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Indian poetry in English initiated with Henry Derozio in the later part of eighteenth

century. The pre-independence poets like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Toru Dutt, Manmohan

Ghose, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu wrote under the influence of

English romanticism. The advent of freedom opened new literary and cultural windows on a

wider international horizon, and many of the chief characteristics of the post war poetry in the

West influenced the Indian poets in English. Influenced by post war British and American poets,

the modern Indian poetic voices like Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das and R.

Parthasarthy have decided to write the poetry of concrete experiences of men living in the

modern world. As S. Nagarajan in his introduction to Contemporary Indian Poetry in English

writes:

It is here that their poetry becomes a walk barefoot in to reality, an effacement of

the ego. The concrete for them invariably carries the aroma of the private life of

the experiencing self. They are mostly concerned with themselves and the

surroundings allied to them. Their poetry records the artist’s own life history and

his struggle against himself. (qtd. in Rukhaiyar 129)

“Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan, born in Mysore, India in 1929, came to the U.S. in

1959, where he remained until his death in Chicago on July 13, 1993” (Ramazani 27). Not only

was Ramanujan a transnational figure, but he was also a trans-disciplinary scholar, working as a

poet, translator, linguist, and folklorist. Though he spent a considerable part of life in a foreign

country, he did not split his connections with his native Indian tradition, feelings and ethos. His

expatriate sensibility provided him a chance to portray his experiences in India and America in

an objective and accurate way. As E.N. Lall said, “Ramanujan’s poems take their origin in a

mind that is simultaneously Indian and Western - Indian mode of experiencing an emotion and

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the western mode of defining it” (Lall 44). He received his primary education at D.

Bhanumaiah’s High School and subsequently went to Maharaja’s college, Mysore for higher

education. Ramanujan received his degree of B.A. and M.A. in English language and literature

from the University of Mysore. He then spent some time teaching at several universities in South

India before getting a graduate diploma in theoretical linguistics from Deccan University in

Poona in 1958. He was a fellow of Deccan College, Poona in 1958-59. The following year,

having been awarded the prestigious Fullbright Scholarship, he went to Indiana University where

he got a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1963.

Having completed his Ph.D. degree, he returned to India and worked as a Lecturer in

English for eight years at Quilon, Belgaum and Baroda. And then he shifted to the United States

of America on a teaching assignment offered by the University of Chicago where he became an

Assistant Professor in 1962. However, he did teach at several other U.S. universities at times,

including Harvard, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of California at

Berkeley, and Carlton College. At the University of Chicago, Ramanujan was instrumental in

shaping the South Asian Studies program. He worked in the departments of South Asian

Languages and Civilizations, Linguistics, and with the Committee on Social Thought.  While

talking about the Indian expatriate poets, Bruce king aptly remarks:

Indian expatriate poets do not write from the position of 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 homeland

as outsiders, with a feeling of something having been lost in the process of

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growth. The ability to tolerate, accommodate and absorb other cultures without

losing the consciousness of being Indian mark the expatriate poets. (King,

Modern Poetry 209 - 10)

He carved a niche for himself both in the field of translation and in the realm of poetry. In

1976, the government of India awarded him “Padma Sri”, for his outstanding contributions in the

realm of Literature and in 1983; he was given the MacArthur Prize Fellowship. Ramanujan was

honoured with the prestigious Sahitya Akademy for his Collected Poems by the National

Academy of letters in 1999. At the time of his demise, Ramanujan was sixty four. As he had no

harmonious relationship with his wife, Molly, a journalist and a writer of a sort, they got

divorced a few years ago. Ramanujan is survived by a son and a daughter. At his death, The

Indian Express recalled him as a “well-known Kannada poet-litterateur and eminent translator”

(qtd. in Dwivedi 2), and The Statesman remembered him as a “well known Kannada litterateur,

poet and critic” (qtd. in Dwivedi 2). His colleagues, Sussane and Lloyd Rudolph, have paid him

rich tributes by remembering him as “both transnational and subnational, capable of the most

sophisticated universalism even while remaining rooted in micro-humanity, regional culture”

(qtd. in Dwivedi 2). His death on 13th July, 1993 has been an irrevocable loss to literature.

