Survey Essays
Interviews
Kynpham Sing NongkynrihCourse Notes
Course Note on Writing in English from Northeast India
Soibam Haripriya
Jobeth Warjri: Thank you so much for agreeing to take part in this interview. I want to start at the beginning—with Oral Scriptings. What made you think of oral narratives and oral storytelling as sources for your creative work?
Esther Syiem: Memory has played an important role in my life. Maybe because I was always told stories by my grandmother, my mother, my father and the innumerable visitors who were never part and parcel of the city of Shillong, but who came from the suburbs, who belonged to far away villages and told us things they saw that we never did.
I was always conscious of my oral antecedents and when I was young, I mined my stories from anyone I met and looked for books everywhere but found that books in Khasi were very few. There was always a sense of something that had to be done for the community in terms of retrieval, recordings, anything that would make these stories come alive. I was unnecessarily burdened with the thought that there were no books in Khasi on Khasi subjects that ‘mattered’ (the situation is different now).
I suppose my first collection of poems was an attempt to bridge the past; I found that these memories were, to my surprise, meaningful and that they had a significantly contemporary relevance. It was my first attempt and I was still feeling my way around but realising more and more that so much had to be retold, reinvented, re-made, updated and understood. I was not looking to write about the daffodil, as I told Professor Temsula Ao in one of my innumerable conversations with her. I was looking to the bamboo and the scuttling rodents who were generating stories of other worlds and other modes of being.
JW: How does the oral shape your style and your understanding of the literary?
ES: My world view has always been oral: by that I mean my consistent affirmation of the world in which words had the power to shape, to rule, to be sourced for their wealth of knowledge and ability to empower a community. In the course of my journey, anything to do with words and word-making seemed to reach out to me in a very essential way. And I responded by listening or reading or immersing myself in these world-views that constituted a very important part of my identity. This was reinforced by constant meetings that I had with those who lived far away from the city. Strangely, I still meet such people on a regular basis and my perceptions and understanding have become stronger – not that I idealise them – but that I find strength in their words and philosophy; where life and death are concurrent to each other and there is acceptance of the pace that life must take – no hurry there, nothing forced, nothing smart or clever about it.
So, stories in one way or another always struck a chord within me. As I said earlier, I swallowed them whole for they provided much food for my thoughts. Inevitably this formed the basis for my entry, if you could call it that, into the “literary” world of attempting to write. Of course, my education was in English Literature and I learnt a good deal about other cultures, but not about my own. This has always made me feel disadvantaged. Besides, there was always within me this sense of belonging to a community that had this uncanny ability to use the spoken word in a way that could move the universe. This has guided my attempts to put it down on paper, and it has always been my attempt to replicate its spirit, incurably candid and independent.
JW: I think, in The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative, you also speak of the oral as a way of interrogating the literary, a hermeneutic that unravels what it means to belong to a particular community. What does this mean for you—to have your cultural identity also be part of the way you interpret the world?
ES: Yes, the oral tales needed to be unravelled and unpacked to find out why they had not disappeared from the face of the earth, given the amount of discussion that went on about how the Khasi community had begun to lose its intangible heritage. Even though I always felt disadvantaged, I saw the oral as an asset that needed new ways to disseminate it productively in the present; to show the oral for what it really is, within Khasi society – not as a set of traditions or practices or sayings to be learnt by rote, but as a philosophy that feeds a particular way of life. One example is the practitioner of herbal medicine. There are no notebooks to be followed, only gut instinct and knowledge handed down (sometimes, not always) and an almost mystical sense of healing. When we talk about the oral it also implies this communion with the universe; the reason why, time and again, I have referred to our indigenous world as the “speaking universe.” It is within this context that the tales speak louder than anything else.
JW: The oral seems to resist a single interpretation. This is especially noticeable in Many Sides of Many Stories where a single poem is open to multiple points of view. How did you achieve this development in your craft?
ES: By listening intently to the same story being retold multiple times and to the hidden nuances and inflexions in the voices of those telling me stories. However, I am not aware of this kind of development in my poems. If there is one, then I’m very happy about it.
The oral goes through multiple retellings. These are like multiple edits. Each edit reinforces the other. All of them are equally important. For example, there is the story of Manik Raitong: some sources speak about an affair that he had had with the king’s wife. Some speak about the liaison after her marriage to the king. Tales from each region are embellished differently, but the implicit story line remains the same. And we pick them up one by one without disputing which one is the right one.
JW: I want to dwell a little on the translatability of the oral into print. How do you strike a balance between the forms of the oral (which are largely in Khasi) with English in which most of your books are written?
ES: I suppose this has not been difficult for me because I move in out of both languages quite easily. When there are words that are difficult to translate, that I think would add to the meaning or texture of the poem, I usually rely upon the original Khasi words. I use them in the midst of a thought process in a poem or to make the Khasi-ness of what I am writing about, stand out etc. In this way I feel assured that I am communicating my own world-view to the rest of the world in an authentic way; and I provide a glossary at the end.
JW: I think gender, as a way of understanding the literary, has been a recurring theme in your work—several of your poems and Memoir in Water: Speaks the Wah Umkhrah come to mind. What, do you think, are the ways in which stories told from the perspectives of women in Northeast India (yours, Temsüla Ao’s and Easterine Kire’s, to name a few) transformative in the way that the literature is understood?
ES: The stories coming from these women writers are different. In Easterine Kire’s novel, When the River Sleeps, the forest is identified as a protagonist; a protagonist that has been sidelined so often that we’ve failed to hear her voice. The narratives that we hear from these women writers come from a place never seen or heard of before. Another example is Temsüla Ao’s These Hills Called Home, which has brought a human face to the Naga struggle. So, women do have a transformative role in wielding their words and stories to a readership and an audience that is still untaught in the resources of a female imagination rich with associative memories and perceptions that have never really been sounded out to the rest of the world.
The river Umkhrah for instance, is the protagonist that has given my book its name. This body of water had often been described to me by those of the older generation who were closely linked to it. Then it had beauty and power and the ability to make itself heard through its raging waters or clear translucence in autumn or winter. It forms the backdrop to my consciousness; I hate it because it’s filthy but I love it too. And I’ve come to understand it almost as woman to woman: the stories that it has carried through the ages, the effluents that plague it now, its ability to clean itself in the monsoon, its faithfulness to all of us by simply flowing onwards, its ability to nurture life, its insistent presence in my consciousness. If this isn’t a woman telling her story then what is? The narrating voice of the woman has many layers . . . to be teased out with each new reading. And the woman’s voice has never been trained to speak in certain way. It is the voice of impulse, imagination, emotional certitudes that have never been discussed, never brought to life . . .
JW: How are the notions of the “oral” and the “literary” affected with the telling of stories that have gendered perspectives?
ES: For me the oral fashions the narrative; in that, I am always conscious of a certain way of story-telling, a certain way of looking at life, that particular inflexion that always brings out the oral strain. By “literary” I understand it to mean the qualifying mark for acceptance in academia. Under the sway of the oral, any thought of the “literary” seems to fall away (for me at least); for when I write I only have one thing in mind: and that is to emulate what comes to me by way of memory, through the stories that close around me all the time. The women in my stories and poems have a keen sense of the oral, never of the literary, and I find that once they take over, their stories take on a life of their own, following their own path of grass-root telling.
Jobeth Warjri: Thank you, Janice Pariat, for being a part of this interview. I would like to talk to you about an important element in your writing—the diasporic sensibility. How has calling multiple places “home” shaped your sense of aesthetics and, also, the affective components related to your craft?
