Cite this Essay
MLA:
Jatua, Sourav. “Escaping Identities Through Language.” Indian Writing In English Online, 03 September 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/escaping-identities-through-language-sourav-jatua/ .
Chicago:
Jatua, Sourav. “Escaping Identities Through Language.” Indian Writing In English Online. September 03, 2024. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/escaping-identities-through-language-sourav-jatua/ .
Review: A.K. Ramanujan. Soma. Edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan. Penguin Random House India, 2023.
The publication of Soma brings to light A.K. Ramanujan’s creative pursuits during the 1970s in the United States. Editors Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez have traversed through a wide array of unpublished notes and poem drafts to compile the intellectual reaction of one of the country’s prominent poets to the legend of ‘Soma’. This reaction is based on Ramanujan’s experience of the substance hallucinogen mescalin, an earthly substitute of the mythical plant and the source of an eponymous divine drink mentioned in the Rig Veda. Like many others before and after him, Ramanujan’s interest in the legendary ‘Soma’ plant was roused by R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushrooms of Immortality (1968).
There are a total of 22 poems in this volume (with some of them having been already published elsewhere under different titles) along with three scholarly pieces, two of which are written by the editors themselves and another by Wendy Doniger. Krishna Ramanujan offers us an up close (and occasionally frank) view of his father’s experience of mescaline; and how Ramanujan’s identity as a conservative Hindu Brahmin conflicted with his interaction with substances and their use in the States. He opines, “In this way, perhaps, his effort at imitating the composing practices of Vedic priests was a moment when a dichotomy between his Brahmin roots and his pull to experience a modern world came together” (Ramanujan 5-6). Rodriguez in his essay “The ‘Ordinary Mystery’ Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry” opines that,
As a poetry project, ‘Soma’ was for this south Indian professor living in the crisis-ridden America of the 1970s above all an attempt at ‘demythologization’ that carried with it a fatality and healthy dose of irony. It was meant as a personal coming-to-terms with poetry as religion, which is a profound universal theme. (Rodriguez 25)
Rodriguez provides us two distinct ways of thinking about the poems. One, as a learned classical scholar and translator himself, Ramanujan sought to defamiliarize the mystical aura that existed around the ‘Soma’ plant. This is where Rodriguez’s argument of ‘demythologization’ works in the poems. Ramanujan’s move to bring ‘Soma’ within the confines of everyday life defamiliarizes the same for its poetic speaker. This also correspondingly constitutes his ‘attempt at demythologizing’ ‘Soma’ (as a myth) for his readers.
This leads us to the second point in Rodriguez’s argument. Ramanujan’s demythicization of the ‘Soma’ plant is an attempt to disassociate the same from the binds of the deep-rooted cultural lineage to which it belongs. This process of dislodging ‘Soma’ from its mythic and subsequently religious connotations by writing about the same in an everyday lyric form became a method for Ramanujan to negate the culture of religious reverence inculcated in him. This is the point where I believe Ramanujan departs from Rodriguez’s argument that his attempt at ‘demythologization’ is a “personal coming-to-terms with poetry as religion.” Poetry, instead, became for Ramanujan a way to escape his own association with religious reverence.
Thus, these poems attempt to carve a (sense of) freedom for Ramanujan both at a personal and a literary level. A closer look at the poems confirms this. The subversion of the ‘godly’ lies at the heart of the seemingly innocuous invocation of the mythical plant by personifying it through pathetic fallacy – “Soma is restless. / Grab him, he breaks away.” (Ramanujan 55) This act of ‘breaking’ then constitutes and sets forth the process of re-characterizing the legend around Soma- “Soma, Soma is no god. … He can churn no sea, burn no forest, /turn no mountain.” (56)
By equating and in turn interchanging his own identity with that of the mythical plant, Ramanujan enmeshes the divine and the ordinary as equals. This is evident in the titles which place the plant alongside the mundane: titles such as, “Soma: he watches TV”, “Soma: he reads a newspaper”, among others. This yoking of the divine and the everyday results in the emergence of a personal narrative of Ramanujan’s own life; thus, after realizing that “Soma, once eye of heaven, /now a mushroom at my feet.”, (58) the poetic speaker-author can speak about Siva and Vishnu and Soma “in the middle of a thought, /at the corner of 57th Street, …”. (66) This interchanging progression continues in the rest of the poems as the mythical element of Soma is demystified to make it fit into the mundane life of the human. This recasting of the divine constitutes the subordination of the divine in the poems.