A deep rooted Indian sensibility coupled with an analytical intellect, sharpened by a long

sojourn in the West are the outstanding features in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan. Although he

wrote primarily in English, he was fluent in both Kannada, the common public language of

Mysore, and Tamil, the language of his family, as well. Ramanujan is an example of a more

polished, sophisticated and profound multiculturalism. Multiplicity whether linguistic, cultural,

or social seems to have been Ramanujan’s fait accompli from his very childhood. He has dwelt

quite graphically on this aspect of growing up in his Daedalus essay titled “telling Tales”:

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As he grew up, Sanskrit and English were our father tongues and Tamil and

Kannada our mother tongues. The father tongues distanced us from our mothers,

from our own childhoods, and from our villages and many of our neighbours in

the cowherd colony next door. And the mother tongues united us with them. . . .

Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West. . . .

Each was an other to the others, and it became the business of a lifetime for some

of us to keep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and to make

something of them. (Collected Essays 449-50)

Ramanujan harps on the kind of amalgamation that has gone into the making of his

personality. He once admitted:

English and my disciplines (linguistics, anthropology) give me my ‘outer’

forms- linguistic, metrical, logical and other such way 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 no longer can tell what comes from where. (Parthasarthy

96)

A.K. Ramanujan’s poetic compositions are The Striders (1966), Relations (1971),

Selected Poems (1976) and Second Sight (1986). The Black Hen published posthumously in

1995. As a scholar and translator of works in the South Indian languages Kannada and Tamil,

Ramanujan worked to make Indian literature acknowledged in the realm of South Asian studies.

His translations are responsible to have created a proper atmosphere for the study and

propagation of Kannada and Tamil in the west, it is his poetry which gives a glimpse of his

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genius. Ramanujan covers another sense of intertextuality which lies in the symbolic evocation

common in Tamil poetry. In her stylistic explanation C.L.L. Jayaprada rightly argues:

On the basis of the stylistic analysis of Ramanujan’s poem, one can say with

confidence that he is a remarkable and original craftsman. His predominantly

nominal style, with the use of concrete nouns wherever possible, renders a

visual quality and terseness to his poetry. (qtd. in Naikar 7)

A.K. Ramanujan's theoretical and aesthetic contributions span a number of disciplinary

areas. His English language poetry incorporates and assimilates linguistic, literary and cultural

forms of English literature. Finally, a collected work of his poetry entitled Collected Poems of A.

K. Ramanujan was posthumously published in 1995, which includes poems from several

previously-published volumes of poetry as well as some previously unpublished poems. The

opinion of Bruce king regarding the poetic sensibility of A.K. Ramanujan is quite authentic:

Ramanujan’s poetry often returns to such paradoxical

concerns as the way in which the present is rooted in a past which itself changes

by being looked at through the eyes of the present, the way identity is unstable

and is continuously being redefined, the way life is both determined and

irrational, the indifference of the universe, the truth and absurdity of Hindu

notions of re-incarnation as seen through the eyes of modern science, the

difficulties of human relations (especially between men and women) and the

absurdities of expressing ideas from one language in another. Such themes are

part of a sensibility which, rejecting spirituality and abstract systems, views

personal experience within the perspective of the intellectual, philosophical and

psychological. (King, Three Modern 60)

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Excluding a few stray ones, most of his poems revolve around Indian themes set against

an Oriental backdrop. Even the poems like ‘Christmas’ which reflect certain features of the

Western milieu, are actually used to delineate the contrasting pictures of the East and the West.

In fact, Ramanujan’s intellectual background and involvement with Indian culture are certainly

deeper than Ezekiel’s and Moraes’. Even though Ramanujan deals with classical Tamil and

Kannada writings, he is at home with the larger India not withdrawing from her ethos. Nissim

Ezekiel says: “India is simply my environment. A man can do something for and in his

environment by being fully what he is, by not withdrawing from it. I have not withdrawn from

India” (qtd. in Ramakrishna 8). He simply wants to establish the fact that a man can do the things

much better by residing in his native place or not by withdrawing himself from his native land.

