Influence of Hindu Heritage in Ramanujan Poetry:
Ramanujan is a traditionalist in the sense that his poetry has been immensely influenced by his Hindu heritage. His memories are located in the specific society of the Tamil Brahmins. Although he was also influenced by western culture and western way of life, the values of Hinduism and the cultural ethos of India, the country of his permeated his life and works. In Conventions of Despair, Ramanujan clearly points out that his Hindu consciousness always haunts him.
Expressing a Conflict between Indian and Western Ethos:
Indeed, Ramanujan's poetry expresses the conflict between Indian ethos, which is natural to him, and the western ethos which he acquired in U.S.A., between East and West, and tradition and modernity. He writes that English and disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give him his cuter forms—linguistic, metrical, logical and other such ways of shaping experience and his first thirty years in India, his frequent visits and field trips, his personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics and folklore give him his substance, his inner forms, images and symbols. They are continuous with each other, and he can no longer tell what comes from where. His very best poetry reveals the fusion of Indian sensibility with his American experiences.
Indianness, an Integral Part of Ramanujan's Consciousness:
Ramanujan's poetry, describing the harmonization of tradition and modernity, universalizes certain aspects of Indian background. His famous poem Chicago Zen assimilates his present in Chicago and his past India. Ramanujan attained total naturalization with the American ethos but he never severed himself from his Indian roots. Indianness was a part of his consciousness. The following lines from Death and the Good Citizen reveal the harmonization between Western and Indian influences in his poetry:
"Heartswith your king of tempermay even take, make connectionwith alien veins and continueyour struggle to be naturalizedbeat, and learn to miss a beatin a foreign bodyBut you know my tribe, incarnateunbelievers in bodiesthey'll speak proverbs, contestmy will, against such degradation.Hide-bound, even warms cannothave me; they'll cremateme in Sanskrit and sandalwood."
Indian Experience and Sensibility:
In Ramanujan's The Striders and Relations poetry seems to grow out of Indian experience and sensibility with all its memories of family, local places, images, beliefs and history, while having a modern stance with its scepticism, ironies and sense of living from moment to moment in a changing world in which older values and attitudes often are seen as unrealistic. While Ramanujan can evoke the warmth of traditional Indian family life and the closeness of long remembered relationships, more often he shows conflict, arguments surprises; he also shows that the supposed glory of the Tamil cultural heritage is a fiction which ignores the reality of the past.
Indian Sensibility's Finding Expression in the Poems of Familial Relationships:
Family is the central theme in his very best poetry. Recollected in adult tranquility abroad, these memories and experiences, indelibly etched on the impressionable mind of a sensitive, growing boy, now pulsate into life. The memory of the day when a great aunt dies, of another when a basketful cobras come into the house, and a host of such other felt experiences give a certain immediacy to his poems. Family is the main metaphor in his poetry but he views the family in the historical context. In this respect he stands a comparison with Nissim who lives in India and is committed entirely to the Indian reality. Ramanujan, on the other hand, has been living in U.S.A. for over two decades. He has, thus been living in immediate isolation from his roots. Although he has striven his best to accommodate himself to his adopted country, he feels an intense yearning for his Indian roots and his familial connections. He is so thoroughly Indian that even his dead body Would not assimilate with dust after burial and would not flower into jasmine and fruits in the alien soil.
His Looking Across an Alien Culture for Indian Myth and Tradition:
Distance lends historical charm and nostalgia to his family poems. He looks across an alien culture and a vast ocean, to find his roots in Indian myth and tradition. In Ramanujan's case apparent alienation from the immediate environment has meant continuity with an older ideal, i.e., with Indian historical tradition. Past always haunts his poetry. He cannot build history out of an unhistoric past. Ramanujan relates his personal and familial conflicts and frustrations to the Indian intellectual environment, both present and past. According to a critic: "History for Ramanujan contemporizes itself largely through the intricate network of familial relations-—with the figures of the father and mother dominating the interior landscape, a parental authoritarianism with atrophies, ironically, the poet's marital relations.
