INTRODUCTION

Indian verse in English did not seriously begin to exist until after the withdrawal of British from India. (R.Parthsarthy: 1976:3) 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
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(1809-1831), in the first half of the nineteenth century. He became a teacher of English literature at the Hindu College, Calcutta. A teacher as well as a poet, Derozio had expressed nature in his poetry like Keats. The flavour of Romanticism is found in his poetry as he was highly influenced by Byron, Shelley, Keats, Scott and Moore. Derozio's most ambitious work was The Fakir of Jungheera. His love for India and its past is revealed in several of his poems from the collection Poems published in 1827. He died at a very early age due to cholera in 1831. Preceding Derozio the British servicemen in India are said to have laid the foundation stones for this genre. Today, Indian Poetry in English has been exported back to the West, in the form of Indian poets living in the West. Kashiprasad Ghose (1809-1837) was one of the first Indians to publish a regular volume of English verse. The Shair and Other Poems (1830) is a great contribution to the level of 'Gorboduc' in English literature. He also has the distinction of being the first Hindu to write original English verse. Though his The Shair and Other Poems was blamed by critics for the lack of originality. John B. Alphanso Karkala comments on his verse collection as: These immature verses, lacking originality and sincerity only indicate to what extent he was influenced by the minor love poets of the late Elizabethan age (1970:43). He is counted as one of the founder pillars of indo-Anglian literature. His contribution in Indian English literature is as equal as Henry Derozios. Ghose edited an English weekly The Hindu Intelligence. His poetry is counted as moralizing and as good texture of originality and conventional descriptions.
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Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824-1873) was equally a talented writer and poet. His Meghanad Badha is a great Bengali epic and is considered as his all-time masterpiece till today. Written in blank verse, this epic was based on the Ramayana but inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost. Here Madhusudan has transformed the villainous Ravana into a Hero. This grand heroic-tragic epic was written in nine cantos which is quite unique in the history of Bengali Poetry. Meghnad-Badh Kavya was Bengali literature's first original epic and gave Madhusudan the status of an Epic Poet. He also produced The Captive Ladie in English. Michael Madhusudan Dutt began writing while he was at

Hindu College. He won several scholarships in college exams as well as a gold medal for an essay on women's education. While a student at Hindu College, his poems in Bengali and English were published in Jnananvesan, Bengal Spectator, Literary Gleamer, Calcutta Library Gazette, Literary Blossom and Comet. Lord Byron was Madhusudan's inspiration. Dutt was particularly inspired by both the life and work of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. The life of Dutt closely parallels to the life of Lord Byron in many respects. Like Byron, Dutt was a spirited bohemian and like Byron, Dutt was a Romantic, albeit being born on the other side of the world, and as a recipient subject of the British imperialist enterprise, Madhusudan was a gifted linguist and polyglot. Besides Indian languages like Bengali, Sanskrit and Tamil, he was well versed in classical languages like Greek and Latin. He also had a fluent understanding of modern European languages like Italian and French and could read and write the last two with perfect grace and ease.

After M. M. Dutt, the two minor voices of Bengal viz. Shoshee Chunder Dutt and Hur Chunder Dutt explored the glorious past of India to regenerate national confidence among the Indians and thereby to promote the spirit of nationalism and renaissance. Shoshee Chunder Dutt in his collection A Vision of Sumeru and Other Poems asserts the legendary and historical past of India. The collection deals with the heroic deeds of Shivaji. The historical consciousness operates in the poem as:They led him to the stately hall, Before the royal throne, Where, towering in the pomp of power, The tyrant sat alone, And knights and nobles stood around. (Gokak: 1985:68) Hur Chunder Dutts Tarra Bai, again recreates historical consciousness in the mind of readers. The purpose of this poem is to glorify the history and thus to promote Indian sensibility, patriotism and the decadent life of Bengalies. There followed a number of writers. These were the Derozio's men' who aspired to become eminent in this field. Besides writers, political leaders and religious men also wrote in their own way for the enlightenment of the public. For instance, Dada Bhai Naoroji was a teacher turned political leader and a good orator, produced many good poems. Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his disciple Swami Vivekananda

were great orators and their speeches carried the essence of truth. Vivekananda essayed English verse too eg:- Kali, The Mother, The Song of the Sanyasi, My Play is Done etc. are some of the best examples to denote his poetic talent. The Dutts - Toru, Aru, Abju were very important people in Indo-Anglian poetry. Among them, Toru Dutt (1856-77) is most important. She is counted as the first poetess in Indo-Anglian literature. She had English education and a rich and respectable ancestry. Her father Govind Chunder Dutt was a good linguist and a civilized man with literary eye. The Dutt family moved to Cambridge in 1871 where she had attended lectures. In 1875, she had translated French writing into English with the title A Sheaf Gleamed in French Fields. She had learned Sanskrit and translated Ramayana, Mahabharata and Sakuntala into English verse. She had attained command over Sanskrit language and transformed her interest from French to Sanskrit and translated a number of Indian mythological works into English . She died very young, at the age 21, of consumption. Her Sanskrit translations Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan' (1882) came posthumously. This work expresses her great reverence for ancient Hindu past. Her translations are marvelous and beyond comparison for a young sick girl. Her greatness as a poet was that she touched the chord of our racial and religious ethos by rendering of those deathless stories from the Indian classics. Her efforts in poetry were complementary to the efforts of social and religious reformation initiated by the early stalwarts of the Indian renaissance.
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Another contributor of literature from Bengal, a land of arts, is Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848-1909). He was Toru Dutts cousin and forwarded her writing at height. He had passed Indian Civil Service Examination in 1869 and served at various capacities in India. He had also devoted much time for literary creation in Bengali and English. Romesh Dutt had written novels in Bengali and translated two of these novels into English named The Lack of palms (1902) and The Slave Girl of Agra (1909). He had narrated historical surveys in a large range likeA History of Civilization in Ancient India , later Hindu Civilization, India in the Victorian Age, The Economic History of British India , and A brief History of Ancient and Modern Bengal. Apart from this, his greatest achievement was the Bengali translation of Rig Veda. His translation in to English verse from Ramayana, Mahabharata, Rig Veda, The Upanishads, Buddhist literatures, Kalidasas Kumarasambhava and Bharavis Kiratarjuniya is most creditable contribution. Iyengar writes the turn from Toru Dutt to Romesh Chunder Dutt as:To turn from Aru and Taru Dutt to Romsh Chunder Dutt is like passing from the bud the flower to the ripened fruit; from Erato and Melpomene to Clio and Calliope; from Ushas; rosy- fingered and short-lived, to the toiling Sun on the ascendant; from infinite promise to impressive achievement. (Iyengar: 1995:44)

Another sparkling star of Indian literature is Manmohan Ghose (1869- 1924). He was an elder brother of Sri Aurobindo. He had English education at Manchester and Oxford. His first poem collection Primavera (1890) was appreciated by literary scholars and classmate at Oxford. Like Derizio, Manmohan Ghose became professor of English at the Presidency College, Calcutta. In 1898, he published collection of poems Love Songs and Elegies and also wrote five act play- Perseus the Deliverer. His wonderful sense of the beauty of English words and rhythm made him notable literary craftsman in eyes of English scholars of England. His poetry was considered much intellectual thoughts and rhythm in his poetry is outstanding feature. Manmohan Ghose was born in 1869, the second son of an illustrious surgeon, Dr. K. D. Ghose. Together with his brothers, Binoy Bhushan and Aurobindo, he studied at Loreto Convent, Darjeeling. In 1879 Manmohan Ghose went to England where he remained until 1894, completing a professional qualification of Bar-at-law at Lincolns Inn. On his return to India, he joined Patna College as professor of English; later on, he was appointed professor at Presidency College, Kolkata and worked as Inspector of schools. Manmohan Ghose began writing poetry when he was in England and some of his poems were published in Primavera, an anthology which also contained poems by Laurence Binyon, Arthur Cripps and Stephen Phillips. Oscar Wilde, reviewing the volume, wrote of Manmohan Ghose: The temper of Keats and the moods of Matthew Arnold have influenced Mr. Ghose, and what better influences could a beginner have ? Manmohan Ghoses poetry in many ways broke with the earlier school of Orientalist poetry. His poems often spoke of a
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longing to return to England, where he had spent twenty two years of his life. While his contemporaries in India, including his brother Aurobindo Ghose, were writing on nationalistic themes and were drawing upon ancient Indian culture, Manmohan Ghose turned to England for inspiration. Up to this time, Indian literature had flourished in its fullness but it was Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who lifted Indian literature at world level and gained for modern India a place on the world literary history. He won Noble Prize for literature and gave recognition to India on global scale. Rabindranath Tagore, the versatile personality of Indian literary scholar is considered as the Rishi, the Gurudev and the Maharshi. He was a poet, dramatist, actor, producer, musician, painter, educationist, reformer, philosopher, prophet, novelist, story writer and a critic of life and literature. He wrote poetry since his childhood. He was only fifteen when he published some of his poems. It was as a poet and the author of Gitanjali he visited England in 1912, and met Rothenstein, Yeats and others. In 1913, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He is well known as the Founder of Viswa Bharati University at Shantiniketan. His most prestigious work Gitanjali (1912) is a sequence of 103 lyrics translated from selected lyrics in his own Bengali works. The term 'Gitanjali' rendered as 'song offerings' by Tagore. The main theme is the relationship between the human soul and God. It is centered in life and the Lord is not only within oneself though to seek whom one has to travel far and knock at every door, but in the very midst of men and women

among 'The poor, lowliest and lost'. Nature and man to the poet are only means of approaching. God and are not important for their own sake. Rabindranath Tagore wrote primarily in Bengali and translated many of his poems and plays into English. Before he was eighteen, he had written more than 7000 lines of verse. For Gitanjali he won the Noble Prize for literature and became poet of the world. After that his other works and Gitanjali were translated by literary scholars into major languages of world. To his credit, there is a long list of poems and plays, both in Bengali and English which had made his place among the worlds greatest writers. In Iyengars words:As the years passed, he became more and more a legendary figure; in his flowing bead and immaculate white robes he was truly in the line of the great Rishi of Upnishadic times, and indeed he was truly in the line of the great bearing witness to the triune Reality, seeing the way showing it to others. (Iyengar: 1973: 103)

The fertile soil of Bengal has given one more shining star to the world in the form of Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950). He is the one uncontestably outstanding figure in Indo-Anglian literature. Though he came out successful in the Indian Civil service examinations, he did not join the service, but decided to devote himself to the task of freeing India from foreign yoke, making revolutionary speeches and hinting at armed

rebellion as a means of attaining it. Songs to Myrtilla, Urvasie, Love and Death, Savitri, Bhavani Mandir, The Life Devine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Essays on the Gita, The Secret of Veda, The Future Poetry, The Foundations of Indian Culture, Renaissance in India, and Heraclitus are some of his major works. The most outstanding work of Indo-Anglian literature is Aurobindos Savitri which is in three parts, divided in to 12 books or 49 cantos which have total 23813 lines, on which the poet worked for fifty years of his life. M. K. Naik observes in A History of Indian English Literature that:Savitri was continuously revised by the poet almost till the end of his days and shaped into an epic of humanity and divinity, of death and the life divine. A sort of poetic philosophy of the spirit and of life, and an experiment in mystic poetry cast in to a symbolic figure. (Naik: 1995:52) To conclude, in brief about Savitri, Iyengar has used the words of Prof. Raymond Frank Piper: Aurobindo created what is probably the greatest epic in the English Language. I venture the judgment that it is the most comprehensive, Integrated, beautiful and perfect cosmic poem ever composed. It ranges symbolically from a primordial cosmic void, through earths darkness
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and struggles, to the highest realms of super mental existence, and illumines every important concern of man, through verse of unparalleled massiveness, magnificence, and metaphorical brilliance. Savitri is perhaps the most powerful artistic work in the world for expanding mans mind towards the Absolute. (Iyengar: 1973: 206) In the list of the path makers for Indo-Anglian poetry, Sarojini Naidu (18791949) was the first female contributor who served IndoAnglian literature for her life time. She studied at London and Cambridge where she had developed the lyrical art. She was multifaceted personality and more than a poet as she had occupied some of the highest official positions in the public life of India. Her first volume of poetry The Golden Threshold (1905) was followed by The Bird of Time (1912), The Broken Wing (1917) and The Feather of the Dawn. These works made her greatest poetess of the age. Her lyrics have a perfect structure and an exquisite finish and she handles various meters and stanza forms in her poem perfectly. M.K. Naik observes: Her best poetry is not just a faded eco of the feeble voice of decadent romanticism, but an authentic Indian English lyric utterance exquisitely tuned to the composite Indian ethos, bringing home to the unbiased reader all the opulence, pageantry and charm of traditional Indian life, and the splendors of the Indian scene. (Naik: 1970:69)

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In India, she is recognized as the Nightingale of Indian song. She became one of the foremost political figures as she was president of the Indian National Congress and her oratorical mastery gave her fame of national leader. She was a combination of a poet and a politician. The Indian resurgence received a fresh impetus during the Gandhian age (1920-1947), which witnessed a tremendous upheaval in the political, social and economic sphere. The freedom struggle reached its peak and there was an unprecedented awakening among sections of society- women, the youth and the depressed classes which had long suffered from the weight of traditional authority. The time appeared to be ripe for the flowering of romanticism as never before, but curiously enough Indian English romantic poetry did not register any signal gains during this period. There was more than one reason for this. First, the major Indian English romantics, with the exception of Sri Aurobindo (whose Savitri actually appeared in its final form after the Gandhian age ended) had already produced their best work by this time and after the high noon of romanticism, a twilight naturally set in. The minor romantics that followed were, the disciples of Sri Aurobindo like K.D. Sethana, N.K. Gupta and others; the academicians like B.N. Seal, G.K. Chettur, Armando Menezes, V.N. Bhushan etc. and the rest like Manjari Isvaran (a far more significant short story writer than a poet) and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya- generally wrote a derivative verse and it is mostly their work which has created the unjust impression that all Indian English poetry before Independence is imitative and inconsequential. Secondly, the political and social awakening made conditions highly conductive to the growth of the novel; and what poetry
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lost, fiction gained, for the major triumvirate of Indian English fiction Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao began to write during this period.

(A) Indian Sensibility as Reflected in Indo-Anglian Poetry 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 be fulfilled in a better way in English than in the vernacular. Prof. Srinivasa Iyengar rightly pointed out that Indian writing in English is a novel experiment in creative mutation when he said: To be Indian in thought and feeling and emotion and experience, yet also to court the graces and submit to the discipline of English for expression (Iyengar: 1973:5) is something that the present writers aim at. 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

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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 (Gokak: 1975:11). Similarly, Paul Verghese says, Indianness is nothing but depiction of Indian culture. (Verghese: 1971:22). In a nutshell 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. The Indian English Poets, giving expression to the Indian experience in thought and imagery, are in the main stream of a tradition. A cultural activity does not grow all of a sudden; it has an origin and a development. It is pertinent to consider the tradition that has been built up by this output and the impact of this tradition on the writers of today. P. Lal remarks that These poets are instrumental in rediscovering values and techniques within ones own tradition (Lal: 1977:25) which is a body of concepts and usages, ideas and feelings to be felt or thought, to win acceptance and currency or to provoke dissent or modification. The angle of the poets vision has been conditioned by his own experience and temperament by the primary attitudes or modes of his perception. Language, Music, Form, Meaning, Style, Imagery, Inner Meaning, Mood, Attitude and Vision: this is how we get to know a poem in each stage of its creation, whatever the process of integration that goes to make up the poem as a whole. (Gokak: 1975:6) says V.K. Gokak.
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When we come to Indian English poetry, we find ourselves in a world in which the response to Indian reality, the underlying sensibility, the use of imagery, diction, etc. are strikingly different from that of the European poetry. The great poet Sri Aurobindo describes the Indian renaissance as less like the European one and more like the Celtic movement in Ireland. (Aurobind: 1972:397). He defines it as the attempt of a reawakened national spirit to find a new impulse of selfexpression which shall give the spiritual force for a great reshaping and rebuilding. In Ireland, this was discovered by a return to Celtic spirit and culture after a long period of eclipsing English influences. In India, the course of renaissance led to new self-identification with ancient cultural heritage. This awakening of India, as Jawahar Lal Nehru observes, was twofold: She looked to the West and at the same time she looked at herself and her own past. (Nehru: 1961: 330-31). While Englishman were rediscovering Indias past, the gradual spread of English education and western ideas brought forth a band of earnest Indians who drank deep at the fountain of European learning. The general awakening began with the introduction of English education. Besides this, the pressure of supreme posed European culture made the reawakening inevitable. The idea of liberty came through Renaissance and thereby determined the future of India. The renewed interest in the ideas of political liberty and Indian sensibility was the unmistakable fruit of western education. One of the most important elements of this renaissance was a dramatic change in the attitude to cultural life of Indian. The new intelligentsia represented by Raja Rammohan Roy,

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Dwarkanath Tagore and V. Baidyanath Mukharji advocated individual freedom, self- identity and modernization. The forceful writings of Raja Rammohan Roy were a shaping influence on the body of Indian English poetry. In this regard H. M. Williams observes: His (Roys) influence extends through the Dutts, Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and on Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. (Williams: 1987:1). He further says, This continuity I find strongly related to the development of India self-awareness and national aspirations (Williams: 1987:1). As he points out, the cultural response to the challenge of British rule resulted mainly into cultural nationalism and Indian sensibility into Indian English poetry was a bold expression of this. In its historical perspective, Indian English poetry reveals three main stages in its growth and development. These three stages may be indicated as imitation, Indianization and individualization. Though these are transition phases of Indian English poetry, the common thread that links them together is the Indian sensibility. In the first transition phase, the sensibility is weak. In the second, it is exhaustive and in the third, it is precise, rich and truly indigenous. The growth of national character of Indian English poetry seems to justify itself, indeed, this way. The first group of poets Henery Derozio, Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Kashiprasad ghosh, the pioneers of Indian English poetry and the representatives of the first phase of Indian English poetry asserted the spirit of nationalism as part of national awakening. Obviously, the assertion of the self was to search for cultural identity and
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thereby to confirm national identity or Indian identity. The urge for selfassertion gets manifested in the poems like The Harp of India, To the Pupils of the Hindu College, Song of the Hindustan Ministrel etc. The search for identity is quite apparent in Derozios sonnet The Harp of India. Here Derozio identifies himself with indias great poetic tradition. He boldly asserts his Indianness: (.) thy notes divine May be by mortal wakened once again, Harp of my country, let me strike the strain! (Derozio: 1980:1) The second phase of Indian English poetry covers the period from 1857 to 1920. The spirit of nationalism is more distinct and strongly Indian in colour. The glorious aspect of Indian nationalism emanates through the texts of poetry and spirit of it is more radiant and purely Indian one. Here we find the shift in sensibility from rationalism to nationalism. The rediscovery of Indian identity is purely Hindu in spirit. The spirit of Hindu nationalism locates its roots in religious scriptures and rich cultural life of India. The poetry of Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Sri Aurobindo and Rabindra Nath Tagore is more or less, manifestation of Hindu nationalism. Toru Dutt expresses her great reverence for ancient Hindu past in her works like Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882). Here she deals with the popular stories from the Ramayana, the
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Mahabharata and the Puranas. These ballads together aspire to promote the sense of continuity, unity and integration in the Indian life. John B. Alphanso Karkala emphasises the significance of these stories: These are not mere fancy tales. Though they were inventions of the poets of the past, they had come down the ages as models of virtue meant to teach and delight the collective conscience of Indian people. (ibid: 122). Again, when Sarojini Naidu addresses a sonnet to India, her patriotic zeal is beyond all doubts and yet the actual product is too heavily cultured with stock ideas and responses and stale expressions:Thy Future calls thee with a manifold sound To crescent honours, splendours, victories vast (ibid: 6) The third phase of Indian English poetry covers the period of Indias freedom struggle i.e. 1920-1947. During this time, the struggle for freedom reached its height. In literature, some of the greatest writers of the century were at their most productive. In the area of Indian English poetry, this period gives no evidence of any new major voices. Again we find the poets like Sri Aurobindo and Rabindranath Tagore who had consolidated their reputation before the advent of the Gandhian age. In this regard M.K. Naik says, The impact of the Gandhian whirlwind produced no outstanding poetry of any kind (1989: 140). Though poetry failed to record the spirit of Gandhian age, fiction gave an authentic expression of Gandhian Movement and the socio-political realities of the contemporary period. However, the poets like Armando
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Menzes, Humayun Kabir, V.N. Bhushan etc. were influenced by the Gandhian whirlwind and naturally their poetry articulated the fervour of freedom struggle and the spirit of the decades of freedom struggle. The ethos of the post- Independence phase (1947- ) of India English poetry is different from that of all the previous periods. Its relationship to the nineteenth century is the same as that of the modern age in British literature to Victorianism or of the Restoration to the English Renaissance. When the overwhelming question of political independence was finally solved, the tensions of the Indian psyche seemed suddenly to relax. Politics ceased to be an idealistic pursuit and was reduced to a power game and the new gods of self- aggrandizement and affluence easily dethroned those of selfless service and dedication to a cause. The era of hope, aspiration and certitude was gone; an age of merciless self-security, questioning and ironic exposure commenced. the rightful assumption of a recognized national identity also gave the postindependence poet greater self- confidence in his new role as the critic of the present, the past and himself, while his nineteenth century predecessor was generally a spokesman of his times and its dreams and visions. In this new role, the post-independent poet found himself in line with modern British and American poets and there was naturally much inevitable borrowing as in the earlier phases. Besides, the scrutiny of self and society has also taken various forms in modern Indian English poetry. Poets like A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthsarthy and Arun Kolatkar are preoccupied with problem of roots. Their examination of their
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indigenous ethos has been in several directions. Ramanujan conjures up early familial memories with a remarkably total recall of the senseimpressions of childhood. Determined to seek.and find/ my particular hell in my Hindu mind, he is likewise keenly aware of his racial burden also. His mind seems to be perpetually busy probing the areas of strength and deficiency of his Hindu heritage. A fellow Tamilian, R. Parthsarthy is equally obsessed with his native heritage. His ambitious Rough Passage (1977) is a brave attempt to deal with the theme of identity exposed to two cultures viz., the Indian and the Western. In his Jejuri (1976), which won The Commonwealth Poetry Prize, Arun Kolatkar discloses the surrealistic similarities between an ossified Hindu religious tradition and an equally rigid scientific civilization represented by the railway station, and demonstrates the superiority of a value-system older than both these i.e. the primal Life Force represented by the cocks and the hens doing a kind of a harvest dance in a field of Jowar. Nissim Ezekiel, one of the most important fourth phase poet, is acutely conscious of his alienation being further accentuated by the fact that he has spent most of his life in highly westernized circles in cosmopolitan Bombay.Though his moods vary from despair to resignation (with an assumption of easy superiority occasionally breaking in), in a poem like Night of the Scorpion, he becomes a detached but highly sensitive observer of the characteristic Hindu response to evil and suffering. Of the three leading Parsi poets, Adil Jussawala views the contemporary Indian scene through the compassionate eyes of an exile returning to India after a long sojurnin the affluent west, while continuing his quest for the Missing Person viz., his identity. Gieve Patel stands
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in no need of a similar quest for he has already accepted the ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel, he being neither Muslim nor Hindu in India. Many contemporary poets write in English about their experience of todays Indian milieu without losing their national identity. Gouri Deshpande, Meera Pillai and other poets from writers workshop rightly speak of the Indian background and they are not ignorant of the shaping of a national consciousness by the environment of the country, the climate, the background of tradition. But some of the new poets deny any umbilical connection with their historical past. A tradition cannot be wholly disowned. Amalendu Bose says that this denial is a boisterous proclamation that these writers are upstarts, and rootless. (Sinha: 1979:64) In a work of art, that is, a well-realised creative effort, presence of Indianness is invariable expressed. It must be noted that within the text, a good writer does not give direct indications of such a presence, but that the operational response of the Indian writer could be deduced by the sensibility working in it. What characterizes the Indianness in the writing is finally the mind behind the organization of the context, the lifeattitudes and modes of perception. C.N. Srinath aptly says, The Indian poet while using English as his medium should have his roots in his own soil and yet be a part of the common culture of the English speaking peoples, indeed of all mankind to the extent that it gives an edge to his native vigour and sensibilities. (Iyanger: 1973:206)

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Creative writing is an achievement of harmony between concept and medium, between what is to be said and how it is to be said. As for concept, the Indian poet is as capable in that area as any poet handling from another language group. It is in respect of the handling of the medium that the non-native poets ability has to pass through a fire test. Several poets have the ability to control their medium and thus achieve aesthetic success. The alien language does not necessarily diminish or regard the writers sense of heritage. Toru Datt, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Esekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das and others have been competent retaining their Indianness in full measure. To discuss and evaluate the poets, the principal question will be the degree of their Indianness culture and medium of their expression. Unless the Indian poets experience is authentic and his own, and not derivative and imitative of conventional modes of the way, the mere choice of specifically Indian themes and settings would not make for authenticity. The Indian poet in English can be a poet only by being truly an Indian. For M.K. Naik, to be truly an Indian of modern times is, to constitute a synthesis of the age-old ethos of India and the culture of the west which English literature and ideas brought to India; it is to live and breathe the culture of India as it exists today a complex product which has changed, matured over millenia, losing and gaining much in the process; it is to write with Indian in ones bones. (Naik: 1980:37). This synthesis has clear glimpses in the works of modern poets like Ezekiel, Mahapatra, etc. For example, Nissim Ezekiels Night of the Scorpion ably illustrates the Indian synthesis in the work of modernists. The contrast between the two attitudes to scorpion bite; the sceptic,
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rationalist attitude armed with a little paraffin as a remedy and the superstitious attitude fortified by prayers and incantations a contrast typical of the modern Indian situation. The immediacy of experience is couched by easy and colloquial style. Coolness, authentic and objectivity are some of the marks of Ezekiels harsher notations of Indian life. Ramanujans creative work, both as poet and as translator, has drawn praise from the English-speaking world. Ezekiel is of the opinion that Ramanujan has enriched the Indo-Anglican tradition of poetry. (Sinha: 1979:121) Even the titles of some of his poems such as A Hindu to his Body (The Hindu: he does not hurt a fly or a spider either), Small Town, South India, Old Indian Belief, and Prayers to Lord Murugan suggest Ramanujans Indianness. In Conventions of Despair, the poet tells explicitly that he rejects the demands of the modern man such as marrying again and again:I must seek and will find my particular hell only in my Hindu mind. (Parthsarthy: 1976:97) Ramanujans Indianness in his poetry indicates a complex interaction or psychological forces kept under linguistic and formal control. His poetry is essentially Indian with the modern connection vitalizing it as in A River he says: The new poets still quoted the old poets, but no one spoke
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in verse, of the pregnant woman drowned ... (ibid: 98) Ramanujan finds his objective correlative in a family around him. In the poem, Obituary he recalls his fathers death, and uses the occasion to comment ironically on ceremonies and rituals associated with the dead. There is a conspicuous craftsmanship, introspection and selfanalysis in Kamala Dass poetry. Confessional tone is sharper in her poems. If we look for her strength as a poetess, we must detect in her poetry the dust, the heat, the crowds, the poverty of India combined with misery and endurance of womankind. She tries to strike a sort of synthesis between the changing reality of a private passion and the apparently unchanging reality of the shining sun on Indian horizon. The overtones of the poem Summer in Calcutta can be taken into account. She is not alienated from the Indian landscape and its social milieu. One of the Indian English poets who has emerged as a major poet only recently is Shiv K. Kumar. Kumar gives in his poetry an evidence of genuine poetic inspiration. His poetry has great precision and the image glistens like polished brass though he has often been criticised for his over refinement, a bizarre search for right word, right phrase, right stance. Subterfuges, Cobwebs in the Sunshine are evasions or deceptions that we encounter in our life. The cobwebs being swept away, the

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subterfuges become visible to us. A Mango Vendor is an eloquent metaphor: Through the slits Of her patched blouse One bare shoulder Two white moons Pull all horses Off the track. (ibid: 54) Kumars originality lies in the uniqueness of his imaginative world. He grapples with abstractions and ideas, images of men and women on the social scene, the complex of emotions centering round human varieties like sex, love, companionship and problems relating to art. Through powerfully evoked images the past is revealed. My Correspondent is a fine example of how Kumar achieves an integrative of idea and image, statement and drama to provide a wholly satisfying experience. Deeply involved in his immediate environment, Kumar continues to strike a convincing note of contemporary life. Trapfalls in the Sky is his fifth collection of verse that won Sahitya Academic Award for 1987. The poems have flawless attention to detail, for instance, the opening poem Mother Theresa feeds Leepers at her Home for Destitutes, Calcutta, and An Indian Mothers Advice to her Daughter Before Marriage (Kumar: 1986:13-14) abounds with the deep Indian sensibility.
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Thus, the poetry of these and other modern Indian English poets suggests a case for exploring Indianness in terms of not only the authenticity of their locale and culture, but the medium of their expression. They regard English language as one of the many Indian languages, and their exploration of it to its fullest possibilities, both in range and depth produces some of the best poetry. Their poetry is lyrical poetry which is unique in that the weight of intellect never overburdens their authentic feelings.

(B) A.K. Ramanujan and His ContemporariesSince 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 various regional languages - Balamani Amma, K.M. Panikkar, Umashankar Joshi, Sri V.K. Gokak, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Amrita Pritam - are efficiently bilingual. In the post 1947 period, Indo - Anglian poetry acquired a newcurrency 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 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.

