UNDERGRADUATE 1 ST YEAR. SUBJECT: English Language & Literature TOPIC: A River by A. K. Ramanujam Duration: 30:19 min

Transcription

1 UNDERGRADUATE 1 ST YEAR SUBJECT: English Language & Literature TOPIC: A River by A. K. Ramanujam Duration: 30:19 min

2 A River MODULE 1 ABOUT THE POET A.K.Ramanujan ( ) is regarded as one of the most versatile literary figures in original writing as also translations. Educated in Mysore he later took his Ph.D from the Indiana University, Bloomington, and then joined the University of Chicago. He assumed many distinguished academic positions here. These include William E.Colvin Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations. Proficient in Tamil and Kannada, A.K.Ramanujan acquired in these languages an inwardness few could achieve and perhaps none excel. The uniqueness of Ramanujan lies in the fact that he was not only a poet in English but also a translator into English of many areas of Tamil and Kannada literature. About all, he was also a critic of exceptional eminence who looked at literature as an inseparable part of one s culture, religion and myth as well as literary and social traditions. Thus his published work includes original poetry in English published in Striders (1966), Relations (1971) Selected Poems (1976), and Second Sight (1986). His Collected Poems was published posthumously in Among his translations of poetry from Tamil and Kannada are: The Interior Landscape, (1967), Hymns for the Drowning of Siva (from Kannada). Ramajunan also translated U.R.Ananthamurty s acclaimed Kannada novel Samskara. He also made significant contribution to the tradition of Folklore as is evident in the collection entitled Folktales from India (1992). From this rich background one should study A RIVER. It has blended subtly many of the strands and streams which we noted above. MODULE 2 FEATURES OF HIS POETRY IN GENERAL A glance at the rich volume of his writings shows that the poetry of Ramanujan has some remarkable features unique to him. First of all, his rootedness in his own native literary traditions gave him an insight into the rich literary heritage of the past. This heritage included rich awareness of not only literary but also critical traditions of India s heritage. The classical, the medieval and the modern became streams in his assimilative consciousness. This gets richly evoked and expressed in

3 the poem A RIVER. Moreover, another of Ramanujan s traits evident in his poetry is his background in linguistics. Awareness of the evolution of a language, its syntax, its vocabulary, its lexical uniqueness all gave him insight into how prose and poetry acquire their qualities over the centuries. Moreover, since English is used by Ramanujan for both his original poetry and translations, one can notice his multifaceted expertise in using images and expressions from his Tamil and Kannada backgrounds. This suggests that Ramanujan s poetry derives its creative originality from the awareness, the unfailing memory of his past and his physical displacement as a result of his being based in another country, and another culture. This is not only what critics call bilingual and bicultural situation but also a rich sensibility capable of holding the bicultural situation as the creative springboard. Themes which are therefore prominent can be described as family and its traditions which are still traceable to the past. But these traditions are now more hangovers from the past honored in letter and not in the real spirit. Thus, the family theme gives rise to the question of the poet s identity: I resemble everyone/ but my self, says the poet in his Self-portrait. It is this loss of identity which Ramanujan sees in the outer landscape and its immemorial past of which A RIVER is a poetic portrayal. MODULE 3 ASPECTS OF THE POEM A poem needs to be read in terms of language, structure, symbols all related to the theme, the basic content which supports the theme; we should also be alert to the fact that poetry is extremely suggestive. For the present purpose and context A RIVER needs to be read as a specific and not, an amorphous river. It is a river which is culture-specific, flowing in Tamil Nadu; to be more specific in Madurai. Ramanujan s poetry reflects a comparative view of the past and the present. Initially, it is in English that he tries to capture the basic emotions which arise in him when he sees a city like Madurai a very important, historically holy, temple town of Tamil Nadu. The city has countless images, icons and religious symbols which have survived the ravages of time. In short, the timeless and the temporal, the past and the present are kept in tension without a futile longing for the past or an equally fruitless disquiets with the present. The changes over time are difficult to accept, since the past is usually associated with grandeur and glory, what the poet s creativity has to do is to shape his frustration in a detached way. If he glorifies the past, it is pointless because it is