Janice Pariat: Calling multiple places “home” has indeed contributed to my “diasporic sensibility”, but I think even more than that my exceedingly mixed ethnic heritage—of Khasi, Jaintia, Portuguese, British. I grew up in pockets of Assam, where my father was transferred from one tea estate to another, but I always had Shillong to call “home”. Except, I grew up in a mixed maternal household—my grandmother was Jaintia, my grandfather Portuguese, so even if I had a place to call home, I was never quite an “insider”. And then, of course I left, to study in Delhi, in London, I lived “outside” here and there for a long while, and I think because of this, along with my mixed heritage, I have felt unmoored, unanchored. At first, in a not entirely positive way—after all, who doesn’t wish to fit in? But I’d ask myself these questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? Where is home? And be quite disquieted by not having a clear answer. Only recently have I learned to embrace this—to acknowledge that I am a child of vast historical processes, of vast movements and migrations across the globe, that my story, as all our biographies, began a long time ago. That I carry the stories of my ancestors. And this has opened me up to the world in a way that I didn’t think possible. I appreciate the abundance of “homes”, I appreciate the complicated, entangled stories that have created my ancestral history—and I think this has permeated into my fiction now. My novel, Everything the Light Touches, intertwined a quartet of stories set across geographies and across centuries. Somehow, I cannot really bring myself to only consider the miniscule anymore. All is open. All is complicated. The past very much alive in our present.
JW: I think that you, along with Anjum Hasan and Jahnavi Barua, were among the first writers from the Northeast to express a fully developed idea of the diasporic in your writings. Formalistically, such as is the case with Seahorse: A Novel and The Nine Chambered Heart, it has resulted in a style that draws from an ephemeral sense of place and the people associated with these places. Was this intentional?
JP: Perhaps it wasn’t quite intentional at the time—we also are able to draw these observations in retrospect. Seahorse, my first novel, very much followed a geographical trajectory that echoed my own—Nem moves from an unnamed small-town to Delhi University’s North Campus, and then is in London/the UK for a year or so on a fellowship. Looking back now I think this allowed, for me, some safety in the intimidating exercise of writing a first novel. These were familiar places—in fact I was living in London at the time of writing the book, and while all else felt unfamiliar, the process of working on a much vaster canvas than the stories in Boats on Land, at least there was the familiarity of these locations and settings to fall back on. In The Nine-Chambered Heart, the unnamed protagonist also follows a geographical trajectory similar to mine, but this was more so I could explore love, desire, relationships, in a variety of settings. To see how we leave stories of ourselves wherever we go—and in a book like this we are able to gather them and place them together.
JW: Contrary to popular understanding of the diasporic as something associated with drifting and wandering, the term also touches upon a sense of a symbolic belonging to place. I think we see this in The Nine Chambered Heart where objects, such as paintings and sculptures, mark the character’s belonging to a certain place in time. What is your understanding of place as a symbolic feature in your writing?
JP: I think we carry home with us wherever we go—be it in the form of a coffee press, a dried flower, a pine cone, food stuff, a pendant, a photo. No matter how nomadic we might be, I suppose we are also only able to appreciate that movement, that journeying, if we are able to recognise some fixities, some anchors. And those anchors can themselves be movable—but they carry meaning within them—a particular place, a particular room or home—that becomes embedded in that object. It’s in the nature of the social lives of things to carry meaning in this way…
JW: In relation to the question above, in Everything the Light Touches, you ground the nomadic experience with the idea of the Nongïaïd. What made you think of connecting the travel and the diasporic experience to one of the cultures you’ve inherited?
JP: Travel in Everything the Light Touches is used as a vehicle to explore the tussle between worldviews—those that hold on to fixity and those that call for fluidity. My characters are travellers caught in movement, just as the novel leans strongly towards supporting a worldview that acknowledges the constant motion of life and the universe. Travel also serves as a useful tool to “unlock” characters—they are placed in unfamiliar settings, dealing with unexpected occurrences, and we see the decisions they make in those situations. Just as in life—I think how people travel is very revealing of their characters. The Nongïaïd as you know are a fictional community—but they play an incredibly important part in the novel as a whole. They symbolise everything that the nation-building project, or any project that seeks to fix and calcify, cannot control. The inclusion of the Nongiaid speaks very directly to the tussle between fixity and fluidity. They are the unsettled, wayward, wild, unruly and untamed that the Linnaean way of seeing is constantly trying to suppress, isolate, manipulate, tame, and eliminate.
JW: Do you see yourself continuing with exploring the diasporic theme in your writing? What’s next for Janice Pariat?
JP: To be honest, I’ve never quite imagined it as the “diasporic theme” until you mentioned so! I am looking to tell more stories that acknowledge these vast timelines and storylines we all belong to—the immense sweeps of history that go into me, my characters experiencing certain things and seeing life, the world in a certain way. I cannot undo this “long perspective”; it will continue to inform my writing from now on.
Cite this Essay
MLA:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “An Overview of Writing in English from Northeast India (the 1980s to the Early 2020s).” Indian Writing In English Online, 21 March 2024, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/an-overview-of-writing-in-english-from-northeast-india-the-1980s-to-the-early-2020s-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
Chicago:
Warjri, Jobeth Ann. “An Overview of Writing in English from Northeast India: The 1980s to the Early 2020s.” Indian Writing In English Online. March 21, 2024. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/an-overview-of-writing-in-english-from-northeast-india-the-1980s-to-the-early-2020s-jobeth-ann-warjri/ .
This essay provides an overview of the Writing in English from Northeast India from the 1980s to the present (the early 2020s). The aim is to give the interested reader an historical and a temporal account of the major literary trends during this period along with perspectives on how the literature has been read. The critical perspectives will shed light on what distinguishes Writing in English from Northeast India from the canon identified as Indian Writing in English, while also providing a possibility for examining the ways in which Writing in English from Northeast India can be read within the purview of Indian Writing in English. I take, as my point of departure, the 1980s since it is around this time that a sense of what distinguishes the literature in English from the Northeast, as a unique literature, emerges. While the use of the term “Northeast” is not without contention, it is used in this essay as a nomenclature that writers from the region grapple with in their relationship to the imaginary called “India.” It is, by no means, my attempt to dilute the diversity of the region in terms of the literary perspectives and output that characterise this often-fraught relationship. The aim, here, is to foreground English as a medium for writing with geographical locales being the contexts from which the language is used. Both the language and its contexts are relevant inasmuch as languages are imbued with the histories of the people who speak them (Ngangom unpaginated).
The 1980s: Colonial Legacies, Lyric and the Shillong Poetry Circle
As with most literature written in English in India, Writing in English from Northeast India began with the recognition that English was not a foreign tongue. The first literary circles in the region comprised, largely, of writers who were educated in mission schools where English was the medium of instruction. Reflecting on the literary climate of the 1980s, Dhruba Hazarika writes, “[C]reative writing in English in the North East of India…began albeit hesitantly, a bit cagey in Shillong itself” (293). The secrecy with which literature in English began has to do with the fact that there were not too many people who had been published in English. The lack of organised literary fora in the region also compounded the difficulties that people writing in English faced where publicity for the literature was concerned. Although some literature in English had been published in the 1960s and the 1970s, such as Murli Das Melwani’s Stories of a Salesman (1967), Jyotsna Bhattacharjee’s Shadows in Sunshine (1965) and Amaresh Dutta’s Captive Moments (1971), the lack of a critical readership to the writing meant that engagement with the literature was limited. Melwani’s Stories of a Salesman was the only book that attracted critical attention during the time it was published (See Archer 488). Four writers took on the responsibility of building a readership to literature in English from the region. They are regarded as the progenitors as far as literature in English in the Northeast is concerned—Desmond Leslie Kharmawphlang, Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Robin Singh Ngangom and Ananya Shankar Guha. Tarun Bhartiya, who was also part of the group, wrote in Hindi. Except for Kharmawphlang and Nongkynrih, the poets traced their roots outside of Meghalaya. They called themselves the Shillong Poetry Circle and their platform was a literary magazine called Lyric.