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Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004)

Nissim Ezekiel, who has been called the father of postindependence Indian verse in English, is the foremost among the Indian-English poets. He is the pioneer of modernity in Indian-English poetry. The Age of Ezekiel in Indian-English poetry started with his creative oeuvre. He was also an art-critic and playwright. In 1952, Fortune press (London) published his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change. He published his book The Unfinished Man in 1960. He cofounded the literary monthly Imprint, in 1961. He functioned as art critic of The Times of India (1964-66) and edited Poetry India (1966-67). From 1961 to 1972, he headed the English Department of Mithibai College, Mumbai. The Exact Name, his fifth book of poetry, was published in 1965. During this period, he had short tenures as visiting professor at University of Leeds (1964) and University of Chicago (1967). In 1969, Writers Workshop, Calcutta published his The Three Plays. A year later, he presented an art series of ten programs for Mumbai television. On the invitation of the US Government, he went on a monthlong tour to the US in November, 1974. In 1975 he went as a Cultural Award Visitor to Australia. In 1976, he translated poetry from Marathi, and co-edited a fiction and poetry anthology. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1983 and the Padma Shri in 1988. He was Professor of English at University of Mumbai during the 1990s. He functioned as the Secretary of the Indian branch of the international

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writers' organization PEN. After a prolonged battle with Alzheimer's disease, Nissim Ezekiel died in Mumbai, on 9 January 2004. His works include A Time To Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), The Three Plays (1969) and Hymns in Darkness (1976). When he began his creative course of life in the late 1940s, his adoption of formal English was controversial, given its association with colonialism. Yet he naturalised the language to the Indian situation, and breathed life into the Indian English poetic tradition. Ezekiels poetry describes love, loneliness, lust, creativity and political pomposity, human foibles and the "kindred clamour" of urban dissonance. Over the course of his creative years, his attitude changed, too. The young man, "who shopped around for dreams", demanded truth and lambasted corruption. By the 1970s, he accepted "the ordinariness of most events"; laughed at "lofty expectations totally deflated"; and acknowledged that "The darkness has its secrets / Which light does not know." After 1965, he even began embracing India's English vernacular, and teased its idiosyncrasies in Poster Poems and in The Professor. He acted as a mentor to many younger poets - Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and several others. In the last few years of his life, he was deeply involved in helping younger poets, especially those based at Mumbai, his advice being forthright, but seldom blunt. Ezekiel's poems are lucid, and are splendidly evocative and satisfyingly sensuous. The recurring note in Ezekiel's recent poems is the

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hurt that urban civilization inflicts on modern man dehumanizing him, and subjecting his virtues to population and devaluation. He is a painstaking craftsman in whose poems we find form. His poetry is simple, introspective and analytical. He is highly disciplined and unpretentious. His skilful use of prosody, his restraint, conversational style, his mastery of irony, his purity of diction and perfect control over his 'emotions place him on the top of the modern, Indo-Anglian poets. The Night of the Scorpion is one of his best poems-A simple narrative poem in which superstitious practices still out grown one juxtaposed with the scientific developments.

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993)

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

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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), Relations (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, as S. Nagarajan puts it, 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. (Peeradina: 1972:18) 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. He is one of the most talented of the new poets. The striders, a collection of poems in Tamil and Relations, (poems) are some of his great works. He settled in Chicago, and his 'exile' there has made him consider 'a search for one's roots' an
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integral part of his poetry.his theme is announced in the epigraph poem, a translation from Tamil, Like a hunted deer On the wide white Salt sand, A flayed hide Turned inside out, One may run, Escape. But living Among relations Binds the feet.

(Collected Poems: 1995:56)

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 repossess the usable past at personal and racial levels. 'Snakes, River, Conventions of Despair, Small Scale Reflection 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
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poetic technique has absorbed the motifs and stylistic devices of both. All this results in a forceful, meaningful, personal voice and Ramanujan has established himself as one of the most talented of the new Indo-Anglian poets.

R. Parthasarathy (1934- )
Of the poets who cultivate an extreme austerity in style, Parthasarathy is probably the most successful. 'The first step-poems, 1956-66, is his poetic collection. His best poems reveal an uncommon talent and a sensibility that deliberately puts shackles on itself. His most ambitious effort is Towards an Understanding of India. He is a conscientious artist with a scrupulous aesthetic taste. His poetry is the articulation of his predicament, of an exile who has alienated himself from his culture. His poetry is an intense search for identity, a search for roots in his nature, culture environment and language. The search is realised by an objective probing of the personal as well as the historic past. The inner conflicts that are inherent in such a search provide the basic tension of his poetry.

Kamala Das (1934- )

Kamala Das was born in Punnayurkulam in Southern Malabar. She was educated mainly at home and spent most of her years in
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Bombay. Her works include Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), The Anamalai Poems (1985) and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996). Among her prose works in English are her fictional autobiography, My Story (1976), the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), a collection of short stories called Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992). She identifies herself as Kamala Suraiyya after her conversion to Islam. Kamala Das is perhaps the most interesting and appealing among Indo-English poets. Both her life and her works are so controversial and unconventional as to invite comments and criticism from readers and critics. Kamala occupies a position of considerable importance in post independent Indian writing in English. Ever since the publication of Summer in Calcutta in 1965, her first volume of poetry in English, She has wielded great influence as a leading poet constituting the modern trend of Indian poetry in English. Sheis a confessional poet speaking out her intimate private experiences with astonishing honesty and brutal frankness. She began writing under the pen name Madhavikutty, a bilingual writer. She has written 30 novels in Malayalam. Her poetic collections, Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, The Old Play House and Other Poems, short story collection A Doll for the Child Prostitute and Other Stories' and My Story her autobiography. Her skill as an artist perfectly matched with her deep insight into human predicaments - social and psychological. She is basically a poet of love, an emancipated poet, feminist, and an iconoclast.

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-)

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Jayanta Mahapatra was born in Cuttack in 1928, was educated there and in Patna. After his Master's Degree in Physics, he joined as a teacher and served in different Government colleges of Orissa. He retired, on superannuation, from the academic profession in 1986 when he was in Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. He started writing poetry in his late thirties. But this late beginning signifies his 'ripe advent'. His works include Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father's Hours (1976), A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves & Fruit (1988), Temple (1989), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005). He turned bilingual and has published a few works of poetry in Oriya including Bali (The Victim), Kahibi Gothie Katha (I Will Tell a Story) and Baya Raja (The Mad Emperor). During 1976-77, he participated in the University of Iowa's International Writing Programme. He received the prestigious Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award (Chicago) in 1975. He is the first Indian-English poet to have received, in 1981, the award of the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters, India) for his Relationship. Other awards and honours include First Prize in Scottish International Open Poetry Competition, Second Prize for International Who's Who in Poetry, London, Gangadhar Meher National Award for Poetry, Ramakrishna Jaidayal Harmony Award and Vaikom Mohammed Basheer (1997) Award. Mahapatra is a very subjective poet, draws his images from his experiences in life which makes him difficult to interpret. His four
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volumes of verse are titled Close The Sky, Ten by Ten, Swayamvara and Other Poems, Counter Measures, A Rain of Rites. Silence is the most important concept in Mahapatra's poems. Some of his poems are the genuine products of his imaginative apprehension of evil in the Indian society.

Keki N. Daruwalla (1937- )

Keki N Daruwalla was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan. His education was at Ludhiana. He joined the Indian Police Service in 1958 and, on retirement, he lives in Delhi. A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award (1984) and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has published several books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. His works of poetry include Under Orion (1970), Apparition Summer of in April (1971), Crossing Tigers(1995), Night and of Rivers (1976), and The Minister Winter Mapfor Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A River (2000) Maker (2002). Swords Abyss (1979) and The

Permanent Unrest & Other Stories (1996) are his works of fiction. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry.

Dom Moraes (1938-2004)

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Dominic Francis Moraes, popularly known as Dom Moraes, was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) to Beryl and Frank Moraes, former editor of Indian Express. He spent eight years in London, and most of his life in Mumbai. He edited magazines in London, Hong Kong and New York. He became the editor of The Asia Magazine in 1971. He scripted and partially directed over 20 television documentaries for the BBC and ITV. He was a war correspondent in Algeria, Israel and Vietnam. From 1973 to 1977, he was chief literary consultant for the United Nations Fund for Populations. His works include A Beginning (1958), his first book of poems, Poems (1960), his chapbook of second book of poems, John Nobody (1965), his third book of poems, Beldam and Others (1967), a verse, Absences (1983), book of poems, Collected Poems (1987), Serendip (1990), poems, Out of God's Oven: Travels in a Fractured Land (1992), The Long Strider (2003), Never at Home, memoir, My Son's Father, memoir, A Variety of Absences: The Collected Memoirs of Dom Moraes (2003), Typed With One Finger (2003), Collected Poems 1954-2004 (2004). Honours and awards he received include Hawthornden Prize for the best work of the imagination, 1958, for the book of poems A Beginning, Autumn Choice of the Poetry Book Society for Poems (1960) and Sahitya Akademi Award (1994) for his Serendip.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947-)

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore. He was educated at the Universities of Allahabad and Bombay and has been teaching

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English Literature at the University of Allahabad. His works include Bharat Mata: A Prayer (1966), Woodcuts on Paper (1967), Poems| Poems|Poems (1971), Three (1973), The Absent Traveller: Prakrit Love Poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala (1991). He is also the editor of Twenty Indian Poems (1990), The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) and Periplus: Poetry in Translation (with Daniel Weissbort) (1993). In 1995, he won the Gettysburg Review Award in non-fiction prose.

Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi. He grew up in Kashmir, and was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. His volumes of poetry include Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987),The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). He is also the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986), translator of The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992), and editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was
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awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

Bibhu Padhi (1951- )

Bibhu Padhi was born in the ancient town of Cuttack in Orissa. He was educated there at the Ravenshaw Collegiate School, Ranihat High School, and Ravenshaw College. He has been teaching English literature in Government colleges. He started writing seriously around 1975 and his poems were published in all the major Indian literary journals, Debonair, The Illustrated Weekly, Imprint, Indian Literature and Quest. Outside India, his poems have been published in, amongst others, Encounter, Orbis, Outposts, New Letters, Southwest Review and The Toronto South Asian Review. A selection appeared in New Voices: Eight Contemporary Poets (Anvil Press, 1990). He has edited a number of poetry anthologies and is a Counsellor in Creative Writing with the Indira Gandhi National Open University, Delhi. His critical writing, on D.H. Lawrence andIndian Philosophy and Religion: A Readers Guide (cowritten with his wife), has been published in the USA. His own first collection, Going to the Temple was published in 1988. Lines from a Legend, which brings alive the world of Cuttack, was published by Peepal Tree in 1993. Other works include A Wound Elsewhere, Painting the House, Games the Heart Must Play (a trilogy of love poems) and Living with Lorenzo (a series of poems on D.H. Lawrence).

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Meena Alexander (1951-)

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India. She is currently a Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and still takes trips back to Kerala annually. Her first book, a single lengthy poem, entitled The Bird's Bright Wing, was published in 1976 in Calcutta. Since then, Alexander has published seven volumes of poetry, including River and Bridge; two novels: Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a collection of both prose and poetry, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience; a study on Romanticism: Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley; and her autobiography, Fault Lines. In 1993, she was the recipient of a Mac Dowell Fellowship.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1952- )

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She has a Bengali father and a Goan mother. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Cambridge in 1982. In 1990, Nair received the first prize in the All India Poetry Society/ British Council competition. She has published three volumes of poetry: Yellow Hibiscus, The Hyoid Bone and The Ayodhya Cantos (Penguin, 2004,

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1999 and 1992). Her research interests are in the areas of literary and postcolonial theory, cognitive linguistics, the philosophy of language and the relationship between technology and cultural text. Nair's books include Narrative Gravity: Conversation, Cognition, Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002 and Routledge, 2003); Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: the Idea of Indifference (Minnesota University Press and Oxford University Press, 2002); Technobrat: Collins, 1997); Culture as well in as a Cybernetic the edited Classroom (Harper 2002).

volume, Translation, Text and Theory: the Paradigm of India (Sage,

Imtiaz Dharker (1954-)

Born in Lahore, Imtiaz Dharker grew up in Glasgow and now divides her time between London and Mumbai. She works as a documentary film-maker in India. She is also an artist, and conceives her books as sequences of poems and drawings. She has written three books of poetry, conceived as sequences of poems and drawings. Home, freedom, journeys, geographical and cultural displacement, communal conflict, gender politics these remain the recurrent themes in her poetry. Purdah (1989) the Devil (2003). is Dharkers first book; Postcards from God (1994), her second book; and the most recent book is, I Speak for

E. V. Ramakrishnan

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E.V. Ramakrishnan is Professor of English in the Department of English, South Gujarat University, Surat. Born in Kannur, North Kerala, Ramakrishnan was educated at Tellicherry, Calicut and Hyderabad. He worked as a Lecturer at Jalna in Marathwada in Maharashtra. Then he moved to South Gujarat University, Surat. E.V. Ramakrishnan has authored three books of poems, including Being Elsewhere in Myself, in English, one collection of critical essays in English and four in Malayalam. He edited Narrating India: The Novel in Search of the Nation (for the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi), Tree of Tongues, An Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry and Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry.

Jeet Thayil (1959- )

Jeet Thayil was born in India and educated in Hongkong, New York and Bombay. In 1998 he went to New York where he received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a 2003 poetry award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poems have appeared in 'Stand', 'Verse', 'Agenda', 'London Magazine', 'The Independent', 'Salt Hill' and 'Kavya Bharati', among many other journals. He is an editor with 'Rattapallax' and a contributing editor with 'Fulcrum', and is currently based in Bangalore and Delhi. He is also known for his performance of his poems, With or Without his New York-based band, Bombay Down. His works include Gemini (Viking Penguin, 1992), Apocalypso (London, Mark Arts. 1997) and English (New York, Rattapallax Press/New Delhi, Penguin India, 2003). Besides the three poetry

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volumes, he has edited two anthologies of short stories, Vox: New Indian Fiction (Sterling, 1996) and Vox 2: Seven Stories (Sterling, 1997).

C. P. Surendran (1959-)

C. P. Surendran was born in Kerala. He took his Masters in English from Delhi University, and was, for a short while, a Lecturer of English at Calicut University. He resigned from his academic job in 1986 to become a journalist. At present, Surendran works with the Times of India. Penguin India has published his collection of poems titled Posthumous Poems. The other books of poetry published by Surendran include Gemini-II and Canaries on the Moon (Yeti Books, Kozhikode). An Iron Harvest (India Ink/Roli Books) is Surendran's first novel.

Makarand Paranjape (1960- )

Makarand Paranjape is a Professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University's Centre for Linguistics and English at the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies. A widely published poet, novelist, critic, and columnist, he is the author of The Serene Flame, Playing the Dark God, Used Book and Partial Disclosure (poetry); This Time I Promise Itll Be Different and The Narrator (fiction); and Mysticism in Indian English Poetry, Decolonization and Development , and Towards a Poetics of the Indian English Novel (criticism). The books he has edited include Indian Poetry in English, Sarojini Naidu: Selected

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Poetry and Prose, Nativism: Essays in Literary Criticism , The Best of Raja Rao, The Penguin Sri Aurobindo Reader, and In Diaspora: Theories, Histories, Texts.

Rabindra K. Swain (1960- )

Rabindra K. Swain had his Master's degree in English Literature in 1983 and a Ph.D on the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra in 1995 from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India. He has published three books of poetry, Once Back Home (Har-Anand, New Delhi, 1996), A Tapestry of Steps (Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 1999), and Severed Cord (Indialog, 2002). Severed Cord is a poignant collection of poems, which deals with the emotions underlying every aspect of life and its subtle relationships. He has also published a book of translation from Oriya, Rajendra Kishore Panda's Bahubreehi. He is a cotranslator of J. P. Dass Dear Jester and Other Stories (2006). Besides, he has a critical work, The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study (Prestige Books, New Delhi, 2000). His poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Verse, New Letters, and Quarterly West, among others.

Tabish Khair (1966-)

Tabish Khair is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus, Denmark. Born in Ranchi and educated mostly in Gaya, India, he is the author of various books, including the poetry collections, My World and Where Parallel Lines Meet (Penguin, 2000), the study, Babu Fictions: Alienation in Indian English
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Novels (Oxford UP, 2001) and the novel, The Bus Stopped (Picador, 2004). His honours and prizes include the All India Poetry Prize (awarded by the Poetry Society and the British Council) and honorary fellowship (for creative writing) of the Baptist University of Hong Kong. Other Routes is an anthology of pre-modern travel texts by Africans and Asians, co-edited and introduced by Khair (with a foreword by Amitav Ghosh) and published by Signal Books and Indiana University Press.

Arundhati Subramaniam (1967-)

Arundhati Subramaniam is a poet, dance critic, a freelance journalist on the arts and in charge of an interactive arts forum at Mumbai's National Centre for the Performing Arts. As poet, she has been published in several journals. She is also on the committee of the Poetry Circle of Mumbai. As journalist, she has written extensively for leading publications in the country, such as The Times of India, The Hindu, among others, and now writes for several culture portals on the web. As arts administrator, she heads a forum called "Chauraha" that promotes dialogue betweeen practitioners of various artistic disciplines. She is the author of two books of poems: On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live. She has also published a book on Buddha and his role in shaping and transfiguring the course of history: The Book of Buddha.

Ranjit Hoskote (1969-)

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Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, cultural theorist and independent curator of contemporary art. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Zones of Assault (1991), The Cartographers Apprentice (2000) and The Sleepwalkers Archive (2001). He has also co-translated Vasant Dahakes Marathi poems under the title A Terrorist of the Spirit (1992) and edited the anthology, Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Indian Poets (Viking, 2002). He has also written a critical biography of the artist Jehangir Sabavala (1998) and a monograph on the painter Sudhir Patwardhan (The Complicit Observer, 2004). As a literary organizer, Hoskot has been associated with the Poetry Circle, Bombay, since its inception in 1986, and was its President from 1992 to 1997. Hoskote was Visiting Writer and Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa (1995) and has held a writing residency at the Villa Waldberta, Munich (2003). He received the Sanskriti Award for Literature in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award in 2004. Hoskote lives and works in Bombay. Vanishing Acts (Penguin Books India 2006) brings together some of his best poetry, drawn from his three published collections, along with a substantial body of new poems. Thus, Indian Poetry in English is nearly 200 years old. It began with Henry Derozio in the first half of the nineteenth century. Preceding Derozio, the British servicemen in India are said to have laid the foundation stones for this genre. Today, Indian Poetry in English has been exported back to the West, in the form of Indian poets living in the West. Indian Poetry in English reflects regional variations such as language, ethnicity and culture. It should also be noted that Indian

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English poets belong to different races, cultures and traditions yet the same Indianness or the Indian sensibility is the key characteristic of Indian English poetry. Looking at the multicultural angle of Indian Poetry in English, one can clearly spot the difference in Western multiculturalism and Indian multiculturalism. In the West, multiculturalism is a recent phenomenon, while in India it is an accepted way of life. Western multiculturalism portrays resistance against cultural hegemony, search for identity and struggle for the recognition of difference. In India, the phenomenon is more assimilatory, than subversive. In spite of the cultural, religious, social and geographical differences, there seems to be an integration, a Unity in Diversity. The Indian identity can be called confluent. This confluent identity is aware of the differences and at the same time, maintains its own integrity. This identity negotiates a space for itself in the multicultural congregation that is India. This aspect is evident in not only Indian Poetry in English but also in other genres of Indian English Writing. As the confluent Indian identity migrates West, the trends range from assimilatory to reactionary, perhaps in response to the trends in Western multiculturalism which incorporates different ethnic identities, from many parts of the World and as a result face resistance from the host communities.

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References
Gokak, V.K., An Integral View of Poetry: An Indian Perspective, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975. Iyengar,K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1995. ----------Indian Writing in English, New Delhi Asia Publishing House, 2nd Edition, 1973. Kulshrestha, Chirantan, (ed.) Contemporary Indian Verse; An Eval
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uation , 1980. Kumar, Shiv, K., Trap Falls in the Sky, New Delhi: Macmillan, 1986. Lal, P., quoted by Linda Hess in Meenakshi Mukherjee, Consid erations ,Bombay: Allied, 1977. Naidu. S, "If You Call Me"; V.K.Gokak (Ed.) the Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992. Naik, M.K., A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995. ------------Echo and Voice in Indian Poetry, in Contemporary Indian\ Verse, (ed.) C. Kulshrestha, New Delhi: Sterling Publishing House, 1980. Parthasarathy, R.,(ed). Ten twentieth Century Poets New Delhi: Oxford, Crown Series, 1976. Peeradina, Saleem, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, (ed.) Bombay: Macmillan, 1972. Sinha, Krishna, Nandan (ed.) Indian Writing in English, New Delhi: Heritage Publishers, 1979.

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Representation of the Traditional Indian Family

(A) Family as a Theme:Ramanujan has evolved as a very important Indian poet through his collections like The striders, Relations, Selected Poems, The Second Sight and The Black Hen and Other Poems, written over a period ranging more than three decades. In spite of his constant exposure to American beliefs and culture, he has consistently written about India not as an obsession, but as a source of inspiration. One observes in his writings a possibility that an artist as an individual is capable of restructuring a personal (Indian) past and nourishing the same as insulated from the

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ideological oppositions that effect the time and space in which his text is written. While recreating the Indian settingsboth rural and urban, he seems to be unaffected by the objects and images of his American surrounding because the life he captures looks so original and just not a memory game. "His exile in Chicago only strengthened his sense of the Indian past: his disturbingly vivid and agile poetic articulations both in English and Kannada are deeply rooted in the myth, folklore, history, culture and ethos of his native soil, (Satchidanandan:1994:6), says K. Satchidanandan in his editorial comment in a commemorative volume on Ramanujan. While recreating the human situations and details of Indian life the image of family appears as a key image. It helps the reader understand and appropriate the meaning and beauty of such poems. R. Parthasarathy, another important Indian poet writing in English suggests, "the family, for Ramanujan, is in fact one of the central metaphors with which he thinks and writes. (Parthasarathy: 1976:95) Most of his poems, though intensely personal, have a universal dimension of their own. 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

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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. Still Another View of Grace, is regarded as one of the finest love poems, a passionate poem of intensity showing the poet caught between the clash of diverse traditions and back-grounds. Like metaphysical poets, he succeeds in combining emotion with reflection. The poets severe angry reprimand to his desire do not follow a gentle mans morals at last ends up with surrender to love and crossing the barriers of his orthodox tradition. The transformation of sensual passion into gentle love is beautifully suggested in the last lines:------I shook a little And took her, behind the laws of my land. (Parthasarathy: 97) In his poems, the drama of love takes place in thought and in accompanying that thought simultaneously. Looking for a Cousin on a Swing, included in his collection The Striders refers to a village swing shared by cousins, a girl of four of five years and a boy, six or seven years of age. The idyllic rural backdrop with the swing is treasured in the shared memory of both the cousins to mature into a romantic longing afterwards when they grow away from
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action

each other. There is no hint of incest as marriage between cousins is a social practice. Against this familial possibility the intimacy of cousins/the shared innocence transforms into an aspired romantic experience. The poem can be read as having two parts: the first one up to the fourteenth line as a song of innocence and the rest as a song of experience. The sweet innocent intimacy of the cousins is built up with "every lunge of the swing." The "lunging pits of feelings" of a small girl keep in store the touch of "innocence" to be contrasted with that of "experience" later. The poet says:When she was four or five She sat on a village swing And her cousin, six or seven, Sat himself against her; With every lung of swing She felt him In the lunging pits Of her feeling; And afterwards We climed a tree. (Collected Poems: 1995:19) The intimacy is intensified as the poet makes them climb a tree, not very tall but full of leaves like those of a fig tree. As they climb up they symbolically gain heights where they are no longer innocent. The image of the adolescent pair associated with the fig tree reminds one of Adam and Eve depicted in old drawings where the genital organs are conveniently concealed by fig leaves. The swing that keeps them
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alienated from the ground and lifted towards the sky through a tension of upward and downward movements anticipates a sensuous experience beyond the boundary of childhood innocence. The second part of the poem presents a contrast. The rustic, folk touch gives way to a cityscape where the genesis of a relationship as innocent as childhood is lost and longing for the same is futile. The little girl is no more a child and:Now she looks for the swing In cities with fifteen suburbs And tries to be innocent About it. (Collected Poems: 1995:1 9) A city with fifteen suburbs and the remote Indian village are poles apart as far as the look and outlook of woman is concerned. The relationship between the cousins suffer from an estrangement and that is effectively communicated through the image of "the crotch of a tree." The fig leaves are no more the images of innocence at the end of the poem. The leaves change colour and turn scarlet. The leaves act as a camouflage to conceal lust. K.N. Daruwalla writes; "His poem 'Cousin on a Swing' is bursting with sexual imagery, yet almost hidden under a cover, just as his cousin hides her sexual feelings (Daruwalla: 1994:22). Ramanujan has bought in the city as a matter of contrast, so that he can capture the contour of the country with more clarity and precision.

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Obituary, another significant poem included in Relations, depicts middle class life in the context of the male dominated Indian family. Since the father is the major (male) figure who burdens himself with all responsibilities in the family, things come to a stand still with his passing away. He leaves a changed wife who has become a widow and the daughter whose marriage becomes difficult without him. The father's liabilities are left for the sons to be settled and the little grandsons grow again this setting. In the poem the poet presents in an ironical vein the tragic effect on the family due to sudden death of his father, causing repercussions on or affecting the whole family set-up:The father bequeathed to his son Dust on a table full of papers Left debts and daughters, A bedwetting grand son Named by the toss Of a coin after him a house that leaned Slowly through (our) growing Years on a bent coconut Tree in the yard. The poets play of words in the lines:Being the burning type He burned properly At the cremation As before, easily
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And at both ends. (ibid: 88) It evokes sarcastic tone mixed with tears and helpers smiles. The ritualistic ceremonies and mixing of the dead persons ashes in Holy River etc. seemed meaningless to the poet who experienced a void that nothing can fill in. His fathers hopes and aspirations too died. No memorial was set up to record his achievements which are almost insignificant. Yet the poet anxiously tried to find out the two lines written about his father in the obituary column in scraps of news paper. This shows his unbroken blood relationship or the last thread of attachment in spite of his ironic digs at the negative achievements of his father. The changed mother, a relic of his fathers death is indeed a sad remembrance of this tragic event that upset the whole family. Generally poems written on death, end with a philosophical resignation. But Ramanujan just presented the situation as it is, affecting the relationships in a realistic manner. There is a poignant undertone suggesting his fathers miserable position who left nothing to his son except debts, responsibilities and expenses for performing annual ceremonies. The process continues as naturally as a coconut tree bends with the passing of years. The old house leans on the same tree. Time passes with the death and the cremation of the father. The Indian life continues meaningfully through rituals. The rhythm of continuity is maintained. Life does not end with the death of an individual. If the corpse is burnt properly, it offers a good sign. The bones left in the ashes after the
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funeral are treated as sacred objects to be picked by the sons to be thrown into the holy river. The ritual is a Hindu way of connecting life with eternity, the soul with God after it leaves the body. The priest supervises the age-old rituals and the sons obey his instructions. Ramanujan not only explores the Indian life- rhythm through this Hindu ritual but seems to be quite aware of the secular world that Hindus inhabit. Hence the railway station is chosen as a locale to denote the meeting point of three rivers. No headstone on the grave is erected to bear the name and the dates of birth and death of the poor dead father. Nobody bothers to note that the man died of a heart attack in the fruit market. Nobody knows about the difficult caesarian birth that had brought the man to this earth long ago. Old age is like ripe fruit and must rut or be consumed. However, the son comes to know of some lines published about his father as an obituary in a Madras newspaper. He searches to find a copy but fails. The old papers are sold to street hawkers who sell the same to grocery stores. The son searches for the obituary on the paper cones that contain salt, coriander of jaggery while buying things from the grocery shops. But the search remains funny and vain. The poem suggests the fact that one does not live in obituaries in print nor the lines on the headstone. While attempts of this kind belong to more or less a western method of documenting and preserving the memory of the dead the Indian way is more human and warm. Because it involves more than one annual ritual and the renewal is more than mere reminiscence. Another poem entitled Small Scale Reflections on a Great House included in the same anthology is yet another poem on the family theme. It records the poet's attitude to the Indian joint family system tinged with irony. The "great house" is the central focus of the poem that absorbs
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everything that enters into it. And not only that, but anything that goes out of this house also comes back. This absorption signifies resilience unique to Indian joint family despite the limitations of the system: Things comes in everyday to lose themselves among other things lost long ago among other things lost long ago; (Collected Poems: 102). Things that come into the house are used, consumed and become a part of the household. They do not go away. The gain or loss of things happens in the boundary of the great house. It is a world in itself. But Ramanujan understands the forces of social change that has already set in through globalisation of culture. He hints at the remnants of past passing from the older generations to the new in terms of religious rites and social habits in Indian families. The items that have their access into the house include the living and the non-living. The entry of 'lame wandering cows,' 'servants,' 'sonsin-law,' 'wives,' 'library books,' 'sweet dishes' from neighbourhood, phonographs,' or hereditary diseases through marriage like epilepsies are to stay permanently under the same roof. But the tinge of irony reveals a critical point of view of the narrator. That is why the cows are 'lame.' The way the arrangement is monitored to let the cow be pregnant signifies a vulgarity about the whole process of maternity perpetuated in the joint family under the dominance and supervision of the elders. The young girls learn to accept their role as future-mothers in a cryptic manner 'behind windows with holes in them.' The library books are borrowed and not read and the fines multiply in the ledgers of the library. The books, the papers and records of the past
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century become a breeding ground for the silverfish. Neighbours celebrate wedding anniversary of 'god' with pomp, not as a pious religious rite but for impressing others with an exhibition of sweet dishes prepared through sleepless nights. Sons-in-law forget their mothers and prefer to stay with their wives in this great house of their fathers/mothersin-law as parasites. And daughters-in-law who come subjugate themselves to the order of the family as the 'hanging banana leaves' yield to the hazards of monsoon. It is a point of no return for these women who leave their own houses, their past and their freedom. Ramanujan, through a brilliant simile describes how things that go out also come back, but in a changed manner. Those who go out of the house for greater opportunities back come disillusioned with more liabilities to the house. The return of the native is not a homecoming for jubilation but like the kind of Indian cotton processed as muslin at Manchester to be sold in India at a high price. Return of things no doubt suggests a centripetal force of the Indian home but there is nothing much positive to be happy about it. The poet adds a lot of instances. The letters mailed also come back as the addressee is not found at the other end. Ideas, too, that evolve in this house to be mentioned casually 'somewhere' come back as rumours come back to their source in a more distorted manner. The closed system of the family runs itself unaffected by intrusion or expulsion. The ideals of the new generation are more or less a repetition of the old. Ideas return like prodigies to prodigal fathers. The daughters who go away from this house after marriage, too come back. The span of their marital life is short-lived. They return as widows or deserted by the idiot husband. The sons who go away return in some cases being reborn as grand children. The so-called uncles who
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have penchant for be betel nuts visit the house to amuse the grandchildren with anecdotes of their unseen fathers. The fatherless children grow under roof with grandparents who encourage them to recite Sanskrit verses and the old rhythm of life continues. The young bring the holy Ganges water to be given to the dying old who is hardly able to gulp through the rattling throat. The rite is an ancient one and connects the old with the new, the myth with the here and now. Even through death people return. The nephew gone abroad as a soldier probably in the world war comes back. He comes back dead, killed in the war. The plane, the train and the military truckbring him back to disturb a good chatty afternoon. The stratification of Indian family and the presence of old rites and habits are reflected adequately by Ramanujan in this poem. The greatness of the great house is ultimately questioned. The reflections however are not done is small scale in the poem. The disintegration of such house and the joint family system as depicted in his 'Love Poem for a Wife, reveal how the abandonment of tradition has resulted in the decadence of the institution of marriage. The non-resident Indian couple in Chicago reconstructs their unshared Indian past and magnifies the invisible space and the sense of apartness between them. The reminiscence appears to be a conscious attempt at projecting illusory past images of each to the other so as to hide the incestous and other sexual affairs of their pre-marital period. India remains in the blurred memory of expatriates in Chicago as a reference to the jackfruit tree in one's father's house in Alleppey.