A.K. Ramanujan did the things much better by remaining outside because he was able to

perceive the things more minutely and with all its aspects by residing far from his country. And

thus among all the poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamla Das and Arun Kolatkar, A.K. Ramanujan

stands as the leading and the primarily one. As Kulshrestha has observed, Ramanujan along with

Kamala Das and Arun Kolatkar attempts:

to reach out to the state of creative freedom that comes to the artist when he is

perfectly relaxed in the intricacies of his own language and can even convey their

emotional and intellectual equivalents appropriately in the grammatical and

syntactical contexts of another language. (qtd. in Surendran 71)

He has contributed widely to many well-known journals and magazines both in India and

abroad such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, Indian Literature, Poetry (Chicago), The

Atlantic Monthly, Poetry North-west, The Carleton Miscellany, The American Scholar and The

London Magazine. His poems also found a place in the widely acclaimed The Penguin Book of

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Love Poems (1974). A detailed study of the creative works of A.K. Ramanujan, reveals that he is

basically a modernist. To quote the eminent critic M.K. Naik in this context:

If we take into consideration, the entire body of Ramanujan’s creative work, i.e.,

his Kannada poetry, his English poetry, his Kannada stories, his recent novel in

Kannada, Mattobbana Atmacharitre (‘Another’s Autobiography’), we cannot

help coming to the conclusion that Ramanujan is essentially a modernist. (Naik

112).

Possessing the modernist’s temperament, Ramanujan makes a conscious effort to break

free from the shackles of the conventional mode of writing poetry. Hence, not only are his

themes centered on the traditional mould but his entire approach to poetry is unconventional.

Like a modern poet, he prefers to write in the free verse, thus liberating himself from the

constraints of a regular pattern. Reviewer Bruce King called Ramanujan, along with two other

transcultural poets, “Indo-Anglian harbingers of literary modernism” (qtd. in Patel 960). This

description highlights several characteristics of Ramanujan's poetry, perhaps less common in

other transcultural poetry. Characteristics of his modernist style include an almost jarring

realism and hints at a kind of confessional style. While Reviewer Geeta Patel agrees with

King's description of Ramanujan's work but she criticizes King for failing “to plumb the

ramifications of exilic writing and the reconstruction or retrieval of the fantasies of tradition. . .

that are characteristic of writing in a postcolonial transnational world” (qtd. in Patel 961).

Many of his poems are personal in nature centered on his immediate family, friends,

relatives and his native surroundings. Ramanujan recalls the varied experiences and anecdotes of

his youth with a renewed sense of analysis. Many of these instances which failed to register any

implied significance during childhood and adolescence are viewed in a different light in later

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years. However these are not fearful recollections and do not have the stigma of nostalgia

attached to them. For A.K. Ramanujan, the recollections deeply etched in his mind, brought the

memories of other days round him, as he depicts: “something opened / in the past and I heard

something shut / in the future, quietly” (Collected Poems 16). In support to this view point, K.

Vedanta Reddy says:

Memories, mostly of life seen through the eyes of a sensitive and observant boy

growing up in a traditional middle class southern Hindu Brahmin family,

recollected during his long sojourn abroad, in the United States of America. . . .

(Reddy 88)

If variety is the spice of life, Ramanujan certainly has plenty of variety in his poetry,

sprinkled with a generous helping of spices in the form of varied poetic devices like irony,

imagery, metaphors and so on. Actually, though there is an immense thematic variety in his

poetry, Ramanujan has transmuted, as K.S. Pal rightly asserts, “The common into the unique, the

local into the universal and the familiar into the mythical” (Pal 3). He frequently resorts to native

themes and traditions. His three Hindu poems-“The Hindoo, he does not 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” are essentially Indian in background and treatment. They take us to the nucleus of the

Hindu philosophy, namely to the Gita. Lakshmi Raghunandan’s remark seems to be quite

appropriate:

In his search for self, Ramanujan like Ezekiel closely examines his own religion

and discovers its defects, but Ramanujan does not totally reject Hinduism for it is

a most comprehensive philosophy, like the house in ‘Small-scale Reflections on

a Great House’. He does however condemn its practice in rigid conventionality as

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is evident in the four ‘Hindoo’ poems. (Raghunandan 153)

As Gokak has observed “Indo-Anglian poetry, like the rest of modern Indian poetry, is

Indian first everything else afterwards” (Gokak 26). The Indianness of Ramanujan’s poetry is to

be marked in a poem like, “Conventions of Despair”, wherein the poet says:

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. . . . (CP 34)

As Bruce King says, “His Indianness is a part of his past, (with which) he is inextricably

linked as he changes and develops” (King, Three Indian 8). Ramanujan depicts his family life

almost untiringly, as is clear from the poems collected in the second volume, Relations,

particularly “Of Mothers, among other things”, “Love Poem for a Wife I”, “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 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 his mother. In summing up the theme of family it can also be said that Ramanujan has given

many memorable and fascinating poems by depicting faithfully his family and his relations. His

physical displacement:

has given a focus to his Indian experience so that the poems emerge as a sort of

microcosm of his family history. They are indeed microcosm of the Hindu family

which has enormously contributed to the stability and psychological health of the

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society for centuries and ensured the continuity of a rich traditional culture.

(Parthasarthy 192)

Of course the father played a very specific role in the intellectual make up of the poet,

and this fact is clearly borne out by these excerpts. Another poem on the familial theme is

“Obituary”, wherein Ramanujan depicts his father’s death graphically; the tone grows ironical at

places. P.K.J. Kurup’s observation can be cited: “To this extent the objective perception of the

poetic self is essentially that of a comic observer of life’s little ironies” (Kurup 194). Themes of

hybridity and transculturalness are highlighted in the following two poems, both from Second

Sight (1986). The poem “Chicago Zen”, exemplifies the theme of transnationalism, and might

be an attempt to imagine himself as a hybrid image. Another aspect of the poems of A.K.

Ramanujan is the east-west tensions. Rama Kundu says that Ramanujan’s poetry “expresses an

Indian sensibility sharpened and conditioned by Western education” (Kundu 160).

Ramanujan living in the U.S.A. find his roots in Indian myth and tradition and customs as

well. That is why his separation from his immediate environment has been a blessing. According

to S.G. Jainapur: “There is a deep sense of alienation in his poetry. . . . He felt intensely about his

cultural roots when he began to live on alien soil. This seems to have pushed him back to a

Hindu ethos in his poetry” (Jainapur 108-09). M. Sivaramakrishna in his book entitled Indian

Poetry in English: A Critical Assessment points out:

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 which atrophies, ironically the

poet’s marital relations. (Shahane 16-17)

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Ramanujan’s historical sensibility is sharp and acute. His awareness of history, which is

hinted at in his first volume of poems, “The Striders” (1964), gets powerfully projected in

several of the so-called family poems in Relations. The consciousness of the tragedy of India,

and of being an Indian-‘the ancient chaos of a country’-comes through clearly in poems like

“Compensation” and “The Last of the Princes”. Commenting on the social consciousness of

Ramanujan, P.K.J. Kurup opines:

If in poems like ‘History’ and ‘Obituary’, memory is played projecting the

consciousness of the poetic self about the familiar tragedy in Indian context,

poems such as ‘Compensations’ and ‘The Last of the Princes’ project the

consciousness of the tragedy in India and of being an Indian and the ancient chaos

of a country. (Kurup 213)

The most formative influences on A.K. Ramanujan, both in terms of perception and

expression have been, undoubtedly, the Vacanakaras, “great voices of a sweeping movement of

protest and reform in “Hindu Society” (Ramanujan 12). In fact, the Virasavism was a movement

of social upheaval by and for the poor, the low caste and the outcaste against the rich and the

privileged. The Virasavism saints unlike exponents of other kinds of Hinduism and like other

Bhakti movements in India do not believe that religion is something one is born with or into. In

reality, Virasaivism is a revolt from within while Buddhism and Jainism were revolts from the

outside. Ramanujan’s Hindu poems should be read in the Virsaivite spirit which protests against

the aberrations in Hinduism- “Yet we must not forget that this fierce rebellion against

petrification was a rebellion only against contemporary Hindu practice . . .” (Ramanujan 33).