Ngangom’s Words and the Silence (1987), published during the time that the Shillong Poetry Circle was still in existence,[1] reflects the position of a poet who, living in exile, has found a second home in Shillong. The poem “Hynniew Trep”, is contemplative in the way that Ngangom’s “poetry of feeling” coalesces with his new-found affection for the city:
Denuded and sweet-smelling hills, it is here
among your boulders and pines that thatched huts
will lie with concrete balconies, and the material
hand, poised on the trigger is forever betrothed
to the artisan or carpenter who has nothing.
…
Seven Huts of my solitude, my first love
Your rain, your wind searched my face for signs
of guilt when I disembarked; a fugitive
fleeing from ties of blood and desire. (Ngangom 29)
The Shillong topography, with its wind and rain, complements the poet’s sense of loneliness which he also identifies as the origin of his poetry, his “Seven Huts…of solitude” (Ngangom 29). The poem shows Ngangom at ease with his adopted home, going so far as to comparing his journey as a poet with a Khasi origin myth. Ngangom’s language reveals a cosmopolitanism characteristic of literature that has been allowed to thrive in a multi-ethnic environment. This is not to say that the homeland, for the migrant poet, is forgotten. Ngangom re-imagines Manipur as the historical Kangleipak, once “beneficent and fabled” but now given to violence (Ngangom, “I am Sorry to See Poetry in Chains” 70).
Much has been said about the political overtones of Writing in English from Northeast India. Ananya S. Guha opines that the “cult of violence” associated with the literature has made writings from the Northeast marketable to Indian readers in the “mainland.” Guha points out, however, that the writers from the region speak of violence in order to point the way for peace (“Violence to What End?: Literary Expressions in the North East” 1-5). As a theme in Writing in English from Northeast India, the colonial legacies of violence can be traced to these early beginnings in the literature.
Lyric was eventually discontinued due to the lack of funds to pay for its publication (Guha unpaginated). In 1989, however, the Shillong Poetry Society, with the help of M. C. Gabriel,[2] published a calendar containing poems accompanied by artwork done by local artists Apart from the members of the Shillong Poetry Circle, poems from other regions in the Northeast, too, were published (See Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Easterine Kire’s poems published in the 1989 calendar of the Shillong Poetry Circle
Source: raiot.in
The poems, such as Kire’s “The Mist” and “For Justin-Pierre,” demonstrate the ideological stance that the writers had in relation to literature which was to distinguish the anglophone poetry of the Northeast from that which existed in the mainland. In his book, Words and the Silence (1987), Ngangom expresses this position. He writes that his is a “poetry of feeling” that is not “mere cerebral poetry” (Ngangom unpaginated). The resultant literature is one that is experiential, impressionistic and lyrical even as the feelings which the writers communicate derive from cultural, political and social heritages. In this regard, English was the preferred language to give voice to the silences both in terms of how literature from the Northeast was viewed as well as the lack of an informed audience to appreciate the literature.
The 1990s: The Northeast Writers’ Forum, English as Bhasha and Women Writers
The 1990s saw a concerted effort from the writers living within the region to establish a consortium, bringing together various writing communities into a common fold. The Northeast Writers’ Forum registered as an official literary body in 1997. The aim of the Forum was “to promote creative writings in, and the translations of regional literary works to, and vice versa, in English” (NEWF unpaginated). English was perceived, by the Forum, as a common ground upon which solidarity across writing communities could be established. The founding members—Meenaxi Barkataky-Ruscheweyh, Indrani Raimedhi, Srutimala Duara, Mitra Phukan, and Dhruba Hazarika—regularly contributed to English dailies in Assam, particularly, The Assam Tribune and The Sentinel (NEWF unpaginated).[3] A significant number of these early writings were vignettes and stories which reflected day-to-day life in Assam during the time. The writings are replete with raconteurs, chance encounters, wry observations of human behaviour and philosophical musings of the place of literature within the context of the everyday. The stories also contained memories of Shillong, a first home for many of the writers. The story “A Plain Tale from the Hills” (1990) by Dhruba Hazarika, written for The Sentinel, juxtaposes the memories of the first home (Shillong) with Guwahati, the place that the author has made his second and permanent home:
Back home in the hills we would go crazy…There was no dust, no heat, no mosquito. Even the sweat was good sweat, sweat brought about by honest, carefree labour and not idle sweat, brought about for no effort of yours but simply because of the glands opening because the sun was harsh. (Hazarika 1990, page unknown)
Although Hazarika later says in the story that the plains “can be more rewarding in terms of experience” than the hills (1990, page unknown), his memory of the hills in Shillong are nonetheless bathed in a nostalgic glow such that the past he speaks of was “honest,” “good” and “carefree” in comparison to the present (ibid.). His nostalgia for Shillong is characteristic of a “diasporic intimacy” that tends to idealise the past, particularly childhood, despite the dystopic realities present in the remembered past (Boym 251-258).
There also emerged, in the Christian dominated regions, a distinct aesthetic as far as literary influences were concerned among the writers. While the writers who were men were more likely to be influenced by Federico Garcia Lorca, Giorgos Seferis, Pablo Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish and Tudor Arghezi, the women writers took recourse to oral traditions and the Bible as sources for the literary. Temsüla Ao’s “The Serpent and I” and “The Healing Touch,” published in Songs that Tell (1988, 2013), re-imagine biblical narratives from the perspective of a woman. “The Healing Touch,” for instance, re-imagines the biblical narrative of the bleeding woman in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (See Matt. 9.20-22; Mk. 5.25-34; Lk. 8.43-48). Ao’s treatment of the narrative, in opposition to the one told in the Bible, carries sexual undertones:
What if, instead of the hem
I had touched the Body? (Ao 36)
Womanist interpretations of biblical narrative is also seen in Ao’s later poems such as “The Creator” in Songs of Many Moods (1995, 2013) where the biblical God is reconstructed as the woman as Creator.[4]Ao writes:
The Caverns
In another woman’s body
Fashioned and
Nurtured me
And pushed me out
To breathe and fight
In a man’s world.
…
The true self
Of the woman in me
Declared.
I am a woman,
And woman creates.
Therefore
I shall create
The real me
And a brave new world. (Ao 128-129).
Ao’s re-writing of biblical narratives showed that English, far from being a foreign tongue, was also comfortable enough for the writers to re-invent its theological meaning. Ao was also one of the earliest women in Nagaland to advocate women’s empowerment through education and played a key role in the development of the Ao Naga script (Kashyap, unpaginated). Belonging, as Lanusanga Tzüdir observes, comes from retrofitting biblical narrative with previously held beliefs in the Ao Naga oral traditions (Tzüdir 265-293). Biblical narrative, in this instance, served to position the self within the ambit of a “mother” tongue—one that drew upon women’s heritage while simultaneously engaging with the global through the English language and English texts (Nic Craith 76).
The 2000s: Mainstream Recognition, the Northeast “Diaspora” and the Other
Except for the Writers’ Workshop, which had published literature in English from the Northeast since its inception, mainstream publishers were—by and large—slow to recognise the literature from the region. By the early 2000s, however, the tide was turning. Publishing houses such as Zubaan, Harper Collins, Penguin, and Katha were at the forefront of bringing out literature in English from the region. The interest of mainstream publishers in Writing in English from Northeast India coincided with the institutionalisation of the literature in the form of research being carried out in universities across the country. A market and readership for the literature was created through this academic interest (Bargohain 1-38; “Northeast India: A New Literary Region for IWE” unpaginated). Notable works that were published during the time included The Collector’s Wife (2005) by Mitra Phukan (mentioned above), Esther Syiem’s Oral Scriptings (2005), These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006) by Temsüla Ao, The Legends of Pensam (2006) and River Poems (2004, 2013) by Mamang Dai, The Desire of Roots (2006, 2019) by Robin Singh Ngangom, Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head (2007) and Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009, 2016), and Jahnavi Barua’s Next Door (2008). While writers such as Syiem, Ao, and Dai reflected what Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih and Robin Singh Ngangom term a “rootedness” to place and folklore (xii-xiii), Hasan and Barua complicated the idea of “rootedness” by writing from the margins of indigenous worldviews that had, hitherto, dominated the literature.