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Though Ramanujan has discussed the theme of love in his poems, he does not appear to be romantic in the conventional sense. As elsewhere, here too, he has a firm grip over his emotions and in his love poems to his wife; he tries to take a realistic view of things. A superficial reading of the poem entitled Love Poem for a Wife convinces the reader that Ramanujan is consciously anti-romantic. However, on a deeper plane, it reflects the intensity of the poets feelings. He resents the fact that he had no part to play in his wifes childhood. He feels that their unshared past has alienated them from each other. Probably, he is threatened by a sense of emotional insecurity. Thus, he writes: Really what keeps us apart at the end of years in unshared childhood. (Collected Poems: 65) In fact, Love Poem for a Wife - I enacts the short anecdotes of domestic nature arranged in a criss cross order. The lack of emotional integration between the poet and his wife was traced back to lack of sharing each others child-hood experiences. Both of them were eager to know each others past. The poet gives details of two different family backgrounds juxtaposing one against the other. His wife is curious to know his past through family rumours and brothers anecdotes and through albums showing the Picture of father in a turban Mother standing on her bare Splayed fee, silver rings On her second toes; (C P: 65) The poet feels a streak of jealousy for not sharing his wifes part. I envy you your village dog-ride
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and the mythology of the seven crazy aunts,(CP:66) The poets father-in-law never cared to remember the past and never bothered to think about his young daughters wanderings. The hiatus between the attitudes of the poet and his wife is shown even in the present when she started a heated argument with her brother James about the location of bathroom in her grand fathers house, even betting on her husbands income ignoring her husbands presence. Sister-in-law and I were blank cut-outs fitted to our respective slots in a room.(ibid) Ironically, the poet suggests that to solve this problem of alienation, one may follow the Egyptian custom of brother marrying his own sister or the Hindu custom of arranged child marriages. In other words, for a happy married life, mutual understanding and sharing of each others experiences are indirectly suggested. This love-hate-relationship is briefly shown in Routine Day Sonnet where the poet says: I wake with a start To hear my wife cry her heart Out as if from a crater In hell; she hates me, I hate her I am filthy rat and a satyr. (ibid) There is, however, a discernible streak of tenderness in the poem, Love Poem for a Wife- II. Here, he seems to have come to terms with the fact that he cannot relive the past with his wife. Shunning aside his feelings of resentment, he tries to comment on his relation61

ship with

his wife. So, with spirited enthusiasm, he takes an interest in everything associated with his wifes childhood. He shares her feelings with her as she goes down the memory lane recalling bits and pieces from the tale of childhood. He listens to her intently as she rattles on: .....rubber plant and pepper vine frocks with print patterns copied locally from the dotted butterfly, grandmother wearing white day and night in a village full of the color schemes of kraits and garter snakes. (Collected Poems: 83-84) One can almost feel the poet-persona warming up to the tender glow of love in his fond reminisces of his wife who was fast asleep: My wifes face still fast asleep, blessed as by butterfly, snake ship rope, and grandmothers other children, by only loves only insatiable envy. (ibid: 85) A sense of reconciliation is experienced as envy and resentment are sacrificed at the altar of acceptance. The past no longer poses a threat to the conjugal relationship between the persona of the poem and his wife. A careful study of Ramanujans love poetry reveals the fact that

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though not possessing an overtly romantic sensibility, the poet definitely betrays the prominent strains of love. Love poem for a wife - 2 , shows the mature aspect of love with a compromising approach. The family relationship is explored upto the root level tracing back his wifes Keralite origin to dense green forest habitation filled with rubber plants, pepper vines, and her granny wearing white in a rural dwelling full of the colour schemes of Keralites and garter snakes. The scene shifts to crater-township Aden, where her ancestors and spent precarious days among stabbing Arabs betrayed and whipped yet happy. The poet employs dream technique in which he identifies himself with his wife physically I dreamed one day that face my own, yet hers with my own nowhere to be found; lost; cut loose like my dragnet past. (Collected Poems: 84) He thinks of his situation like that of androgynous God Nataraja (half woman half man contained in a common body) balancing stillness in the middle of dynamic dance (a duel as the poet calls). The poet finds himself in a similar state balancing himself between diverse backgrounds of his own and his wife, the present and the past (still there a drying net on the mountain.). Coming back to reality and world of wakefulness, he finds his wife sleeping calmly undisturbed by her past. My wifes face still fast asleep, blessed as by
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butterfly, snake, shiprope and grandmothers other children, by my only loves only insatiable envy.(ibid) A blessing indeed indicating a similar approach for the poet also to follow. Real love transcends differences and affords calm composure. Of Mothers, Among Other Things is one of the most touching poems that deals with the significance of family and mother in the life of a person. The poem brings out the poets enduring relationship with his mother. The pitiable condition of an aged mother is impressively presented with the deft touch of an imagistic painter. Her hands are a wet eagles two black pink-crinkled feat, one talon crippled in a gardentrap set for a mouse. Her sarees do not cling; they hang, loose feather of a one time wing. (ibid: 61) The poets nostalgic memory, dried up like a twisted blackbone tree recalls the rosy picture of his mother in her youth, active and caring for her children. From her earnings three diamonds splash a handful of needles and I see my mother run back from rain to the crying cradles. The rain broke the tree-tasseled light into rays. The rain may suggest the changing fortunes of life. The effect of age enfeebled his mother who looked like a lean wet eagle. Her fingers became disabled
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and too weak to pick up a grain of rice from the kitchen floor. This pitiable condition affected the poet so much that he felt his tongue dried up like a parchment tasting of bark in his mouth. The expatriate and the local dichotomy disappear as the poet discovers the same unchanging motherhood among other things, among opposing cultural contexts and in the non human animal world. The poem evokes the ideas of birth, survival and death. The personal tone in the first person depiction of the mother image merges into the impersonal world of reality. The youth and the age in the life of a woman are for the most part consumed in rearing the children. The mother is like a bird trying to protect the nestlings in the face of heavy rains. As an eagle cripples a claw in a garden trap while picking a mouse for its nestling a woman is trapped by other things of the world. She has to barter her youth for the ones she brings to the world. One thing becomes obvious from Ramanujans poems centred round women, that is, the poets ungrudging acknowledgement of the powerful role played by women in shaping the personality of a man. In between the lines of his poems, featuring a matriarch one can almost catch a glimpse of the proverb, which states that the hand that rocks the cradle, is the hand that rules the world. In Extended Family, the poet says that even in far-off America, he cannot rid himself of the habits inculcated in him by his mother. Like his mother, he too listens to songs (probably devotional) early in the morning. Like mother, I hear faint morning song (though her it sounds Japanese). (ibid: 169)

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Thus, Ramanujan's poetry abounds in family themes. Family images not only recreate the Indian cultural contexts but evoke in the readers universal human urges responsible for meaningful relationship. He shows us our own photographs, taken in India and processed in the United States. Ramanujan, in his quest for culture, tradition and Indian sensibility explored the theme of family relationships in multifarious ways, which gave him a base for creative use of English as well as for study of human psyche in various contexts. In brief, Ramanujan is like a cater pillar on the family tree.he lives on its leaves and finally is being eaten away by the tree. As the tree for a caterpillar remains its cradle, its alter of growth and finally its pyre similarly Ramanujan finds his fulfillment in his family. The family can even expand its circle of meaning, encompassing both the worlds and forms- the inner and the outer. And even as I add, I lose, decompose, into my elements, into other names and forms, past and passing, tenses without time, caterpillar on a leaf, eating being eaten. (Second Sight: 13)

(b) Familial Figures with Special Reference to Women

Ever since thoughts came to be expressed in the form of verse, women have occupied a place of prominence in the realm of poetry. It is
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true that the treatment meted out to women has varied down the ages. Nevertheless, a poet has not been able to obliterate the presence of woman from his poetical compositions. While some poets have placed woman on a pedestal-fit to be worshipped as a goddess, others have made them their targets of ridicule. In the field of Indian English poetry too, there has hardly been a poet who has left the subject of woman untouched in his poetry. Starting from Derozio whose unfulfilled love affair found an outlet in his love poems, we have others like Toru Dutt, who wrote on the silent suffering of the exiled Sita in her poem 'Sita' and Sarojini Naidu who has painted a gaily, colourful picture of women in her poem Bangle Sellers. In the poems of Tagore, one sees a glowing tribute paid to womanhood in general with his emphasis on the varied parts played by a woman. The works of later poets shed light on the diverse facets of a woman's personalitywoman as the epitome of endurance; woman busy in household chores, woman as the embodiment of self-sacrifice; woman as the epitome of love and compassion. In short, a woman is expected to fit into the shoes of any role assigned to her. A.K. Ramanujan is no exception in giving 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 come rushing to him. In these recollections of the poet, one is able to get a glimpse of his associations with women at different planes.

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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 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. Her careless attitude towards her appearance is revealed in the following lines: .....her hands are a wet eagle's two black pink-crinkled feet, one talon crippled in a garden trap set for a mouse. Her sarees do not cling; they hand, loose feather of a one time wing. (Collected Poems: 61) The poet almost laments the loss of his mother's youth. The mother loses her individual identity amidst her humdrum jobs throughout the day. She has her hands full with sewing, looking after babies and keeping the house immaculatea fusion of many roles rolled into one. Speaking in a similar vein as Ramanujan is Jayanta Mahaptra in his poem entitled A Missing Person. Here he gives the archetypal image of a woman with the oil lamp which may symbolically be interpreted as the woman's quest for identity. Thus, he writes: In the darkened room a woman cannot find her reflection in the mirror. Waiting as usual
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at the edge of sleep. (Mahapatra: 37) However, Sri Aurobindo gives an entirely different picture in his poem entitled To his Mother. Unlike Ramanujan who talks of his mother as he remembers her, Sri Aurobindo pays a glowing tribute to motherhood in general and his mother in particular. So he says: August! Dearest! Whom no thought can trace, Name, murmuring out of birth's infinity, Mother! Like heaven's great face is thy sweet face, (Aurobindo: 14) Elevating his mother to the status of a goddess, he further writes: Goddess, at whose dim heart the world's deep charms Tears, terrors, sobbing things, were yet be? She, from whose tearing pangs in glory first I and the infinite wide heavens burst? (Ibid: 14) Here, the personal and the impersonal are merged into one. Ramanujans poems which are dedicated to his mother do not border on the philosophical. While on the subject of his mother, another feature to be noted in the poetry of Ramanujan is his apparently unsentimental attitude. In the poem entitled Still Another for Mother, a sudden encounter with an unknown lady who unconsciously reminds him of his own mother and he identifies the young man with his own self. Though he has no conversation with either of them, he conjectured that the handsome/shortlimbed man (Still Another for Mother: 15) was the elderly ladys son. He tried to move on casually pretending to be unmoved by the sight before him but for some inexplicable reason, the mother-son- duo arrested his

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attention. The mother found it difficult to go away from the spot as even a glimpse of her son could be seen. The poet too intently watched her :And she just stood there, looking at his walking to me looking at her looking on. She wanted then not to be absent perhaps on the scene if he once so much as even thought of looking back. (ibid: 16) The incident has aroused the poets curiosity so much that he tried to imagine what has taken place between them; Perhaps they had fought. Worse still, perhaps they had not fought. (Ibid: 16) Though the pet tried to be non-chalant about the entire episode, he admits that it had aroused certain recollections in him: Something opened in the past.... (Ibid: 16). Despite his pragmatic approach to life, a womans faint resemblance to his mother jolts him a little, stirring certain memories within him which he probably finds difficult to repress. Like a typical modern poet, Ramanujan is consciously antiromantic. He does not go overboard in the glorification of love nor does he invest his beloved with a luminous halo. Before the advent of the modern age, poets by and large, were emotionally overwhelmed while writing on the theme of love. While some poets solemnize their beloveds, others heaved wistful sighs at their unfulfilled love affairs. Wordsworth mourned the loss of Lucy in The Last Love while in She was a Phantom of Delight he solemnized his beloved as an ethereal spirit endowed with
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exquisite physical beauty. Rober Burns compared his lady love to a beautiful red rose and a lovely, lilting, melody. The earliest Indian English poets were influenced by their British counterparts of the 19 th century in their composition of love poems. In Song of the Hindustanee Minstrel, Derozio attributed an enriching beauty to his love, Dildar and hailing the permanence of love, he writes: Our hearts the same, through worlds may change, Well live, and love, Dildar! (Derozio: 3) While some poets wrote their love poems with their beloveds in mind, there were others like the Italian sonneteers who dedicated their poems to imaginary lady loves. Pragmatism, a pre-eminent feature of Ramanujans poems is evident everywhere, even while the poet deals with the subject of women. In Routine Day Sonnet, he makes no attempt to present a facade of conjugal bliss. In the earlier part of the poem, he enumerates a list of things which form an inseparable part of his daily routine and have no novelty about them. Perhaps, the relationship with his wife has also reached a state of stale familiarity (Hardy: 1939:3) (to borrow an expression from Thomas Hardy). It is this mundanity which results in emotional unfulfilment and alienation. Thus, he writes towards the conclusion of the poem: But I wake with a start to hear my wife cry her heart out as if from a crator in hell; she hates me, I hater her Im a filthy rat and a satyr. (Collected Poems: 68)
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Ramanujans down-to-earth treatment of marriage bordering on mundane realism reminds us of Nissim Ezekiels poem named Marriage. In the opening stanza of the poem, he paints an idyllic picture of marriage. To the lovers marriage is an eternal union which was already fixed in heaven and merely 72olemnized on the earth. He says: Lovers, when they marry face Eternity with touching grace complacent at being fated Never to be separated. (Ezekiel: 32) There is an undercurrent of boredom as he speaks of the stereotyped aspects of wedding. The poet also focuses on the physical side of marriage. The bride is always pretty, the groom A lucky man. The darkened room roars out the joy of flesh and blood. (Ibid: 32) The bitter sweet relationship that exists between the two partners as delineated by Ramanujan is reiterated by Ezekiel: However many times we came apart, we came together. The same thing over and over again. (Ibid: 32) Actually, the modern poets believe in the actualities of living, rather than dwelling in the world of dreams. A.K. Ramanujan makes no attempt to steer clear of the basic tenets of modernity in literature. There have been several poems in literature where the poet personae have fallen victims to the irresistible sensual appeal of women. In their eagerness to
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emphasize the physical appeal of the fairer sex, the Metaphysical poets, particularly, have at times paints slightly disturbing images of women. Donne, for example, has described a woman as a bracelet of hair wrapped around the bone. Ramanujan too talks of sensual fulfillment in his poem, Still Another View of Grace. The first part of the poem deals with the poets inner struggle to keep all temptations at bay. He was determined not to malign his clean image of a gentle man by any licentious behaviour: ..Beware Do not follow a gentlemans moral With that absurd determined air. (Collected Poems: 45) But his wall of self-imposed code of morality soon begins to crumble and before long, he makes an absolute surrender at the altar of physical gratification: Commandments Crumbled In my fathers past. Her tumbled hair Suddenly known As silk in my angry hand, I shook A little And took her, behind the laws Of my land. (Ibid : 45) Thus, morality too begins to waver before the irresistible attraction of a woman. If one compares Ramanujan to Tagore, one finds that both are widely divergent in the treatment of their subject. Unlike Ramanujan, Tagore would crave for emotional fulfillment, rather the gratification of physical desires, even if it meant a willful creation of tangible material
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distance. Ramanujans admittance of the fact that a man can be swept off his feet (even to the extent of compromising with his moral standards) in the face of feminine charm is a downright and realistic portraiture of human relationships. In this particular poem, Still Another View of Grace, the poet persona finds fulfillment beyond the threshold of marriage, providing that modern poetry is not divorced from the actual conditions prevailing in society. The Archetypal image of the woman, as a torchbearer of idealism, receives a severe blow. Frailty thy name is woman, (Shakespeare :14) wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet insinuating at an extra-marital affair, in The Hindoo: He Doesnt Hurt a fly or a Spider Either , Ramanujhan makes a dig at the woman who is dissatisfied with her conjugal life tries to derive the joy of sexual fulfillment outside wedlock. The poet gives the concept of the new liberated woman who instead of living for others, lives for herself. However, the joy of this forbidden pleasure does not drift into eternity and is rather short-lived as is obvious from the lines: .one day, spiderFashion, she clamped down and bit Him while still insider her, (Shakespeare: 14) Perhaps, the wife regards herself as a failure in upholding the sanctity of marriage and spurns her lover brusquely terminating the relationship. Though the cuckolded husband here is a mute spectator of his wifes adulterous relationship and does not give vent to his displeasure in any way, the wife chooses to put and end to this liaison on her own. Here,

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does the poet hint at the fact that a womans conscience, which though may be dormant for a time, is reawakened sooner or later? Having a comprehensive grip over the Indian psyche, the poet is also aware that in most Indian households, unmarried sisters are a responsibility to be dispensed with, so, he writes in Obituary. Father, when he passed on, left dust on a table full of papers, left debts and daughters, (ibid: 5). Placing debts and daughters on the same plane hints at the unpleasant reality that both are a burden on the shoulders to be off-loaded at the earliest opportunity. Thus, a sisters company is not only a source of happiness but it also enjoins with it a sense of duty. The fact that a sisters marriage is of prime concern to the poet is amply borne by the lines, which occur in A Leaky Tap After a Sisters Wedding: Our sisters were of various sizes, one was ripe for a husband and we were not poor. (11) One gets a glimpse of his intimacy with his sister towards the conclusion of the same poem: My sister and I have always wished a tree could strike or at least, writhe like that other snake we saw under the beak of the crow. (9)

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Ramanujans poems also reveal the pre-eminent role played by his sister in his childhood. In later years, he vividly recalls the little anecdotes centered round her. While on the theme of women, Ramanujan takes care to include the subject of daughters as well in the poetry. In Routine Day Sonnet, he appears quite the doting father as he meticulously mentions the daily activities he enjoys with his daughter. A walk before dark with my daughter to mark another cross on the papaya tree; dinner, coffee, bedtime story of dog, bone and shadow. (Ibid: 78) In the poem entitled On the Very Possible Jaundice of an Unborn Daughter, he casually mentions with the help of natural imagery, the colour of his daughters eyes. ..how can my daughter help those singing yellows in the whites of her eyes? (ibid: 68) In Extended Family, the poet denotes the similarly between him and his daughter. Like my little daughter I play shy (ibid :14) The first sub-title of the poem Some Relations is Nursery Turtles. Here, he described the pet turtles, which are tended by his daughter. My daughters turtles try

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To hibernate in the jar, very far from the ocean. (ibid: 170) While discussing the varied roles of women, Ramanujan graduates from writing about his immediate family to an extended one. Thus, aunts, girl- cousins and grandmothers regularly feature in his poems. The poem titled History delineates an interesting anecdote, which, apart from centering round a particular incident also sheds light into the inner recesses of a womans mind. The poem begins with the description of a somber incidentthe death of a relative. In a matter of fact tone, the poet describes how after the death of his great aunt, her two daughters instead of mourning their mothers loss, vied with each other, secretly removing the ornaments from her body. Her two daughters one dark one fair, unknown each to the other alternately picked their mothers body clean before it was cold or the eyes were shut of diamond earrings, bangles, anklets, the pin in her hair, the toe-rings from her wedding the previous century all except the gold in her teeth and and the silver g-string they didnt know she wore her napkins on to the great disgust of the orthodox widows who washed her body at the end. (ibid :101)

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It was only after the accomplishment of the task that the aunt appeared satisfied: And the dark stone face of my little aunt acquired some expression at last. (ibid: 108) A womans natural fondness for jewellery, here takes an unpleasant turn changing into an almost insatiable thirst for gold. As greed raises its ugly head, a mothers bereavement also fails to inflict any visible pain. Being close to the roots of his native culture despite his long stay abroad, Ramanujan is aware that the word family has a broader significance in Indian than anywhere else in the world. The orbit of siblings is not limited to ones own brothers and sisters but it includes a wide gamut of cousins as well. Looking for a Cousin on a Swing is one such poem which paints a picture of an enjoyable experience of a common place incident of sharing a swing with a girl cousin. The swinging delights experienced by the cousins were too deeply imprinted to be erased. It was an innocent fun-filled experience and the close proximity of a girl did not kindle any carnal instinct. According to the poet, it was one of those rare untainted experiences in life wherein the little boy and girl (because of their ages) are looked upon as playmates and nothing more. When she was four or five she sat on a village swing and her cousin, six or seven, sat himself against her; with every lunge of the swing

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she felt him in the lunging pits of her feeling; and afterwards we climbed a tree, she said, not very tall, but full of leaves like those of a fig tree, and we were very innocent about it. (Ibid: 108) Any mention of the word grandmother immediately conjures up an image of boundless love and affection an affable old woman with an unending reservoir of fascinating tales. Understanding the psyche of little children who huddle together at a grandmothers knee, craving to bask in her exuding warmth, perhaps prompted Ramanujan to write the poem entitled Lines to a Granny. Here the grandmother patiently answers all questions pertaining to the tale of the sleeping princess who was awakened from her hundred-year slumber by a prince who braved all odds to reach the forgotten castle. An age-old story retains its freshness of appeal because of the grandmothers deftness in the art of story telling. The poem begins with the childs enthusiastic queries about the story of The Sleeping Beauty, Granny, tell me again in the dark about the wandering prince; and his steed, with a neem leaf mark upon his brow, will prance again to splash his noonday image in the sleep of these pools. (Ibid: 19) The child had heard the story so often from the grandmother that it rattles off the entire story but wants to hear it all over again. The story is
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told and re-told by grandmothers down the ages but its timeless appeal remains intact. As the poem draws to a close, the child wonders whether the story is a figment of the imagination or an experience in truth. But tell me now: was it for some irony you have waited in death to let me learn again what once you learnt in youth, that this is no tale, but truth? (ibid: 17) Today, there are no children pestering the grandmother for stories. She does not need to constantly replenish her stock of tales for inquisitive listeners. However, her priority in life remains the samethe desire to see her loved ones happy. Her heart throbbed Tonight I can sleep Sans pills. She heaved. (ibid: 38) Ramanujan does not confine his depiction of women to the web of personal relationships alone. Many of his poems mention women outside the gamut of personal relations. The poem, Son to Father, for instance, describes the vulnerability of a woman very succinctly. It is no dream to see a son skewered or a daughter lowered like a match into a sulphur mine of hungry men. (ibid: 135) In the poem Difference, the poet gives a vivid account of how women work shoulder to shoulder with men to produce finished works of clay. The beads of perspiration are not only visible on the mens faces but
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the women too slog equally hard while making picture- perfect clay models of men, women, toys and animals. The women mould a core of clay and straw, wind around it strings of beeswax on which the men do the fine work of eyes and toe nails. (ibid: .171) A streak of feminism is evident in Ramanujan when he champions the cause of women in poems such as The Guru. In this poem, he resents the unrelenting attitude of the world at large to women in general. Forgive the weasel his tooth forgive the tiger his claw but do not forgive the woman her malice. (ibid: 251) He does not regard in favourable light the fact that a womans independence is greatly curbed. In fact, her will is often regarded as subservient even to that of animals. Thus, in a sarcastic tone, he writes: Give the dog his bone, the parrot his seed, the pet snake his mouse but do not give the woman her freedom. (Ibid: 251) The broadened outlook of the poet persona, however, does not allow him to stand the humiliation of a woman much longer. So, at the end of the poem, very unceremoniously, he leaves the service of his master as he recalled his own bonding with a woman. For I remembered I was a man born of woman. (Ibid: 251)

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In the poem named On Not Learning from Animals, the poet realizes that it is not only among human beings that women are snubbed but among the animals too, the female of the species are regarded as an inferior lot. Actually, whether among men or animals the females have always been dominated by their male counterparts. Thus, the persona of the poem while empathizing with his mother who does not have the freedom to exercise her will realizes that she is not alone in her predicament. Not only a woman but a female animal too is a victim of male Chauvinism. So he says: But then I forgot how troubled I was when I saw, at seventeen, after quarrelling a female ape with a black stiped snout sort out patiently with her long hands, then sniff, and lick lettuce leaves clean for her lord and master while he growled all through. (Collected Poems:217) Though not overtly sympathetic, Ramanujan is definitely aware of the fact that women have been helpless victims of the atrocities committed by men down the ages. In The Opposable Thumb, the poet mentions the grandmother who is bereft of one fingera standing testimony of her husbands uncontrollable temper. Just one finger left of five, a real thumb no longer usual, casual or opposable after husbands
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knifing temper one Sunday morning half a century ago.(ibid :6) While speaking on the subject of women, one thing is clear in Ramanujans poetry, that is, his consciously unromantic attitude in general. Though a streak of fondness may be discernible in a selected few poems, but by and large, he does not fashion his thoughts in the romantic mould. In A Rather Foolish Sentiment Said of Course to a Girl Sometime Ago, he admits his inability of a romantic courtship. He asserts: I have no head for tunes, so into the dark I can carry no singing voices, no flutes, no eye for colours either, so no pigments for my cave men painting, nor even the gold and the silver filamentsthat lanterns are said to throw upon you hair. (ibid: 18) In the opening lines of the poem Not Knowing, the poet confesses that he is at a loss of words when he sees a young lady in the park. It is perhaps the lack of verbosity on his part that the possible friendship is nipped in the bud itself. Not knowing what to say to her I walk into the park and watch the sparrows she is sitting on a green bench watching sparrows. (ibid: 216)
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It is perhaps the physical aspect that matters to him more than the inner sensibility. But here too, he appears to be confused. While jostling his way through a crowd, he suddenly stumbled upon the girl in question. Thus, he writes: but only the passing touch of people whom I once touched in passing when they let me pass. Perhaps it will not pass, for in that touch I think I stumbled on a pulse, and wondered like a fool who has no proper sense of body if it were yours, or mine, and wondered if you wondered too.(Ibid :18) In many of the poems, the poet persona view woman as an instrument of gratification of the senses, rather than as a companion for a lifetime. In the poem entitled The Day Went Dark, he delineates the physical appeal of the woman in the following words: I loved a woman, with turquoise eyes, navel like a whirlpool in a heap of wheat and the day went dark my hands were lizards my heart turned into a hound.(ibid :232)

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In the given poem, it appears as if the persona of the poem stubbornly refuses to penetrate the exterior of the lady in question and discover her inner beauty. Love 5 is another such poem that focuses on the carnal aspects of the relationship between a man and a woman. The poet leaves little to the imagination as he gives a bare and rugged picture of the anatomical details of a womans body. In the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, particularly in his treatment of women, one at times finds an echo of the novelist George Bernard Shaw. Like Shaw, Ramanujan too seems to select woman as an agent of the Life Force (a power working upon the minds and hearts of individuals seeking to raise them to a higher level of life). The poet regards woman as an instrument required for the continuation of procreation. So in Looking and Finding, he writers: Looking for a system, he finds a wife. Was it Vallejo who said, How anger breaks down a man into children? (ibid: 179) In the poem titled, Why I Cannot Finish This Book , the poet reaffirms the strong influence of a woman through a personal experience. The fairy tales which he had savoured in infancy remain firmly itched in his memory long after the blissful days of childhood are over. Thus, he writes: Letting so of fairy tales is letting so of what will not let go:

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mother, grandmother the fat cook in widows white who fed me rice and ogress. (ibid: 169) Thus, it becomes clear that the women not only looked after his physical well being but also enriched his mind in their own way. The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan focuses not only on the women of the material world but it also throws light upon those ethereal female deities dwelling in the celestial spheres. Thus, a number of his poems mention the goddesses of Hindu mythology. In the poem A Devotees Complaint, the poet talks of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. It is not very pleasant to incur the wrath of these goddesses: Try to curry favour with Lakshmi you lose an eye-tooth Saraswati, she slaps you hard and where her fingers touch your cheek, you have no hair so you have to shave close or bear her four finger mark on your face. (ibid: 237) A.K. Ramanujan, the poet, noted for his philosophy of detached sensibility appears to have made not only a comprehensive study of woman as a whole but also an in-depth analysis of the secret chambers of
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a womans heart. A careful study of his poems thus provides a psychological insight into a womans mind. The poet pens down with great precision the almost accurate characteristics of a womans nature. In The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare had written Love is blind, yet lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.(Shakespeare: 1990:208) Ramanujan too thinks that at least as far as women are concerned, love definitely does not take recourse to any logic. In the poem Love 1: What She Said, the young lady in question is so smitten by the charms of her lover that she stubbornly refuses to see the darker aspects of his personality. In the very first stanza, she admits that her green-eyed lover does not possess a heart of gold. His eyes are moss green His blood is cold His heart is a piece of lead. (Collected Poems: 219) Her subsequent findings about him are even more alarming. But surprisingly, his rapacious behaviour too does not disturb her in any way. His face is razor clean His liver is on old He raped his niece Shes dead. (Ibid: 219) The man she loved not only had robbed a woman of her virginity but was also responsible for her death. The besotted young woman was oblivious to his other discrepancies also. The fact that his mother has not a nice

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woman or that they did not earn their livelihood honestly did not turn her away from him. His mothers mean theyve stabbed and sold puppies and monkeys for bread. (Ibid: 219) The lady consciously chooses to turn a blind eye to his faults, so smitten is she, by the charms of his love. She feels fully gratified even if he so much as casts a look at her. Yet I grow lean his heart is gold to my greed. My eyes are fed when he turns his head.(Ibid: 219) The woman is so much infatuated with him that the ignoble tendencies of his nature do not have any adverse effect on her. So, his heart which is actually of lead, appears to be of gold of her ensnared being. Ramanujan, who is well aware of the feminine psyche, knows that a woman is not comfortable with the idea of getting old. In fact, one of the best compliments that can be paid to a woman is that she looks younger than her actual age. Keeping this in mind probably, the poet has composed the poem Love 4: What He Said to His Daughter . Here, he has mentioned that women do not like to cross the threshold of eighteen years. In the first stanza, the poet persona is taken aback that his teenaged daughter should fall in love with a seventy year old man. I love him, she said

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at eighteen. But hes seventy, I said, ...... (ibid: 227) As a sixty-three year old man, he has come to the conclusion that women like to remain young forever. That all the women Ive ever loved Have stayed eighteen Forever. (Ibid: 228) He goes on to give the example of Pierre Bennard, who always portrayed his wife as a woman of thirty-six years in his painting. She remained thirty-six years old for over a period of three decades. Pierre Bennard always painted his wife as thirty six getting in and out of bathtubs, sleek, naked on diamond squares of blue tile till she was seventy three.