He further asserts, “Defiance is not discontinuity. Alienation from the immediate

environment can mean continuity with an older ideal”. Ramanujan narrates that “Prayers to Lord

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Murugan” (Relations), is a poem “of lack and self-doubt, in which it is like some other religious

poems (e.g., some Virsaiva poems) that I had translated” (CE 192). This must dispel the

impression that the poet’s critical attitude to Hinduism was an outcome of his exposure to

Western. Ramanujan’s contemplating conversion to Buddhism at one time shows his affinity

with the Vacanakaras who shared with Buddhists the doctrine of ahimsa, non-violence towards

all creation.

Ramanujan’s views on culture, Indianness and Western metaphysics are randomly

scattered in his other writings also and they provide vital clues to the complex configurations of

tensions that sustain his poetic universe. In the essay “Parables and Commonplaces” he dilates

graphically, for the first time, on culture and the related issues. He begins with the premise that

cultural encounters “lead to definition, redefinition, a dialogue with the other where each returns

to himself reflected refracted even alienated and thereby redefined” (qtd. in Amirthanayagam

142). He underlines the fact that there is no uniform pattern and degree of cultural interaction as

it varies from culture to culture in accordance with its capacity for “coping with, containing,

appropriating and domesticating the bizarre, often terrifying alien” (qtd. in Amirthanayagam

138).

Ramanujan is especially careful in the use of the imagery in his poetry. He is so in order

to achieve concreteness, sensuousness, and precision in it. It is said that his images are largely

visual and striking. But Ramanujan has no immoderate addiction for image-making and he

resorts to this device when it is really needed. Parthasarthy has praised Ramanujan for his “eye

for the specific physiognomy of an object or a situation which he then reveals with telling detail.

C.L.L. Jayaprada supports the view made by Chirantan Kulshrestha and further states:

“Chirantan Kulshrestha has aptly commented that Ramanujan’s poetry shows a ‘chiselled

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workmanship’ . . .” (qtd. in Ghosh 106). The poetic craft of A.K. Ramanujan incorporates a

number of elements. An apt choice of words, vivid imagery, picturesque representations and

tendency for precision and detail are the hallmarks of his craftsmanship. In this connection it

would be pertinent to quote the noted critic Taqi Ali Mirza:

a word or two about Ramanujan’s accomplishments as a craftsman. The

terseness of his diction, the consummate skill with which he introduces rhyme and

assonance into the verse, the sharply etched, crystallized images and the

disciplined handling of language make Ramanujan one of the most significant

poets in India today. The image, no doubt, plays a key role in Ramanujan’s art

but, . . . he does not rely solely on the image for the effectiveness of

communication. . . . Ramanujan . . . appears to be quite fond of skillfully

creating tableau-like effects in many of his poems. (qtd. in Shahane 157)

Ramanujan is very often extolled for “his unique tone of voice, a feature that accounts for

the characteristic style of his poetry” (qtd. in Naikar 8). In one of his interviews, Ramanujan

converses about his use of language in poetry:

Everybody uses language, yet when I use it, I must use it in such a way that it

says something new, innocent. Language is full of stock phrases, clichés-you fall

back on them whenever you are really thinking. It is exactly like perception. . . .

The words, when they appear in a particular order, surprise you, as though you

had never seen them before. That’s when you know you can’t change it any more.

(qtd. in Ramakrishna 12)

R. Parthasarthy rightly suggests, “Ramanujan on the other hand has been able to forge an

oblique, elliptical style all his own. . . . There is something clinical about Ramanujan’s use of the

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language. It has a cold, glass-like quality. It is an attempt to turn languages into an artifact” (qtd.

in Rajeshwar 176).