An Ironic Treatment to the Indian Scene and Familial Relationships:
Ramanujan's irony is all pervasive. His imagination is always focused and 'never diffused. His language is rapier sharp. His poetry is both delicate and intricate as the spiral line of a shell. He brings to his poetry an authenticity of experience. But the experience is sieved through a perspective of the past, a configuration of familial relationships and his ironic perception. Small Scale Reflections on A Great House vividly describes the Great House closely related with his early life. The poet recollects from memory the familiar events and faces with which he was very intimate. The entire description is nostalgic. The comic and pathetic, the humorous and the serious are commingled. Daughters who have been married and their husbands come to the Great House and do not easily return. The sons run away as boys, get married and breed children. They return to the house in the form of their children who perform very services for the elders of the family. History exposes the greed in the family. How the great aunt is robbed by her daughters is described ironically.
Ramanujan's Expressing Dichotomy:
Ramanujan, in Still Another View of Grace, conjures up the conflict between East and West, between past and present, between tradition and modernity through vivid, concrete images. The poet conjures up the figure of a sexy woman to whose passion he submits against his father's advice and the Brahminic tradition of the family:
"But there she stoodupon the dusty road on a night lit april mindand gave me a look. Commandments crumbledin my father's past. Her tumbled hair suddenly knownas silk in my angry hand, I shook or littleand took her, behind the laws of my land."
Disagreement between the Accepted Doctrines of Hindu and Western Modernity:
The opening lines of the poem Conventions of Despair, show poet's strong awareness of the requirement of modernity. For being a modern or to follow the principles of modernity means that man should marry again. He should have fondness of seeing the movies. He should participate this scientific age and should also try to make research on anything. He should support the nuclear test ban treaty. He should settle down in a foreign country. He should adopt artificial manners. After uttering a lot, the poet suddenly realizes that he has spoken too much. In the same poem, he accepts modernity like hell where the poet would be treated as 'the Marginal Man', I should smile dry eyed and nurse martinis’. He cannot part with his Hindu consciousness:
"The Hindu consciousness is pervasive.I mast seek and will findMy particular hell only in my Hindu mind."
What is the hell, envisaged by Ramanujan? He describes it in detail in the following words:
"must translated and turntill I blister and rootfor certain lives to come, 'eye deep',in those Boiling Crates of Oil; weepiron tears for winning what I should have lost;see them with lidless eyessaw precisely in two equal parts(One of the sixty-four artsthey learn in That Place)a once beloved head at the naked parting of hair."The torture becomes all the more shocking when he sees:"a granchil bare,her teenage flesh to the pimpsof ideal tomorrow's crowfoot eyesand the theory of a peacock-feathered future."
The poet rejects both the modern and the Hindu conventions of despair and prefers the 'archaic despair/it's not obsolete yet to live/in this many-lived lair/of fears, this flesh'.
The Power and Inability of Hindu Religion, Tradition and Doctrines:
Ramanujan's awareness of his Hindu heritage does not lead to a blind acceptance of it on Ramanujan's part. Ramanujan is equally alive to both the strength and the deficiencies of his racial ethos. Ramanujan admires the Hindu religion's vision of the unity of all life as expressed by him in the poem entitled Christmas, and as he does in Small Scale Reflections on a Great House in which he recognizes the great absorbing power of Hinduism by describing a typical joint family. At the same time, Ramanujan takes full cognizance of Hindu religion's inability to satisfy completely the modern mind because this religion fails to perceive the elemental evil in life. The Hindu reads his Gita but fails to attain the calm which the Gita preaches. The Hindu does not hurt a fly or a spider because of his essential cowardice though he pretends that he does not hurt these creatures because of his gentleness. Ramanujan also occasionally juxtaposes ironically the ancient Hindu ethos with the situation of the modern Hindu as in the poem entitled Some Indian Uses of History on a Rainy Day.
The Technique used in His Poetry:
Ramanujan's poetic technique also evinces the influence of the East and the West. The techniques of Tamil and Kannada verse exercised great influence on his poetry. The sophistication with which Ramanujan recreates and treats South Indian culture is also reflected in his techniques, which like his translations, often seem a modern recreation of the spirit and methods of Tamil and Kannada verse. The word play, funs, inner rhymes, rhetorical devices, ironies, distanced neutrality of tone, under-statement, compression and elliptical progression of poems have similarities to his translations. This does not mean that Ramanujan is unaffected by his reading of Yeats, Eliot and other moderns, who have influenced him, but he is highly aware of the conventions, techniques and structures of Indian verse and these have been used and transformed in his poetry.