A.K. Ramanujan | Guillermo Rodríguez Martín

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MLA:

Martín, Guillermo Rodríguez. “A.K. Ramanujan.” Indian Writing In English Online, 26 February 2024, <link to the post> .

Chicago:
Martín, Guillermo Rodríguez. “A.K. Ramanujan.” Indian Writing In English Online. February 26, 2024. <link to the post> .

A.K. RAMANUJAN (1929-1993)

Attipat Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born on 16^th March 1929 in Mysore, Karnataka, as the second of six children. His father, Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami Iyengar (1892-1953), a Tamil Vaisnava Iyengar Brahmin from Triplicane, (Madras), was a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Mysore. His mother, Seshammal, a Tamilian from Srirangam was not college-educated, but widely read in Tamil and Kannada regional literatures. Ramanujan’s upbringing in the Mysore family house, where he was exposed to multiple environments through kinship relations, multilingualism, and his father’s multidisciplinary education, provided the basis for his miscellaneous intellectual and artistic productivity. Ramanujan grew up surrounded by four languages (Kannada, English, Tamil, Sanskrit) and received a tri-lingual formal education (in Kannada, English, and to a lesser extent, in Tamil). He did not learn Sanskrit formally but absorbed it as a religious language and ritual code. Like most Brahmin children he inherited the orthodox religious conventions at home from his father and elders. At the age of sixteen, though, he renounced the Brahmin tradition, and threw away his sacred thread.

Since Ramanujan underwent most of his education in modern Kannada and English, these two became his literary languages. He acquired formal knowledge of Tamil only at the college level. He completed his BA with Honors in English Language and Literature from Mysore University in 1949 and his MA the following year. For the next eight years, he was a lecturer in English at various Indian colleges: S.N. College, Quilon (Kerala), Thiagarajar College, Madurai (Tamil Nadu), Lingaraj College, Belgaum (Karnataka) and M.S. University, Baroda (Gujarat). In 1958, he received a graduate diploma in linguistics from Deccan College, Poona (Pune). The following year, Ramanujan travelled to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, enrolling at Indiana University, where he obtained a PhD in linguistics in 1963. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1962 as an assistant professor and was appointed professor in 1968. At the time of his premature death in 1993, he was the William H. Colvin Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Department of Linguistics, and the Committee on Social Thought. He had also held teaching assignments as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Michigan. Ramanujan received many honours and prizes, including the Padma Shri awarded by the Government of India in 1976 for his contributions to Indian literature and linguistics, and a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1983. In 1988, he delivered the Radhakrishnan Memorial Lectures at All Soul’s College, Oxford. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. In 1999, he was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in English for The Collected Poems (1995). He was the author and/or translator of twenty-four books, including posthumous works, and he co-authored and edited various other seminal publications. While still alive, he published seven volumes of original poetry in English and Kannada and landmark translations of verse from Tamil (ancient Sangam classics and medieval Alvar saints) and Kannada, including his famous book of poetry from medieval Kannada mystics, Speaking of Śiva (1973), which was nominated for the National Book Award in the United States. His translation of U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Kannada novel Samskara is considered a classic. His last published book was Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages (1991).

Ramanujan was one of the pioneers of post-Independence Indian poetry in English who introduced multiple Indian traditions (classical pan-Indian, regional, and oral) into modern Indian poetry—as well as modern translation theory and practice. He was also a multi-disciplinary scholar, linguist, and folklorist, all of which impregnated his many-layered poetic work. He is  recognised today as an influential essayist, translator, and bilingual poet (in English and Kannada). Although he worked from 1959 to 1993 in American universities and many of his essays on a variety of Indian literary and cultural subjects appeared in academic publications in the United States, most critical studies on his work are dedicated to his poetry in English and were published in India. This asymmetrical situation can be traced to his categorisation as one of the stalwarts of modernism in Indian poetry in English, and to the growing critical output in India after the 1970s on post-Independence Indian poetry in English, shaped mainly by Indian professors of English and fellow poets who followed a similar poetics influenced by British and American modernists.