And as the subject of the research work is the “Representation of Deities in Attipat

Krishnaswami Ramanujan’s poetry”, so the various aspects related to deities, their existence in

the Indian society and the beliefs related to them have been studied. According to Oxford

Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, the meaning of the word “Deity” is a god or goddesses (400).

The deities have been worshipped throughout the history. How the deities came into existence is

quite a subject of discussion. The man-made notion about the deities can be presented here as

they are generally considered as the mere imagination of the sculptors, poets and the writers by

most of the people who perceive the things with their reason.

The idea of man-made gods strikes the most in case of scriptures and writings about

religion because the books written by several authors contain in them the several kinds of

ideologies and notions. What one can perceive the other cannot and not only the visual approach

towards the things but the emotions with which they interpret the things are different in each

person. This is the reason that the liability of the things has diminished and we took the

description of deities as a mere imagination of the poets, writers and the sculptors. As A. K.

Ramanujan puts it, “No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time. And when he does

get to read it, he doesn’t usually read it in Sanskrit” (qtd. in Sharma 419). Again to cite A. K.

Ramanujan’s words: “Thus a text like the Mahabharata is not a text but a tradition. It used to be

every poet’s ambition to write a Ramayana or the Mahabharata” (qtd. in Sharma 420). Petteri

Koskikallio says that:

Ramanujan and Leavitt find two main changes when classical myths or epics are

retold. The first is “fragmentation;” that is, only part of the classical whole is

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taken up and retold in a new form. Another feature is called “proximation,” which

includes “domestication,” “localization,” and “contemporarization.” With this

change the gods and heroes are seen more like tellers and listeners of the story,

while pan-Indian myths are transferred to local places and everything happens

nearer the present time. (Koskikallio 149)

Ramanujan made great efforts “to highlight the multilingual and multicultural aspects of

India” (qtd. in Dwivedi 5). D. Ramakrishna says that:

The American anthropologists like Robert Redfield and Milton Singer coined

terms like “Great Tradition” (involving the ancient pan-Indian Sanskrit texts) and

“Little Tradition” (seen as local, mostly oral, and carried by the illiterate) and

stressed the need for “texts” of a culture in preference to “fieldwork”. . . .

(Ramakrishna 5)

Ramanujan argues that these terms need modification, and asserts:

Written and hallowed texts are not the only kinds of texts in a culture like India’s.

Oral traditions of every kind produce texts. “Cultural Performances” of every

kind, whether they are plays, rituals, or games, contain texts, written and oral. In a

sense, every cultural performance is a text in itself. (qtd. in Dwivedi 5)

The Vedas are considered the earliest literary record of Indo-Aryan civilization, and the

most sacred books of India. They are the original scriptures of Hindu teachings, and contain

spiritual knowledge encompassing all aspects of our life. Vedic literature with its philosophical

maxims has stood the test of time and is the highest religious authority for all sections of Hindus

in particular and for mankind in general. “Veda” means wisdom, knowledge or vision, and it

manifests the language of the gods in human speech. The laws of the Vedas regulate the social,

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legal, domestic and religious customs of the Hindus to the present day. All the obligatory duties

of the Hindus at birth, marriage, death etc. owe their allegiance to the Vedic ritual. About Indian

literatures Ramanujan in his essay entitled “Where Mirrors are Windows” says that:

Various bodies of literary, religious, sastric, or ideological materials, as they

come into being at different periods, become part of the vocabulary of Indian

literatures- Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina texts, especially legends, stereotypes,

beliefs and the commonly known controversies among them. . . . (CE 18)

Historians provide us many guesses but none of them is free from ambiguity. It is

believed that human did not compose the revered compositions of the Vedas, which were handed

down through generations in time immemorial. The general assumption is that the Vedic hymns

were either taught by god to the sages or that they were revealed themselves to the sages who

were the seers of the hymns. The Vedas were mainly compiled by Vyasa Krishna Dwaipayana

around the time of Lord Krishna (c. 1500 BC). The bibliographical evidences indicate that the

Vedas are written in the Grantha and Nagari scripts, and according to tradition Veda Vyasa, a

Dravidian, compiled and wrote the Vedas. The Grantha script belongs to the southern group of

scripts and Veda Vyasa being a Dravidian would certainly have used it. Since the earliest

evidence for Grantha is only in the 5th c. AD. This thing came to us flowing with the traditions

and culture and the poet supports this thing also when he says in his another anthology Collected

Essays of A.K. Ramanujan: “Just as our biological past lives in the physical body, our social and

cultural past lives in the many cultural bodies we inherit-our languages, arts, religions and life-

cycle rites” (CE 184).

