a characteristic
of Indians, which is not that bad as consistency would turn out to
be if it is adhered by as intently as it is found in the following Buddhist
parable of the raft:

Once a man was drowning in a sudden flood. Just
as he was about to drown, he found a raft. He clung
to it, and it carried him safely to dry land. And he
was so grateful to the raft that he carried it on his
back for the rest of his life. Such was the Buddha's
ironic comment on context-free systems.
Ramanujan must have had a high sense of humour, which is now

in this Collected Essays, raised to the form of art. Very often he resorts
to it to drive a point home. He might be deep in his discourse on

profound themes yet within that ambit he would bring in an anecdote
or an instance that substantiates his stand, without diluting the somber
mood. That is an effective method of making your standpoints clear

and helping them stay on in the readers' minds. It was the way with
the tellers of folktales, of the epic writers in the different
languages of India, who were, even half a millennium ago no less

intertextual than one could be today:
In several of the later Ramayanas Csuch as the Adhyatma
Ramayana, sixteenth century), when Rama is exiled, he
does not want Sita to go with him to the forest. Sita

argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments:
she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile
herself in his exile and so on. When he still resists the
idea, she is furious. She bursts out, 'Countless Ramayanas
have been composed before this. Do you know of one

where Sita does not go with Rama to the forest? That
clinches the argument, and she goes with himiAdhyatma
Ramayana 2.4.77-8;see Nath 1913, 39). And as nothing
in India occurs uniquely, even this motif appears in
more than one Ramayana." ("Three Hundred Ramayanas ")
This sense of humour also finds a strong vein in Ramanujan's poetry

in English. But sadly, I feel an absence of Ramanujan's autobiographical
writings as well as the ones on his process of writing poems which

would have revealed ways for further understanding of his impressive
body of poetry. There is only one such short paragraph on his oft
quoted poem "Prayers to Lord Murugan:"
In 1967, Fred Clothey.. .studied Murugan, his temples...
I was one of his readers, and as I worked with his
chaptersI was in Madras that yeara series of prayers
formed themselves in my head. The prayers were

addressed to Murugan, with many references to the
iconography and history I was steeped in, and also

to the sixth century poem that Aiyar, among others,
had edited. My poem ("Prayers to Lord Murugan")

too talks about some Indian attitudes to the Indian past,
with which I was somewhat despondently preoccu
pied at the time. I had felt that Sanskrit itself and
Rabindra K. Swain I 167
all that it represented had become an absence, that
the future needed a new past.
Any serious reader of Ramanujan thought of him this way his

translations of ancient verses and his own in English are both comple
mentary and supplementary but such reiteration of the poet is a
delight for us. Or, is it that Ramanujan did not write any such stuff?
When a poet turns to prose the result is such an astounding work
like The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, which is part Indology, part
treatise on folklore, part theory of translation. And it is all a delight
for the readers for when a poet turns to prose, he is only in a witness
box from where he has to bear testimony to the strength he has shown
in his poetry.

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Sahitya Akademi

Scholarship With Wings: The Poetry and Prose of A.K. Ramanujan

Scholarship With Wings:

"Butcher's Tao" in Black Hen is emblematic of A.K.Ramanujan. This

The butcher in China

looks long at a bull till he sees

the bull and how

the beast is jointed,

then moves his knife

by heart with his hand

for weddings or combs,

peasant, saddle and rein

to banquets, friends and

ready for sprinkling

on children with polio

essay develops on Ramanujan's two posthumous collections, Uncollected

A. K. Ramanujan passed away in 1993, at the age o

in one of his interviews which is included in this book where

His constant preoccupation with Indian literature, both written

the poet resolves this tension.

in the field, shaped his sensibility tremendously. He is one of those

world triumphs. It is ultimately, as Philip Larkin put it, love that is

Yet this beauty throws pots and pans

whenever she is in a rage

and he told her she was beautiful.

Ramanujan's Hindu world is a world of clairvoyance, of

One is not sure if Ramanujan is being ironic here in his observation

158 / Indian Literature : 217

Epilepsy may confer

sometimes; amnesia may

Some kind of resolution of the conflict between these worlds

occurs very often in this posthumous collection. A strong metaphor

poet takes a lesson from it:

That's the poet's world! No more safe than a snake's, and no

Ramanujan was very fond of "Oranges". In this poem, an orange

in the kissing mouth, / the dying brain." These disturbing insights

I didn't have any

Rabindra K. Swain / 159

of him or me who had

between day and the needles

in the wrist between

that he was reading night and day my Speaking of

used other than Sanskrit. Here is a classic example of Ramanujan's

people is a world of intimate relationships, which excludes the big

world and the outside world are distinguished. War

is a part of the outside world. The language of the

In terms of genres, the folktales live out of the interior

have to do with wars. All the gods have a great many

monks who could do multip

taneously: he repeated witho

with another, completed a h

while on his bareback.

Telugu, they say, 'The story went to Kanchi, and we

tale says very well what I wish to say about breaking

real while it lasts, though it is not. At the end of a

wouldn't talk to me.'

my grandmother had to tell me in our mother tongue, Oriya, had this

but he wouldn't talk to me." Now, three decades after my listening

As to why should he translate folktales but not the ancient Sanskrit

Thus, Ramanujan tries to find out an answer to the general apathy,

Such complex relationships raise many equally complex questions in

We may explain away the Indian pattern as only a

one; or assert that Indian tales manifest a cultural