Ramanujan’s interest in poetry started as a teenager writing in the Kannada language in Mysore, and he soon began to read T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and other modern poets, and to write poetry in English in the mid -1940s. He is said to have been influenced by Gopal Krishna Adiga, a Kannada Poet who had already absorbed the style and techniques of modern European literature, particularly Eliot. His first poetry collection in English was published much later, when he was already living in the U.S. The Striders was brought out in 1966 by Oxford University Press from London at the recommendation of Girish Karnad, a fellow Kannadiga who was working at the Madras office of the prestigious English publishing house. The book received the Poetry Book Society spring recommendation. In the decades that followed, Ramanujan`s poetry in English became part of the canon of Indian Poetry in English that was being established by influential critical anthologies; he was also considered a poet of the Navya (new) movement in Kannada that arose in the 1950s led by poets like Adiga. Ramanujan was labelled a modernist in both literary circles since much of his poetry of the 1960s and 1970s was characterised by imagism, irony, and experimental formal devices.

On the other hand, in western academia he was foremost known as a folklorist, a researcher of oral traditions, and as a groundbreaking translator of South Indian medieval mystic poetry traditions such as the Kannada vachana poetry (10^th century CE) and Tamil Alvar poetry (6^th to 9^th  centuries CE), as well as of the Tamil classical Sangam poetry (3^rd century BCE to 3^rd century CE). His translations have had many admirers in India and the West, as well as detractors, such as Tejaswini Niranjana and H.S. Shivaprakash, who dismissed his medieval Kannada poetry translations as being too steeped in irony and other modernist techniques.[1]

Ramanujan started publishing poetry in English in Indian journals such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, and Thought in the years from 1956 to 1958. His multi-lingual education and avid interest in English literature as a student and lecturer in India gradually led him to linguistics in his late twenties. Like many bright fellow Indians in the 1950s, Ramanujan had been given the chance to pursue higher studies, and a possible career in the United States under the Fulbright and Smith-Mundt Program. His life in America from 1959 (aged 30) undoubtedly shaped his poetics and translational work, though he did not consider himself an Indian diaspora writer, and he travelled to India regularly for research, academic programs, and cultural ‘re-fills’. It was his scholarly thirst, his desire to explore new disciplines, as well as his natural curiosity for different things, that took him to the United States. He was set on studying linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and there he absorbed the prevalent structuralist theories from some of its leading exponents. The new environment also enriched his social life and writing skills; he deftly recorded his interactions and encounters with intellectuals, poets and everyday Americans in his diaries, extracts of which were published posthumously as Journeys: A Poet`s Diary (2019). His experience there — and studies in linguistics—had an immediate impact on his poetry from the early 1960s, of which only a narrow selection was published in his first poetry collection, The Striders (1966). In the early compositions of the 1960s, from Mysore to distant Chicago and looking back, Ramanujan takes on his Hindu tradition, as well as his multi-cultural identity, with an irony grounded in comparison and contrast:

 Self Portrait            

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
despite the well-known laws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father. (21)



Conventions of Despair

Yes, I know all that. I should be modern.
Marry again. See strippers at the Tease.
Touch Africa. Go to the movies.

Impale a six-inch spider
under a lens. Join the Test-
ban; or become The Outsider.

Or pay to shake my fist
(or whatever-you-call-it) at a psychoanalyst.
And when I burn

I should smile, dry-eyed,
and nurse martinis like the Marginal Man.
But, sorry, I cannot unlearn

conventions of despair.
They have their pride.
I must seek and will find

my particular hell only in my hindu mind:
must translate and turn
till I blister and roast

for certain lives to come, ‘eye-deep’,
in those Boiling Crates of Oil; weep
iron tears for winning what I should have lost

see Them with lidless eyes
saw precisely in two equal parts
(one of the sixty four arts

they learn in That Place)
a once-beloved head
at the naked parting of her hair.

Must go to bed
with frog-eyed dragons,
once my dream-dark queens

when I had a cavalry of princeling sons.
And I must draw, ductile,
the sudden silver of a glimpse

through the hole of a stare
and see a grandchild bare
her teen-age flesh to the pimps

of ideal Tomorrow’s crowfoot eyes
and the theory of a peacock-feathered future.
No, no, give me back my archaic despair:

It’s not obsolete yet to live
in this many-lived lair
of fears, this flesh. (32-33)