The concept of the “other” is important in Writing in English from Northeast Literature. On the one hand, the region and its peoples are characterised by an “other”-ness in relation to the rest of India. While on the other, the non-indigenous groups in the region find themselves contending with otherness in relation to the social, political and cultural structures within the region itself. The relationship can often prove to be bewildering and complex as Nongkynrih expresses in the poem “Sundori” in The Yearning of Seeds (2011):
Beloved Sundori,
Yesterday one of my people
Killed one of your people
And one of your people
Killed one of my people
Today they have both sworn
To kill on sight.
But this is neither you nor I,
Shall we meet at the Umkhrah River
And empty this madness
Into its angry summer floods?
I send this message
Through a fearful night breeze
Please leave your window open. (12).
Written in 1992, Nongkynrih’s poem can be read as a reflection of the ethnic strife that pervaded Shillong during the 1980s and 1990s. There is a clear demarcation between “us” and “them” affecting the relationship between the poet and his beloved. The latter, as is evident from the poem, belongs to a non-indigenous community in the city. Yet, despite the political manoeuvrings that would have these divisions be as they are, the poet feels that the love he shares with Sundori exceeds group affiliations. But he is not sure of this fact. There is a hint of pleading when he says, “Please leave your window open” (Nongkynrih 12; emphasis added). Othering breeds suspicion, even within the communities that share the same cultural values and heritages, as Ao writes in the short story “The Curfew Man” in These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (2006):
While all normal activities came to a halt after the curfew hour, for some individuals the real work began only after dark. These were the informers…paid to gather information about those whose sons or relatives had joined the underground. They monitored the people who visited these houses; kept watch on where they went and also tried to find out what they told their neighbours and acquaintances. There was another group of people whose activities too, were constantly monitored. They were the sympathizers of the [Nagalim] movement, many of them government servants, doctors, teachers and even ordinary housewives. (Ao 34-35)
To circumvent state surveillance, the people living under its shadow live through their wits and wiles. Khatila, of the story “The Jungle Major,” for instance, counts upon her husband’s physical unattractiveness for him to escape the clutches of the Indian Army and the informers. She hurls abuses at him pretending as though he were her servant:
“You no good loafer, what were you doing all day yesterday? There is no water in the house even to wash my face. Run to the well immediately or you will rue the day you were born.” …[S]he gave a shove to Punaba with some more choice abuses and he hurried out of the house and on to the path leading to the third well. Soon he and his small party vanished into the jungle and out of the cordon set up by the soldiers. (Ao 6-7)
In what can be called a moment of signifying,[5] Khatila rightly assumes that the way she treated her husband, Punaba, would disorient the soldiers of the Indian Army, making them believe that he was not the Nagalim Major they were after.
Into this context of mutual suspicion of Writing in English from Northeast India, a new group of writers entered the scene. They brought a diasporic sensibility to the literature in a way that was hitherto unexplored. Anjum Hasan, Jahnavi Barua and later, Janice Pariat,[6] spearheaded an understanding of Writing in English from Northeast India from a diasporic perspective.
Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head (2007) is set in Shillong. It evokes, as a blurb on the book reveals, a “provincial milieu.” With its rain drenched streets, pine trees and rock music enthusiasts, the novel certainly captures the atmosphere in Shillong during the 1990s. The novel, however, exceeds its provincial setting through the introduction of characters whose inner lives are thrown into turmoil by their being outsiders or “dkhars” to the dominant Khasi population in the region. Sophie Das’ parents, for instance, trace their origins to North India and West Bengal. Sophie’s mixed cultural heritage results in a dilemma:
Sophie was odd because she was a Das, yet could only speak a few sentences in Bengali and could not, therefore, be friends with other Dases (and Chatterjees and Ghoshes) in the class. “I’m not Bengali,” her mother would say as an explanation for this aberration. “I’m from the north. Your father is Bengali.” She never explained what this made Sophie. (Hasan 23)
In a context where ethnic lines are so carefully drawn, a multi-racial identity such as Sophie’s poses a problem where belonging-ness is concerned. It does not help that the term “dkhar,” used by the dominant Khasi community as a blanket term for all Indian non-tribal communities, erases the cultural specificities and heritages that these communities have and belong to. As Paramjit Bakhshi writes in the essay “I, Dkhar” (2018):
Ours is a story, rarely told: a tale so politically incorrect, it has no takers…we are invisible and unheard of—different “strangers in the mist”—minorities but not of popular description, or ones who have suffered discrimination down the ages. (135)
The absence of a history to make sense of their discrimination and the political occlusion of their marginalisation, result in a self that is defined only by the category of being “outsiders” (Bhakhshi 136). Hasan’s novel delves into the psychological effects of such exclusions. Sophie’s narrative, which reappears in Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This (2009), arrives at a belated—if unsatisfactory—resolution. Sophie, now grown up and living in Bangalore, realises “She was alone from now on. She was her own context” (Hasan 236). The question remains as to what this “context” is that Hasan speaks of. In an interview with The Punch Magazine, Hasan clarifies her position in relation to Shillong:
[B]y the time I myself embarked on Lunatic, I wasn’t really thinking of the Brontës. I had moved to Bangalore by then and Shillong itself seemed like a mythical place to me, it didn’t need another literary source to illumine it. And it’s usual for the comparison to run in one direction—Shillong is like the Yorkshire Moors or Scotland or whatever. But the Yorkshire Moors could also be like Shillong. (Hasan and Roy unpaginated; emphasis added)
Shillong had become, for Hasan, a place she could enter through the literary. It had become a home that, by virtue of its inherent fictional qualities and literariness, could contain other homes, elsewhere.[7] Home as an entity which exists within the literary would complicate a theme that has been prominent in Writing in English from Northeast India since its inception—of land and the writers’ belonging to it.
The 2010s to the early 2020s: The “Return” to Land, Orality and the “Northeast”
Tracing the idea of the picturesque to the nineteenth century concept of the Concordia discors, Pramod K. Nayar dwells on the representation of land in the Northeast Indian imaginary:
The picturesque in NE poetry presents a curious tension. On the one hand it maps the land as a site of harmony and picturesque beauty. On the other it also represents a land in tragic transformation where fissures, disunity and chaos reign. (Nayar, “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India” 11)
He calls the “fissures, disunity and chaos” in relation to landscape the “savage/d picturesque,” a postcolonial development in the way land is imagined (Nayar “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India” 12). In Nabanita Kanungo’s poetry, the “savage/d picturesque” draws from the Sylheti immigrant experience. The poem “The Unreal City,” in A Map of Ruins (2014), represents the harmony of the picturesque as a lie that obfuscates the experiences of the immigrant in Shillong. Kanungo writes:
The unreal city merely continues,
living an awkward romance with trivia and mist,
a profound seclusion amidst multitudes of faces,
the politics of weather,
the tea and the fleeting headline;
gesticulating with its proportions hurled beyond,
a plot deepening with red possibilities.
And somewhere, huddled around that narrative,
you will find a café, a few poems,
besotted with claims;
broken characters
of ambivalent lines.