4 nonexistent. If he condemns the present as a barren wasteland, it will be a futile escape into nostalgia a pointless love of a glorified past. Glorified with justification because Madurai in the past (an abode of goddess Minakshi) was imbued with glory which is real. It is an epitome of the high levels of Tamil culture a culture which is shaped largely by religion and a high standard of Tamil language and literature. MODULE 4 THE POEM: PART ONE The opening lines of the poem suggest a paradox: Madurai is a city of temples and poets poets who sing about cities and temples, but here the river dries to a trickle in the summer. If one reads these lines carefully, one notices that the poet s basic attitude is one of recording and reporting and skillfully introducing elements that is juxtaposing details which are not cultural but natural. For instance, cities are human creations, so are temples, cities represent the varied facets of culture, civilization, arts, civic governance, citizens, infrastructure, transport, education and so on. Both mental and environmental factors count. Notice also the exquisite art of Ramanujan in giving endless suggestive potential by simply playing (or reversing, repeating) the same words: suggestion through reversion we can call it. The poets sang of cities and temples: they are based in cities and worship in temples but in their poetry too they make no exception: the material for their poetry is connected to what they live in: cities and what they believe in, the symbol of which is the temple. In short, these are city-based poets writing about their cities. Or, even if they live outside the city, their theme is life in the city and faith in the temple and the religious motifs which they represent.. The poet highlights what Madurai represented in Tamil consciousness and culture; how the images of cities and temple evoke several motifs of an urban context through symbolic motifs. The poets sang makes it clear that it is an oral tradition and poetry was not closet poetry read in the privacy of one s house for few friends or connoisseurs. It was a public event and the music of the poem came alive when the poem became a song sung before an appreciative audience. In other words, one has to note the art of reading a poem as consisting of paying attention to every word. Poetry in the past was meant to be sung, as a kind of performative art: Sahitya and Sangita, both the arts blended in rich harmony to form the spontaneous

5 delight of listening and the cultivated art of contemplating the content of what was being sung. MODULE 5 THE POEM: PART TWO The next question which arises, naturally, is: how does the poet respond to the natural factors when they bring about misery to humans. He responds by an ironic use of the word sang in the last sentence of the first stanza: The poets only sang of the floods. The river is a natural phenomenon which has both the gift of providing endless quantities of drinking water and causing destruction through floods. The succeeding lines give a deeply moving panorama of human misery. There is, first of all, summer which every year dries [the river] to a trickle in the sand and bares the sand ribs a pitiable condition. The other components which a dried up river makes us see are listed the straw, a woman s hair which clogs the Watergates, the bridges with patches on rusty bars, the patches are marks which are left as residue after repair work to the bridge is done. In short this technique of piling up detail after detail like a prosaic catalog of goods at a mall and not human elements shows the intense detachment with which the poet evokes human and natural misery. In this collocation or juxtaposition of living things and inanimate objects: in exquisite images of crocodiles and water buffaloes, Ramajunan evokes the nonchalance, the indifference of the poets to the bleak landscape as an existential context of misery instead of responding to and launching into doing something about it. The sleepy crocodiles collocated with the wet stones could be taken to apply to the poets: they are sleepy, drowsy to human and other elements of a dried up river: they are only alert to the material which a dried up river yields to form a good poem. In other words, the human elements are sleepy, stony; yet they glisten, glow but like stones, stones standing for glittering diction and images in a poem. The dry stones are like shaven water-buffaloes ironically starved of water because the river dries to a trickle. This section ends with two very suggestive images: lounging in the sun (buffaloes) and the poets. If we consider this poem in terms of such observations, emotion is trigged when there is a situation which is representative of human emotions such as fear, sorrow, love, amusement, etc. But emotions themselves do not make a poem. The original

