Familial Relationships in Ramanujan's Poetry |
Ramanujan's Indian sensibility finds its superb expression in poems dealing with familial relationships. Family is the central theme in his very best poetry. M.K. Naik remarks: "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 Ramanujan's poetry but he views the family in the historical context. In this respect he stands a comparison with Nissim Ezekiel 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. “Being a Hindu, his dead body would accept only burial." In his famous poem "Death and the Good Citizen" he writes with a touch of subtle irony:
"Or abroadthey'll lay me out in a funeralParlor, embalm me in pesticide,bury me in a steel trap,lock me so out of naturetill I'm oxidized by left—over air, withered by ownvapors into grin and bone.My tissue will never graft,will never know new print,never grow in a culture,or be mold and compostfor jasmine, eggplantand the unearthly perfectionof municial oranges."
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 unhistorical past. Ramanujan relates his personal and familial conflicts and frustrations to the Indian intellectual environment, both present and past. M. Sivaramkrishna remarks: 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."
The Indian scene and familial relationships receive an ironic and bemused treatment in Ramanujan's poetry. His irony is all pervasive. K. N. Daruwalla comments: "Ramanujan's imagination is always focused and never diffuses. 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." An analysis of his major poems on the theme of family will enable us to have a proper understanding of his art.
"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 the 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:
“They come back to the house as prodigiesborn to prodigal fathers.”
The occasional return of nephews gives a tragic turn to the poem. After having won laurels in the battlefield they return to the house in the form of corpses brought in aeroplane, train or military truck.
"History" exposes the greed in the family. How the great aunt is robbed by her daughters is described ironically in the following lines:
“When the great aunt died, her twodaughters, one dark one fair,unknown each to the otheralternately picked their mother's body cleanbefore it was coldor the eyes were shutof diamond ear-rings,bangles, anklets, the pinin her hairthe toe-rings from her wedding.”
"Love Poem For a Wife I" depicts a "psychic drama" through a "You and I" conflict. It conveys the intensity of the poet's yearning for emotional fulfilment in familial relationship.
"Of Mothers, Among Other Things" conveys to the readers his own impressions of his mother at different stages of her life. In distant Chicago he earnestly remembers her and desires for her company. How tender and vivacious she was in the full bloom of her youth:
“I smell upon this twistedblackbone tree the silk and whitepetal of my mother's youth.From her ear-rings three diamondssplash a handful of needles,and I see my mother run backfrom rain to the crying cradles.How changed she was in old age!Her sareesdo not cling ; they hang, loosefeather of a onetime wing.My old parchment tongue licks barkin the mouth when I see her fourstill sensible fingers slowly flexto pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor."
In "Still Another View of Grace" Ramanujan 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 stood upon that dusty road on a nightlit april mindand gave me a look. Commandments crumbledin my father's past. Her tumbled hair suddenly knownas silk in my angry hand, I shook a littleand took her, behind the laws of my land.”
The poet, though he knows all, is ignorant about his own self. Irony and good humour dominate "Self Portrait":
“I resemble everyone but myself,and sometimes seein shop-windowsdespite the well-known lawsof opticsthe portrait of a stranger,date unknown,often signed in a corner by my father.”
K. A. Panikar observes: "The confessional note in the poems about close relations, mother, father, grand-father, wife and children gains in aesthetic validity from this ironic stance."