Often, on tired evenings,
it refuses to leave my eyes;
the grey colour of its segregated walls
that crept stealthily
into the insufficient metaphors of my time,
forgotten words like old, week-long rains and pines;
the banality of fear, its exclamations. (Kanungo, “The Unreal City” 17-18)
The harmonious picturesque which is preserved as an emblem of the city—its “week-long rains and pines”—are contrary to what Kanungo experiences as a third generation Sylheti immigrant. Her poetry is, at best, filled with “broken characters/of ambivalent lines” and “insufficient metaphors”—a deficiency in language to capture the historical legacies of the Partition. The vestiges of Partition are kept in place by a landscape that is marked with “segregated walls” and “red possibilities” that question her citizenship (Kanungo 18; 42-43). Kanungo’s postmemory[8] is framed by the threat of violence that could erupt at any moment to disturb the apparent peace that prevails in Shillong, a legacy that she proclaims in 159 (2018) as “history’s slip of birth” (Kanungo 7). In the poem, “Surma,” Kanungo expresses longing for the home her ancestors had left behind:
You shall be all the poems I chance upon
my mildewed file of poetry,
every ache I cultivate
in the plagued plains of our past,
our battles and pacts with the sky.
I have grown so bitter remembering you
they say I was born old.
But I know I was born dead,
perhaps blind or
you have walked so far away
I cannot trace you in the forlorn map.
…
I see my fugitive ancestors
falling on their knees on an imagined shore.
A part of me, that’s still your daughter
makes an impossible wish:
Surma, flow backwards one day
and undo all of this. (Kanungo, “Surma” 38-39)
Kanungo’s poem captures Nayar’s “savage/d picturesque” in its entirety: the landscape is anthropomorphised and imbued with feeling (often chaotic and traumatic) that emerges from the literature of a subject whose past has been overshadowed by colonialism (Nayar 11-19). But Kanungo’s poetry also reflects a subjectivity that is “caught in an in-between of real and imagined identity… more pronounced in second and third generation Sylhetis who were born in independent India” (Bhattacharjee 248). In her plea to the Surma to “undo all of this,” Kanungo entertains the possibility of an imagined self that is whole and not bound by the historical and collective trauma that dictates her reality. Any real sense of home, Kanungo reasons, is to be found in language: “For meaning is all there is” she writes in “What I’ll Take With Me When I Leave Shillong” (Kanungo 70).[9] Where Writing in English from Northeast India is concerned, this language is also influenced by orality and oral traditions.
The oral traditions practised by the indigenous communities within the region are closely connected to land as an indispensable part of self-identity. Mamang Dai’s River Poems (2004, 2013), for instance, draw upon folk practices of indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh to position the self within a network of social and cultural relationships. In the poem “Song of the Dancers,” Dai draws upon the Ponung dance of the Adis to reflect on the significance of cultural identity rooted in land:
The cloud is in love with the mountain.
The blue crest wrapped in stillness
bears this addiction of air and water,
the mark of rain on the steep jungle
the mysteries of the path of her valleys,
and the silence space of her memories.
…
We danced so long
we broke all our bracelets
to please a fancy.
In the dark I heard all your stories,
listened to your songs;
In empty space dreaming desire
vivid in the sun’s embrace
once, our eyes beheld lakes of fire. (Dai, “Song of the Dancers” 19)
In an interview with Thanal Online (2008), Dai explains the indigenous worldview that informs her writing:
The traditional belief of the Adi community to which I belong is full of this union. Everything has life—rocks, stones, trees, rivers, hills, and all life is sacred. This is called Donyi- Polo, literally meaning Donyi- Sun, and Polo- moon as the physical manifestation of a supreme deity, or what I like to interpret as “world spirit.” (Dai unpaginated)
In a landscape that is subject to various developmental projects by state and private entities alike, indigenous worldviews such as those expressed by Dai, can be a bulwark against deforestation and resource extraction. By treating all forms of life as sacred, indigenous philosophies and worldviews have been known to resist anthropocentric conceptions of environmental solutions and sustainability (McGregor et. al. 35-40). Indigenous worldviews, however, represent precarious[10] knowledge systems that are imperilled due to the historical effects of colonialism and, more recently, neo-liberal developments (Karlsson 4-7). There is also a caveat—most of the ethno-nationalist groups in the region that rely on indigeneity as an authentic parameter for belonging do so at the expense of women and other minority communities in the region. As Nandana Dutta points out, “The separatist discourse is also a nationalist discourse” (Dutta, “Nationalism and Otherness: Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom” 76). For this reason, ethno-nationalist movements within the region are often called out by the writers for being parochial and for betraying the very people they claim to serve.[11] In Jahnavi Barua’s Undertow (2020), the separatist discourse embedded in land, would have tragic consequences.
Undertow begins with an infraction. Rukmini Goswami, one of the characters in the novel, has decided to marry a person who is not from her caste. In fact, Alex, her fiancé, is not even Assamese. He is
[T]he wrong man…A man who was not of her religion, let alone her caste, nor of her race, not from any region remotely near hers, and a man whose skin was dark, to make matters worse. (Barua 5)
On the day of her wedding, Rukmini’s choice of a partner, is framed against the student agitations in Assam in the 1980s. Central to this narrative is the Brahmaputra, a river that, Barua reveals in succeeding chapters, carries the history of the Assamese people (147-149). When Loya, Rukmini’s daughter, “returns” to Assam, it is this heritage—that has spurred nationalist sentiment in the region—that Loya confronts. Barua is careful to portray the Brahmaputra as a living entity that embodies all of the sentiments (nationalist and otherwise) that the people living close to it have. Rukmini, on the way to her wedding, muses,
Once she was at the river, she was safe. Here she often dawdled. The water was so close she could smell it. On hot summer afternoons, the heat rose off in its swells, and in the winter, a cloying clamminess touched her skin, teasing out goosebumps. And always, the sense of being part of a larger heart beating that ran invisible leads into her own timid one, charging her with energy. (Barua 15)
The Brahmaputra, therefore, reminds the people belonging to it, of their connectedness to the past and their duties toward it. When, twenty-six years later, Loya makes it to her grandfather’s house on a hill beside the river, she feels the river’s presence watching her: “She sensed, in a distracted way, the river behind her…” (Barua 38). This same river, however, also exacts a price. When Loya is caught in a bomb blast in a market close to her grandfather’s house, she is pushed into the waters of the Brahmaputra by a crowd of people where she drowns.
Barua’s narrative unravels the double-edged sword of history. While history, like the Brahmaputra’s, can sustain and support life in the form of a steady identity, it can also—like the river—swallow the lives of those who do not conform to, or follow, its diktats. And it is, perhaps, such contradictions and antagonisms within the same narrative that makes Writing in English from Northeast India a body of writing that escapes any one categorisation.
Conclusion
Writing in English from Northeast India reveals a complexity that resists any single perspective. The Literature, as has been demonstrated in this essay, is as diverse as the people who write and the heritages they draw from. In the interest of critical insight, it may be concluded that it is a literature of the margins in the same way as bell hooks, in her reflection on marginality, writes that “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body…We could enter that world but we could not live there” (hooks ix). This makes the body of literature, analysed here, not only a literature of the “Northeast” but Indian literature as well (See Chandran unpaginated). Apart from the writers whose works are mentioned in this essay, other writers in English from the Northeast include Mona Zote, Lalnunsanga Ralte, Parismita Singh, Avinuo Kire, Prajwal Parajuly, Tashi Chopel, and Nini Lungalang.
Works Cited
Ao, Temsüla. Book of Songs: Collected Poems 1988-2007. Heritage Publishing House, 2013.
—. These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2006.
Archer, William H. Review of Stories of a Salesman by Murli Das Melwani, Books Abroad, vol. 42, no, 3, 1968, p. 488. PDF download.