(Ibid. : 228)

Not only did her age remain static but her beauty and glamour too did not diminish in the portraits. If a man views a woman as an object of his passion, a woman too seeks physical gratification. The only difference perhaps is that while a man openly admits his desire for sexual fulfillment, a woman, more often than not, pretends to be disinterested. She also forcefully tries to keep all carnal desires at bay. In a humorous vein, the poet describes in Mythologies 3 how a newly wedded bride pretends to be indifferent to a
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physical relationship with her husband. Considering herself an ardent devotee of Lord Shiva, she spurned any kind of union with a mortal being. In the first stanza, she threatened her husband with dire consequences if he dared to touch her. Keep off when I worship Shiva Touch me three times, and youll never See me again, said Akka to her new groom. Who couldnt believe his ears? (228) Here whole body echoed with the intonation of Om. Her husband, however, refused to see her as a spiritual being and craved for a physical union. Om, Om! she seemed to intone in bed with every breath and all he could think of was her round breast, her musk, her darling navel and the rest. Finally, when he did muster, enough courage to touch her against her will, she did succumb to his temptations. So he hovered and touched her, her body death by cold to mortal touch but hot for Gods first move, a caress like nothing on earth. She fled his hand as she would a spider. Threw away her modesty, as the roods and cones of her eyes gave the world a new birth. (Ibid: 228) Thus, despite her initial reservations, the young bride shoved aside her self-imposed celibacy and proceeded to enjoy the fruits of conjugal bliss. Now, she beheld the divine image of Shiva in her earthly husband. She also felt that the vehicle of Shiva, Nandi, the celestial bull and the
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ordinary bull grazing in her house were one and the same. All differences were resolved and there was a merger of the body with the spirit. She saw Him then, unborn, form of forms, the Rider, His white bull chewing cud in her backyard. (Ibid: 228) In the poem, Any Cows Horn Can Do It, the poet takes a peep into a womans heard and paints her as a deeply sensitive being. Here, he does not talk of a particular woman or a female relative but of women in general. A woman is naturally blessed with the gift of empathy. So, she is easily affected by the happenings around her. Moreover, she also got a sharp memory. The minutest details of everyday incidents are carefully preserved in the store house of her mind. The opening lines of the above mentioned poem depict how a woman is deeply pained by the death of a cousin. She cannot suppress her sorrow within herself and must give vent to it by weeping loudly. Mention any cousins death in the walled redfort city, shell weep aloud with not throught of neighbours. (ibid : 93) A sudden recollection of an embarrassing experience of her girlhood days is enough to make her blush as she relives the incident once again. Any reminder of her youths market places crawling with feeling hands, eyes groping for the hidden hooks that hold together little girls and she will glow green fire from all nine walls of a womans shame.(Ibid: 93)

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The day she had been taken to task by her parents for having deviated from the code of conduct set before her is too strongly embedded in her subconscious mind to be forgotten. Not only had she been severely reprimanded by her father when he caught her in the lobby of a hotel but her mother too expressed her disapproval very strongly. Even after having matured into womanhood, she still shudders to think of this unpleasant incident. Shell grow cold remembering what is not forgotten: getting belted by father standing on a doorstep with a long strip of cow hide and the family idiom the day he caught her in the hotel lobby, mothers mouth working red over betel leaf and betel nut, the clove ground into the nutmegs of satisfaction seeing a disobedient daughter brought to her senses. (Ibid: 93) Though the mother did not voice aloud her thoughts but her betel stained mouth betrayed the approval of seeing her daughters freedom curbed. A woman is very easily disturbed by the slightest hint of discord. No sooner is she distressed by something than she forgets even her daily household chores. The cooking may get burnt and the children may go about presenting an uncared for appearance but the woman remains oblivious to the lapse of duty on her part. Any old quarrel over novel, movie, or a suspicion of pregnancy is enough

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to make wife, sister or girl friend walk silent from room to room smouldering with no care for burned rice or the black nails of children before visitors; a soreness on two granules of her throat will do it. (Ibid: 93) More often than not, a woman falls victim to insomnia. Pre-occupied with her own thoughts, she spends many sleepless nights lying awake. Any disturbing incident robs a woman of her peace of mind and often she lies awake at a stretch till the wee hours of the morning when it is time to get up. Any number of things can make a woman lie awake and watch window-squares crawl out, grow oblong and vanish all night long with every car in the street till mornings small shadowless hour.(Ibid :93-94) A womans heart is so tender that it reaches out to an unknown child who many have been hurt in any way, say, even by a cows horn. However, despite the inherent tenderness and her naturally empathetic nature, a woman is immune to anything that is not tangible. In other words, according to Ramanujan, she refuses to be emotionally stirred by any piece of creative writing. Closely woven in the web of human relationships, a woman cannot empathize with an imaginary situation. For instance, she remains unmoved by the emotions expressed by a poem: but nothing you say with words
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in a poem will make her scream, get sick, or go grey in the face Youll never do it, for poems cannot fly like yes or hurt like a fall on the side walk cannot replace the panic runs for imaginary children in the middle room of a house with the porch on fire. (Ibid:94) The poet feels that a woman cannot feel the pulse of a poem unless she can identify with the characters or incidents described in it. A woman is moved by a particular poem only if she does not feel alienated from its content. Even if she can relate it to a distant relative, she feels she is a part of the poem. Poems arent even words enough to rankle, infect or make the smallest incisions unless wife, girl friend or sister and Im not talking of strangers or the unborn somehow are made to think its all about their shame in the market, or and elegy on the death of a far off cousin.(Ibid : 78) It is strange but true nevertheless that a mothers image is so deeply rooted in the subconscious mind of a man, that even in his wife, he unconsciously looks for the image of his mother. In the poem, titled Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees , the poet draws a parallel between the woman and his dead mother. So, in the very first stanza, he writes: Dear woman, you never let me forget
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what I never quite remember: Youre not Mother, certified dead but living on, close to her children. (Ramanujan :180) The poet persona not only reminds himself that the woman in question is not his mother but he has to forcefully remember that she is not his daughter either: Dear woman, you remind me again in unlikely places like post offices where I lick your stamps, that I must remember youre not my daughter, unborn may be but always present. (Ibid:181) At the conclusion of the poem, he delineates the complete picture of a woman. He depicts the multi-various roles she is expected to play. The varied roles played by a woman are finally merged into a comprehensive whole. The man views the woman as a merger of a mother, daughter, sister, wife and companion. Yet I know youll play at jewish mama, sob-sister, daughter who needs help with arithmetic, even the sex pot next door, topless tree spirit on a temple frieze, or plain Indian wife at the village well, so I can play son, father, brother, marcho lover, gaping tourist, and clumsy husband.(Ibid:183) The wife, according to the poet, cannot be singled out to play an individual role. She is expected to enact the parts of caring mother, a sympathetic sister (who weeps at the slightest provocation), a daughter
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depending on her father for help, an attractive consort and at the same time a dutiful wife. It pampers a mans ego to feel that a woman looks up to him for protection and needs help at every step of her life. Thus, an in-depth analysis of A.K. Ramanujans poems centred around women calls to mind a poem entitled Woman composed by Teresinka Perara of Bluffton (USA) published in The Quest. You are resignation you are the rush to help those who in the afternoon have longing eyes and ancient sorrow. Woman, you are a city where all the men live and breathe and name you as they would a place when they reach their homes Woman, you are regression History, terminal, melancholy you are a way of dying slowly, of moving eternally, you are habit, panic, fear resignation but always, along with all of this you are all heart.(Pereire.)

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Reference
Daruwalla, K. N. Ramanujan, The Expatriate Local, Indian Literature, 162(July-Aug.) 1994. Hardy, Thomas. The Life and the Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge , Macmillan and Co. Ltd.1939. Mahapatra, Jayanta. A Missing Person An Anthology of Indian English Poetry,Edited by a Board of Editors, Orient Longman. Parthasarathy, R. A. K. Ramanujan, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, Delhi:OUP,1976. Pereira, Teresinka. Woman, The Quest- A Bi-Annual Journal of Indian Writing in English, Vol.xi, June, 1995, Ed.Ravi Nandan Sinha. Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan- Molly Daniels-Ramanujan(Ed.)New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Satchidanandan, K. Reflections: The World Mean, Indian Literature, 162, (July-Aug.) 1994. Shakespear, William. Hamlet, (Ed.) A. W. Verity, Radha Publishing House, Calcutta, 1990.

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Wordsworth,William. Tintern Abbey, An Anthology of Poems for Degree Course, (Ed.) David Green, Macmillan India Ltd., 1979.

Chapter III Nostalgia as the Backdrop

(a) Memories and Relations
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. (Parthasarathy: 1976:95) No doubt, Ramanujan to be ever inspired in the face of his relations his mother, father, wife, children, uncles cousins and his other
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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 words of S. Nagrajan, 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. (Saleem: 1972: 18) 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 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. His poem from the collection, Looking for a Cousin on a Swing , is lyric poem. The poem preserves the poets childhood memory of a cousin who was his play-fellow when they were children. They would sit together on a swing and move rapidly. Experiencing the innocent physical touch they also used to climb a tree with dense foliage. The girl, grown up and probably married is unable to forget the pleasure of the swing. She looks for the swing in the cities with fifteen suburbs where she is settled after marriage. She longs for the same physical touch, physical pleasure.
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When she was four or five she sat on a village swing and her cousin, six or seven, sat himself against her; with every lunge of the awing she felt him, in the lunging pits of her feeling; And afterwards we climbed a tree she said, not very tall but ful of leaves like those of a fig tree, and we were very innocent about it. (Collected poems: 19) The childhood innocence no doubt is lost and maturity has stepped in. It brings a lot of difference in the relationship. She desires for a relationship and yearns for her past days. The nostalgic longing for childhood days are expressed in this poem. The mood of nostalgia is evident throughout the poem. Ramanujans A River is one of the best poems to be dealt in regard to this aspect. The river which flows through the city of Madurai is a symbol of timelessness. It represents the central flow of culture, the culture of his father. Madurai, earlier, was the city of temples, symbolizing the spiritual culture of man. By remembering this river, the poet remembers his father who belonged to this highly spiritual, conservative and traditional background. It is this culture which has been inherited by the son. To the poets who sang of cities and temples,
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spiritual attainment was considered the highest mark of civilization. But now, Every summer A river dries to trickle In the sand, (Collected Poems: 38) Modernism results in disintegration. The once stable values give way under the onslaught of Westernisation. In this way the poem also presents a harsh criticism on the old and the new poets. The poem is a piece of cynical criticism aimed at poets who force themselves to look only at the beautiful things in life and involuntarily ape the same lines quoted by the poets for ages together. The poets write about the sensational themes but are not moved by the tragic and pathetic sights. They see around, a river in the poem is Vaikai which flows through Madurai. The poet remembers the city and the river. The river is described in the first stanza. It is just like a trickle. In Madurai, City of temples and poets Who sang of cities and temples: Every summer A river dries to a trickle, In the sand Baring the sand-ribs, (ibid: 38) The womens hair and straw clog the flow of the water. The images of rusty bars of the bridges, stones looking like crocodiles, dry stones

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looking like the shaven water-buffaloes and vivid and pictorial quality to the poem. The wet stones glistening like sleepy Crocodiles, the dry ones Shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun. (ibid.) Contrasted to his picture is flooded river in the rainy season. Nature has creating and destroying power. The flood carries away three village houses, two cows and a pregnant woman. Neither the new nor the old poets seem to be sensitive and responsive to suffering. The callousness of the modem poets to the suffering is irritating. The destruction caused by flood is not poetic at all. For the poets the river becomes subject of poetry only when it is flooded. The new poets were indifferent to the human suffering. The next poem Of Mothers, Among Other Things, is a remarkable poem dealing with the poets nostalgia of his past. The poet remembers his mother and recalls her youth, middle age and old age. He describes his mother in youth as beautiful and delicate like silk and white petals of a flower. I smell upon this twisted Backbone tree the silk and white Petals of my mothers youth. (ibid: 61) He remembers his mothers three diamond earrings that glittered like sunlight. In the middle age, his mother used to run to the cradles to

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calm the crying baby. The rain stands for the years of misfortunes, She faced tackling and sewing. Splash a handful of needles, And I see my mother run back, From rain to the crying cradles, The rains tack and sew. ( ibid.) She grew old and withered. Her hands became wrinkled like and eagles feet. In her old age, her sari hung loose around her like broken feathers of a wounded bird. Thus, the poet becomes nostalgic about his mothers memory. He says: My cold parchment tongue licks bark, in the mouth when I see her four still sensible fingers slowly flex, to pick a grain of rise from the kitchen floor. (ibid) Another poem which reflects the mood of nostalgia is Love Poem for a Wife. The poem is about the unhappy married life, its conflicts and problems.the poet uses a wife instead of my life this kind of use hints at the slight alienation of the two as life-partners. In the first poem the poet suggests that the main cause for this alienation is their unshared childhood. (65) The poet in a nostalgic mood says, Really what kept us apart at the end of years is unshared childhood. You cannot for instance, meet my father. He is some years dead. Neither can I meet yours:
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he has lately lost his temper and mellowed. (65) He did not find emotional fulfillment in his relationship with his wife. The emotional detachment, alienations has resulted from the fact that they have not been able to share each others childhood experiences. There is no spiritual and emotional unity. Physically they are one but emotionally they are not. The poet seeks to find the emotional fulfillment in the relationship. The whole poem is geared up to highlight the hiatus underlying the relationship of the poet with his wife, who is directly addressed as you. Commenting on the poem, Dr. Chirantan Kulshrestha writes that it ends with the problematic uncertainty with which it begins (Self in Ramanujans poetry: 1978-79:115) In the second love poem, the poet becomes even more nostalgic and attempts to strike a note of compromise between him and his wife. the poem is divided into two sections,- the first section introducing a number of incidents, people and places associated with his wifes past, while the second alluding to a serious crisis for the poet as the wife loses her temper at trifles. The poem expresses poets mood in the following lines, I dreamed one day That face my own yet hers, With my own nowhere To be found; lost; cut Loose like my dragnet Past. (Collected Poems: 68) Ramanujans Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House, is a poem of the nostalgic memory of his childhood. The poet gives a long list
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of things that enter the great house but never leave the house. Things such as cows, books, sweet dishes, daughters-in-law and even the song of a beggar enter the house. His nostalgic memories of the ancestral house and the joint-families are revived in this poem. The things lost long ago revive in the speakers memory. He says: 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; lame wandering cows from nowhere have been known to be thethered, given a name, encouraged to get pregnant in the broad daylight of the secret under the elders supervision, the girls hiding behind windows with holes in them. ( ibid: 97) The poet intermingles comic, tragic touches together. The widowed daughters, the dead soldiers, the sons-in-law are a part of the poem. In a way, the poet makes an exposure of the great ancestral house having, a vast digestive and assimilative power.(Dwivedi: 1995:90) The poet remembers some of the events of his life in this great house. Obviously, it is a large house still following the traditional Hindu joint-family system and having the wonderful capacity to all in-coming things and persons.

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Ramanujans poetry is a recollection of emotions. Memory unfolds itself in his mind. He has the memories of the south Indian family life. Indian sensibility is present in almost all things. The Outer forms and Inner forms suggest the linguistic situation and cultural determinates respectively, which act upon him simultaneously. His poetry is the outcome of the interaction of these two forces. He has to convey the psyche of one culture in an alien language. Praising Ramanujan as the best of Indo-Anglien poets. R. Parthasarathy wrote: Both The Strider (1996) and Relations (1974) are the heir of an interior tradition, a tradition very much of the subcontinent, the deposits of which are in Kannada and Tamil, and which have been assimilated into English. Ramanujans deepest roots are in the Kannada and Tamil past and he has repossessed that past, in fact made it available, in English language. I consider this a significant achievement, one almost without a parallel in the history of Indian English verse. Ramanujan has, it seems to me, successfully conveyed in English what, at its subtlest and most incantational, is locked up in another linguistic tradition. (Parthasarathy: 34) A.K. Ramanujan taught Dravidian linguistics at Chicago in America for twenty years but he mentally lived in India. His collected poems create a jaunting effect because he is a sensitive expatriate who has not forgotten his own soil. He nostalgically remembers: In Madurai City of temples and poets who sang of cities And temples.
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(Collected Poems:19) In this way, Ramanujan makes a conscious effort to be Indian in his sensibility in spite of his prolonged stay in the West. Ramanujan also presents a pleasant picture of Chicago just as he does that of Alleppey: In Chicago it blows hot and cold Trees play fast and loose. Small flies sit on aspirin and booze. Enemies have guns. Friends have doubts. Wives have lawyers. (ibid: 103) Ramanujan presents quixotic picture of Chicago as compared to that of his native Karnataka. These two selves continually interact in the poetry of Ramanujan. Ramanujan is a typically Indian when he recalls that his patterns of sorrow are his own, inherited from his own collective Hindu unconscious: And when I burn I should smile dry-eyed And nurse a martinis, like the marginal man, But sorry, I cannot unlearn Conventions of despair. They have their pride. But I must seek and will find My particular hell only in my Hindu mind. (ibid: 34) The Conventions of Despair is a poem written in the tone of John Donne: Yes, I know all that, I should be modern.
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Marry again. See trippers at the tease. (34). The casual tone is reminiscent of the great metaphysical poet. Ramanujan had an unusual ability to bring alive the picture of the object before the minds eye. In the following passage, he recreates the familiar picture of snakes: A basketful of ritual cobras comes into the tame little house, their brain-wheat glisten ringed with ripples. they lick the room with their bodies, curve uncurling writing a sibilant alphabet of panic on my floor. (ibid: 4) The phrase a sibilant alphabet of panic provides the characteristic quidditas of snakes, whereas ripples gives the idea of fluidity and suppleness of the movement of snakes. For this reason, Ramanujan is predominantly an imagist poet. Dom Moraes has great praise for the way Ramanujan says things: Ramanujans technique was a natural one: he used assonance, off rhyme, internal rhyme, shifts of metre, from very early on in his career. (The Times of India: June 18: 1995). It is because of this quality that there is fine starling fusion of form and content in the poetry of Ramanujan. Ramanujan expresses his nostalgic feelings with fierce originality. He believes that grace can come not only through religion, tradition and culture but also through sex. He writes with blatant frankness: Commandments crumbled in my fathers past. her tumble hair suddenly known as silk in my angry hand, I shook a little and took her, behind the laws of my land
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(Collected Poems: 45). This comes very close to W.B. Yeats lines: That some streak of lightning From that old man in the skies Can burn out the suffering No right-taught man denies But a course old man am I I choose the second best And forget it all a-while Upon a womans breast. Ramanujans poetry is a fine integration of India and America. P. Mallikarjuna Rao has rightly said: While the influence of the West is evident in his many-faceted irony, the impact of the native culture is borne out by his imagery, setting and milieu and nostalgia. (Bhatnagar: 59) Ramanujans strong point is the frequent use of powerful images. These images give exposure to his nostalgic passions. This can be well seen in his poems. While using this technique, Ramanujan prefers the precise, the particular and the concrete to the vague, the general and the abstract. This can be seen how Ramanujan brings alive the striders before the minds eye. He describes with sensitivity how striders balance themselves in water. This brings to mind the picture of Christ in Lycidas: Him who walked the waves. In Ramanujan this sentence becomes: No, not only prophets/walk on water. (Collected Poems: 3)

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Thus, he describes the amphibian quality of striders who move with equal ease on land and water. In Striders, powerful Gods are pitted against the weightless insects of New England. Another important cause of nostalgia in Ramanujans poetry is his excessive pre-occupation with family. This is this theme that recurs in many poems. It is obvious in his description of ancestral house. Some time 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-----(ibid :96). Thus, many of Ramanujans poems reflect the fact that his roots bind him to the early years of his childhood. Though memories constitute a major section of Ramanujans poetry, he does not draw any succor by falling back on these reflections. At times, he has a skeptical attitude even towards the nature of memory. The poem entitled Lines to a Granny can still be regarded bordering on fond remembrances. Ramanujan has a great regard for his grandmother for she is a symbol of past glory. Here, the poet vividly recalls the breath-taking fairy tales savoured by him long ago at his grandmothers knee. The fact that he yearns to relive those moments once again is a prominent streak of sentimentalism in his otherwise detached sensibility. The poem begins with these lines : Granny, tell me again in the dark about the wandering prince; and his steed, with a neem-leaf mark
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upon hi brow, will prance again to splash his noonday image in the sleep of these pools. He will break with sesame words know only to the birds, the cobweb-curtained door; and wake the sentinel, the bawdy cook; the parrot in the cage will shout his name to the gossip of the kitchens blousy flame. (Collected Poems: 17) Ramanujan continues the tale of The sleeping Beauty in the same dream like vein : Let him, dear granny, Shape the darkness and take again the princess Whose breath would hardly strain the spiders design. (ibid.) As the poem draws to a close, the poet seems to overpower memory by obliterating its negative aspect. Thus, he quizzically asks his grandmother But tell me now : was it for some irony you have waited in death to let me learn again what once you learnt in youth, that this is no tale, but truth ? (ibid: 17)
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Ramanujans pre-occupation with familial memories is so great that a poem entitled History tells us about his aunt. He remembers the death of his aunt nostalgically; Which usually changes slowly, changes sometimes during a single conversation: the petite little aunt in her garden of sweet limes now carries a different face, not merely older or cooler or made holy by deaths and childrens failures.(ibid:107) The poet does not want to forget or miss any minute detail about his past and about himself. His self is the only medium that makes him aware about his real past. Thus, self occupies an important place in Ramanujans poetry. This can be seen in his brilliant poem Self-Portrait: I resemble everyone But myself, and sometimes see in shop-windows, despite the well-known laws of optics, the portrait of a stranger, date unknown, often signed in a corner by my father. (ibid: 23).