A.K. Ramanujan’s interpretation of modernity has a postcolonial bias about it:

. . . modernity, itself a new attitude to history and tradition, with a new kind of

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pride in the past, also discovers and includes the Indian past, through new

techniques of discovery and through a juxtaposition of “the pastness of the past”

and its “presence”. (CE 189)

A very meaningful point of view which is sought to be emphasized here is the importance

of the Epics and Puranas in the history of Indian thought. The ancient sages were quick to

appreciate the necessity to appeal to the various sides of human nature and to alter the method of

teaching in adjustment with this need. Reality and creation are not to be regarded as two facts or

problems to be encountered but two ways of witnessing the same thing. The human mind is

composed not only of the rational powers but also the emotional and the instinctive elements

which feel the presence and working of certain truths that rationality cannot explain adequately.

The Epics and Puranas answer to that aspect of human nature which is other than the

ratiocinating or the investigative.

In his essay “Where Mirrors are Windows” A.K. Ramanujan himself resisting the

‘monism’ and even ‘cultural imperialism’ of proponents of a single ‘pan-Indian Sanskritic Great

Tradition’ reiterates:

. . . cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often conflicting . . .

What we call Brahminism, Bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, Tantra, tribal

traditions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most prominent of

these systems. They are responses to previous and surrounding traditions; they

invert, subvert and convert their neighbours. (CE 8)

The second chapter of the research study entitled “Infinite in the form of Finite” projects

the knowledge of the poet A.K. Ramanujan about his native region and its traditions and culture

as well as rites and rituals. The poet also seems to be influenced by the mythologies and other

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theological books and their description in his poems prove this point. There are several poems in

his anthologies entitled “Mythologies 1”, Mythologies 2”, “Mythologies 3”, “Zoo Gardens

Revisited” and “The Difference” and many others. Here in many poems the depiction of the

incarnations by Lord Vishnu has been done by the poet very specifically which shows the deep

knowledge of the poet about his Indian culture. But the adoption of these books cannot be said as

an influence of his Indian culture, to some extent he himself is influenced by them. The major

books in this category are Shrimadbhagvadgita, the Mahabharta and the Ramayana.

The personalities and events described in the Puranas cannot always be taken as myths

and fables which have no substance in them, for the universe is nothing but the Absolute beheld

through the channels of human perception. In their attempt at a bringing together of the temporal

and the eternal, the Epics present before us a picture of divine perfection commingled with

human weakness. In these records of cosmic history, the usual meanings of past, present and

future assume a different suggestiveness and it is futile to read into them a mere human

viewpoint of understanding. It is here that we come face to face with the fact that religion is

neither a social practice nor a human contrivance but the perennial activity of timeless being.

“Though Hinduism is often understood as being polytheistic, supposedly recognizing as

many as 330 million gods, it also has one “god” that is supreme-Brahma. Brahma is an entity

believed to inhabit every portion of reality and existence throughout the entire universe”

(Taliaferro 19). “Brahma is both impersonal and unknowable and is often believed to exist in

three separate forms: Brahma—Creator; Vishnu—Preserver; and Shiva—Destroyer. These

“facets” of Brahma are also known through the many other incarnations of each” (Hayzen 14).

Among the remarkable achievements of Hinduism was its blending of the countless cults,

gods, and totems of India’s many ages and diverse peoples into one vast mythology-a mythology

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dominated by the two Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu. The roster of these deities reaches, quite

literally, into the millions. It includes all the gods of early sacred and epic literature and their

later permutations; deified mortals; and the animals, birds, trees, mountains, rivers, and plants

revered as divine personalities by India’s primitive tribes. And from there only the gods and

goddesses were associated with the nature and get veneration in the Indian culture. The first

chapter of the research is related to this aspect of the Hindu traditions and culture which has been

expressed in the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan in a very significant manner.