Ramanujan reworks the conventional first-personal lyric subjectivity in these poems by anthropomorphizing ‘Soma’, thus merging human subjectivity with the divine. The result of this merging is that the everyday mortal existence of the poetic speaker is imbibed with a heightened and otherworldly consciousness around him. This allows him to develop an ‘othered’ subjectivity that represents his telling voice and simultaneously, becomes an alter-ego under the hallucinogenic effects of the plant. In the Vedas, the word ‘soma’ is used simultaneously for the drink, the plant and the Moon God, Chandra. Ramanujan here follows a similar pattern by rendering the conventional lyric subjectivity permeable with the fluid use of the term ‘Soma’ to refer to both the poetic speaker-author and his alter-ego. The aforementioned otherworldly consciousness is not developed to constitute a uniform internalized psyche of the poetic speaker, but is a conduit through which Ramanujan attempts to transcend his own lived experiences. The poetic speaker-author is one who has consumed Soma in real life and now he departs from any fixed sense of mortal identity. This escaping drive is observed specifically in the manner in which his speaking voice is constructed in the poems. This is where Ramanujan’s success in these poems lies; we hear an atemporal voice speaking, an ‘altered’ persona of the poetic speaker (after consuming Soma) which creates an absolute sense of freedom from pre-established identities. In the poem “He looks at the Persian rug”, for instance, this escape is aligned with the movement of animals for sacrifice:
A live chicken.
He thinks he can hear it cluck
but it’s plucked
when he looks again,
. . .
And before he can think
This chicken’s a buffalo,
A scapegoat slaughtered
in a village of sins
for the virgin goddess
black hag of plagues.
(86-87)
The poetic speaker is rendered objective with a third person subjectivity (‘He’), but it is simultaneously offset with the presence of the ‘I’ who appears later seemingly as a different persona; this is coupled with the stark images of sacrificial animals. The presence of the gory non-human (the hen and the buffalo) presents an implicit anthropomorphizing, suggesting a sense of identification with the same.
This theme of escape becomes the central focus in the poems for which a subjective externalisation from a unified sense of ‘being’ is important. The externalised perspective developed out of the poetic speaker-author works to this end; everyday mundane acts are reinterpreted and presented through an external lens by the poetic speaker, be it physical ailment in “Soma: Sunstroke”, hunger in “Soma: he is hungry but cannot eat”, literary influences in “When Soma is abroad”, or the world around in “Soma: he watches TV”. Ramanujan works the mad, divine influence of ‘Soma’ deftly upon the human experience in these poems. This challenges our conventional ways of interpretation in the beginning, but the poems have an infused vitality within their portrayal of multiple states of being that rewards a patient reader.
Works Cited:
Ramanujan, A.K. “Soma (121) (After Rig Veda 8.79)” Soma: Poems by A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan, Penguin Random House India, 2023, pp. 55.
—. “Soma”, pp. 56.
—. “On discovering that Soma is a mushroom”, pp. 58.
—. “Wish we could talk about Soma and such”, pp. 65.
—. “He looks at the Persian rug”, pp. 86.
—. “Soma: he watches TV”, pp. 76.
—. “Soma: he reads a newspaper”, pp. 69.
—. “Soma: Sunstroke”, pp. 78.
—. “Soma: he is hungry but cannot eat”, pp. 80.
—. “When Soma is abroad”, pp. 88.
—. Ramanujan, Krishna. “Hummel’s Miracle: The Search for Soma.” pp. 3-21.
—. Rodriguez, Guillermo. “The ‘Ordinary Mystery’ Trip: Soma in A.K. Ramanujan’s Poetry.” pp. 22-52.
Wasson, Gordon. R. Soma: Divine Mushrooms of Immortality. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
Header Image: Penguin Random House, India
Sourav Jatua is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, University of Hyderabad. In his dissertation, he studies the relations between the everyday as a thematic entity and the poetic speaker in Philip Larkin’s poetry.