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Man puts on many masks and sometimes, it is difficult to know his true identity. Man is not only his fathers son but other thing too. Self in Ramanujans poetry has many facets. It goes on multiplying in reflected mirrors: No knowing who I am or what I want I roam the city walk into movies hurtle down a roller coaster till mirrors in a mirror shop break me up into how many I was show me in profile and fragment (ibid:216). The passage shows the multi-faceted personality of the poet which is the result of his rich past. Ramanujans not only remembers his personal relations but also he remembers the surroundings of his Indian past. In this regard, his technique is unique for its achievement of unexpected effects for he intermingles his memories as well as his interest in anthropology. Cows are encouraged to get pregnant in broad-day light, while a man defecates between two rocks, showing the symmetry of his buttocks. Ramanujans interest in anthropology and folklore is also responsible for his love of astonishing details: Probably Only the Egyptians had it right, Their kings had sisters for queens To continue the incests of childhood into marriage or we should do as well-meaning Hindus did,
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Betroth us before birth, forestalling separate horoscopes and mothers, first periods, and wed us in the oral cradle and carry marriage back into the namelessness of childhoods (CP:67). Akshaya Kumar rightly sums up Ramanujans poetry in the following words: The excremental images of pissing and defecation surface on his creative landscape as frames of that metaphysical exhaustion and rabid nihilism which informs the very impulse of his creativity. No wonder if there is any iridescence in his poetry, it is the iridescence of horsepiss after rain.. If there are any smells, these are smells of urine on lily or womans odours in theatre The interior is exteriorized through brazen rocky images. A little girls underwear therefore, befittingly becomes warm and secret place for a pregnant scorpion. (New Quest: January-February, 1998: 13-14). Ramanujan has written few Hindu poems too denoting his nostalgia for his religion. A typical Hindu remains indifferent to good and evil. This is the theme of The Hindoo: he reads his Gita and is calm at all events. The idea of this indifference is expressed in startling image: I do not marvel when I see good and evil: I just walk over the iridescence of horsepiss after rain. (79). Here the thing said and the thing meant do not seem to merge into each other. This is related to another Hindu poem. The Hindoo: he does

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not hurt a fly or a spider either. Here sexual jealousy hurts the calm composure of grandfather: Watching as only husband will a suspense of nets vibrate under wife and enemy with every move of hand or thigh: Watching, watching like some spider-lovers a pair of his Borneo specimens mate in murder, make love with hate, or simply stalk a local fly. (Collected Poems: 63) Ramanujans collected poems show his major concern for his family, relations as well as his oscillation between his present and glorious past. Vinay Dharwadkar has rightly said: These formal and thematic elements now alter our understanding of what the poet felt and thought, why he chose certain voices, images and metaphors, what his conceptions of nature and culture were, how he re-imagined time and human history, where he located the conflicts and interdependence of society, family, and self, or how he resolved some of the ethical dilemmas of poetry in the late twentieth century. (ibid: 17) Thus, Ramanujan is chiefly concerned with memories and the way they finalise or falsify human contacts in a changing world. But Ramanujan can not be termed as a conventionalist or an advocate of modernization and westernization. He is the product of both and his poetic output mirrors him as a poet aware of change. In the poetic cosmos of Ramanujan memories are often pleasant. They provide strength and vigour to his poetry.
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(b) Native Themes

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

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hands. The Indianness of Ramanujans poetry is to be marked also in a poem like Conventions of Despair, wherein the poet says: But, sorry, I cannot unlearn conventions of despair, They have their pride. I must seek and will find my particular hell only in my Hindu mind. (12) Even his poems dealing with family relationships reveal a good deal of Indian life and atmosphere. The family, for Ramanujan, is one of the central metaphors with which he thinks, (Parthasarathy: 1976: 95) says the noted Indo-Anglian poet Parthasarathy. Ramanujan depicts his family life almost untiringly, as is clear from the poems collected in the second volume, Relations, Of Mother, among other things, Love Poem for a Wife- 1, Love Poem for a Wife- 2, and Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House. The family relations always haunt the poet, and there are many good poems which own their origin to the re-collected personal emotions. These poems deal with the memory of his relations and the ambiguous freedom that life away from them confers. The sense of loss is most poignantly connected with the reminiscence of the mother. Viewed in this light, Of Mother, among other things, is a soft, soothing poems which encompasses the mothers youth, her unerring care for the crying cradles, her devotion to her work, unmindful of the rains and the fluttering loose saris, and her painstaking domestic responsibility. The stanza which works is the last one: My cold parchment tongue licks bark in the mouth when I see her four still sensible fingers slowly flex
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to pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor. The metaphors in first two lines emphasise the futility of the poets language to express the rough, bitter taste of the memory, and the last two lines provide an irresistible objective correlative of the emotion. It is not that poet deliberately intended to illustrate the inadequacy of poetic language but that the simple picture of the last two lines makes the previous imagery of the poem seem laboured and incoherent. Love poem for a Wife -1 highlights the poets sense of estrangement from his wife, and the reason for this is indicated in the very first stanza: Really what keeps us apart at the end of years is unshared childhood. You cannot, for instance meet my father. He is some years dead. neither can I meet yours: he has already lost temper and mellowed. (Collected Poems:38) The shared childhood should have added spices to their sentimental attachment, and the want of this writhes the poets heart. In some of translations too, Ramanujan airs out a similar concern, such as in What he said: What kin was your mother to mines? What was my father to yours anyway? And how did you and I meet ever? (ibid: 40)

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But Love Poem for a Wife -2, there is no such writhing of the heart and the tone has softened considerably in portraying the lean, lovely face of the wife my wifes face still fast a sleep, blessed as by butterfly, snake, shiprope, and grandmothers other children, by my only loves only insatiable envy. (ibid: 42) The poem Small-scale Reflections on a Great House tells us about the wonderful assimilative and digestive powers of the house which absorbs not only good things but also bad things. On the one hand, it is very warm to guests, sons-in-law, wives coming from poor houses, daughters married to short lived idiots, sons returning in grand children, nephews killed in the war in the borders; on the other, it tethers others cows, matures unread library books in two weeks, does not return neighbours dishes brought up with the greasy sweets. The pretentious shame of the girls of the house is beautifully brought out in the first few lines: Sometimes I think that nothing that ever comes into this house goes out. Things come in everyday to lose themselves among other things lost long ago among other things lost long ago; lame wandering vows from nowhere
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have been know to be tethered, given a name, encouraged to get pregnant in broad daylight of the street under the elders supervision, the girls hiding behind windows with holes in them.( ibid: 56) The expression with holes in them speaks more than what actually meets the eyes. Apart from the above-mentioned native themes, Ramanujan explores certain other too in his poetry, such as childhood, the experience of love, and the exposure to contemporary urban life. In truth, some of the poems pertaining to his family life concentrate on the recollections of childhood. Love Poem for a wife -1 is one such poem. Looking for a Cousin on a swing also recalls the innocent days of a premature girl of four or five and a little bigger boy of six or seven. The swing having created a sensation in them inspired them to climb a small fig tree full of leaves. Children and their happy state of existence come to the fore in Love Poem for a Wife- 2. In another poem, Entries for a Catalogue of Fears, he writes: Ill love my children without end, and to them infinite harm staying on the roof a peeping-tom ghost......(ibid:67) The poem History mentions children thrice and tells us about the change wrought on the petite little aunt by death and childrens failures. He says:
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Which usually changes slowly, changes sometimes -----------------------the petite little aunt in her garden of sweet limes now carries a different face, not merely older or colder or made holy by deaths and childrens failures. (ibid: 107) Ramanujans best love poem is perhaps Still Another View of Grace, which successfully captures the heat of passion in the heart of the poet. Looking for a Cousin on a Swing is also a pleasant love poem. The following lines in it are specially arresting: Now she looks for the swing in cities with fifteen suburbs and tries to be innocent about it. (ibid:88) The tone becomes ironical here, and the girl now having grown into a mature woman on the look out is taken to task for perpetrating her initial corrupt impulse and practice. The two pieces on his wife are really delightful to read. The two dominant stains of love-union and separation, attachment and alienation are marvelously depicted in them. Hatred is the occasional feature of love, and this is what we find in Routine Day Sonnet: She hates me, I hate her/ I am a filthy rat and satyr. (28). True love is not to be found in the traffic of flesh, but in the concord of souls. If a man cherishes the former sort of love, he is sure to be fear-ridden,
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say at the age of seventy, for the dwindling physical strength and for his utter futility in the face of the fascination/of passing/old women,(ibid.) and he will be left with no option but to handle his thing helplessly- this is precisely what we find in the sixth stanza of Entries for a Catalogue of Fears. The predicament of the helpless lover reminds us of that of Prufrock in Eliots poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , with difference of age no doubt. The exposure to contemporary urban life is to be witnessed in the poem Still Another View of Grace, which recounts the painful hesitancy on the part of the poet and the upright boldness on the part of the Christian lady in their approaches to love. The poems Still Another for Mother and Conventions of Despair handle this subject in one way or the other. In the first, we have: And that women beside the wreckage van on Hyde Park street: she will not let me rest as I slowly cease to be the towns brown stranger and guest.(34) And, in a second the poet decides to be modern and says, Yes, I know all that. I should be modern. Marry again. See strippers at the Tease. Touch Africa. Go to the movies. Impale a six-inch spider under a lens. Join the Test-ban,
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or become the Outsider.

(ibid.)

Of the two passages quoted above, the first demonstrates that one can hardly attain the peace of mind in the midst of metropolis like London, and the second that one has to be mobile and modern to fit in the present-day world and to avoid the bitter sense of agony and frustration. Much of Ramanujans poetry is based on recollections of the past and women occupy a pre-eminent place in these reminisces. Ramanujan has made a detailed analysis of the varied roles played by women. His poems mention a string of relationships revolving round women. If his poetry reflects the image of mother and wife, the portraits of a sister and girl cousin too fit into their own slots. In more than one poem, the poet cherishes the companionship shared with his sister. In the poem, Snakes he remembers his sisters rippling long tresses. He somehow finds a resemblance between her neatly braided plaits and glistening snakes. Sister ties her braids with a knot of tassels but the weave of her knee long braid has scales, their gleaming held by a score of clean new pins. I look till I see her hair again. For I remembered I was a man born of woman. (Ibid: 251) Apart from these familial themes, the poet deals with the historical themes also. In No Amnesiac King, the poet deals with the legend of King

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Dushyanta. Here the poet chastises the attitude of the forgetful king Dushyanta who left poor Shukuntala to her fate after wedding her secretly in the sacred precincts of a hermitage. Holding as an example his own attitude towards his wife he feels that the husbands of today are far better than the so-called idealistic ones of the past who are still held in such reverence. He recalls this incident as he waits (what seems to him) endlessly for his wife at the market place. As I wait for my wife and watch the traffic in seaside market place and catch my breath at the flat-metal beauty of whole pomfret, round staring eyes and scales of silver in the fishermans pulsing basket, and will not ask, for I know I cannot, which, if any, in its dead white belly has an uncooked signet ring and a forest. Legend of wandering king and waiting innocent, complete with fawn under tree and inverse images in the water of a stream that runs as if it doesnt. (ibid: 126) The sight of the gleaming fish thus brings back to the poets mind the rather shameful incident which is often re-told with vigour to each succeeding generation. The poets educated mentality, however, cannot sing praises of a king who seems to take a woman for granted. One can almost hear the poets unspoken queries to the writers who since time immemorial have glorified such a man instead of admonishing him.
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The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan focuses not only on the characters and legends of the material world but it also throws light upon various ethereal deities dwelling in the celestial spheres. In his poetry, he talks about Lord Vishnu, Shiva, Murugan, Lakshmi, Saraswati etc. A number of his poems mention the goddesses of Hindu mythology. In the poem A Devotees Complaint, the poet talks of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge. It is not very pleasant to incur the wrath of these goddesses: Try to curry favour with Lakshmi you lose an eye-tooth Saraswati, she slaps you hard and where her fingers touch your cheek, you have no hair so you have to shave close or bear her four finger mark on your face. (ibid: 237) Apart from goddesses, Ramanujan also deals with the she-demons in his poems, thus shedding light on both the aspects of womanhoodthe benevolent and the malicious. Since, A.K. Ramanujhan is a poet of realism he not only draws the readers attention to the better side of a womans nature, but also to the bitter. In Mythologies 1, Pootna, the female demon or Rakshasi offered her poisoned breast to the baby Krishna in an attempt to kill the lord. People were deceived by her overture of affection and her honey sweet tongue did not betray the evil within her,
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The breast she offered was full of poison and milk. Flashing eyes suddenly dull, her voice was silk. (ibid: 221) The poet goes on to describe how the all knowing and merciful lord Krishna took pity on this wicked demon and killed her as a means of saving her. Thus, finally, bereft of her guise as a beautiful woman, the demon found her redemption in death. The child took her breast in his mouth and sucked in right out of her chest. Her carcass stretched from north to south. (Ibid: 221) The devilish woman not only failed in her mission but she was also redeemed by the grace of the celestial child. She changed, undone by grace, from deadly mother to happy demon, found life in death.(Ibid. : 221) A.K. Ramanujan, the poet, noted for his philosophy of detached sensibility appears to have made not only a comprehensive study of woman as a whole but also an in-depth analysis of the secret chambers of a womans heart. A careful study of his poems thus provides a psychological insight into a womans mind. The poet pens down with great precision the almost accurate characteristics of a womans nature. In brief, it can be said that the constant use of native themes and nostalgic utterances make his poetry essentially Indian. Ramanujan
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proves himself as a distinguished poet of contemporary India who largely concentrates on his family and relations, his Indian associations, Indias glorious cultural heritage and its various ways of life.in this regard Surjit S. Dulai rightly points out: It is certainly true that Ramanujans harking back to Indian experience has always played a fundamental role in the shaping of his poetic sensibility and the content of his poetry. (Dulai: 1989:151:

References
Dulai, Surjit, S., First and Only Sight: The Center and the Circles of a. K. Ramanujans Poetry, Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol.24,No.-2, Summer, Fall, 1989. Dwivedi, A. N., A. K. Ramanujan and his poetry, Delhi:Doaba House,1983. Manmohan K. Bhatnagar, (ed.) Indian writings in English, Delhi: Atlantic Publishers 2000. Kulshrestha, Chirantan. The Self in Ramanujans Poetry, The Indian Journal of English Studies, xviii, 1978-79. Parathasarathy,R.(ed.) Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1976.

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Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan- Molly Daniels-Ramanujan (Ed.) New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Saleem, Peeradina, (ed.), Contemporary Indian Poetry in English, Bombay: Macmillian, 1972.

CHAPTER IV

Indian Cultural Sensibility

(a) Indianness:
Amongst the distinctive Indian-English poets of the post-

Independence 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

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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. (Walsh: 1973:28) Some poets of this era may have merely marginal significance in the growth and expansion of this genre, but Ramanujan adds a great vitality to it by virtue of this remarkable command of the English language, his wide-ranging poetic sensibility as well as his unlimited love for his native land. Not too many Indian poets in English come anywhere near him in the present day fast changing literary scenario which seems to be somewhat muddled with the number of mediocres rising everyday. Only a few poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes and Keki N. Daruwalla can be singled out to measure up to international standards, and of them Ramanujan has been singularly competent to Forge .... and obligue, elliptical style all his own, thereby showing his scrupulous concern with language. (Parthasarathy: 1976: 195-6) Ezekiel and Ramanujan have stood the test of time. As for Ramanujan, he has brought out three volumes of English poetry during the span of two decades, and deserves our serious consideration. All his poetical works are OUP publications, and some of his best poems in the firth two volumes are put together in Selected Poems (Delhi: OUP: 1976). Taken together, his poetical collections display his unflagging interest in and surging enthusiasm for his family and relations as well as his adequate
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awareness of Indias rich cultural heritage as reflected in her myths and legends and history and in her ways of life. The terms Indian and Indiannes must be clearly understood before we start examining cultural sensibility in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan. he does not leave us in the lurch with regard to a plausible connotation of these terms, and he subtly suggests in the title-piece that a Hindu, which is equivalent to an Indian, is supposed to have second sight, to have a moral, spiritual and mystical version of life. This is what he makes a foreigner to observe about a Hindu: You are Hindoo, arent you? You must have second sight. (Selected poems: 1986: 89) The observation comes to the poet as a bolt from the blue, reminding him immediately of the high expectations of the people abroad. Whether he has that Second Sight or not is a different question, though we assure him that he possesses plenty of it and that he has done a good deal towards its extension and popularisation through his poems and translations. To possess second sight has something to do with dwij which means twice-born. An orthodox Hindu brahmin is supposed to be a dwij or twice-born by undergoing the pious upanayan (holy thread) ceremony for the sake of unbreakable self-control. The quality of self-control is unsurpassable, and this has been underlined in our Shastras, in our Vedas and other relevant philosophical treatises. Even a famous poet and student of Sanskrit (Yeats: 1938:11) as T.S. Eliot has been alluded to by another contemporary poet W.B. Yeats, speaks highly of this quality in the Waste Land (1922). Eliot goes to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (5.1-3) in order to re-inforce the teachings of
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Prajapati to his sons-cum-disciples consisting of men, demons and gods in the present-day context when the humanity at large is threatened with an acute moral and spiritual crisis. Giving his thought to the question of Indianness of Indian writing consists in the writers intense awareness of his entire culture.( Gokak: 1978: 24) Another thoughtful professor of English, Dr. K.R. Srinivas Iyengar, has recognized certain well-marked areas of operation for what is Indian or Indianness, and these areas include the choice of subject, The texture of thought and play of sentiment, The organization of material, and The creative use of language.( Iyengar: 1975: 8) Ramanujans volumes of poems and specially the Second Sight deal with Indian familial themes and relations. Of such poems, Extended Family and Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees are to be specially marked, though family connections are also traceable in a lesser degree in Elements of Composition, Ecology, and Son to Father to Son. Indian legends also find a place here. In No Amnesiac King, the poet gives an account of the legend of King Harishchandra. Poems like A River and A Hindu to His Body deal with Indian cultural symbols and their significance in life. Again as the roos of Indianness lie in its strong family system, the poet a special account of Indian family. The poem Extended Family reminds one of the epigraph appended to Relations, which runs thus: Like a hunted deer on the wide white salt land, a flayed hide turned inside out,
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one may run, escape, But living among relations binds the feet. (Collected Poems: 55) For the reason specified abovethat living/among relations/binds the feet, that it offers one a sense of belonging, a sense of rootedness Ramanujan fondly remembers his family and relations in so many poems. The poet reserves his softest feelings for his mother and grandmother (granny, as he lovingly calls the latter). Though The Striders does not have many poems on family and relations, it does mention mother, granny, and wife in sweet terms. In this volume, mother figures in Snakes and Still Another for Mother, and granny in The Opposable Thumb and Lines to a Granny, and wife in Still Another View of Grave, and father in Excerpts from a Fathers Wisdom. The second volume, Relations, contains a number of poems on family and kith and kin. The poems like Of Mothers, among other things, Obituary Love poem for a wife- 1, Love Poem for a Wife- 2, History, and Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House are all composed on this native theme. In Second Sight, extended family continues that effort of the poet and opens with a description of his grandfather, whom Ramanujan imitates in point of bathing before the village crow. Then it proceeds to describe other members of the family, and the poet informs us that he resembles his father in slapping soap on his back and in thinking in Sanskrit proverbs. True to himself he wipes himself dry with a Turkish towel. Like his little daughter, he plays shy, and like his small son he holds his peepee and plays garden hose in and out the bathtub. Like his grandson, he looks up
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unborn at himself, and like his great great-grandson he is still contained in the wombs of Futurity. The poem ends on a note of hope for the extension of his family ad infinitum: my future dependent on several people yet to come. (Collected Poems: 65) In a way, the poem combines past, present and future in its simpleseeming yet subtle texture, and thus squeezes time and universe, as though, into a ball. Such a vast functioning of a poem was envisioned only by Shakespeare when he spoke of the poets fancy in a fine frenzy rolling / doth glance from earth to heaven etc. ( A Midsummer Nights Dream), or by Donne when he composed immortal verses like the following: Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove/ Into the glasses of your eyes /..../ countries, towns, courts. (The Canonization) Amongst others, perhaps Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth could have composed such verses, but they are definitely beyond the reach of ordinary poets. Kudos to Ramanujan that he comosed such verses with utter simplicity comprehensiveness and clarity of vision. Love Poem for a Wife and Her Trees is divided into four parts and serves as a link between the first two volumes and Second Sight. In truth, all the three volumes have something to say about the poets wife and her mercurial temperament. In The Striders, we have Still Another view of Grace, wherein we find a beautiful marriage of thought and feeling and a good deal of dramatic suspense, (Dwivedi:1983: 73)and in
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Relations we come across the two lovely poems about his wife. Love Poem for a Wife and Her Tress is verily a continuation of the same subject, and it unmistakably brings out the poets soft feelings and reasonable thoughts towards his Christian wife. He thinks that she is still young and charming though she is now a mothercertified dead but living on. (ibid.) She has been living with her children behind the glittering curtains having peacock pattern on them. The Brahmin poet is irresistibly attracted towards her, though her family trees are not in line with his own. He thinks that it is just a mere coincidence that he is born a son and she is a daughter to someone. She haunts his mind everywhere, even in unexpected places like post offices. As she happens to be the daughter of someone else, it is none of his business to protect her from the ravishing gaze of the world, from the undesirable advances of that muscular and bearded person who would be son-in-law in due course, even from her own hearts madness, from all things messy and futile, and even from himself. Instead, he would rather like to entangle her in his strong arms and do the rest in a multi-storeyed building. Out of this contact with her, a second tree symptomatic of a new generation will be born, sending waves of pain and shock to her: Out of touch, deprived of traffic, now an ant-world down below, seen from a fortieth floor, nose pressed to window, in the safe custody of an antiseptic bubble, your spinal cord will wither (Collected Poems: 77)

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The third part of the poem, which is the tenderest of all, highlights and poets weakness for his wife at night while at dawn next day he remembers her as his better-half as the faraway stranger whos nearby (78) who after occupies him totally. The poet compliments her for being a woman of the practical world, for being one that knows that Ill never know : languages of the deep south, weathers, underground faults in my own continent, mushrooms for love and hate, backrubs and sinister witchery... (ibid: 79). She is one who shows great understanding and wisdom in buying the perfect pomfret for dinner and in plucking the right red apple in garden for dessert.(ibid.) The fourth and last part of the poem displays this wonderful woman in her different roles a Jewish mama, a subsister, a help-needing daughter, a sexpot next door, a towering tree-spirit with a cold body, a plain Indian wife at the village well. while the poet himself appears in the varying roles of a son, a father, a brother, a macho lover, a gaping tourist, and a clumsy husband. Taken as a whole, the poem highlights Ramanujan as a soft and sensitive person who can fully appreciate his birth and parentage, physical and mental charms, and the practical wisdom of his wife. It is at least one poem where the poet does not indulge in word- jugglery or in undue imagistic details. The image of tree is remarkably worked out herein. Apart from these poems, we have a host of them in the three volumes of Ramanujan that concentrate on various other members of his family:
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on grandparents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, daughters, and sons. These family members are not mere his family members, they are the very representatives of the Indian ethos that lurks everywhere in his poetry. Through such poems, the poet unfurls the variegated pictures of the Hindu family system, which does not break up with marriages (as in the West) but gets consolidated with the induction of each new member (as in India). Some of the poems that fall under this category are: A Leaky Tap After a Sisters Wedding, On the very Possible Jaundice of an Unborn Daughter (its title is reminiscent of Thomas Hardys poem To An unborn Pauper Child), and Looking for a Cousin on a Swing (all from The Striders), Real Estate, Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House, and History, and son to Father to Son (all from Second Sight) . As our purpose holds to examine the poems in the third and latest volume only, we shall confine ourselves hereafter to a consideration of them. Indian mythology lays stress on the composition of human body as the result of the union of five elements viz. air, water, earth, sky and fire. Elements of Composition, threats of the various elements that go into the making of human body. Being subjective in content and form, the poem graphically details the decomposition. Like others, the poet is made of his fathers seed and mothers egg (Collected Poems: 121) as well as of earth, air, fire, and largely water. The poet says, Composed as I am, like others, of elements of certain well known lists, fathers seed and mothers egg gathering earth, air, fire, mostly water into a mulberry mass, moulding calcium. (ibid.)
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The poet then mentioned uncles eleven fingers which produce shadow plays of rajas and cats before becoming fingers again. He also mentions the look of panic on sisters face/an hour before/her wedding and a dated newspaper map of an unseen place being carried by a friend in his passport. He then evokes the picture of the lepers of Madurai (the place being a famous seat of Tamil cultural and of Meenakshi temple), who are male, female, married, with children. For a moment, he appears to feel for them: I pass through them as they pass through me taking and leaving affections, seeds, skeletons...... (ibid.) But hurriedly he shifts his attention to insects, mayflies, and a legend of the half-man. At the close of the poem, we witness the image of the Caterpillar on a leaf, eating, /being eaten. The image is highly suggestive of the mans fragile living condition in the present-day tension-ridden world. Ecology deals with the change of season and atmosphere in India and therewith the flowering of the three Red Champak trees, giving the poets mother her first blinding migraine/of the season (ibid:124) and rendering the poet furious. The poet actually wants to cut down those trees, but his mother does not permit him to do so. After all, the trees were the source of supplying sweet-smelling flowers of her gods and her daughters and her daughters daughters, but for cousins they also necessitated a dower of migraines in season (ibid: 124). The season referred to here is the rainy season in India. The poem serves as a very
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good connective between this volume and the first two volumes where the poets mother is seen in Snakes, Still Another for Mother (both in The Striders), and Of Mothers, among other things (in Relations). The poem Son to Father to Son, a compact piece no doubt, projects the poet as a boy of five, dreaming of his father who has a beard resembling a hanging hive. The boy cries aloud at the mere touch of the hair/on his hands and at seeing his toes like talons ( 48) The second part of the poem informs us that the same body now having grown up becomes a father of his son and daughter. And the son resembles him closely I wake with a round/shadow for my head ( 49) and is greatly surprised to discover him so fully developed. The poet starts ruminating over the revolving rounds of human lot and over the continuing changes wrought in mans age and personality. It is a very thoughtful poem indeed. Looking at the poem having examined so far, we can say that Ramanujan adds a touch of intimacy and authenticity to his Indianness by dwelling largely on his family and relations. Hence the poet Parthasarathy rightly remarks that The family, for Ramanujan, is one of the central metaphors with which he thinks. (Perthasarathy: 1976:95) Also, the joint Hindu family system comes alive in them with all its flexibility and rigidity, with all its good and bad points. Obviously, a house cannot be built on shifting sand dunes, and Ramanujan has built his artistic house on a solid foundation of concrete and mortar. His poems of family and relations and Indian associations are derived directly from his experience and knowledge, and they ensure the continuity of a rich traditional culture. (ibid: 192)

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There is also a cluster of poems in Second Sight dealing with Indianness in the form of Hindu myths and legends, Hindu gods and goddesses, and with Indias colourful spectacles and her ways of life. These things are to be found in Ramanujans all poetical collections, but in the latest collection they come out with a bang. In The Striders, poems like Snakes, A River and A Hindu to His Body are significant, unfurling as they do the variegated pictures of Indian life and culture. Briefly to state, A River brings into sharp focus the river Vaikai flowing through Madurai and causing havoc and suffering to the people during the floods. The poet says: In Madurai, city of temples and poets who sang of cities and temples: every summer a river dries to a trickle in the sand, (ibid: 38) A Hindu to his Body emphasises the importance of body to a Hindu (who is supposed to attach greater importance to soul) because body is the medium for him to attain his ultimate aim, i.e. salvation. Hence the poet celebrates the need of body and says, Dear pursuing presence, dear body you brought me curled in womb and memory. (ibid: 40)