Ramanujan accepted his self-imposed ‘exile’ both as a mediating role between Indian and American scholarship (calling himself ‘the hyphen’ in Indo-American Studies) and as a creative dialogue with himself that provided a double resource for his writing, a creative give and take. As an artist and scholar transacting between cultures, he accepted his ‘hyphenated’ condition with ambivalent ease. He was equally at home in India and America, though his personal life, as his diaries reveal, was full of existential self-doubt, marital tensions, and lifelong fears. He often noted, ironically, that his academic life was a ‘curious perversity’: he had taught Western literatures to Indian students as a college lecturer (like many other Indian writers in English), and he ended up lecturing on Indian literary traditions in the United States, as he was part of a pioneering programme to introduce Dravidian studies at the University of Chicago. Drifting into routine and campus life there, Ramanujan made new ‘discoveries’ researching his Tamil literary heritage. In 1962, he chanced upon an anthology of Tamil classical poetry by U. Ve. Caminataiyar in the basement of the Harper Memorial Library, University of Chicago. This encounter with the ancient Tamil poets of the Sangam period was a milestone in his academic and poetic career. The more he became engaged with this ancient ‘fraternity of poets,’ the more the art of translation—that is, of transacting between languages, traditions and times—became for him a way of thinking and of explaining his self. In 1967, Ramanujan published his first landmark volume of classical Tamil Sangam poems, titled The Interior Landscape, which contained translations of the akam (love) genre from the Kuruntokai anthology (first three centuries CE). The poems were masterpieces in the economy of language, much to the taste of American New Criticism, and revealed to modern readers a ‘language within a language’ that the poet-translator pursued throughout his creative career. Ramanujan also encouraged fellow Indian poets, such as Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasarathy and Adil Jussawalla, to enlarge their scope and explore a multicultural identity—as Indian poets writing in English—by translating from their own mother tongues.

Several other formal features of his poetry, prevalent since the 1950s (before his engagement with Tamil classical poetry), can be traced to both Indian and Western sources. For instance, the distinctive employment of free verse, and the stylistic convention of beginning a poem ‘in medias res,’ were typical techniques adopted from the modernist poets as well as from the oral traditions that Ramanujan researched as a hobby in his youth, including the vachanas (sayings) of the medieval Virasaiva lingayyat mystics in Kannada he had been exposed to since 1947. Ramanujan had absorbed the skill of free verse from his early studies of American and English poetry in India, and he admired Whitman’s pioneering use of it in Leaves of Grass. In line with T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins (and other poets he read and studied profusely), he was convinced in his early days as a poet that the natural, organic quality of poetry could only be achieved by bringing the verse close to speech. Both in Kannada and English, he wanted his poetry to sound as if he were talking to someone in an ordinary conversation, and made his point in the imagistic poem that opened his first collection:

The Striders

And search
for certain thin
stemmed, bubble-eyed water bugs.
See them perch
on dry capillary legs
weightless
on the ripple skin
of a stream.

No, not only prophets
walk on water. This bug sits
on a landslide of lights
and drowns eye-
deep
into its tiny strip
of sky. (1)

In a typical Ramanujan composition of this period, an idea—often a childhood memory—, comes alive through its formal devices, line breaks, formal shape, language, sound, etc., as much as through the theme and metaphors. His training in linguistics impregnated his verse with a personal style that showed a scrupulous concern with language and a unique poetic idiom. In these poems the aesthetic experience arises from a well-formed image, which comes alive out of an unwilled and unconscious act, not unlike the workings of a casual conversation recounting a dream or a nightmare. Further, this real or ‘imagined’ experience is delivered in well-crafted artefacts, culled out of language and words on the page. The formal structure (linguistic, logic, and visual) of a poem and the style of poetry, the skill of playing with language, of putting words together to convey a particular meaning, remained a life-long preoccupation with Ramanujan.

Another early feature of his poetry is the use of the mask to distance his personal feelings, as he takes up a plurality of identities to hide his self in passivity and irony. This makes his poems seem personal yet distant as if he were watching himself perform. It is an observant state of being allowing for freedom and transparency. Again, the acceptance of a plural identity may seem a modern poetic strategy (for years in India he had been pursuing Yeats’ concept of the ‘mask’), but Ramanujan derived this practice also from the dramatis personae (female and male) employed by the ancient Tamil poets to speak to ‘others.’

