Nostalgia and Recollections of Past in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry

A.K. Ramanujan, an Indian expatriate in U.S.A. for long, carefully avoids the sophistication of the rootless and does not exploit the purely physical fact of living in another country. His poetry is permeated with Indian experience. Chidananda Das Gupta writes: “As with so many Indian writers living abroad, it is the Indian experience -a whole storehouse of it that they carry inside, review, relive from time to time and bring into contact with the present experience-that nourishes Ramanujan's poetry." In "Conventions of Despair" he categorically points out that he cannot get rid of his Hindu consciousness: 

“a language, a fire, a clean first floor 

with a hill in the window, and eat 

on an ancient sandalwood door. 

The Hindu consciousness is pervasive 

I must seek and will find 

My particular hell in my Hindu mind.” 

Ramanujan's poetry is an expression of Indian sensibility, sharpened and nourished by Western education and environment. He himself writes in this connection: "English and 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. They are continuous with each other, and I can no longer tell what comes from where." Ramanujan's success as a poet lies in the fusion of Indian sensibility with his American experiences. The East-West or the traditional-modern conflict provides the necessary tension to his poetry and raises it to the level of the highest art. 

Ramanujan observes complete artistic detachment and irony to portray the Indian scene from across the Atlantic. Certain aspects of Indianness that he portrays have a universal significance. Mark the following lines from "Still Another For Mother": 

“And that woman 
beside the wreckage van 
On Hyde Park street : She will not let me rest 
as I slowly cease to be the town's brown stranger and guest.” 

The old ragpicker in Chicago, where he has lived for three decades could have been in Mysore, where he studied, or Madras from where his parents came. India has always been alive in his consciousness. His famous poem "Chicago Zen" assimilates his present in Chicago and his past in India: 

“Watch your step. Sight may strike you 

blind in unexpected places. 

The traffic light turns orange 

On 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, 

You fall into a vision of forest fires 

enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent 

On the 14th floor, 

Lake Michigan crawls and crawls 

in the window. Your thumbnail 

cracks a lobster louse on the window pane 

from your daughter's hair 

and your drown, eyes open, 

towards the Indies, the antipodes. 

And you, always so perfectly sane.” 

He feels at home in America but his responses are entirely personal and they are not the same as those of Americans. His naturalisation in America could not sever him from his Indian roots and sensibility. In "Death and the Good Citizen" he reveals his inborn affinity with India:

“Hearts, 

with your king of temper, 

may even take, make connection 

with alien veins and continue 

your struggle to be naturalized. 

beat, and learn to miss a beat 

in a foreign body 

But 

You know my tribe, incarnate 

unbelievers in bodies, 

they'll speak proverbs, contest 

my will, against such degradation. 

Hide-bound, even worms cannot

have me ; they'll cremate 

me in Sanskrit and sandalwood, 

have me sterilized 

to a scatter or ash.” 

"A River" describes the devastation caused by flood. Vaikai, a river, dries every summer but no poet sang of the river that dried. The poet sang only of the floods' and not of the river that dried. The dry river is then contrasted with the river in flood which “carried off three village houses/one pregnant woman/and a couple of cows/named Gopi and Brinda, as usual." Following the tradition of old poets the poets sang of the floods. They showed no human concern. Ramanujan satirises the lack of human concern in these poets : 

“but no one spoke 
in verse of the pregnant woman 
drowned, with perhaps twins in her 
kicking at blank walls 
even before birth.” 

"Image for Politics" is a dig at present-day politics which is embodied in the image of the cater who finally gets eaten up. 

A.K. Ramanujan has abundantly drawn upon folklore to give him his "inner forms, images and symbols." He explores India's common heritage of myth and tradition. The educated Indian has to face. a traumatic experience when he has to view India's tragic past against her equally tragic present. His predicament is really tragic when he realises that the perennial springs of the continuity of tradition—myth, literature, family—have become sterile. He is aware of the decadent social milieu of contemporary India. He is pained at "the near complete demythicised reality of the present"— a perception which paralyses creativity as in "Prayer to Lord Murugan" : 

“We eat legends and leavings, 

remember the ivory, the apes, 

the peacocks we sent in the Bible 

to Solomon, the medicines for small Pox. 

the similes for muslin ; wavering snakeskins, 

a cloud of steam. 

Even-rehearsing astronauts, 

We purify and return 

our urine to the circling body 

and burn our faces 

for fuel to reach the moon 

through the sky 

behind the novel.”

Ramanujan seeks his identity neither in America, nor in the immediate present but in the mythical and literary past.