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The poem Snakes, however, is quite memorable in that it throws light on one of the prevalent Indian customs and rituals that of offering the milk to nagas (cobras or snakes). The reverential attitude of the poets mother towards a basketful of ritual cobras is clearly expressed in the following extract: Mother gives them milk in saucers. She watches them suck and bare the black-line design etched on the brass of the saucer. The snakeman wreathes their wreathing round his neck for fathers smiling money. But I scream. Sister ties her braids with a know of tessel. ( ibid: 2-3) The Hindus observe this ritual on the Naga-panchami day, which invariably falls in the month of Shravan (the fifth month in the Hindu calendar). The second collection, Relations, is richer in the matter of presenting certain unmistakable Hindu ( Indian ) myths and customs and gods and certain significant historical events. It will be remembered for its three Hindu poems, namely The Hindoo: He doesnt Hurt a Fly, or a Spider Either, The Hindoo: he reads his Gita and is calm at all events, and The Hindoo the only Risk. The Gita is one of the invaluable philosophical treasures of the Hindus, and it has been highly valued in the West. A. K. Ramanujan gives several references to this great Hindu
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scripture in his poetry. Again, Indian history finds an outlet in poems like Some Indian Uses of History, Some Relations, and The Last of the Princes. Hindu myths and legends, gods and goddesses, are accommodated in such poems as One, Two, Maybe Three, Arguments Against Suicide (which directly mentions Kamasutra, the Treatise of Love, and the legend of burning Kamadeva, the God of Love or Passion, by Lord Shiva). Compensations (which makes a reference to the Tandava dance of Lord Shiva on the Doomsday), and Prayers to Lord Murugan (which offers fervent prayers to this ancient Dravidian god having six faces and twelve hands). This is how the poet invokes the blessings of Lord Murugan: Lord of headlines, help us read the small print. Lord of the sixth sense, give us back our five back our five senses. Lord of solutions, teach us to dissolves, teach us to dissolve and not to drown. (Collected Poems: 61) According to the belief of the masses and the poet, Lord Murugan is the god of fertility, joy, youth, beauty, war, and love.(ibid: 57) Second Sight, which is amply rich in the depiction of Hindu myths and legends, gods and goddesses, and Indian ways of life, opens its
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account with O Amnesiac King. This poem records the well-known legend of Raja Dusyanta and forest-beauty Shakuntala (the adopted daughter of Kanva Rishi). What the poet suggests here is that King Dusyanta actually committed an act of crime in forgetting all about his beloved Shakuntala and in not recognising her even when he came to his court in a state of worry and expectancy. The amnesiac king, i.e. Dusyanta, could not recognise her because she had lost he wedding ring gifted to her by him while she was bathing in a river. The ring was swallowed up by a fish which was later caught by fishermen and brought to the royal cook, who cut it open and to his great surprise discovered the ring in its belly. The ring was restored to the king who recovered at one stroke all lost memory (16). He immediately recollected is Gandharva marriage with Shakuntala in the forest and grievously repented for his misbehavior towards her. Then, in a swift transition of thought, the poet reverts to his own wife and suggests that he cannot forget about her even for a while when she goes to the marketplace to buy fish from the fisherman in the gaze of all. He also suggests that in such matters even a commoner is much better than a king like Dusyanta. Thus, the old legend has been embued with a modernistic touch and Ramanujan is well-known for his modernistic touches and ironical attitudes. Another poem which is no less significant for its use of Hindu(Indian) myth and legend is A Minor Sacrifice in five parts. It brings to the fore the story of Raja Parikshit and his son Janmejaya. The myth relates to the killing of a snake by King Parikshit in a forest in order to garland a sazes nech/with the cold dead thing, which promptly earns the sages cursean early death by snakebite (35) The kings son, Janmejaya, does all possible to forestall his fathers eventual death, and he
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....... performs a sacrifice, a magic rite that draws every snake from everywhere, till snakes of every stripe begins to fall through the blazing air into his altar fires. (Collected Poems: 35) So miraculous is the power of his magic rite that all kinds of nagas (snakes) come hurtling and fall headlong into his sacrifice ( yajya), but one poisonous snake known as Takshak remains stuck to the leg of Lord Indras throne and somehow survives. That Takshak ultimately bites the king who dies resigned to his lot. After introducing the legendary story of Raja Parikshit, the poet tells us about the killing of a poisonous scorpion by his uncle with the ivory dragonhead of his walking - stick in order to save his loved son Gopu. His uncle shows the children the ripe, yellow poison-bead of the scorpion just behind its sting. Meanwhile, his grandmother also arrives there and she starts telling them that a pregnant scorpion generally hides in a warm secret place and that it bursts its back to bear a umber of baby scorpions and thereafter it dies instantly. The uncle then informs them that the baby scorpions are quite red at birth but later they change their colour and grow gray with their growth. That very afternoon, the superstitious Shivanna proposes to the boy-poet to get rid of the world of scorpions of all colours and kinds by the powers of witchcraft and black arts. The scorpions, according to him , will come rushing at their bidding into the bole of the sighing neem tree if a minor sacrifice is perfomed hen the sun is in Scorpio (the eighth sign of Zodiac
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which operates during the months of October and November). First, they will have to feed and satisfy the twelve-handed god of scorpions who demands one hundred live grasshoppers/caught on a new moon Tuesday (37). Secondly, they will have to acquire three jars to put the grasshoppers in. With these arrangements, the children go out on a catching spree, and by evening they are able to catch ninety-nine of them, but the hundredth eludes them for some time. Suddenly Gopu pounces in the dark and completes the tally. Immediately the boys come back to their homes and clean their hands in bathrooms. They do not eat anything or sleep hands in bathrooms. They do not eat anything or sleep well that night. The supervision of the jars falls to Gopus lot who keeps them safe under his bed and dreams dreadfully all night. Next morning, all the boys go to see Shivanna, the planner of the whole scheme, and carry the jars on their backs, but to their shock and amazement they are informed by his mother that he is in the hospital taken sick the some strange twitching disease. (40) Later on, the mischievous Shivanna is reported dead, and on his death the poets uncle informs all the children that on Tuesday Shivanna clawed and kicked the air like some bug on its back. The poem has a sub-title, and it is remembering the dead in My Lai 4. The sub-title suitably associates the senseless killings of grasshopers by Shivanna & Co. with the massacres of Mai Lai rendering thousands of Vietnamese maimed and dead. The American soldiers were at the back of purposeless killing of Vietnamese. In a review of Second Sight, Elizabeth Reuben comments that this poem in particular is terse with
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understatement and that it narrates a stroy of childish cruetly and retribution worthy of that ugly Biblical incident of Elisha and the bears. The poem as a whole is immersed in a superstitious atmosphere, and conveys a clear-cut message to readers that humanity should love all creatures, big or small, and should not kill them violently out of blind belief. There are, then, some poems in Second Sight which draw the sketches of the Hindu gods and goddesses in unmistakable terms. Of such poems, mention may be made of Zoo Gardens Revisited, The Difference, and Moulting. In the first-named poem, the poet invokes various gods of the Hindus to protect different kinds of animals to be found in the zoo animals like flamingoes, monkeys, orangutans, giraffes, ostriches, tigers, tigresses, and chimps. The last lines of this prose- poem are very pertinent to quote here: Lord of lion face, bar snout, and fish eyes, killer of killer cranes, shepher of rampant elephants, devour my lambs, devour them whole, save them in the zoo garden ark of your belly. (ibid: 47) A number of manifestations of Lord Vishnu (whom T.S. Eliot alludes to as Preserver in his Four Quarters) have been recalled in this quoted passage. Lord of Lion face is Nrisingh, who relieved the world from the clutches of Hiranya- Kashyapu, the tyrannical father of the boy Prahlad, a great devotee of the Lord. Boar snout refers to his assuming the shape of Varaha, who lifted the stolen earth from the waters of the deep and thus freed it from the demon-thief. Lord Vishnu also appeared
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as Matsya fish eyes in order to save Manu, the progenitor of the human race, from a great deluge. According to an Indian myth, the Lord rushed to the rescue of Gajendra from the jaws of a powerful crocodile. He is also represented in our mythology as Kurma, the Tortoise, sitting on whose back he recovered some valuable things lost in the deluge. The Kurma back also served as the pivot of the mountain Mandara during the churning of the ocean in a tug-of-war between gods and demons. The Lord is also depicted as Kalki, the White Horse, who purged the creation. The zoo garden ark of your belly pointedly alludes to the Biblical story which tells us that the almighty God saved two of every kind of creatures in Noahs ark when the entire creation was to be destroyed due to its criminal or immoral activities. In this way, the poet has marvelously combined the Eastern and Western mythology in a harmonious while, and thereby has transcended the local for the universal and the familiar for the mythical. The Difference is a poem which mentions The Hindu soul at death, (66), the tiny Taj Mahals for tourists (67) and brings into sharp focus the myth of Lord Vishnu who assumed the shape of the Dark One i.e., the Vaman God and who appeared before king Moradhvaj as a dwarf-beggar to test the latters world-renowned generosity and charitable nature and who demanded of the king just three steps of earth. With his three steps, the Lord measured heaven and earth (68) as well as the underworld (which is not mentioned herein). But the testing of the noble king was still not over, for the lion on whom the Lord rode had eaten nothing so long and was terribly hungry. The king and his obedient spouse had nothing to feed the lion, as they were mere paupers presently.
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The Lord added to their misery and helplessness by pointing out that his chariot could eat nothing but the fresh flesh of their only lovely son, and that the son should be slashed into two halves by the royal couple without shedding even a drop of tear. The King now knew that it was a severe test for them, yet he could not allow anyone to go hungry from his door. Therefore, he and his wife took up the saw in their hands and moved it over the head of their son blinding their eyes. Instantly, Lord Vishnu appeared in his true mettle and caught holds of the hands of the dumbfounded royal pair and pronounced glory and lasting fame for the King, who had come with flying colours through the test. The Excellent poetic use to which Ramanujan has put this unforgettable Hindu myth of Lord Vaman and King Moradhvaj speaks volumes of his grounding in the quintessence of Indian culture and wisdom. Moulting is a small prose poem, the last paragraph of which is quite important from the viewpoint of the application of Hindu mythology by the poet. This paragraph runs as follows: Lord of snakes and eagles, and everything in between, cover my son with an hours, shade and be the thorn at a suitable height in his hour of change. (71) Here the poet invokes the blessings of Garuda, the Lord of snakes and eagles, for the protection of his loved son, especially in his hour of change. Indian philosophy and ways of life also find expression in the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan. Thus, the poem Questions derives its epigraph from one of the well-known Upanishads, namely the Mundaka (3.1.), where we have the description of two birds sitting on the self-same tree, one of
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them eating the fruit of the tree while the other simply watching. The pertinent question is: which of the two birds acts in the right manner? The first one which is eating and in turn is being eaten, or the second one which does not burn with the desire the bird which is eating the fruit of the tree is doing so in utter ignorance, but the second one which abstains from eating is full of wisdom and has discarded the ways of the world. The second bird has controlled its desires, and therefore, it is wiser than the first one. Through the image of the bird, the poet has set at rest all questions, all doubts and distractions, about the purpose of human life on earth. The variegated pictures of Indian life come alive in such poems as Astronomer, Death and The Good Citizen, etc. Astronomer graphically portrays a fatty Indian astronomer whose eyes are always fixed on the planets and stars in the sky, through he himself lives on earthSky-man in a manhole (24). He is full of Sanskrit proverbs, and keeps his almanac spread before him. Though he always moves in Sanskrit zodiacs, He is forever troubled by the twitching in his kidneys. Apparently, he is a Tamil BrahminThe kidneys/in his Tamil flesh (24)who is constantly swayed by that honey called woman. The poem has become somewhat satirical in tone, but its Indian background can hardly be questioned. Death and The Good Citizen presents the condition of the good citizen after his death in a hospital, and in the fourth and penultimate paragraph speaks about the typical Indian method of the burial of the dead: theyll cremate me in Sankrit and sandalwood, have me sterlized
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to a scatter of ash. (ibid: 26) The poem also obliquely suggests that this method of burial is quite contrasted with that in the West, where people usually take to a steel trap or coffin method. Pleasure offers a pen-portrait of a naked Jaina monk (30) who is ravaged by spring fever caused by the vigour of long celibacy. He is now overpowered by the passion of a mango bud (which is symbolical of a beautiful virgin), and all his philosophy seems to have been consumed. He is described sarcastically thus: his several mouths thirsting for breast, buttock, smells of finger, long hair, short, hair, the wet of places never dry,..... (30) To such a monk, the cool Ganges turns sensual, smearing his private, pars, and he stands on an anthill of red fire ants to feel the pleasure of sex-hunger and is eventually eaten away by them, limb by limb. The poem is a forceful dig at the forced celibacy which lands one in great misery and sadistic pleasure. The poem At Forty brings out the living picture of a common sight in Indiathat of a wrestler like Jatti, who teaches wrestling to his disciples at the gymkhana of the Mysore palace. After giving a minute description of Jattis physical make-up, the poet informs us that he is well-fed and massaged, but no sex is permissible to him lest he should lose his energy. The palace people are very proud of him, but one day he is taken to the Town Hall for a trial of strength and is thrown there by a black hulk
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round after round (p. 54). After this shameful and ignoble defeat, Jatti returns straight to the gym to bury his head in the ground and to be attended by five diciples. He then leaves for his home in a huff, never to return there. Later he becomes a sulphurous foreman/in a matchstick factory (55). Perhaps the subtle suggestion of the poet is that one should built no merely ones body but also ones mind. It has to be mentioned in passing that Looking and Finding, a prose poem, is full of topical allusions, especially in the fifth paragraph, which runs thus: Having no clear conscience, he looks for one in the morning news. Assam then, Punjab now, finds him guilty of an early breakfast of two whole poached eggs. (ibid: 74). Obviously, the earlier insurgency in Assam and Nagaland and the present violent militancy in the Punjab have been alluded to in this short para. In a nut shell, Ramanujan is a distinguished poet of contemporary India who largely concentrates on his family and relations, on his Indian associations, on Indias glorious cultural heritage, on the Hindu myths and legends, on the Hindu gods and ways of life, for his poetic utterance. This tendency of the poet clearly demonstrates that he has not naturalized the Western themes and traditions so much as the Indian ones. His unflagging Indianness is undoubtedly one of his irresistible charms for us, and it speaks voumes of his cretive talent and poetic power. Prof. Iyengar, therefore, rightly remarks that Ramanujan has stabilized as one of the most talented of the new poets, K.R. Srinivas Iyengar (671). Speaking of his own poetic art, Ramanujan once obrserved thus:

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English and my disciples (linguistics, anthropology) give me my outer formslinguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience; and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannnada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give me my substance, my inner forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and I no longer can tell what comes from where. (Cited from Parthasaratrhy: 96). The outer and inner forms combinedly constitute the linguistic and cultural determinant of a poets imagination,( Kulshrestha:1978-79: 110). and the cultural determinant of Ramanujans imagination puts a seal on his being autochthonos and indigenous in content and thought. This fact is amply evidenced in his Second Sight. Hence, we agree with Nissim Ezekiel, an established Indian poet of our day, when he remarks in a brief essay that Ramanujan has enriched the Indian-English tradition of poetry in a perceptible way. Though living and teaching in America for a long time he is essentially an Indian poet.

(b) South Indian Ethos:

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 proficient in Tamil, his mother tongue, and Kannada, the language he grew up with and studied, his poems were predominantly written in English.

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Ramanujans translations of classical Tamil poetry and the Kannada Vacanas in English helped to propagate Tamil and Kannada in the West. Speaking of his poetic art, Ramanujan remarked, English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my outer forms and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and professional pre-occupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give me my substance, my inner forms, images and symbols. (Parthasarathy: 1976:96) According to Ramanujan, the study of Indian folklore has never been a sharply defined field. Overshadowed by Indology, it has a distinguished intellectual history. (Blackburn:1986:1) in his collection of essays entitled Another Harmony, he says that folktales in several Indian languages like Hindi, Telugu and Kannada are part of complex civilization and they are related to the more immediate social and performance contexts. Ramanujan maintains that Indian culture is, a composite of classical, folk and popular streams. (ibid: 26) In his note to The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology , he says, Anyone translating a poem into a foreign language is, at the same time, trying to translate a foreign reader into a native one. (Ramanujan: 1967:11) To translate is to carry across not merely one language to another but from one mode of thinking to another, and one native culture to another culture. The purpose of translation is to translate a foreign
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reader to a native one. To carry across is the fundamental motivating principle of translation. A translator crosses the chasms of language. A translator has to use both the halves of his brain to get close to the original he has to let poetry win without allowing scholarship to lose. The greatest contribution made by Ramanujan to world literature was his translations and transcreations from the classics of Kannada and Tamil. These translations are a storehouse of the South Indian ethos that lie scattered in his poetry. Fifteen Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (1965), The Lotus in the Navel (1969), Vacanas, Speaking of Siva(1972) (from Kannada), Samskara (1976),The Interior Landscape (1967) (from Tamil Akam Poetry), Poems of Love and War (1985) (Ettuttokai Pathupattu) and The Hymns for the Drawiung (1981) (Thiruvaimozhi) are the finest in the genre. They stand as a testimony to Ramanujans scholarship and creatively, a combination which is rare to great men of literature. While translating he makes explicit typographical approximations to the inner form of the poems concerned. In his Afterwards to the Interior Landscape, the translator says that the Cankam poetry is classified by theme into two kinds: poems of akam (the inner part or the interior) and poems of puram (the outer part or the exterior). Akam poems are love poems: puram poems are all other kinds of poems, usually about good and evil, action, community, kingdom etc. (ibid: 101) He has a great admiration for the Tamil Sangam poetry. At the end of Afterword to The Interior Landscape he says: In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity there is not much else in any Indian Literature equal to these
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quiet and dramatic love poems. In their values and stances they represent a mature classical poetry. Passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and naunces of designs, impersonality by vivid detail leanness of line by richness of implication. (Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil: 1985:54) The richness and newness of Sangam poetry are chewed and digested only by a few scholars of Tamil. Ramanujan is one who delves deep into the ocean of this Sangam poetry and comes up with gems of translation into English. There is formalism to Sangam poetry. It is classified by there into two kinds, namely, akam the inner part and puram the outer part. Akam is love poetry and puram is war and other kinds of poetry. The following is an Akam poem from Ramanujans Interior Landcape. What she said: People say, You will have to bear it Dont they know what passion is like or is it that they are so strong? Ask for me, if I do not see my lover grief drowns My heart like a streak of foam in high waters dashed on the rocks little I ebb and become nothing. ( Krishan:1992:2) S. Krishnan says that there is a curious resonance between the above kind of Akam poem with the medieval Japanese poems such as Rihakus (This poem was translated by Ezra Pound) The River Merchants Wife: A Letter. This is how it concludes:
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The leaves fall early this autumn in wind. The paired butterflies are already yellow With August over the grass in the west garden: They hurt me, I grow older. (ibid) S. Krishnan finds the resonance of passion and separation of lovers in the Akam and the medival Japanese poem of Rihaku. He also finds and echo of the Alvars (in their worship of Lord Vishnu) in Gerard Manley Hopkins poem The Wreck of the Deutchland.(ibid) It appears that Ramanujans scholarship and Sangam poetrys contemporary potentiality go hand in hand. One critic points out that Ramanujan chose not the works of the Great Tradition with their roots in Sanskrit, but works of Little Tradition, with their roots in the local languages. A translator has been defined as bilingual mediating agent between monolingual communication participants in two different language communities, and it is the translator who decodes messages transmitted in one language and recodes them in another. But A.K. Ramanujan is entirely different from this conventional view of translation. In poems of Love and War, Ramanujan translates old Tamil poems selected from anthologies compiled over two millennia ago. The poems of this book are selected from the Eight Anthologies and The Ten Long Poems; sections of the Tolkappiyam are used to develop a commentary on Tamil poetry and poetics. The poems are classified by their themes as akam and puram. Each section contains poems that evoke a particular landscape: hillside, Seaside, forests, cultivated fields and the wilderness (or desert). Each landscape with the mood it represents, and the poems
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that evoke it, is called by the name of a flower or plant of that region: Kurinki, a mountain flower; Palai, a desert tree; neytal, blue lily; mullai, jasmine. In puram poems, certain situations (e.g. a siege), persons (e.g. a chieftain), and themes (e.g. ideals of good life) appear to be more important than landscapes. Thus, Ramanujan has presented South Indian ethos in these poems by arranging them into five themes i.e. Kings at war, Poets and Dancers, Chieftains Lessons, War and After. The third and fourth books consist of a few late classical poems (fifth to sixth century) with a different subject. The third offers some comic, even bawdy poems, poems of loves excess in contrast to the decorum of the previous sections. The fourth and the last book includes a long hymn to Vishnu, one of the earlier examples of its kind in Indian literature, and two pieces from the long poem, A Guide to Lord Murugan. The erotic and the heroic motifs of both the akam and puram poems are imaginatively reworked in these early important religious poems. (Poems of Love and War: 1985:14-15) A. K. Ramanujans Hymns for the Drowning, poems For Vishnu (trans.) from Tamil, contain some of the earliest religious poems about Vishnu, or Tirumal, the Dark one. The author is an alvar (one) immersed in god the root verb al means to immerse, to dive, to sink to be lowered, to be deep.the title plays on the meanings of such an immersion for poet and reader. These poems written by Nammalvar between AD 880 to 930 represent the most early bhakti texts in any Indian language. Early bhakti movements were devoted to Shiva or Vishnu. Hymes for the Drowning is chiefly concerned with poems related to Vishnu, and his incarnations. The poem Zoo Garden Revisited has remarkable parallels with the Vishnu portrayed in the Hymns for the
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Drowning. In the last line of the poem the poet prays to Vishnu to protect all the birds and the animals in the zoo which include flamingoes, ostriches, monkeys, giraffes, tigers, tigresses and many more, from the cruelty and callousness of man.the poet appeals to the lord Vishnu: Lord of lion face, boar snout and fish eyes, killer of killer Cranes, shepherd of rampant elephants, bebou my lambs, Devour them whole,save them in the zoo garden ark of you belly (ibid: 154) In the poem the Man Lion the poet describes Vishnus Manifestation in the form of the man- lion (Narsimha) as: At the hour of sunset, there was blood on the heaves and the eight directions. Our lord plunged the demon into despair and slaughtered him: a lion tearing open a mountain under his claws. (Hymns for the Drowning: 1993:9) In the poem, The Boar Rescues the Earth the poet deals with the story of the demon Hiranyaksa who abducted the earth and kept it under the ocean. Vishnu became the boar, slew the demon after a thousand year war and lifte d the earth from the waters with his tusks. The seven icelands of the earth,
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They stayed in place:. Miraculously, That day Our Lord pitchforked them out With his tusks From the deep. (ibid:42) Again in the poem Before I Could Say the poet talks about the Matsya incarnation(Fish) of Lord Vishnu,who appeared as Matsya to save Manu, the ancestor of all human beings from the great flood. The poet says, Before I could say, he became cowherd Fish Wild boar, (ibid: 49) Another poem that can be analysed in a similar manner is the Difference. Here the poet says, When Vishnu Came to mind, The Dark one you know Who began as dwarf And rose in the world to measure Heaven and earth with his paces. (ibid: 172) Here, there is a reference to Vishnu, the Dark one as Vamana, the Dwarf, who measured the earth in three steps.
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Speaking of Shiva is a book of Vacanas or religious lyrics in Kannada free verse. The Vacanas were written between the tenth and twelfth century in India by the Virasaiva saints. The spontaneity of worship that is characteristic of the bhakti movement advocated total surrender to god. In Speaking of Shiva, Ramanujan translated into English some of the Vacanas of the four great mystic poets of the period: D Basavanna, Devara Dasimayya, Mahadeviyakka and Allama Prabhu. In this way through his translations Ramanujan depicts the South Indian ways of living, thinking and working. Ramanujans four volumes of English poetry reveal a certain degree of indebtedness to his translations from Kannada and Tamil. The methodology used by the Tamil poets in his translation entitled Poems of Love and War reveal a correspondence in the structural and thematic design of his poems. The collective consciousness as conveyed through creative expression, can be identified with the help of various parameters such as the linguistic structure, genres and styles, themes, cultural milieu, philosophical vision, ideology and geophysical space. (Khubchandani: 1989:107) the content of Ramanujans poetry is essentially Indian. These poems can be arranged in a particular sequence for interpretive purposes. They resemble the Interior Landscape of Tamil poetry mediating between an individual and the large social world. The akam and puram definitions of the structure of classical tamil poetry can be extended to Ramanujans poetry. The Black Hen offers a redemptive vision in spite of the disintegrating values of our times as is evident in the last poem entitled Fear No Fall. There are innumerable references to Lord Murugan in his poetry. Lord Murugan is the Asian Dravidian god of fertility, joy, youth,
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beauty, war and love. He is represented as a six faced god with twelve hands. Prayers to Lord Murugan in Relations has six sections. In the first section, Lord Murugan is greeted thus: Lord of the new arrivals lovers and rivals: arrive at once with cockfight and banner dance till on this and the next three hills Womens hands and the garlands On the chests of men will turn like chariot wheels. (ibid: 113) In A Guide to Lord Murukan, the guide poem and the heroic praise poem have become devotional. The subject is a god instead of a hero. The motifs, the landscapes, the moods of awe, love and supplication, are directly in the classical Tamil heroic (puram) tradition. Murugan is both lover and chieftain. The interior (akam) and the exterior (puram), love and war, meet in him.(Afterwards: 1993:112) In the religious poems in Poems on Love and War, the poem Murukan: His Places has remarkable parallels. When Lord Murukan arrives: this cock- banner is raised in the festival of festivals for many towns around; wherever devotees praise and move his heart; where his spear- bearing shamans
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set up yards for their frenzy dance. (Poems of Love and War: 215) Eventually, the search for the self which serves as the subjective centre of experience ends on a metaphysical note. It combines both the Upanishads and bhakti poetry with the Virashaiva tradition in Kannada and the Shrivaiahnava tradition in Tamil. Again, Speaking to Shiva is a book of Vacanas in Kannada free verse. Vacana literally means saying, thing said. In the Vacanas, the Virasaiva saints speak of Shiva and speak to Shiva. To the bhakti poets, true religion was the religion of the soul, unencumbered by dogmas and rituals. The bhakti poet was a visionary and a seer, a mystic of a high order. He was one who revealed his own self-realization so that others could transcend the limits of their finite self to attain a state of bliss. In this regard Ramanujan observes, living in history, time and clich, one lives in a world of the pre-established, through the received ( Sruti) and the remembered (Smriti). But the experience when it comes, comes like a storm to all such husks and labels. (Introduction, Speaking to Shiva: 1973:31) the Virasaiva saints rejected both the Sruti and Smriti. They were concerned with the experience of the Now. So, their compositions were Vacanas or What is Said. It was not concerned with what is remembered or received, but what was experienced now. Mahadeviyakka is one such poet saints translated in this volume. Ramanujan makes a mention of her in his poem Mythologies 3 and says: Keep off when I worship Shiva. Touch me three times,and you will never See me again,said Akka to her new groom
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Who could not believe her ears. (Collected Poems: 228) Again the poem Fear No Fall deals with the same bhakti; it has even greater overtones of a greater insight, an intuitive power, and an extra sensory perception. In the last stage, there is no worship anymore, for who is out there to receive such worship? This is oneness or aikyasthala. Like space joining space, water water, the devotee dissolves nameless in the lord, who is not another. Thus, Ramanujan has effectively demonstrated the supreme significance of his roots that are so deeply tucked in the south Indian traditions. Ramanujan has derived his poetic technique the ancient Kannada and Tamil verse his technical accomplishment in inconstable and his thematic strategy is precisely the right one for a poet in his position. He has completely exploited the opportunities his material offers him in this regard M.K. Naik opines, Of all his contemporaries, Ramanujan appears to have the surest touch, for he never lapses into romantic clich. His unfailing sense of rhythm gives a fitting answer to those who hold that complete inwardness with language is possible only to a poet writing in his mother tongue. (Naik: 1982:201) In his poetry the Indian sensibility and indigenous ethos gets its more genuine and potent expression. He observes the inalienable link between life and art and tries to touch the life into art. To him as Chirantan Kulshrestha assumes, life and art must connect at some point.(Kulshrestha: 1981:181)

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References
Blackburn, Stuart H. and A. K. Ramanujan, (eds.). Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India . New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems: 1909-1962, 5th impr. (London: Faber & Faber, 1970. Ezekiel Nissim , Two Poets: A.K. Ramanujan and Keki N. Daruwalla, The Illustrated Weekly of India (June 18, 1972), Khubchandani, M. Lachman, The Bonds and Bounds of a Literary Tradition, Comperative Literature: Theory and Practice, (ed.) Amiya Dev, Sisir Kumar Das, Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1989. Kulshrestha Chirantan, The self in Ramanujans Poetry , The Indian Journal of English Studies, XVIII (1978-9).
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-------------------------A.K. Ramanujan:A Profile, Journal of South Asian Literature, 16.2, 1981. Iyengar,K.R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English : Prospect and Retrospect, Indian Writing in English, ed. Ramesh Mohan, Naik, M.K., A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995. Ramanujan, A. K., The Interior Landscape, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. -----------------,Second Sight (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). ----------------,Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, New Delhi: OUP, 1985. -------------------Introduction, Speaking to Shiva, trans., A.K. Ramanujan, New York: Penguin, 1973. -------------------,The Striders (London: Oxford University Press. Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), ----------------,Translators Note, Poems of Love and War, Selected and translated by A. K. Ramanujan,Delhi:OUP,1985. -----------------,Hymns for the Drowning, Poems for Vishnu by Nammalvar, Trans. From Tamil by A. K. Ramanujan, N.Y.: Penguin, 1992. R. Parthasarathy, How It Strikes a Contemporary: The Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, The Literary Criterion, XII, Nos. 2 & 3 (1976), R. Parthasarathy, ed. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (Delhi: Oxford Univesity Press, 1976), p. 95. _____________, The Literary Criterion, p. 192. Reuben, Elizabeth, Cautious Wisdom, The Indian Express Magazine (Nov. 9, 1986)
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S. Krishan, The Interior Landscape, The Hindu, October4, 1992, ii. V.K. Gokak, The concept of Indiannes with reference to Indian Writing, Indian Writign in English, ed. Ramesh Moham (Madras: Orient Longman, 1978). W.B. Yeats, Introduction, Aphorisms of Yoga by Bhagvan Shree Patanjali (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), p. 11. William Walsh, Introduction, Readings in Commonwealth Literature (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1973).