The method of association, by which events and things are recalled, linked and creatively juxtaposed within the poet’s psyche, is also a typical characteristic of Ramanujan’s verse. It makes his poetry highly metaphorical in nature as he constantly moves between the objective and the personal, the cultural and the archetypal, the conscious and the unconscious. This technique, influenced by Jungian psychoanalysis, as well as the Vaisnava belief of continuity through change and the metonymical insets (ullurai) of Tamil poetics, enables him to present within the framework of a few lines the entire complexity of his thoughts and feelings, as well as the shifting identities of the self. The narrative mode and the insertion of a ‘dramatic scene’ to render the nuances of a particular experience, are devices used in longer imagistic compositions like “Snakes,” the second poem in The Striders collection:

Snakes

No, it does not happen
when I walk through the woods
But, walking in museums of quartz
or the aisles of bookstacks,
looking at their geometry
without curves
and the layers of transparency
that make them opaque,
dwelling on the yellower vein
in the yellow amber
or touching a book that has gold
on its spine,
I think of snakes,

The twirls of their hisses
rise like the tiny dust-cones on slow-noon roads
winding through the farmers' feet.
Black lorgnettes are etched on their hoods,
ridiculous, alien, like some terrible aunt,
a crest among tiles and scales
that moult with the darkening half
of every moon…. (2-3)

Ramanujan’s ideas on poetic inspiration are inextricably rooted to the physical body and the senses, and he often connected biological time with nature, personal history, folklore, memory, and the process of writing. Thus, many compositions have a meta-poetic significance associated with the natural world and folk wisdom: plants, leaves, fruits and seeds, or the instinct of fear of certain animals such as reptiles and insects, may evoke natural or inborn responses and even give birth to poems:

Which Reminds Me

I have known
that measly-looking man,
not very likeable, going to the bank
after the dentist,
catching a cold
at the turn of the street
sitting at the window of the local bus,
suddenly make
(between three crossings and the old
woman at the red light)
a poem.

Which reminds me
of the thrown-away seed
of the folktale tree
filling with child the mangy palace dog
under the window,
leaving the whole royal harem
barren. (23)

The bodily senses entail an immediate presence and a reaction, but they can leave lasting resonances. In Ramanujan’s second collection of poems Relations (1971), which contains reworked compositions from the 1960s, the poem on “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing about Touch,” for instance, is a review of the human body and how it “remembers” through the senses:

Eyes, Ears, Nose, and a Thing about Touch

Eyes are fog,
are trees green or on fire,
a man’s face quartered by the cross-
hairs of a gunsight. Crows, scarecrows,
eyes in others’ eyes. A brown dog
dipped and gilded in the sunshine,
or blurred through someone else’s glasses.

When lucky
it dawns birdcries,
the ear has children with bells;
the fall, delay, and fall
of a wooden doll on the wooden
stairs, what mother says
to cook and early beggar.

Urine on lily,
women’s odours
in the theatre, a musk cat’s
erection in the centre of a zoo,
the day’s bought flowers
crushed into a wife's night
of grouses: the sudden happiness

of finding
where noses can go.
Touch alone has untouchables,
lives continent in its skin, so
segregating the body
even near is too far.
Through all things that press,

claw, draw blood,
yet do not touch,
it remembers a wet mouth
on a dry;. . . . (21-22)

Another persistent idea Ramanujan explored during the 1970s was that of an external force that heightened the bodily senses and could inspire poets. In fact, a first-hand experience with the hallucinogenic substance mescaline, recorded in his diary in 1971 under the effects of the drug, lingered in him for many years. The multiple ramifications (physical, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual) of this experiment—which may be considered an artistic failure and a revelation at the same time—, and a renewed interest in the Hindu concept of soma, became almost an obsession as he kept drafting and re-visiting a series of poems around this theme from the 1970s until the early 1980s. His concern with the myth of soma, referred to in the Vedas both as a god and a divine drink, resulted in an unpublished sequence of poems he intended to bring out under the title ‘Soma’ as a new collection in 1982. As he explained in a 1981 interview, his personal take on the ancient concept was above all an attempt at demythologisation of “whatever one calls ‘divine’ in our ordinary life.” The volume was eventually discarded, as he was unsure of its poetic import and worried that readers would associate his new work with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. After Ramanujan divorced his wife Molly Daniels (who left for India with their two children) in the crucial year of 1971, he went through a psychological depression that resurfaced in later years, as several diary entries reveal. He found respite and inspiration in the south Indian mystics, for in the years that followed, he published two volumes of poetry translations from medieval Kannada and Tamil. His landmark volume, Speaking of Śiva (1973), shows him repossess the revolutionary Kannada Virasaiva poets that inspired him in his native Mysore as a rebellious teenager. From 1976 onwards, he immersed himself in the Vaishnavite Alvar poetry while he was translating the Tiruvaymoli by Nammalvar, published as Hymns for the Drowning in 1981. The poetry of the medieval Tamil Alvar mystics remained one of the deepest influences in his life and made him emulate a poetry of ‘possession’ and of ‘connections.’