6 personalized emotion needs to be generalized and humanized. Then the literary piece becomes accessible to reading and reflection on its meaning and significance. Generalization in this poem can be seen by the poet s choosing of Madurai. It is a specific city in Tamil Nadu. It has a past, a history, and a present. MODULE 6 THE POEM: PART THREE Keep this in mind and let us go to the second section which gives us a specific instance of who the narrator is. It begins: He was there for a day / when they had the floods. We wonder: who is this he? Is he the poet or a friend of his who reported the incident to him? One way to understand this is the literary structure known as persona : the assumption of a personality both attached and detached from an experience or event. The first stanza had poets who wrote choosing floods and they are from the past. At the second movement of the poem, we have another who obviously belongs to the present and who was there for a day / when they had the floods. The past slides into the present tense, almost. And this persona is perhaps not a poet at all. He could be a keen observer, a reporter, a media person who is covering the floods and reporting it. But he is the poet, too because he is doing more than reporting or recording; he is evoking a whole complex emotions ensuing from the rising of the flood and its consequences. Like the earlier juxtaposition of dried up river and floods, there is another: earlier the poets sang about the floods, now the people who watch the floods talk. The persona records both. People talk of rising flood water, the cobbled steps and the bathing ghats submerged by the water. But the more alarming items are: the village houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of cows. These are given names; Gopi and Brinda but ironically these names also are those of Lord Krishna s devotees, his gopis, as they are called. The characters figuring in the poem are now: the old poets, the poet s persona, women (one pregnant) washed away by the floods, people talking about the floods, the buffaloes, crocodiles, (related to Vishnu s legend: Gajendra Moksha ). In the penultimate part of the poem there is a suggestion again of the absence of any pragmatic activist social concern on the part of the poets. The new poets representing the present show their concern in repetition and remembrance of what the old poets said. They only recall what the old poets said. No one recognizes and therefore no one speaks about the devastating effect of the recurrent floods. What does this poet / persona say? No one spoke in verse he says. Why is the word verse chosen as a substitute for poem or poetry? Can we not say that the

7 new poets lack both the inner sensibility of a poetic kind and the social awareness which responds to calamities and impels them to do something to remove the suffering inflicted by floods, to the extent possible? If the new poets are unable to socially respond, at least they could have tried their hand in writing even mediocre poetry. The older poets are poets, but may not have bothered about social concern and activism. But the new poets, taking the same subjects as material for poetry turn out only to be versifiers. They seem to be incapable of even versified social comment! MODULE 7 CONCLUSION A RIVER thus brilliantly brings together the past and the present as common materials for poetic creation: human misery and anguish caused by uncontrollable natural calamities: drought on one side and floods on the other: both are calamities. Then what remains: pregnant women continue to perish, carrying children: striking at blank walls / even before birth. Then are mentioned the cattle Gopi and Brinda, whose association with gods is obvious. The conclusion of a poem is always a significant part. Many critics see the poem as a portrayal of the impact of westernization and modernization on traditional values. According to this reading, the new poets dissociated poetry from human concerns. Even if it is successful poetry, it is sterile in terms of human values. In such poetry, to quote T.S.Eliot, words slip, slide, perish, do not stay in place. When Ramanujan says that the river has water enough / to be poetic / about only once a year, obviously there is scarcity of real, authentic poetry. If earlier poets sang of cities and temples, there was at least poetry. Now there is no authentic poetry except versified cataloguing of calamities and crises. The pregnant woman, with twins in the womb, the cattle, and other items are still carried away by the floods. Also, perhaps Ramanujan likes to say, there is no enduring poetry. However, this is not the complete truth. Because, even when written in English (which could also threaten native, natural linguistic sensibility). A RIVER is one of the most memorable Indo-English poems. So it comes full circle. There are poetasters and brilliant poets like Ramanujan. His poetry retains its Indian roots yet uses with distinction the tongue in English chains. There are no chains of alienation here but only acute, accurate eye for Indian sensibility.