Bakhshi, Paramjit. “I, Dkhar.” Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India, edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat, Amaryllis, 2018, pp. 135-148.
Bargohain, Rajashree. Echoes from the Hills: Poetry in English from Northeast India. 2017. Indian Institute of Technology, PhD dissertation.
Barua, Jahnavi. “Home.” Insider Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India, edited by Preeti Gill and Samrat, Amaryllis, 2018, pp. 81-101.
—. Next Door. Penguin Books, 2008.
—. Undertow. Penguin Random House, 2020.
Bhattacharjee, Jyotsna. Shadows in Sunshine. Alpha-Beta Publications, 1965.
Bhattacharjee, Sukalpa. “Narrative Constructions of Identity and the Sylheti Experience.” The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India: Poetry and Essays, edited by Tilottama Mishra. Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 245-258.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
Chandran, K. Narayana. “English in India: An Overview.” Indian Writing In English Online, 05 Apr 2022, www.indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/english-in-india/.
Dai, Mamang. The Legends of Pensam. Penguin, 2006.
—. River Poems. 2nd ed., Writers’ Workshop, 2013.
Dai, Mamang and Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal. “Fusion of Journalism and Poetry.” Thanal Online, vol. 2, no. 4, May 2008. http://www.thanalonline.com/Issues/08/Interview2_en.htm
Dutta, Amaresh. Captive Moments. Writers’ Workshop, 1971.
Dutta, Nandana. “Nationalism and Otherness: Reading Nation in the Literature Classroom.” The Global South, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 71-90. PDF download.
__. “Northeast India: A New Literary Region for IWE”, Oxford UP, 18 September 2018. https://blog.oup.com/2018/09/northeast-india-new-literary-region/
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988.
Guha, Ananya S. The Shillong Poets and the Poetry Society. 19 June 2023. E-Pao. http://e-pao.net/epSubPageExtractor.asp?src=reviews.books.The_Shillong_Poets_And_The_Poetry_Society
__. “Violence to What End?: Literary Expressions in the North East.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 49, no. 7, 2014, pp. 1-5. PDF download.
Hasan, Anjum. Lunatic in My Head. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2007.
—. Neti, Neti: Not This, Not This. India Ink, 2016.
Hasan, Anjum and Sumana Roy. “The Lyrical Expression of the Ordinary Attracts Me: Anjum Hasan.” The Punch Magazine. 1 October 2015. https://thepunchmagazine.com/the-byword/interviews/the-lyrical-expression-of-the-ordinary-attracts-me-anjum-hasan.
Hazarika, Dhruba. “Creative Writing in Northeast India and the Northeast Writers’ Forum.” GUINEIS Journal, vol. VII & VIII, 2020-2021, pp. 292-299.
—. “A Plain Tale from the Hills.” The Sentinel. 1990.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1997.
hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. South End Press, 1984.
Kanungo, Nabanita. A Map of Ruins. Sahitya Akademi, 2014.
—. 159. Poetrywala, 2018.
Karlsson, Bengt G. Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s North East. Berghahn Books, 2011.
Kashyap, Adrika. Temsula Ao: Celebrating a Legacy of Literature and Advocacy. 8 March 2023. Feminism in India. https://feminisminindia.com/2023/03/08/temsula-ao-celebrating-a-legacy-of-literature-and-advocacy/
Kharmawphlang, Desmond L. Touchstone. J. Kharmawphlang, 1987.
Kire, Easterine. “For Justin-Pierre.” 1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
__. “The Mist.” 1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
McGregor, Deborah et. al. “Indigenous Environmental Justice and Sustainability.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, vol. 43, 2020, pp. 35-40. PDF download.
Melwani, Murli Das. Stories of a Salesman. Writers’ Workshop, 1967.
Nayar, Pramod K. Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2019.
—. “The Postcolonial Picturesque: The Poetry of Northeast India.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 5-21.
Ngangom, Robin S. Alternative Poetry of the Northeast. 13 November 2018. Sahapedia, https://www.sahapedia.org/alternative-poetry-of-the-northeast.
—. The Desire of Roots. 2nd ed., Red River, 2019.
—. Words and the Silence. Writers’ Workshop, 1987.
Nic Craith, Máiréad. Narratives of Place, Belonging and Language: An Intercultural Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Nongkynrih, Kynpham Sing. The Yearning of Seeds. Harper Collins, 2011.
Nongkynrih, Kynpham S. and Robin S. Ngangom. “Introduction.” Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India, edited by Kynpham S. Nongkynrih and Robin S. Ngangom, Penguin Books, 2009, pp. ix-xv.
North East Writers’ Forum (NEWF). About. January 2023. North East Writers’ Forum, https://www.newf.co.in/about-newf/.
Pariat, Janice. Boats on Land. Random House, 2012.
—. Everything the Light Touches. Harper Collins, 2022.
—. Seahorse: A Novel. Penguin Random House, 2018.
—. The Nine-Chambered Heart. Harper Collins, 2018.
Phukan, Mitra. The Collector’s Wife. Zubaan/Penguin Books, 2005.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1991.
Syiem, Esther. Oral Scriptings. Writers’ Workshop, 2005.
Tzüdir, Lanusanga. “Appropriating the Ao Past in a Christian Present.” Landscape, Culture, and Belonging edited by Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy L. K. Pachuau, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 265-293.
1989 Calendar of Shillong Poets and Artists. 16 April 2016. Raiot: Challenging the Consensus. https://raiot.in/1989-calendar-of-shillong-poets-artists/
[1] The Shillong Poetry Circle was disbanded in 1990 (Guha unpaginated).
[2] M. C. Gabriel was a poet associated with the publication cell of the North Eastern Hill University. His whereabouts are unknown (raiot.in).
[3] Due to the difficulty in accessing the archives, this portion of the essay, particularly the writings of women in The Assam Tribune and The Sentinel, will be developed as a separate essay.
[4] Compiled in Book of Songs: Collected Poems, published in 2013.
[5] A term originating from the African American community, signifying refers to the ability of language to mask literal meaning in favour of the fictional and metaphorical in order to upend power relations (See Gates 55-56). In using abusive language against her husband, Khatila signifies on the nationalist, gendered and class divisions present in Naga societies and creates this fictional moment. Thus, she secures a safe passage for her husband into the forest.
[6] Except for Boats on Land (2012), Janice Pariat’s remaining books—Seahorse: A Novel (2014, 2018), The Nine-Chambered Heart (2017) and Everything the Light Touches (2022) —have diasporic themes and convey diasporic sensibilities (See Pariat 67; 179; 3-7).
[7] In the essay “Home” (2018), Jahnavi Barua writes that her initial displacement from her home in Shillong enabled her to create many homes elsewhere such as Delhi, Guwahati, Manchester and Calcutta (Barua 100-101). Here, Anjum Hasan also expresses the same sentiment.
[8] A term coined by Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012), “postmemory” refers to presence and creation of memories relating to historical trauma in the works of second and third generation writers and artists (Hirsch 5).
[9] Here, Kanungo expresses Salman Rushdie’s view that home, for the exiled writer, can only be subjectively imagined through language (Rushdie 10).
[10] I understand precarity as the preponderance of neo-liberal technological interventions that render indigenous belonging redundant (See Nayar 137-149).
[11] Writers who have expressed disillusionment with subnationalist movements include Robin Sing Ngangom, Temsüla Ao and Monalisa Changkija, among others.
Cite this Essay
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In Arundhati Subramaniam’s words, Gieve Patel the poet and playwright has been a “quietly enduring presence in the country’s literary scene for five decades” (x). Something along the same lines may be said of Patel the painter and sculptor, whose parallel and complementary career has progressed consistently and enduringly, and whose reputation, in India and abroad, today equals if not exceeds his literary achievement.