Thus, the discarded Soma poems, published posthumously in 2023 in a contextualised collection, mark a transitional point between Ramanujan`s earlier poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, and his more mature poetry of the 1980s, which was more metaphysical, abstract, and meta-poetic in an existential sense. The later Ramanujan from the mid-1980s onwards was shaped not only by the Alvar poets, but increasingly also by the Upanishads and Buddhist philosophy, which he rediscovered after travelling to Sri Lanka in 1983. His poetic vision expanded from the body-Soma personal relation to the larger Body-Universe consciousness in his third volume of poems titled Second Sight (1986). The Upanishadic caterpillar motif, food-cycle poems, connected to Whitman’s notion of the poetic ‘I’ as cosmos, bioenergetics, yoga, psychoanalysis and an eco-logical world view, are at the back of the concerns that poured into this last poetry collection published during his life. And so, with this volume Ramanujan explored larger themes, reaching out to another level of consciousness and inter-connectedness, one that also reflected his intellectual evolution, from structuralism (Saussure, Lévi-Strauss) to poststructuralism reminiscent of Barthes and Derrida combined with Indian philosophical traditions. Here were the same life-long ideas in his poems, re-circulated in a larger continuum of ancient traditions and post-modernity, adding even more layers of interpretation to the multiple identities hidden in the verse lines, in a complex design of inter-related poems that was not immediately understood by readers and critics. Without wholly dropping his ironic distance (and mask), the poet-speaker of these poems embraces his passive-active paradox (the Upanishadic watchers closing in on the poetic ‘I’) and seems to be conscious that his entire output is a meta-poetic exercise of ‘connecting’ words, images and thoughts, constructing and deconstructing, just as the cycle of life and death (the entire cosmic history) is a never-ending process:  

Connect! 

Connect! Connect! cries my disconnecting
madness, remembering phrases.~
See the cycles,

father whispers in my ear, black holes
and white noise, elections with four-year
shadows, red eclipses

and the statistics of rape. Connect,
connect, beasts with monks, slave economies
and the golden bough.

But my watchers are silent as if
they knew my truth is in fragments.
If they could, I guess

they would say, only the first thought
is clear, the second is dim,
the third is ignorant

and it takes a lot of character
not to call it mystery, to endure
the fog, and search

the mango grove unfolding leaf and twig
for the zebra-striped caterpillar
in the middle of it,

waiting for a change of season. (73)

A careful reading of the Second Sight poems allows one to ‘literally’ connect a sequence of inter-related poems that echo similar themes with the same verse structure. Many of the poems in this collection were part of an earlier unpublished long ‘Composition’ consisting of 26 sections that was later decomposed into twelve published poems. Ramanujan opted at some point in 1984 to dismember the long poem and let his philosophy of life take over. Picking up the main themes of The Striders and Relations, his fears and anxieties, and the belief that ‘truth’ is in ‘particulars,’ Second Sight reveals his pragmatic belief in a paradoxical and fragmented reality. The poet wants to return to the world of senses and instincts but knows all the same that any active involvement in the world, that is, the experiencing of fear and desire as the Buddhists say, only leads to anxiety and suffering. This collection, which contains many new poems composed in the verse format of two and half lines, inspired by the fourth-century Tamil prosodic form of the kural, includes also earlier discarded drafts from the 1960s and 1970s grafted into new work, turning his poetic belief in the artistic ‘continuum’ into practice. Thus, the central theme of the body composing and decomposing into macro and micro elements within the continuous flux of life (lives) is carried over to the creative act. A poem for Ramanujan is a ‘composition’ made of textual tissue, words, and images that are fragments from and of his mind and body. In this manner he presents the creative cycle of poetry and poetry writing as a natural process: like breathing air or ingesting food, for poetry, as the mirror-window of the chain of life, passes through all ‘elements of composition’ of which life is made. According to this view, the art of ‘composition’ takes part in the never-ending process of creation and incarnation of elements, which include the poet, the poem, the words in the poem, and the reader in a transformative aesthetic experience. This circulating organic process is a fundamental metaphor of Ramanujan`s poetics of metamorphosis, and is expressed, for instance, in poems like “Elements of Composition”:

Composed as I am, like others,
of elements on certain well-known lists,
father’s seed and mother’s egg

gathering earth, air, fire, mostly
water, into a mulberry mass,
moulding calcium,

carbon, even gold, magnesium and such,
into a chattering self tangled
in love and work,

scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see,
only by moving constantly,
the constancy of things

………….....................

I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving

……………….…

and even as I add,
I lose, decompose
into my elements,

into other names and forms,
past, and passing, tenses
without time,

caterpillar on a leaf, eating,
being eaten. (11-13)

Ramanujan shunned unifying theories and was always suspicious of grand ideas and wary of epiphanies and revelations. He was incapable of making his larger poetic design—and aesthetic belief—too visible to others, as his own doubts and stated lack of self-esteem made him go back and forth in his particular ‘hindu hell’ (The Striders 32). So he preferred to let poem flow into poem, his thoughts and images ‘clinching’ on and off, running like an intermittent waterfall into a river. His poetic ideal envied the fraternity of classical Tamil Sangam poets and their ‘secret language’ embedded in a long tradition of poems that spoke to each other. This was a life-long aspiration of Ramanujan, which went back to W.B. Yeats and his first readings of Eliot`s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” as a student of English literature. He had hoped to bring his ‘design’ to the fore more effectively with a larger body of writings he was building up. But the work of one of India`s most talented poet-translators and scholars remained unfinished. Ramanujan`s sudden death in 1993 left many works—literary and academic—incomplete and ‘fragmented’.

The Black Hen was the editorial title given to a group of posthumous poems included in The Collected Poems in 1995. It contains poems drafted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ramanujan was suffering from increasing physical pain due to an adverse spinal condition and experienced renewed tensions in his personal life (he remarried Molly Daniels in 1976 and they divorced again in 1988). These late poems go deeper into metaphysical questions and move into darker mind spaces. In the opening poem he re-visits the Keatsian romanticism of his youth intermingled with old animal fears through the lens of a reflective existential pessimism, and there are also other poems that move beyond anxieties of transmigration and disintegration to forebodings of death:

The Black Hen

It must come as leaves
to a tree
or not at all

yet it comes sometimes
as the black hen
with the red round eye

on the embroidery
stitch by stitch
dropped and found again

and when it’s all there
the black hen stares
with its round red eye

and you’re afraid… (195)


Death in Search of a Comfortable Metaphor

Grandmother's version
of how scorpions die
to give birth
may not be true
but sounds right.

Maybe death is such
a scorpion: bursts its back
and gives birth
to numerous dying things,
baby scorpions,

terrifying intricate
beauties, interlocked
in male and female,
to eat, grow, sting,
multiply, burst their backs

in turn, and become feasts
of fodder for working
ants, humus for elephant
grasses that become elephants
that leave their herds
to die grand lonely deaths.

But when did elephants
console the living
left behind by a death?

16 March 1992

[the poet's sixty-third birthday] (273)

A year later, on 13 July 1993, A.K. Ramanujan died unexpectedly in a Chicago hospital of a heart attack. We can only imagine where his diaries, journals, poetry and scholarship would have led him had he lived longer. Ultimately, the greatest honour for any writer lies in one’s work being read well after life has passed. Ramanujan’s poems, prose, essays and translations have left a vast legacy. They keep inspiring and influencing new generations of poets and scholars, and enthral readers to this day. Since his passing there has been a regular output of posthumous publications of his prose and poetry (in English and Kannada), which keep adding new layers and revelations to his body of work. His books of translations, essays, and collections of folktales have become classics. They continue to be reprinted in the United States and India, and they are also being translated into other languages around the world .

Select Bibliography

1. Poetry in English

• Collections

The Striders. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Relations: Poems. London, N. York: O.U.P., 1971.

Selected Poems. N. Delhi, N. York: O.U.P., 1976.

Second Sight. N. Delhi, N. York: O.U.P., 1986.