CHAPTER-V Seduction to the West

(a) Confrontation between the East and the West:
While talking about the Indian expatriate poets, Bruce King aptly remarks, 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 con-

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sciousness of being Indian marks the expatriate poets. (King: 1987:209 10) 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. (ibid: 215) 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 always with us. It is what gives us the richness of -- what you call it -- the richness of understanding. And the richness of expression. (Jha: 1981: 5) To express it in the words of E. N. Lall, 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. (Lall: 1983:44) A.K. Ramanujan is an expatriate Indian English poet. He grew up in Mysore but since 1960 when he was about thirty years old he had been staying in the United States as a professor of Dravidian Studies and Linguistics. Though he lived in the States, far away from the Indian soil but he had never forgotten the country of his birth and youth, the country of strong socio-cultural heritage which nurtured Indian sensibility in him. In fact through his works he tried to acclimatize an indigenous tradition i.e. the Indian tradition with special reference to Kannada tradition. His works exhibit a profound fusion of two cultural polarities. In this connection, E. Narendra Lall opines:- Both evaluations corroborate my thesis that
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Ramanujans poetry is the expression of his poetic sensibility in which the Indian subjectivity coalesces with the western objectivity. In other words, his Indian heritage and experience inspire his poetry, which is given speech and form based on English poetic tradition. (ibid: 201) 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 rootless ness, which is a predominant factor in the works of the unity of his migration. As Ramunajan was alive to the sharp difference between the enriching culture and tradition of India and the west, his sense of nostalgia got intensified with passing years. The readers are driven to juxtapose the Spiritual community-oriented, tolerant value system of India and the materialistic, individualistic, racist, power-hungry exploitative system of the west, (Kirpa1:1989:5) and hence, the poet goes back with renewed spirit and vigour to his people and his country. Therefore, a major theme of Ramanujans poetry has been his obsession with the familial and racial past. Ramanujans poetry written in English while he lived in the highly westernized society of the States irrevocably impresses on the readers mind the arresting images signifying poets irreversible bond with his past in India. This is the only reason why various critics both from the western land and his own country have expressed strikingly divergent responses to his poetry. These critics have perceived a sense of nostalgia for the past with the desire to re-create it in the present situation. There are some other
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who speak of his rootedness in his Hindu experience. Paul Vergheese says that his poetry expresses his Indian sensibility sharpened and conditioned by western education.(Verghese: 1931:93) There is yet another group of critics that opines that his poetry oscillates between the two worlds, the country of his birth and the country of his domicile. Thus, if a western or Westernized critic focuses his attention on the Indian ness of Ramanujans poetry, an Indian critic bewails his disinclination to fully explode his Indian experience.(Naik: 1981:44) The fact remains that he presents a torn mind which oscillates between two cultural polarities. Ramanujman himself accepts English and my disciplines (Linguistics, anthropology) give me my outer forms linguistic metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience, and my first thirty years in India, my frequent visits and field trips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the Classics and folklore give me my substance, my inner forms, images and symbols. (Parthasarathy: 1996:92) The perspicacity with which Ramanujan delineates his subconscious preoccupations and urges that were formed during his interactions with India and her culture speaks volumes of his inalienable Indian mental make up. He tries to locate the influence of his indigenous past as well as the influence of the modern western education simultaneously. Kannada Yes, my knowledge of English has been deeply affected by my knowledge of Indian literature and poeticsIf English cuts us from our culture, It wont get us very far Indian English, when it is
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In a revealing interview that Rama Jha had with

Ramanujan in 1980, the latter explains the influence of English and

good

does

get

its

nourishment

from

each

Individuals knowledge of Indian culture and Indian languages. It certainly does for me. (Times of India: 1980:13 ) Thus, Ramanujans responses to life in the States are moulded by the emotional inputs that he gathered during the formative years in India. These responses are well reflected in his poetry where he gives enough evidence of the fusion of his awareness of Indian sensibility and acutely felt temper of western modernity. From this view point one can categories Ramanujans poems into two separate groups. Poems like Conventions of Despair, Entries for a Catalogue, Still Another View of Grace, Christmas, Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day etc. belong to the category of poems in which the conflict between Hindu heritage and notions of modernity are the themes. In the second category fall the poems like Of Mothers, among other things, Love Poem for a Wife, Small Scale Reflections On a Great House, Obituary, Reflections, Snakes, History etc. where family theme dominates. Ramanujans sojourn in the States and other countries result in the production of poems that record the recurrent phenomenon that his responses to the environment in the Anglo-American set up irrevocably stirs his memory to his Indian past. In the Snakes (second poem in the volume The Striders), the poet shows the same belongingness for his past. When the poet moves in the museums or among stacks of books, his subconscious remembers with tenacious fascination his early years in IndiaA basketful of ritual cobras comes into the tame little house,
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their brown wheat glisten ringed with ripples. They lick the room with their bodies, curves, uncurling, writing a sibilant alphabet of panic on my floor. Mother gives them milk in saucers. She watches them suck and bare the black-line design etched on the bears of the saucer. The snakeman wreathes their writhing round his neck. for fathers smiling money. But I scream. (Collected Poems: 1995:4-5) Thus, the Indian past is recaptured in images that transform themselves into metaphor to endow his poetry with a new tension between the East and the West. For instance in Still another for Mother he says Something opened in the past and I heard something shut in the future, quietly. (ibid: 15) The formative influence of religion which provided him a system to know the meaning of life is rich in him because he grew up in a traditional middle class Southern Hindu Brahmin family. He retained his faith in the Hindu philosophy of the Unity Consciousness. His acceptance of the oneness of all life is evident from his poem Christmas: For a moment, I no Longer know Leaf from parrot
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Or branch from root nor, for that matter that tree from you or me. (Striders: 1966:30-31) The man, the tree and the parrot possess identical creative impulses and therefore they must be considered as expressions of the same erective force. Though the western tradition also accepts God as the creator of the universe, it seems to maintain the dichotomy between Man and Nature and Man and lower creations like animals and birds. Though Wordsworth could, for instance, find a Lurking soul within the meanest flower, he could not equate it with the human soul. To him and to poets like Robert Frost, the objects of nature, however closer they may be to the life of man, cannot become the man. This kind of difference between the oriental and occidental traditions is also emphasized further through the tree image in the same poem. The bare leafless tree standing outside his window in the USA and the lively tree seen out of his window in India which is more than a mere stiff geometrical shape are images that bring to his mind the two different cultures. After his death the poet desires to rise in the sap of trees and feel the weight / of honey - hives in my branching / and the burlap weave of weaver - birds in my hair. (A Hindu to his Body: 9). The oneness of life could be illustrated through the example of the sap. Though the sap itself is a colourless pigment, it creates all colours and all colours converge into one creative source. Ramanujan is not blind to certain superstitious aspects of his religion. The Hindu principle of non-violence sometimes reminds of
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cowardice to the poet who has lived in a country known for rationality, dynamism, fast scientific and technological growth and violence. There is the danger of the principle degenerating into callousness and indifference in actual practice. As the Hindu is not expected to hurt a fly or a spider, his great grandfather remained a helpless victim of and silent spectator to the adultery of his wife. (The Hindu: He Doesnt Hurt a fly or a Spider either: Relations) In his poem Obituary (Relations), he recalls his fathers death, and comments ironically on rituals and ceremonies associated with the cremation of the dead. In Love Poem for a Wife- I Ramanujan, in a mock - serious tone pulls up the Hindus who; betroth us before birth, forestalling separate horoscopes and mothers first periods, and wed us in the oral cradle and carry marriage into the namelessness of childhoods .( collected Poems:64) As an expatriate writer, Ramanujan is a teacher and he does not revolt against his society like the western counterpart. The revolutionary zeal which permeates the poetry of the West like those of Shelley and Byron, for instance, and the humanistic vision or the social concern and commitment found in their poetry is totally missing in him. Expatriation has not caused any setback in his growth as an artist because he has not lost touch with his mother country. The mother figure also remains a dominant figure. In Of Mothers, among other things he depicts the bond between his mother and himself, which is prevalent in all traditional societies. The poet Smell (s) upon this twisted / back bone tree
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silk and white / petal of my mothers youth. Suddenly, he realizes that the silk and white petal of her youth has changed and now she has become old and her sarees / do not cling: they hang, loose / feather of a one - time wing. (Kirpal : 78), while writing about Third World expatriate fiction says that Oedipal, incestuous impulses are implicit in the tug that the son feels towards his mother and motherland. He has the usual love hate relationship with his motherland which characterizes intense relationships. Some times, she is a figure of awe and authority; at other times she is the mother, the only home and only companion as in the case of A. K. Ramanujan. The journey motive that is predominant in Third World expatriate writings could be perceived here at the level of the mind. The poets mind often undertaking a pilgrimage to the mother or motherland. And the constant movement represents transition from one mode of being to another. Ramanujans confrontation between the east and the west includes an objective and accurate portrayal of both countries - particularly the native country. In his poem A River, he gives minute details about the nature of the river and the condition of the bridge across it and so on. While many poets of the past and present sang only about the floods and presented a romantic and idealistic picture and called it a creative force initiating life on earth, Ramanujan offers information about the other side of the picture by explaining the destructive nature. While admitting that the river in Madurai has water enough / to be poetic / about only once a year, he is alive to the fact that, it carries away in the first half - hour three village houses
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a couple of cows named Gopi and Brinda and one pregnant woman expecting identical twins with no mole on their bodies with different - coloured diapers to tell them apart. (Collected Poems:38) By showing the river as a preserver and destroyer, the poet gives a complete picture. The havoc caused by floods and drought suggested by the sand - ribs, runs contrary to the poetic myth - making tendency of Tamil poets who ignored reality and the poem itself, as Bruce remarks, is an attempt to debunk the romanticisation of traditional Tamil culture. (King: 210) In the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan, we find coalesces of the East and the West - the inner world of his Indian heritage and experience and the objectivity and accuracy of the Western poetic tradition. Though his memory is sharp and his vision of Indian society is comprehensive, he cannot be called a nostalgic traditionalist. Though he was alive to western modes of expression, changes and attitudes, we cannot conclude that he accepted them fully and advocated modernisation and westernization. He expresses his philosophical views thus: You cannot entirely live in the past, neither can you entirely 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 with us, it is what gives us the richness of- what you call it-

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the richness of understanding. And the richness of expression. (Quoted in King: 214) Again the poet declares, I did not mean by religion, provincialism, nor did I mean by it just the devotion to a particular region. What I was saying was the particularity of the experience. Even when you are cosmopolitan, you ultimately have to know something quite deeply.(ibid: 14) As in the case of several expatriates, Ramanujans works include nostalgia, inwardness, and documentary realism; but there is no idealization and the vision does not become dark inspite of the ironic and satiric tone. His poetry is characterized with a fusion of the East and the West ideology. It is due to his exposure to the rationalistic West and his own roots lying deep in Indian nativity. Though the poets sensibility is characterized by indifference, yet when there is a confrontation between tradition and modernity, he succumbs to the allure of Westrn modes. The poem Still Another view of Grace dramatizes the conflict between the two sets of values. Here the poet succumbs to the attractiveness of Westrn values, even though his brahmin ancestry rebelled against it at first. Ramanujans most popular poems, Obituary and Last of the Princes reveal the same East vs. West tension. Obituary portrays the travails of a typical orthodox Hindu family trying to come in terms with modernity. It tries to bring out the authority of tradition and the absurdity of rituals. The Last of the Princes focuses on the clash between tradition and modernity. It dramatizes the mismatch between the decadent aristocratic order and the demands of modernity. Again in River the poet introduces the motif of floods against the existing passivity and routine of

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tradition. Floods symbolize the oncoming modernity and change with an uncontrollable speed People everywhere talked of the inches rising. of the precise number of cobbled steps run over by the water, rising On the bathing places. (ibid: 9) The trauma of change creates an unprecedented chaos. At first, the impact of change is felt at the lower strata of society represented by the cobbled steps. It advances further at the bathing places where rituals are observed, the flood later engulf the unaccomodated and the vulnerable segments of society. And the way it carried off three village houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of caws named Gopi and Brinda, as usual. (ibid:10) Change, caused by modernity is so sudden that traditional human values are carried off. The pregnant woman symbolizing creativity and motherhood is undermined. Gopi and Brinda, the milk giving cows carrying folklore and mythology are drowned in the floods of modernity. Ramanujan attacks the poets who are not affected by the floods. They are at a safe and respectable distance. He exposes the cruelty and indifference of the poets towards human calamity and suffering. represents the clash between tradition and modernity. Thus the river

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Again, Conventions of Despair depicts a clash of Hindu orthodoxy and western modernity. In the opening lines of the poem he shows a strong awareness of the requirements of modernity but there is a sudden realization that national heritage should always be maintained:But sorry, I can not unlearn. Conventions of despair they have their pride. I must seek and will find my particular hell only in my Hindu mind. (ibid: 11) Thus the syndrome of western modern sensibility is rejected in favour of Hindu heritage, but he is not ready to accept its superstitions and so he goes on to give a brief ironic description of the tortures to which sinners are subjected in the Hell :must translate and turn till I blister and roast for certain lives to come; eye deep, in those boiling crates of oil; weep iron tears for winning what I should have lost, See them with lidless eyes, Saw precisely in two parts, (one of the sixty four acts they leaving that place). a once beloved head, at the naked parts of hair. (ibid: 34)

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Both these examples are enough to prove that he is confronted by the cleavage between the East and the West, tradition and modernity, experiment and superstition. Modernity urges for experimental knowledge but traditional heritage changes his perception of things, and then he asserts that he has to work out his salvation in terms of his own religion, tradition and his own nativity. Thus, the present environment in country where he lives after he is thirty-one years old makes his recapitulation of his Indian past not only insistent but also ironic in more than one sense. His India is very much there in his poetry, but the images of India projected by him turn into metaphor that acquire an inescapable undertone of irony. Thus India is mirrored in Ramanujans poetry no doubt but his watching eye do not gloss over the cracks in the mosaic of those images. From personal experience the poet constantly passes on to a depiction of shared or collective experience. He seeks comfort in the communal past. He constantly goes back to Indian common heritage of myth and tradition. His poetry reflects the predicament of one, who, while intellectually convinced of the need for relating himself to history, through tradition, is exposed to a milieu, the contemporary Indian one in which the models of continuity of tradition, myth literature family etc. are largely sterile. There is, in short an acutely unnerving perception of the nearcomplete demythicised reality of the present a perception which cripples creativity; as is found in the poem Prayer to Lord Murugan. Still he is determined to seek his identity in Indias past, I must seek and will find my particular hell only, in my Hindu mind.
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(Collected Poems: 65) The immediate consequence of this is to discover that the native conventions can be meaningful not in the immediate present but in the literary past which he wishes to relocate in the otherwise sterile present symbolizing modernity. In the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan, we find a coalesces of the East and the West - the inner world of his Indian heritage and experience and the objectivity and accuracy of the Western poetic tradition. Though his memory is sharp and his vision of Indian society is comprehensive he cannot be called a nostalgic traditionalist. Though he was alive to western modes of expression, changes and attitudes, we cannot conclude that he accepted them fully and advocated modernisation and westernization. As in the case of several expatriates, Ramanujans works include nostalgia, inwardness, documentary realism; but there is no idealization and the vision does not become dark inspite of the ironic and satiric tone. His poetry is characterized with a fusion of the East and the West ideology. It is due to his exposure to the rationalistic West and his own roots lying deep in Indian nativity. This paper is a humble attempt to explore the cultural cross-currents i.e. fusion of the East and the West in A.K. Ramanujans poetry. In a nutshell it can be observed that A.K.Ramanujan is an expatriate Indian English poet. As an expatriate he oscillates between two worlds the country of his birth and the country of his domicile. It is rightly said that one may take a person out of his country but one cannot take the country out of his mind. Even when one voluntarily leaves his country for another his mind still harks back to the past. This is very much

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true with Ramanujan. He infuses the Western ideology with the Eastern one. In this regard Bruce King aptly remarks Ramanujan is neither a nostalgic traditionalist not an advocate of modernization and westernization. He is a product of both and his poems reflect a personality conscious of changes, enjoying its vitality, freedom and contradictions, but also aware of memories which form his inner self, memories of an unconscious namelessness which are still alive at the foundation of the self. (King: 13)

(b)Tradition V/S Modernity

Literally speaking, the word tradition means custom, opinion or belief system handed down to posterity. It is a focused word in diverse facets of learning. Philosophers down the ages have time and again referred to tradition in their discourses. The word tradition is not exclusive to any particular field of study, be it philosophy or political science, sociology or literature, tradition holds a position of importance. Eminent thinkers of both East and West have aired their views on tradition. The notion of tradition constitutes a very significant element in Indian thinking. The Indians are particularly proud of the cultural heritage that has been inherited from ancestors. In this context, it would not be out of place to quote Yogendra Singh who opines: It is sometimes held that a continual re-articulation of tradition in the writings of Indian sociologists, right from the time of the pioneers to the contemporary generation, only reflects the perpetual quest for an Indian identity for
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sociology in the face of challenges from the western paradigms both of science and society. (Singh: 1990: 32) An Indian poet in English, who is well schooled in Indian philosophy, folklore and religion (that is, Hinduism) is likely to experience a cultural ambivalence. Ramanujans achievement lies in the fact that he is able to fuse the two cultures together. Yet it is not Tennysonian compromise; when taken in its essence, his work has modernists temper. A.K. Ramanujan and Jayanta Mahapatra often come through as poets steeped in their cultural milieu despite the fact that Mahapatra is a third generation catholic. Mahapatra deals mostly with inner landscape therefore; there are fewer opportunities for him to comment on out- moded social customs as Ramanujan has. His comments on many traditional beliefs are caustic but this should not lead the reader to imagine that A. K. Ramanujan rejects his Hindus (Tamil Brahmanical) background. Despite his stay in the states for over thirty years, he was no Michael Madhusudan Dutt to forsake his religious heritage by embracing another faith. he can be regarded as a kind of reformist but to say that he not proud of being a Hindus is to miss the point of poetry completely. It is perhaps, Ramanujans long sojourn abroad that explains his persistent inclination with his Indian past-both familial and racial. The past thus constitutes a major theme in his poetry. Speaking in the same vein, R. Parthasarathy says, There is something to be said for exile, you learn your roots are deep. (Naik: 14) Despite being a modernist in essence, Ramanujans roots are too deep to be amputated. It is true that he is exposed to a completely different cultural environment for considerable period of time but
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nonetheless, his links with his motherland are too strong to be severed. Driving home this point, S. K. Desai claims that, Ramanujans expatriation is a marginal affair and his alienation is myth create by critics. Though he lives in Chicago, he is all the time preoccupied with India, one of his continuing projects being collection of folk tales, proverbs, riddles which brings him to India once at least in two years. (Kurup: 1991: 182) A.K. Ramanujan's poetry exemplifies how an Indian poet writing in the English language can derive strength from retracing his steps to his roots. In poem after poem, he recalls the memories of his childhood and his experiences of life in India. In these poems, one may discern an enlightened intellect looking at things in a dispassionate manner. Nevertheless, there is no attempt to disown the richness of past experience, (Das: 1982:129) as Vijay Kumar Das very aptly comments in The Poetry of A.K Ramanujan. While going through his poetry instead of looking for information or being judgmental, one must try to re-live the experience of the poets. Acute awareness of traditional social behavioural patterns is distinctive feature of Ramanujans poetry. This encompasses the various customs, the religious standpoint, the prevalent social hierarchy and the cast distinctions widely rampant in different parts of India. Though Ramanujan is consciously aware of his roots, he is not blind to the discrepancies of his native culture. Small Town South India is a short poem laying bare the narrow mindedness of certain section of people who are afraid to discard the age-old superstitions beliefs, which have become an inseparable part of their existence. In contrast, we have the
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opinions of those broad-minded people who have ventured out of their shell and have had a taste of the wide world beyond. Returning from the West, the poet is at once conscious of the numerous restrictions imposed by the South Indians in their day to day lives. To the poet recently returned from the U.S.A. even the cows and buffaloes of the particular town seem to be within the clutches of tradition. The street cows have trapezium faces. Buffaloes shake off flies with a twitch of ripples. (Collected Poems: 1995:100) As the poet returns to South India after a long period of absence, he experiences the suffocation of a drowning man. Sinking to the bottom of the sea-bed in a barrel is an expression of the poets resentment at these shifting restrictions. The sun dawns a pickled look through layers of seawater, his toes appear greenish in colour as if affecter by mildew while trees are porous coral. As if this is not enough, he is encountered by the city shark and the wifely dolphin. The poet expresses his anguish in the lines. I sink to the sea-bed in a barrel. Water layers salt and pickle the sun Toes mildew green, trees are porous coral. Ambush of city shark and wifely dolphin. (ibid: 100) At this stage, he has no better company other than the finless slipper fish and has to make do with dense undergrowth for roof. Obviously, he cannot enjoy a relaxing sleep: I bed down with long finless slipper fish. The ceiling has weeds the sleep is brackish. (ibid.)
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With the image of a drowning man who is incapable of adjusting with his surroundings the poet gives us a subtle hint of the inadequacies he observed when he stepped on to the South Indian soil. There is also a sense of alienation in this poem. The fact that Ramanujan is well versed in folk lore of mythology is amply borne by the fact that in his poems he recalls these timeless tales from time to time. In his poem Mythologies the poet gives us a picturesque description of how Pootna the female demon was redeemed by the divine grace of the celestial baby, Lord Krishna. As per the story, the poet also describes how the she-demon lured the child into sucking her poisoned breast: The breast she offered was full Of poison and milk. Flashing eyes suddenly dull; Her voice was silk. (Collected Poems : 221) Failing in her deadly mission to kill the child, she was the one who received redemption: The child took her breast In his mouth and sucked it right our of her chest. Her carcass stretched from north to south. (ibid: 221) Pootna being thus, cleansed of her sins received a new life of eternal bliss: She changed, undone by grace, from deadly mother to happy demon, found life in death. (221) Finally, the poet makes an earnest plea to this baby-faced god of immense strength that he too may be absorved of all evil and live life anew: O Terror with a baby face, Suck me dry. Drink my venom.
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Renew my breath. (221) Another poem which reaffirms the poets strong grip on the Indian mythological tales is Mythologies-2 Here Ramanujan recounts the ageold tale of the wicked demon-king Hiranyakashyapu and his subsequent defeat at the hands of Lord Vishnu. No metter how had he tried to evade death, he could not escape the fatal blow dealt by the omni-potent lord. Hiranyakashyapu was enmeshed by his own web, which he had weaved round him. Thus, the poem runs: When the clever man asks the perfect boon : Not to be slain by demon, god, or by beast, not by day not by night, by no manufactured weapon, not out of doors nor inside, not in the sky nor on earth, Come now come soon, Vishnu, man lion, neither and both , to hold him in your lap to disembowel his pride with the steel glint of bare claws at twilight. (Collected Poems: 226) Finally, the poem ends with the poets fervent prayer to God almighty to obliterate all his doubts and reinstate him in the path of faith. He acknowledges the omnipresence of God and prays to be blessed with an enlightened sight: O midnight sun eclipse at noon, Net of loopholes a house all threshold, Connoisseur of negatives and assassin
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Of certitudes, slay now my faith in doubt. End my commerce with bat night owl. Adjust my single eye; rainbow

bubble,
so I too may see all things double. (ibid: 226) In poem like Convention of Despair, the poet makes it explicitly clear that it is impossible for him to shun his root completely and step into the shoes of modernity whole-heartedly. Ramanujan looks at traditions with an unbiased criticism. Nevertheless, he remained loyal to the ideas, which entered into the psyche during his formative years in India. Staying in the U.S.A., he comes across motifs of modernity such as the urge to seek an outlet for sexual fantasies, the need for entertainment through the silver screen as well as the indifferent pursuit of science and simultaneously protesting against nuclear tests. He is well aware of the fact that if he fails to adopt the so-called westernised life style he will be branded as a foreigner. Thus, he confesses: Yes, I know all that. I should be modern. Marry again. See strippers at the Tease. Touch Africa. Go to the movies. Impale a six-inch spider under a lens. Join the Testban, or become the Outsider. Or pray to shake my fist (or whatever you call it) at a psychoanalyst. And when I burnI should smile, dry-eyed, And nurse martinis like the Marginal Man. (ibid: 34)
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A deep analysis of his own personality convinces Ramanujan that he cannot compromise with his identity in terms of his Hindu cultural heritage. Therefore, he cries out emphatically: I must seek and will find/ my particular hell only in my hindu mind. (ibid: 34) Here, we see that alienation from his native soil does not sever the poets bond of continuity with his older ideals. So rejecting the modern sensibility, he makes a heart-rending plea at the end of the poem: No, no, give me back my archaic despair; Its not obsolete yet to live in this many lived lair of fears, this flesh. (34) One is inclined to agree with M.K. Naik when he says of Ramanujan that, the poet also appears to view favourably the great absorbing power of his traditional culture. (Naik: 19) In an interview with Rama Jha, Ramanujan states: The past never passes. Either the individuals past or historical past or cultural past. (Jha: 1981:7) P.K.J. Kurup has rightly pointed out that in the poetry of Ramanujan, The image of home becomes a unifying force among individual and tradition, emotion and intellect, past and present. And again the same image home provides the poetic self of Ramanujan a sense of affirmation in facing the actualities of modern living. (Kurup: 1991:92) Again, A Minor Sacrifice is a poem that deals with a popular India folk-lore coupled with an incident from the poets past. The poem begins with a discussion of the well known tale of Indian mythology, Parikshat and his son Janamjaya. The first two stanzas describe the kings encounter with sage having garlanded the saints neck with a snake,
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followed by his curse and then the subsequent step taken by the kings son for the demolition of this poisonous reptile, thus trying to acquit his father of the fatal prophecy of snake bite. Id just heard that day Of the mischievous king in the epic who kills snake in the forest and think it would be such fun to garland a sages neck with the cold dead thing, and so he does, and promptly earns a curse, and early death by snake bite, His son vows vengeance and performs a sacrifice, a magic rite that was draws every snake from everywhere, till snakes of every stripe begin to fall through the blazing air into his altar fires. (Collected Poems: 144) The poet relates this incident to similar one in his childhood where in place of snakes; it was the scorpions who were on the verge extinction. In this case, grasshoppers were made the sacrificial offerings to appease the scorpion god. One day, in his childhood, as the poet recalls, his uncle, a staunch believer in non-violence being driven to exasperation, was forced to kill a scorpion. Then that day, Uncle of all people, a man who shudders at silk,
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for he loves the worm, who would never hurt a fly but catch it most gently to look at it eye and let it go, suddenly strikes our first summer scorpions on the wall next of Gopus bed with the ivory dragonhead off his walking stick and show us the ripe yellow poison-bead behind the sting. (ibid: 144) The traumatic experience caused by a scorpions sting is affectively Portrayed in Nissim Ezekiels The Night of the Scorpion . The sting of the scorpion mentioned in this poem reminds us of the intense pain suffered by the woman in Ezekiels poem. The intensity of her trauma can be felt in the lines : My mother twisted through and through groaning on a mat. (Ezekiel: 1993:20) To go back to Ramanujans recollection, he remembers vividly his grandmother and his uncle enlightening the children on the subject of scorpion: Grandmother then tut-tutting like a lizard, tell us how a pregnant scorpion will look for a warm secret place, say, a little girls underwear
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or a little boys jockstrap, and then will brust her back to let loose in her death a host of a baby scorpions. (Collected Poems: 145) Together with a lad named Shivanna, the poet hatches a conspiracy to get rid of the scorpions ones and for all. Shivanna suggests that by casting a spell on them they can lure them inside a tree and then set fire to them en masse. To the poets inquisitive queries, Shivanna replies: Witchcraft, says he, shining darker than an ebony turtle. we can make them come at our bidding when the sun is in scorpio, like guests to a wedding, into the hole of this very tree. and they will burn in a bonfire you and I will light. (ibid: 145) In his eagerness, the poet wanted to begin the task immediately but Shivanna calmed him down saying that at first they have to appease the scorpion god with hundred wingless grasshoppers caught on a Tuesday having the new moon. So, on the destined day the poet sets out along with another accomplice named Gopu in his cruel mission of massacre. They accomplish their task with surprising alacrity and deftness. So we steal three pickles jar at down on that breezy new moon Tuesday. Leading and hopping all over the lawn, we become expert by noon
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at the common art of catching grasshoppers on the wing. (ibid:146) As they proceed on their deadly act of genocide, they are able to observe the agony of these mute creatures. The fear and pain of the victimised insects are etched in their memories. Ironically, for them, the experience is far from thrilling: We unlearn what we couldnt have in years, some small old fears of other living things, though were still squeamish when we pull their wing and shiver a bit as we put away hose wriggles in our bottles. And we learn as from no book, the difficult art of our counting little writhing objects through glass walls with flaws and bubbles. (ibid: 147) By evening, their arduous task is over. They had to make a special endeavour only in their last catch probably because the grasshoppers too were becoming wary of their hunters. Then carefully guarding their prized catch, they quietly sneaked into the house. After giving themselves a hard scrub which almost tore off their skin, they drew lots to decide on the keeper of the grasshopper for the night. The lot fell on Gopu. None of
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them really ate or slept well that night and Gopu was frightened by nightmares : That night we dont eat or sleep too well. We draw sticks and it falls to Gopus lot to keep the jar of grasshopper cripples safe under his bed and even that savage innocent dreams all night of every punishment in the narrow woodcut columns of the yellowing almanacs of Hindu hells. (ibid: 148) Shivanna the leader of the trio meets with an even more ghastly fate, When the others go to meet him the next day, they find him on his deathbed. Shivanna never recovers from his strange disease to which the finally succumbs. When we go to see Shivanna on Wednesday morning, the jars behind our back .. Shivannas mother tells us he is in the hospital teken sick with some strange twitching disease. We never see him alive again. (ibid: 148) The last part of the poem has direct bearing on the mythological tale with which the poem begins. Like the kings son in the story, Shivanna too suffered from an inexplicable torture.
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Uncle says, later, Did you know, that Shivanna, he clawed and kicked the air all that day, that new moon Tuesday, like some bug on its back? (ibid: 148) Was it merely co-incidental or as Graham Greene would have said, a form of divine vengeance? The poet leaves it to us to decide. A Leaky Tap After a Sisters wedding is another poem set against the Indian backdrop. In a matter of fact manner, the poet remembers his sister, particularly the one who had matured into adulthood: Our sisters were of various sizes, One was ripe for husband and we were not poor. (ibid: 9) In later years, he recalls the dripping sound of defective tap after his sisters wedding, as he hears the sound of the woodpecker boring noisily into the tree and sees a snake hanging helplessly from a crows mouth. The poet and his sister had always wished the tree to be blessed with the power expression: It is a single summer woodpecker peck-peck-peck-pecking away at the tree behind the kitchen. My sister and I have always wished a tree could shriek or at least writhe like that other snake
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we saw under the beak of the crow. (ibid: 10) Although many of the incidents of the past find expression in Ramanujans poetry through the medium of memory, the poet does not harbour any sentimental feeling towards it. His poem On Memory is a case in point. He admits that he has the nursery rhymes and other fact and figures and details of history at his fingertips: Ask me : nursery rhymes on Tipu Sultan of Jack and Jill : the cosmetic use of gold when the Guptas ruled : an item of costume in Shakespearean times. (ibid: 21) Simultaneously, he laments at the inability of memory to provide an impetus to his creative genius. Thus, he has an ironic and cynical attitude towards the nature of memory saying it has no place at all for unforgettable things. (21) We can safely conclude that although Ramanujan was consciously aware of his roots, which were steeped in tradition, he did not lack the ability to appreciate the modern out look towards life. All along, he has been honest enough to acknowledge the total impact of influences that have shaped his poetic genius. In a conversation with Rama Jha, Ramanujan asserted: Yes, my knowledge of English has been deeply affected by may knowledge Indian literature and poetics.if
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English cuts us frim iur culture it wont get us a very far Indian English, when it is good, does get its nourishment from each individuals knowledge of Indian culture and Indian languages. It certainly does for me. That is what binds us back to our childhood and early years. (Jha: 1980:13) As has been stated earlier Ramanujan does not encircle his Indian heritage by a luminous halo. He is often critical of certain beliefs and traditions, which have been handed down reverentially to the succeeding generations. In No Amnesiac King, the poet explodes the Shakuntala myth. He bristles at the callous manner in which Dushyanta treats his wife Shakuntala. Having married her in the seclusion of a hermitage, the king conveniently forgets his wife some time later. He regains his lost memory only at the sight of the wedding ring he had presented to Shankutala, which was accidentally discovered in the belly of a fish. One knows by now one is no amnesiac king, whatever mother may say or child believe. one cannot wait anymore in the back of ones mind for that conspiracy of three fishermen and a palace cook to bring, dressed in cardamom and clove the on well-timed memorable fish, so one ca cut straight with the royal knife to the ring waiting in the belly, and recover at one stroke all lost memory, make up for the years drained in cocktail glasses
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among dry women and pickled men, and give back body to shadows, and unto the curse that comes on the boat with love. (ibid: 126) Here the poet highlights almost the unpardonable offence of the king forgetting Shakuntala and making her life miserable. He has better opinion of common people of the present time who are more humane and considerate. Ramanujans broadened outlook resulting from his stay in the West perpetuated him to question the untold reverence shown to a king with such a derogatory flaw in his nature. He recalls the myth as he waits for his wife endlessly at the sea beach. The sight of bright pomfret fish probably reminds him of that fish of long ago which had swallowed Shakuntalas ring. As I wait for my wife and watch the traffic in sea side market places and catch my breath at the flat-metal beauty of whole pomfret, round starting eyes and scales of silver in the fishermans pulsing basket, (ibid: 126-27) We are inclined to agree with K.Venkta Reddy who remarks, As a modern poet Ramanujan shows no blind reverence for old myth and tradition. (Ready: 1994: 90) At times, the glory of the Hindu heritage is overtly contrasted against the inglorious Indian present. Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day is one such example. It presents three
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distinct pictures-each revealing the wide gulf between the past and the present. The first picture is that of rainy day in Madras in 1965. The clerks jostle with the porters for a lone seat in a bus: Madras, 1965, and rain. Head clerks from city banks Curse, better, elbow in vain the patchwork gangs of coolies in their scramble for the single seat in the seventh bus. (Collected Poems : 126) Their conversation revolves round King Harshas reign when the emperor made thousands of monks stand in a row and distributed expensive gifts among them. They also mention the Chinese traveler Hiuen-Tsang in the course of their talk. They get so carried away by their conversation that the ultimately miss the eighth bus also. Then they have to depend only on their own two feet to carry them to their destination: They tell each other how old king Harshas men beat soft gongs to stand a crowd of ten thousand monks in a queue, to give them and the single visiting Chinaman a hundred pieces of gold, a pearl, and a length of cloth;
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so, miss another bus, the eighth and begin to walk, for King Harshas monks had nothing but their own two feet. (ibid: 74) In the above lines, we get a glimpse of the chaos and disorder, which was steeped into the once disciplined Indian society. The second picture provided through the poem is of well-dressed fashionable Indians standing awestruck before the wonders of Egypt. These wide-eyed Indians who are mesmerized by Egyptian antiquities are hardly well-versed in the glorious heritage of their own motherland. They are probably ignorant that the fine fabrics which are draping the mummies have actually been imported from India. Thus, there is a satirical description of the so-called Indian tourists: Full bright Indians; tiepins of ivory, colour cameras for eyes, stand every July in Egypt among camels, faces pressed against the past as against museum glass, tongue tasting dust, amazed at pyramidfuls of mummies swathed in millennia of Calicut muslin. (ibid: 74-75) The third section of the poem is a satirical description of an Indian professor of Sanskrit in Berlin in 1935. The professor is totally lost in an alien land. He struggles with the German language at every step and is at his wits end trying to locate place and memorise landmarks. Suddenly, the familiar sight of the Swastika symbol drawn on the arm
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of a stranger in a bus makes him to feel at home. The Swastika interpreted at different levels by the Germans and the Indians ironically strike a chord of familiarity. While the Hindus since the ancient times regard the Swastika as a good omen, the modern German holds an entirely different attitude towards it: 1935 professor of Sanskrit on cultural exchange : passing through; lost in Berlin rain; reduced to a literal, turbaned child, spelling German signs on door, bus , and shop, trying to guess go from stop; desperate for a way of telling apart a familiar street from a stranger or east from east at night, the brown dog that barks from the brown dog that doesnt, memorizing a foreign paradigm of lanterns, landmarks, a gothic lotus on the iron gate; suddenly comes home in English, gesture, and Sanskrit, assimilating the swastika on the neighbours arm in that roaring bus from a grey nowhere to a green.
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(ibid: 75) Thus, a comprehensive study of Ramanujans poetry reveals that A.K. Ramanujan feels seducted towards west and oscillates between the two shores i.e. the East and the West but soon returns towards his roots. in the words of P.K.J Kurup, His poetic selfs awareness of the need for relating himself to history through tradition. It is here that he realizes that the sense of alienation felt by the modern artistic self from the immediate environment can in reality imply continuity with an older ideal. (Kurup: 1991: 184) Although Ramanujan does not reject his cultural roots and Hindu heritage, he is essentially a modernist. He has a clear vision and makes good use of his analytical bent of mind. In Death and Good Citizen, the poet offers divergent solutions for the disposal of the human body after death. From a modern and secular viewpoint of an environmentalist, the human body originates from nature, is sustained by nature and after death returns to nature. This return to nature is a fundamental principle of conservation according to which everything in our environment should be recycled. During ones lifetime, the waste-matter excreted by the body should be used as fertilizers to improve the quality of plants: I know told me, your night soil and all your citys goes still warm every morning in a government lorry, drippy (you said) but punctual, by special
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arrangement to the municipal gardens to make the grass grow tall for the cows in the village, the rhino in the zoo : and the oranges plump and glow, till they are preternatural. (Collected Poems: 126) Similarly, from a modernists viewpoint, at the time of death, the healthy organs of the body should be donated for transplants. For example, at the time death, the heart and eyes can be of use to someone else: Heart, with your kind of temper may even take, make connection with alien veins, and continue your struggle to be naturalized: beat, and learn to miss the beat in a foreign body. (ibid: 135-136) But from an orthodox Hindu viewpoint, an act like organ donation at death would be regarded as blasphemous. The tradition bound Hindus believe in the theory of re-incarnation and observe special rites during cremation. So if the persona of the poem were to die in India, his funeral would be treated almost as religious ceremony complete with the chanting of devotional verses from scriptures : But you know my tribe, incarnate Unbelievers in the bodies,
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theyll speak proverbs, contest my will, against such a degradation. Hidebound, even worms cannot have me: theyll cremate me in Sanskrit and sandalwood; have me sterilized to a scatter of ash. (ibid: 136) The persona of the poem is aware that if he were to die in the West, then also his views as a secular environmentalist would suffer a set back. The pious Christians there would never allow his body to decompose into the soil directly. His dead body would first be embalmed and then entombed in accordance with their tradition before being finally buried in the earth. Or abroad, theyll lay me out in a funeral parlour, embalm me in pesticide, bury me in a steel trap, lock me out out of nature till Im oxidized by leftover air, withered by may own vapours into grin and bone. (ibid: 136) So even in America, his wish to return to nature directly after death would remain a mere dream. As a result of the predominance of Christian rites and rituals, his wishes to be one with nature and be of service to humanity even after death will remain unfulfilled: My tissue will never graft, will never know newsprint, never grow in a culture
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or be mould and compost for jasmine, eggplant and the unearthly perfection of municipal oranges. (136) While on the theme of tradition and modernity, we can take the example of Old Indian Belief, which as the very title itself suggest has a direct bearing on Indian beliefs. Ants come nowhere within the vicinity of a living cobra but the moment it is dead, they feast deliciously on its corpse. Aided by natural agents in wearing down the dead skin of the snake, ants soon tear down its flesh, baring its skeletal framework. The latter is then accidentally discovered by a school girl or preserved in museums for display. No ant, red, white or black can stand the smell of a live cobra. But theyll pick the flesh off dead ones to the last ivory rib : with a little help from rain, sun and the natural chemistry of recent flesh, theyll leave snake skeletons complete with fang and grin for school girl picnic horror, and the local museum collection of local celebrities. (ibid : 106)