Born in 1940 in a Parsi family from southern Gujarat, Patel studied at St. Xavier’s College and Grant Medical College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai). A physician by profession, he practiced in both rural and urban India, gaining the experience, the sensibility, and the insights that would influence and define much of his poetry and art work. Likewise, his family background—small landowners “of rural stock, very devout, orthodox” on his father’s side, and more rationalistic and westernised practising Zoroastrians on his mother’s (including a grandfather and an uncle who were doctors) (De Souza 88). This background was largely responsible for his inquiring attitude towards, and his empathy for, the vulnerable and disadvantaged: the “servants” and the indigenous Warlis working on the family estate, the crippled beggars populating the pavements of Bombay, the elderly, the sick and dying. After his retirement from medical practice in 2006, Patel focused primarily on his art, while poetry occupied him only occasionally, or was put to the service of a long-standing translation project involving the seventeenth-century Gujarati mystic Akho (Akha Bharat).
Like many other Bombay poets, Patel found in Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004) a mentor and a friend who helped him shape and publish his first poems, reviews, and translations in literary periodicals (Quest, Poetry India) and anthologies (Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, Asian P.E.N. Anthology, Writers Workshop Miscellany). Ezekiel also published Patel’s first collection, Poems (1966). This was followed by How Do You Withstand, Body (1976), issued by Clearing House, the poetry publishing collective which Patel had started the same year with fellow poets Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and Arun Kolatkar (who was also responsible for the stunning covers and the overall design of the books). The same year Clearing House published Jussawalla’s Missing Person and Mehrotra’s Nine Enclosures, while the Indian branch of Oxford University Press launched its New Poetry in India series, which went on to issue Mirrored, Mirroring (1991), Patel’s third and last collection of poetry. The three books were reprinted in 2017 as Collected Poems, which adds nineteen new poems and a few translations from Akho (but does not include previously uncollected poems, such as “Commerce,” originally published in the quarterly Mahfil in 1972). Patel’s three plays—Princes, Savaska, and Mister Behram—were first performed in Bombay in 1970, 1982 and 1987, respectively, and published in 2008. As for his many pieces on art and theatre, his book reviews, and his interviews—which appeared over the years in various magazines, journals, exhibition catalogs, and art books—have not been anthologised yet.
Compared with most of his Indian contemporaries, Patel’s poetic output is rather limited, which may or may not account for the lack of scholarly and critical attention of the kind that, for example, has been paid to the work of Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, or Agha Shahid Ali. This may have to do, at least in part, with Patel’s slow and ruminative creative process, which he explained in an interview with fellow Bombay poet Eunice de Souza.
Most often the first draft is just a few lines or a couple of pages. Very rarely do I get a completed poem at first go. The draft is put away and looked at occasionally every few months. This can go on for years. Something keeps hovering between the poem and me, an incomprehension. I keep working towards the point at which the images, the philosophical angle, a certain sequence of words or rhythm come together in a way I want them to. (De Souza 97)
In the same interview, Patel traces the origins of a central theme in his poetry to two concurrent events: the premature death of a cousin and his own puberty.
Knowledge of the death trauma and the awakening of sexuality coming at the same time made me realize that the body is an important vehicle for the understanding of our sojourn through this world. I had seen a very beloved person perishing at the same time that I became aware of my own physical sexual needs. The physical became for me a permanent obsessive focus. There is the body as sexual object, perishing object, subject to unbearable pain, and almost unbearable ecstasy, women’s bodies and the violence done to them, and so on. (De Souza 90)
In the poem that opens his first collection, “On Killing a Tree,” the body is only metaphorically human, but the humiliation and the devastation it suffers are distinctly anthropomorphic, and, like in subsequent poems depicting actual human bodies, hint at the larger bodies of community and society. In Patel’s poetry the anatomical, the physiological, and the pathological are always patently political. The third stanza, in particular, reveals the extent to which the execution of the poem (i.e., the carrying out of its plan) coincides with the execution of the tree (the carrying out of its death sentence):
The root is to be pulled out —
Out of the anchoring earth;
It is to be roped, tied,
And pulled out — snapped out
Or pulled out entirely,
Out from the earth-cave,
And the strength of the tree exposed,
The source, white and wet,
The most sensitive, hidden
For years inside the earth.
(Poems 1)
Repetition and detail (pulled out, snapped out, out of, out from) lead to the pivotal line, “And the strength of the tree exposed,” linking the effort (and the frustration) to its final, fatal results. More than the roping, the tying, the snapping and the pulling out of the root, it is the exposure of the strength of the tree, what was “hidden / For years inside the earth,” which represents the ultimate mortification and annihilation of the body, and finds equivalents in the autopsy (“It is startling to see how swiftly / A man may be sliced / From chin to prick” [“Post-Mortem” 21]) and Patel’s future “torture poems.”
Poems is a portrait of the artist as a young man exploring the borderlines of his empathy and sensibility. A landowner’s son and a medical student with an inquiring attraction to liminal, transactional spaces (the servants’ quarters on his family estate, a mendicant leper, a dying child, or a dissected body), he articulates his interest early on in a diptych consisting of a short question (“Grandfather”) followed by a longer answer (“Servants”). “But for what, tell me, do you look in them, / They’ve quite exhausted my wonder,” asks the grandfather to his young, city-educated grandson (“Grandfather” 2). The reply, instead of an explanation, provides a visual (almost voyeuristic) exploration of the point at issue. Prompted by a slant-rhyming closed couplet (“They come of peasant stock, / Truant from an insufficient plot” [“Servants” 3]), it describes the furtive experience of observing the servants as they “sit without thought” and smoke in the dark. When the “Lights are shut off after dinner,” the servants revert to a dim, uncommunicative universe of their own. Like their skin, “The dark around them / Is brown, and links body to body,” suggesting an archaic and mysterious complicity with nature and introducing the punchline comparison to cattle “resting in their stall”—a far cry from the romanticised and glorified depictions of low-caste or tribal subjects that are typical of much Indian poetry, both from before and after the independence. Later on in the book, Patel returns to the scene when, in “The Solution of Servants,” he interrogates his own marginal relation to them.
If I were suddenly to open
The door, switch on the lights,
And break in before them smiling,
There would be a scramble,
Separation, and then
An air of apology, not anger.
Yet on my leaving wouldn’t they
Continue as before?
(Poems 17)
In poems like “Nargol,” “Catholic Mother,” “Cord-Cutting,” “Old Man’s Death,” “Post-Mortem Report,” “In the Open,” and “Pavement,” Patel-the-Poet examines Patel-the-Medical-Student or the-Young-Doctor as he confronts powers “too careless / And sprawling to admit battle,” such as poverty, death, or the simple fragility and vulnerability of the human body. At the same time, by exploring and questioning his empathy with marginality in all its forms (including old age, in “Grandparents at Family Get-Together”), Patel explores his own difference as a member of a dwindling minority (the Parsis), which makes him an outsider in a country dominated by larger cultural and religious groups. This “ambiguous fate” is the subject of “Naryal Purnima,” the longest poem in the collection and one of Patel’s most ambitious attempts to articulate a political self. The pause between the first and second monsoon rains, which the first stanza describes (and the Naryal Purnima: the traditional offer of the Coconut [Nariyal] Full Moon [Purnima] ), acquires a symbolic meaning in the collapsed cameos of the second stanza, tracing the watershed between the time when the “country pushed root, prepared to fling / An arc of branches” that would eventually lead to self-affirmation and independence, and the “ambiguous implications” of the present, when “Only a faded haze remains / Over academic portraits in public buildings.” Sitting on the promenade of Marine Drive, his back “set / To the rich and the less rich as they come / Scrubbed and bathed, carrying a dirty little satchel / With a nut for the gods” the poet reflects on his allegiances “with the others – the driftwood / From the South, poised black and lean / Against a blinking sea – / Their minds profanely focused / On the wave-pitched gifts.” (Poems 24) The underlying question (“Do I sympathize merely with the underdog? / Is it one more halt in search for ‘identity’?”) leads to a much more sensitive topic, namely the preferential treatment received by the Parsis under British rule, which in turn reflects the complexity and the ambiguity at the heart of this “search for ‘identity’”—as an individual as well as a member of a minority and a citizen of the country as a whole.