• Posthumous collections

The Black Hen in The Collected Poems of A.K Ramanujan. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1995. Contains also The Striders (1966), Relations (1971) and Second Sight (1986).

Uncollected Poems and Prose. Edited by Molly A. Daniels–Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. London and New Delhi: O.U.P., 2001.

The Oxford India Ramanujan. Edited by Molly Daniels–Ramanujan. New Delhi, O.U.P., 2004. An omnibus collection that includes all the poems from the previously published books of poetry in English (1966, 1971, 1986, 1995, 2001) listed above, and the four collections of poetry translations from medieval Kannada and classical and medieval Tamil (1967, 1973, 1981, 1985) listed below.

Soma. Poems by A.K. Ramanujan. Edited by Guillermo Rodríguez and Krishna Ramanujan. Gurgaon, Haryana: Penguin Viking, 2023.

2. Posthumous collections of prose in English

The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan. Edited by Vinay Dharwadker. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1999.

Uncollected Poems and Prose. Edited by. Molly A. Daniels–Ramanujan and Keith Harrison. London and New Delhi: O.U.P., 2001.

Journeys: A Poet’s Diary. Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez. Gurgaon, Haryana: Penguin Random House, 2019.

3. Books of translations

• Tamil and Kannada poetry in English

The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967.

Speaking of Śiva. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1973,

Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammāḻvār. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long poems of Classical Tamil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

The Oxford India Ramanujan. New Delhi: O.U.P., 2004.

• Kannada fiction into English

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man (Samskara). By U.R. Ananthamurthy. New Delhi: O.U.P., 1976.

3.3. English fiction into Kannada

Haladi Meenu (The Yellow Fish). By Molly Daniels–Ramanujan. Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1966.

3.   Collections of Indian folktales in English

Folktales from India. A Selection of Oral Tales from Twenty-Two Languages. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

A Flowering Tree and Other Oral Tales from India. Edited by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. Berkeley: University of California Press; New Delhi: Viking Penguin India, 1997.

4. Other co-authored or co-edited works in English

A.K. Ramanujan and Edward C. Dimock Jr. et al., eds. The Literatures of India. An Introduction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. London: O.U.P., 1975.

A.K. Ramanujan and Stuart Blackburn, eds. Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folklore of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. London: O.U.P., 1986.

A.K. Ramanujan, V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, eds. When God is a Customer: Telugu Courtesan Songs by Ksetrayya and Others. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; New Delhi: O.U.P., 1995.

A.K. Ramanujan and Vinay Dharwadker, eds. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry. New Delhi: O.U.P, 1994.

5. Works in Kannada

5.1  Poetry collections in Kannada

Hokkulalli Hoovilla (No Lotus in the Navel). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1969.

Mattu Itara Padyagalu (And Other Poems). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1977.

Kuntobille (Hopscotch). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1990.

5.2 Novella in Kannada

Matthobhana Atmacharitre (Someone Else’s Autobiography). Dharwar, Karnataka: Manohar Granthamala, 1978.

5.3 Collections of proverbs in Kannada

Gadegalu (Proverbs). Dharwar: Karnataka University, 1955. Dharwar: Karnataka Visvavidyalaya, 1967. Dharwar: Manohar Granthamala, 1978.

5.4 Posthumous collected works in Kannada

A.K. Ramanujan Samagra (Complete Kannada Works) Edited by Ramakant Joshi and S. Divakar. Dharwar: Manohar Granthamala, 2011.

6. Translations of A.K. Ramanujan’s Kannada books into English

• Kannada poetry

No Lotus in the Navel (Hokkulalli Hoovilla, 1969). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. Advisory ed. Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi. New Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 3–58.

And Other Poems (Mattu Itara Padyagalu, 1977). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 59–126.

Hopscotch (Kuntobille, 1990). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 127–186.

• Kannada novella

Someone Else’s Autobiography (Matthobhana Atmacharitre). Translated by Tonse N.K. Raju and Shouri Daniels–Ramanujan. A.K. Ramanujan. Poems and a Novella. N. Delhi, O.U.P., 2006, 214–323.

 

Further reading

Rodríguez, Guillermo. When Mirrors are Windows. A View of A.K. Ramanujan`s Poetics. New Delhi: O.U.P., 2016.

 

Notes:

[1] See Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 181-185, and H.S. Shivaprakash, “Introduction,” I Keep Vigil of Rudra: The Vachanas (N. Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010).