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Ecology is another such poem where the poet cannot help expressing his indignation at the stubborn refusal to do away with age-old familiarities, even if they are flowering trees. The poets mother, allergic to the pervading g fragrance of the champak flowers, found herself suffering from acute migraine year after year. But she would brook no talk of having those trees cut. She required the flowers for the performance of her daily ritualistic worship. Moreover, being steeped in superstition, she could not bear to dissociate herself from these champak trees, even if they caused her unbearable physical suffering. This was a recurrent phenomenon every year in the rainy season, which could be avoided, had logic and reasoning prevailed : The day after the first rain, or years, I would come home in a rage, for I could see from a mile away our three Red Champak trees had done it again, had burst into, flower and given mother her first blinding : migraine of the season with their street-long heavy-hung yellow pollen fog of a fragrance no wind could sift, no door could shut out from our blackpillared house (ibid: 120) In the poem entitled The Guru Ramanujan established himself as modernist who is not afraid to raise his voice against the flaws and
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discrepancies in our societal structure. He makes no bones about his disdain for the self-proclaimed god men who undertake the responsibility of enlightening the ignorant people. While on one hand, the pseudo-guru makes no mention of charity towards humanity in general, on the other, he is meticulous about his own comforts: Forgive the weasel his tooth Forgive the tiger his claw but do not forgive the woman her malice or the man his envy said the guru, as he moved on to ask me to clean his shoe, bake his bread and wash his clothes. (ibid: 251) The guru makes pretence of being kind and compassionate as he preaches to show concern for animals. But he is completely bereft of as Shakespeare coined the phrase the milk of human kindness. (Shakespeare : 1997:96) Give the dog this bone, the parrot his seed, the pet snake his mouse but do not give the woman her freedom nor the man his mid-day meal till he begs said the guru, as he went on to order his breakfast of eggs and news asking me to carry his hair to the dais. (ibid: 251) The persona of the poem, unable to compromise with the hypocritical nature of the guru revolts against him and ultimately bids
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goodbye for good. He cannot stand the latters irreverent attitude and derogatory remarks against women. So, he says: I have dog is the bone, the parrot his seed, the pet snake his mouse, forgave the weasel his tooth, forgave the tiger his claw, and left the guru to clean his own shoe for remembered I was a man born of a woman. (ibid: 251) Here we are inclined to agree with P.K.J Kurup who says about Ramanjujan With a great deal of skill he cold fuse the essential Indian sensibility with the temper of modernity and rescued his poetry from becoming merely nostalgic. (Kurup: 181) Despite being highly critical of many aspects of his Hindu culture deeply steeped in tradition, A.K. Ramanujan is certainly not blind to some of its stable virtues. The poem Christmas clearly underline the essential dis-similarities between the oriental and occidental cultures. The tree shorn of all its leaves, standing bare outside his window in the U.S.A. signifies only a Euclidean framework for him : Here in dawns routine rectalngle my eastern window frames a tree: Euclids ghost Arresting life for me. (Collected Poems: 32) In contrast to this seemingly aloof tree, symbolizing all that is impersonal is the tree outside his home in India. The tree in the East encompassed nature in all its bounty within its widespread branches:
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But where I came from thinking are timed differently. My window Sometimes seems quite cunning defining all at once the abstact skies with a leftward leep of greens, a shock of leaf upon Christmas eyes. And I am limed On branches bare as roots With that latest hatch of birth-bewildered parrots. (ibid: 32) An analytical study of the poems of A. K. Ramanujan reveals the poets strictly impartial mentality. His irreverent attitude to some of the traditional beliefs shows his ability to transcend the traditional outlook unflinchingly. Ramanujan is essentially a modern poet with a rationalists approach. He is rightly called the product of the education of enlightenment. To quote Taqi Ali Mirza: R. parthasarathy is closer to the mark when he says that Ramanujans poetry is the product of a specific culture and that his real greatness lies in his ability to translate this experience into the terms of another culture. (Mirza: 160:1980)
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A.K Ramanujan is not tradition-bound poet in the sense that he dies not accept unquestioningly whatever cultural furniture has been handed down to him. At the same time, he dies not aspire to be a modernist by rejecting his cultural roots. In his essay entitled What is Indian in Indo-English poetry Ezekiel highlights the blending of Indian and European cultural elements in Ramanujan. Commenting on Conventions of Despair he says that, The poet tells us explicitly that he rejects the demands of modernity such as marrying again as well as age-old tenets of morality. (Ezekiel: 1993:39) The symbols of modernity are equated with having no qualms with regard to re-marriage or disregarding the age-old tenets of morality. The poets brahmanical ancestry, however, forbids him from easily falling a prey to the western allurements. Therefore, he decides to work out his salvation treading on the path of his own religious traditions. As Rama Nair points out, There is an implied solution here In Hindu philosophy, the classical theory of karma implies a pragmatic approach to lifes problems.(Nair: 1994:38) Quoting Kari H. Potter, she further says, An effective experience is painful or pleasurable because at least in part, karmic traces produced by bad or good actions respectively play a part in the production of that experience. Thus, since all effective experience, Sukha or Dukha, are produced by our actions and so deserve, there is no underserved Dukha. (Nair: 1994:38) Thus, the poet realises that in no way can he snap his root from his tradition and one of the ways of coming to terms with the onslaught of modernity is to accept the philosophical concept of karma, which is an inseparable part of the tradition bound Hindu religion. Ramanujans
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poetry asserts his quest for interpreting the traditional from a modern perspective. In order to bring home the point that despite his repeated assertions of trying to seek (Ramanujan: 34) his particular hell (ibid:34) only in the Hindu mind, (ibid: 34) thus, Ramanujan is essentially a modernist. To conclude, Ramanujans highly analytical mind prevents him from romanticizing his past or aping the western paradigms blindly. Ramesh.K Srivastava very succinctly points this out : Ramanujan exposes the hard-heartedness of those people who in the myths or in history have been considered great for a long time. Having encountered two cultures, one ancient and the other modern, each illuminating and enriching the other. Ramanujan does not accept the mythological and historical characters through the coloured eyes of several generations, but scrutinises them afresh after removing the cobweb of traditional impressions. He interprets the ancient from modern perspective and the modern by correlating with the past. (Srivastava: 1984:167) Thus, though Ramanujan seems to be sededucted to the West yet he adopts a dispassionate and balanced attitude in his writing. He is a man who has his head firmly fixed on his shoulders and does not allow emotions to predominate his intellect. Following the path of the golden mean, he has been able to paint an analytical picture of the two cultures with which he has been so intimately associate. In other words, Ramanujan is too sensible and wise a writer to be drawn to either extreme of the cultural spectrum. He has accepted the presence of both
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the shaping forces in his cultural background but has refused to identify himself completely with any of them.

References
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, The Seventies and After, New Delhi: Sterling, 1984. Das, Bijay Kumar, The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, in Modern IndoEnglish Emmanuel, Poetry, Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1982. Narendra Lall, The Poetry of Encounter:

Three Indo-Anglian Poets ( Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel) New Delhi: Sterling, 1983. Ezekiel, Nissim, What is Indian in Indo-English Poetry? Critical Responses, Commonwealth Literature, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1993. Jha, Rama , A Conversation with A.K. Ramanujan, The Humanities Review. Vol. 3, No. 1, January - June 1981. King, Bruce, Modern Indian Poetry in English, London: Oxford University Press,1987. Kirpal, Viney, The Third World Novel of Expatriation, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1989. Kurup, P.k.j., The Self in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, Contemporary Indian Poetry In English, New Delhi, Atlantic Publications and Distribution, 1991.

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Lall, E. N. Beyond Poetry as Family History, The Poetry of Encounter. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1983. Mirza, Taqi Ali, A. K. Ramanujans Particular Hell, Indian Poetry in English : A Critical Aseessment, Ltd., 1980 M.K. Naik, A.K.Ramanujan and The Search of Roots in Humanities Review New Delhi: Jan-Jun 1981. Nair, Rama, A. K. Ramanujan : A Study in Psychological Realism, Indian Literature Today , Vol. II, Poetry and Fiction, Dhawan, R.K.(Ed.), New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994. R. Parthasarthy, Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Ramanujan, A. K., Collected Poems, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. --------------------The Striders , London: Oxford University Press, 1966. --------------------The Relations, London: Oxford University Press, 1971. Ready, K.Venkata, Recollections Emotionalized in Un-tranquil Moments : The poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, Critical Studies in Commonwealth Literature, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994. Srivastave,Ramesh.K., Reflection of Growing Dehumanization in Ramanujans Poetry, Contemporary Indian English Poetry, Atma Ram (Ed.), Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1989, Singh, Yogendra, Tradition and Social Structure, in Indian Sociology: Social and Emerging Concerns. Vista Publications, New Delhi: 1990. The Times of India, Sunday, Jan 20, 1980.
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Shahane Vasant A. and M.

Sivaramakrishna (Ed.), Madras: The Macmillan Company of India

Verghese, C. Paul , Problems of Indian Creative Writing in Bombay: Somaiya Publications 1971.

English,

CHAPTER- VI

Conclusion
An in-depth study of the poetical works of A.K. Ramanujan establishes him as an outstanding poet who has carved a niche for himself in the field of Indian English poetry. His poetry, translation, and his rendering and interpretation of Indian folklore mark him as an extraordinarily gifted poet and artist. If poetry is an interpretation of life, then here is a man who through his art interpreted it richly, variously, and deeply. He 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

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modernity. Ramanujan is actually a gifted Indian intellectual who has savoured of both the eastern and the western cultures. The foregoing analysis also shows how Ramanujan, responds characteristically in his own way to certain Indian situations and experiences, and how his Indian sensibility is peculiar and recognizable. His intense involvement the in the Indian cultural milieu shows that his roots have gone deep in his native tradition and culture. Being modern Indian poet in English, he has shown a growing awareness of his environment. His creative mind responds to the Indian reality and helps him create a new, independent poetic tradition in Indian English literature. One can easily discern the clear differences among in his religious, linguistic, geographical and familial situations, yet the native experience as expressed in his works is obviously related to the shared conditions and the milieu. In this final assessment, one has to emphasize that all through his poetic career, Ramanujan remained an NRI, but he is firmly anchored in Hindu tradition and mythology. For his poetic inspiration he goes back not to Sanskrit classics but vernacular South Indian folklore and subaltern poets of Tamil Cankam and Kannada Vacanas . Again, a close study of Ramanujan's poetry confirms that he is deeply associated with his intellectual background and involvement with Indian culture. Ramanujan establishes his roots with his native land firmly. Despite his expatriate status, he is deeply involved with both the cultures, Eastern and Western. For him, the American environment acts as the exterior and the Indian as the interior. They are the two lobes of his brain as he has himself admitted. Ramanujan is anchored to his rich literary and personal familial past, with a varying degree of emphasis on
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the quality of Indian ethos. Still as a post-colonial poet, he focuses more on the Indian reality than on an Arcadian past. I.N. Lall notices in his poetry : a curious combination of East and West. The experience of the emotion is Indian but the mode of defining it is Western. (Lall: 1983:43) From a thematic and imagistic analysis of his poetry in English, it is evident that Ramanujans works deal with the psychic problem of adjustment between cultures, the Indian and the Western. The critical mode of inquiry adopted is that psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is primarily a way of the understanding man, and offering a possible cure for his problems of maladjustment. The treatment aims to promote insight or self-understanding, and the cure for which the patient seeks analysis is supposed to flow from this understanding. Such an understanding would involve confronting ones feelings and inclinations, and other dimensions of ones personality. When these are taken into account, then one can acquire a better appreciation of what one desires in the preoccupations and activities that fill ones life. A.K. Ramanujans concern with his Indian past, his American present, and a return to his cultural roots through the mode of translations, reflect the quest of the self for an inner world of stability and harmony. His translations of the religious Kannada Vacanas and the poems for Vishnu by Nammalvar reveal that the quest for inner quietude can perhaps be realized only through a spiritual reconciliation with his own Hindu heritage and sensibility. Ramanujans poetry is a matter of experiencing an effect of centripetality. As S. Chindhade comments:

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Ramanujan's recurring themes are ... the problem of belonging or rootedness and its consequent nostalgia, recourse to personal familial past, and a conspicuously strong response to certain Indian situations. (Shindhade: 2001:62) A.K. Ramanujans poetry proves that he is essentially a great modern poet with Indian sensibility. Of all his contemporaries, Ramanujan has the finesse and expert craftsmanship of an authentic creative writer. He does not lapse into romantic clichs or derivative models. His poems are remarkable for their deep emotion, and insights into the trauma of everyday existence. M.K. Naik observes, His unfailing sense of rhythm gives a fitting answer to those who hold that complete inwardness with language is possible only to a poet writing in his mother tongue. (Naik: 1982:201) Ramanujans poetry is noted for its Indianness. His extensive knowledge of Kannada folklore enriched his poetic vision and interpretation. Though his earlier volumes of poetry dealt primarily with the social plane of experience, The Black Hen evokes subtle resonances of a metaphysical and spiritual reality. In his excellent essay on Two Realms of Kannada Folklore, Ramanujan analyses the genre and system of the Kannada folklore. He argues that it is a system where each genre is related to others, fitted, dovetailed, contrasted so that we cannot study any of them alone for long. (Ramanujan: 1986:41) For Example Kannada riddles complement Kannada proverbs in various ways. The riddles have no social themes, as proverbs have. The riddles concentrate on familiar objects of nature (water, sun, eyes, trees, eggs etc.) or culture
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(well, book, sickle etc.) and play poetic and logical games with them.(ibid.) A common Kannada riddles is: What has three eyes but is not Siva? The answer is A coconut. Ramanujan uses this technique very efficiently in his poetry and thus makes it charming and value oriented. Far away from the familiar surrounding of home, Ramanujan arrests the steady flow of his thoughts in the form of verse. Multiplicity of themes expressed in a deft style, that is characterised by a rich storehouse of metaphors, images and symbols is a remarkable facet of his poetry. He often appears to be obsessed with his past. But the past is given a different dimension. Ramanujan does not recall the experiences of his past in moments of tranquility. Rather, he recollects these incidents at random. He makes no effort to seek solace from these recollections. Memory, for him, is not an escape route into oblivion, taking him away from the painful contradictions of the present. Thus, unlike Wordsworth, who consciously draws succor from memory, for A.K. Ramanujan, the inward eye (Wordsworth: 1990: 6) is not the bliss of solitude. (ibid: 6) Another hallmark of Ramanujans poetry is his anti-sentimental approach to life in general and personal experiences in particular. On the one hand, he is a great Indian poet with Indian sensibility and on the other; his poetry possesses characteristics of detachment. His poems hardly reveal any sentiment bordering on tenderness. He can relate in a calm and detached manner any of the grim realities of life. However, at times, he resents this apparently cool demeanour to take everything in ones stride. This shows that he is not really unconcerned about human misery. In fact, cruelty to animals also pains him deeply. The remarkable
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thing is that he can express his emotions in a controlled manner. There is a vast difference between the approaches of A.K. Ramanujan and P.B. Shelley, with his sensibility rooted in sentiment, feels: Our sweetest songs are those That tell of saddest thoughts. (Shelley: 357) Ramanujan, however, does not draw any pleasure from dwelling in melancholy. For pleasure and solace he again and again returns to his indigenous past. Again, Ramanujans poetry convinces one that A.K. Ramanujan stands out as one of the most distinguished Indian English poets who embodies the choicest elements of his rich native culture and the detached outlook drawn from an intellect subjected to Western thought. He preferred to describe himself as the hyphen in Indo-American. His conscious attempt to appear as a detached observer is probably the result of his quest for artistic perfection. He refrained from getting too much involved with his subject possibly with the intention of not tainting his poetic self. Ramanujan may have written on the same themes as his contemporaries or those chosen by the stalwarts of English poetry but it is his treatment of these themes that places him in a different class of poets. For instance, Nature has been a favorite subject of poets since the dawn of literary writing. While Keats and Wordsworth have been faithful worshippers of Nature, Ramanujan dies not hesitate in focusing upon those aspects of Nature which are not so benign. The earliest IndianEnglish poets too glorified the fathomless beauty of Nature and looked upon it as a timeless healer like their British counterparts but Ramanujan
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had the individuality to break free from these fetters of imitation. He too dealt with Nature in his poetry but he has given it a completely different dimension. Instead of drawing solace from the serene beauty of Nature, in some of his poems, he has harped on its destructive aspects resulting in heaping untold misery on mankind. He cannot be labeled as an escapist whose vision is blurred with the idea of escaping from the stark realities of life. Ramanujan, as an indigenous poet can best be summed up in the following words: Ramanujan is neither a nostalgic traditionalist not an advocate of modernisation and Westernisation. He is a product of both and his poems reflect a personality conscious of change, enjoying its vitality, freedom and contradictions, but also aware of memories which form is inner self memories of an unconscious namelessness, which are still alive, at the foundation of the self. (Datta: 1994:131) Like the noted literary critic T.S. Eliot, Ramanujan, too, believes in continuity from tradition to modernity, a continuity between his poetry, translation and scholarship. According to A.N. Dwivedi : A modern poet shows a peculiar sensibility bordering on complexity, variety and sophistication, and has nothing to do with the Romantic or the Victorian sensibility. He generally evolves a novel method of writing, a peculiar tone of disillusionment, and a diction charged with passion, pulse and power and abounding in concrete images and striking symbols, colloquialisms and slang.(Dwivedi:1979:291)
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For A.K. Ramanujan confusion and chaos are all pervasive in the cotemporary milieu. For instance we can take these lines from Bulls : Bulls and bulldozers block each other on the road to Chidambaram. Ravens, caw. Fruitbats hang broken umbrellas in the branches of the giant tree. Ambivalent as a man married to two wives. I walk through the holy place, one eye wincing, fearing beggars and leprosy, another on temples, women. (Ramanujan: Collected Poems: 246) For him Indian reality is a favourite subject for contemplation. Indian beliefs, situations and ancient confusions attract him most, and he exhibits post-modern and post-colonial perspectives of contemporary man as a rudderless boat. He deals with social injustice, economic disparities, operative lawlessness, social disorderliness and, above all, static tradition in a brilliant way and thus highlights those social problems which have brought about the deterioration of human values. In poems like Lord Murugan one can discern his awareness of the injustice, cruelities and inhumanities which are rampant in Indian society. His response to the landscape of India, sense of tradition and culture of his land of birth, and aliveness to social and political issues of post219

colonial times, get a keener edge from his Sabaltern inclinations. When Ramanujan emerged on the Indian literary scene in the sixties, Indian English poetry had taken a very significant turn in form and content. The principal development was the complete break from the Aurobindian phase of romantic/lyrical poetry of the pre-Independence era. Romantic and Victorian tradition in verse was giving way to a terse, ironic idiom as discerned in the work of modernist poets in England and America. Ramanujans poetry represents the synthesis of Western skepticism and native culture in artistic terms. His four volumes of poetry, The Striders (1966),Relations (1971),Second Sight (1986) and The Black Hen (1995), exhibit a subaltern voice. He is quite alive to his Hindu consciousness that colours his vision of life. To a large extent, the Dravidian non-conformist schools of Cankam and Vacanas have shaped his mind and determined his poetic mode. He has brilliantly fused the South Indian tradition to a foreign medium to create a new structure and texture of poetry. His poetic corpus reflects his favourite themes including post-colonial morals and manners, family, relatives, love, death and cultural discord. In spite of his thin poetic output, he is recognised as a poetic talent who could interpret the reality of contemporary India to the Western world. The extreme precision with which he combines the ancient fables with the ironic, skeptical view of a rationalist is worth noticing. Thus his unflinching re-evaluation of his native culture enables him to reflect on the complexity of post-colonial India. Despite his intense involvement with Indian cultural traditions, Ramanujans poetry displays modem themes and forms. He achieves a rare amalgamation of the ancient and the modem, the Indian and the American idiom.

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Against these touchstones, Ramanujan emerges as a truly modern poet whose sensibility incorporates complexity, variety, and disillusionment in a typically modern idiom. The curious blend of the two diverse cultures, the two vitally different peoples and environs creates a sort of complexity or tension in his poetry. Discarding the use of the conventional rhyme and metre, he has adhered to the rhythms and stanzas of classical Tamil poets. In his diction also he is quite modern and chooses to be colloquial, scientific and harsh. His style is direct, deliberate, stark and concentrated, and he derives his vocabulary from the lowest to the most exalted regions. His discontentment with the existing state of affairs and his alien status lie at the root of his chosen poetic modes- irony, satire and mock-epic. His thematic concerns display existentialist anguish,and postcolonial angst. He is a social realist, having a keen eye on the social and political developments around him. In fact, he takes poetry as a forceful channel of expression which is more condensed, compact and concentrated than prose. For him, communication is the soul of poetry, but it should be conveyed in an oblique way. Direct statements and didacticism are kept out of it. Suggestiveness and intensity are the prized possessions of his poetry. Moreover, a thoughful poet without a sense of music would look as dry and dull as wood. And music is not merely the ability of the song; it rather sends a clear-cut signal about the emotion. Thus, working on the manifold aspects of contemporary society, he responds to some post-modern/post-colonial problems in his poetry. His suggestive and symbolic creative faculty discloses very well some of the rampant problems of the contemporary world.

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To conclude, 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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References
Chindhade,Shirish, Living Among Relations Binds the Feet : A. K. Ramanujan,Five Indian English Poets, New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers, 2001. Datta, Vandana, Expatriate in Indian English Poetry, Commonwealth Writing : A Study In Expatriate Experience, Dhawan, R.K. & L.S.R. Krishna Sastry, New Delhi, Prestige Books, 1994, P.131 Dwivedi,A.N., Indo-Anglian Poetry, Allahabad : Kitab Mahal, 1979. Lall, I.N.Beyond Poetry as Family History,The Poetry of Encounter (New Delhi : Sterling Publishers, 1983) p.43. Naik,M.K., A History of Indian English Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1982. Shelley, P.B., To a Skylark, The Pocket Book of Quotations: A new Collection of Favorite Quotations from Socrates to The Present, A Cardinal Edition, Pocket Books Distributing Company, Fort Bombay.

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Two realms of Kannada Folklore, A.K. Ramanujan, Another Harmony, ed. Stuart H. Blackburn and A.K. Ramanujan (Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. Wordsworth, William, The Daffodils, New Intermediate Prose and Poetry Selections, Bihar Intermediate Education Council, Patna: Sunrise Publication.

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