A.K. Ramanujan recalls the varied experiences and anecdotes of his youth with a

renewed sense of analysis. Many such instances which failed to register any implied significance

during childhood and adolescence are viewed in a different light in later years. He cherishes his

memories but analyzes them assuming the role of a detached observer. The first chapter,

“Introduction” introduces with the other two chapters of the research work. The second chapter

which is to be studied elaborately consists of several poems of A.K. Ramanujan’s four

anthologies and all the poems elaborate the subject of discussion i.e. “Deities and Nature” in a

peculiar way. The poems have the description of natural objects such as trees, animals and rivers

etc. which are related to Hindu gods and goddesses in one way or the other or have been

associated with them due to their mythical and religious significance by the people in India.

The poet reveals the beliefs and traditional rites and rituals of the people in India and thus

both aspect i.e. deities and nature occur in his poems naturally. Being an Indian poet it was

natural for him to introduce the traditional beliefs of his native land. These traditional beliefs

have been developed by the people from the time immemorial and who have adjoined them with

the natural objects because these natural objects occupy a great place in Indian myths and

legends. Plants, trees and other natural objects were always revered and venerated by the people

20  

who perform several rites and rituals in their dedication. The only reason of veneration is that

they have been associated with gods and goddesses in Indian mythology and Hindu traditions.

From time immemorial the grateful mankind found it entirely natural to worship trees that gave

them food, shelter, fire, shade and clothing etc. Bruce King refers to:

Ramanujan’s 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. (King, Modern

Indian 215)

Thus the chapter discusses the poet’s approach towards the natural objects and the rites

and rituals associated with them also perceived by him. All the rites, rituals and customs are

attached with the veneration of the deities and along with them the natural objects also get

veneration because the mythologies give them importance along with the deities as well as

several illustrations can be found in the Puranas, Upanishads, Vedas and other holy books like

the Mahabharata and the Ramayana also. In the holy book of Hindus, Shrimadbhagavadgita

Lord Krishna while preaching to Arjuna says that: 

                             yo mam pasyati sarvatra

sarvam ca mayi pasyati

tasyaham na pranasyami

sa ca me na pranasyati (Shrimadbhagavadgita ch. 6, text 30)

(For one who sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me, I am never lost, nor is he ever lost

to Me). And this sloka supports the chapter entitled “Deities and Nature” very specifically.

21  

The third chapter of research describes the “Infinite in the form of finite” in Attipat

Krishnaswami Ramanujan’s poetry. The title “Infinite in the form of Finite” itself gives the

expression of Incarnation i.e., the bodily manifestation of a supernatural being. Incarnation of

gods is a kind of belief in Hinduism which originates from the Hindu’s religious and philosophic

books. According to these books the whole universe is commanded by one supreme power and

Lord Vishnu is considered that supreme power in almost all the writings and scriptures. The

manifestations of lord Vishnu is depicted everywhere. He is supposed to be incarnated from time

to time for the demolition of the evils and irreligion in the world. Lord Krishna in

Srimadbhagavadgita states:

yada yada hi dharmasya

glanir bhavati bharata,

abhyutthanam adharmaysya

tadatmanam srjamy aham (Shrimadbhagavadgita ch. 4, text 7)

(Whenever and wherever there is a decline in religious practice, O descendent of Bharata, and a

predominant rise of irreligion—at that time I descend Myself.)

Here we find Ramanujan a perfect amalgamation of the Indian sensibility and

modernization which came to him due to his long stay in United States. But it is also perceived

in his poems that after remaining out of the nation he used his analytic aptitude towards the

traditional rites and customs of India very aptly. Lord Vishnu is depicted in the poems of A.K.

Ramanujan elaborately and in these poems the god is associated with the animals as depicted in

the legends and myths.

22  

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