Our interiors never could remain
Quite English. The local gods hidden in
Cupboards from rational Parsi eyes
Would suddenly turn up on the walls
Garlanded alongside the King and the Queen.
And the rulers who had such praise for our manners
Disappeared one day. So look instead for something else:
Even accept and belong.
(Poems 24)
But accepting and belonging to what, exactly? Confronted with this predicament, the poet finds temporary relief in turning “From these suppliants to the urchins,” and seeing in their “meagre flesh” and their hunger an “indisputable birth-mark / To recognize / Myself and the country by” As the urchins “strip to plunge,” and the “oily ones are startled [and] imperiously order them / Away” while “coconuts are tossed and touch water” (Poems 25), the poet performs a symbolic act of identification with the underdogs. This act allows the poet’s “present identities” to emerge as a more pluralistic and inclusive self, as the concern for the possibility that “Our prayers may go unheard” (Poems 26; emphasis added) clearly suggests. Similarly, in a previous poem, the humiliating defeat of giving in to the persistent requests of a mendicant leper marks the beginning of a possible political consciousness, as “Walking to the sea I carry / A village, a city, the country, / For the moment / On my back” (“Nargol,” Poems 9).
This scrutinising, self-inquiring attitude culminates in the single suggestive stanza of “Evening,” a subtly complex meditation on the promises and pitfalls of decolonisation.
Our English host was gracious
We were soon at ease;
Or almost:
The servants
were watching.
(Poems 28)
This perfectly balanced cinquain consists of two opening lines and two closing lines linked by a conjunction and a conjunctive adverb in the middle. The first two lines make a dual statement (one for each of the parties involved) and convey a relaxed convivial ambience. The authenticity of this (ideal) situation is then questioned by the conjunction-adverb combination suggesting a possible alternative, while the colon introduces the couplet that ends the poem on edge. The reader will notice the similarity, indeed the specular relationship, between the three clauses (“Our English host was gracious / We were soon at ease” and “The servants / were watching” [Poems 28]); but the significant difference between the end-stopping of the first two and the enjambment of the third calls into question the equilibrium—and the nature itself—of such a relationship. What is truly under scrutiny here is neither the silent watchfulness of the servants nor the graciousness of the English host, but the questionable ease and legitimacy—indeed the anxiety—of the Indian guests, as members of the indigenous ruling class confronted with its new roles and responsibilities in the independent country.
How Do You Withstand, Body, published ten years after Poems, has been significantly influenced by the period in which it was written, strife with political violence and armed conflict, . The communal riots in Gujarat (1969), a new military confrontation with Pakistan (1971), and a state of emergency (1975–1977) that result in widespread political repression and the curtailment of civil liberties threaten to dismantle India. A notion of metaphorical and metaphysical “bodiness” permeates the book, starting from the cover picture: a frontal view of a male torso cut out in the shape of a kite, nipples on the lookout and navel nosing downward. The medical student or the fledgling doctor who fathomed the dissecting room, or found a difference in the morgue, has become a seasoned practitioner, self-consciously proud of his achievement. “How soon I’ve acquired it all!” He declares at the beginning of “Public Hospital”; then goes on to describe how
Autocratic poise comes natural now:
Voice sharp, glance impatient,
A busy man’s look of harried preoccupation—
Not embarrassed to appear so.
My fingers deft to manoeuvre bodies,
Pull down clothing, strip the soul.
Give sorrow ear up to a point,
Then snub it shut.
Separate essential from suspect tales.
Weed out malingerers, accept
With patronage a steady stream
Of the underfed, pack flesh in them.
Then pack them away.
(How Do You Withstand 15)
The poem is less a self-mocking portrait than a depiction of professional arrogance based on power and its multiple and seamless applications. Whether it is used to heal, torment, or destroy, the ability to “manoeuvre bodies,” “pull down clothing” and “strip the soul” is a power that legitimizes and justifies itself. Control over the body (to expose the strength and strip the soul) is the faculty of the doctor, the torturer and the executioner, and in “Forensic Medicine Text Book” Patel illustrates all the possible ways in which such a textbook can be used as a torture manual, or a blueprint for all kinds of bodily violence. The anatomical, human body (the poet’s body “constituted of organs”) is also the metaphorical—but no less physical—urban body described in “Public Works” or “City Landscape;” or the battered, exploited, developed natural landscape; or even the Earth as a suffering whole (although Patel does not pursue this thematic approach, leaving it to more environmentally-conscious poets to pursue). Whichever the case, as a seat of reproductive power, the body is always a battlefield, thence Patel’s rhetorical question
How do you withstand, body,
Destruction repeatedly
Aimed at you? Minutes,
Seconds, like gun reports,
Tatoo you with holes.
(How Do You Withstand 12)
Or, if not a full-fledged battlefield, a conflict zone; and whether urban, natural, or planetary, always intrinsically feminine, “target spot / Showered / With kisses, knives” (“What Is It Between” 37). Rather than a boundary between incompatible territories defined by age, health, caste and other socially discriminating conditions, the body is now seen as a tragic territory in its own, perpetually contended, beleaguered and blasted by ferocious and merciless enemies. A “priceless rag soaked in desires,” torn between the blinding opposites of carnality and carnage, and constantly subject to the ravages of time and space, as “Your area of five / By one is not / Room enough for / The fists, the blows” and “All instruments itch / To make a hedgehog / Of your hide” (“How Do You Withstand, Body” 12). The difference is not between the morgue and the dissection hall anymore, but rather between dissection and dismemberment, the forensic pathologist’s scalpel and the savage brutality of the eye-gouging penknife, the tongue-chopping tongs, and the infinite other tools and techniques listed in the “Forensic Medicine” poem mentioned above.
Mirroring the violence against the human body is the constraint man puts upon nature, as represented in two juxtaposed urban landscapes, “Public Works” facing “How Do You Withstand, Body” and “City Landscape” facing “The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel.” In the former case, body-scape and city-scape are linked by such words as “destruction” and “demolition,” “fists” and “blows,” “stab wounds” while all instruments itching to drill the skin are matched by “builders slicing the ocean / Down to blue ribbons”, which in turn, in “The Ambiguous Fate”, find a correspondence in the “milk-bibing, grass-guzzing hypocrite / Who pulled off my mother’s voluminous / Robes and sliced away at her dugs.” (“The Ambiguous Fate of Gieve Patel” 26). Likewise, the human body as a “poor slut” reduced to “Dumb, discoloured, / Battered patches; meat-mouths / For monster’s kisses” finds a parallel in the overturned city bus described as a “wrecked, mangled monster” and also in the child mangled “out of my arms” by a circumcised butcher in “The Ambiguous Fate.” (26) Yet, while both “Public Works” and “City Landscape” begin with an image of urban constraint and imprisonment (“Day after day the sea enchained / Behind granite buildings”, or seen “through / slats of buildings,” “City Landscape” 27), they significantly evolve in different directions. With the “slicing [of] the ocean / Down to blue ribbons,” the former poem takes a somewhat Freudian plunge into childhood territory, where a simple game (“All walls / Against Water”) may turn into a nightmarish “sewage trickle between my legs” and trigger a vision of “the island-city sinking” and “taps in each little household / Bursting in sympathy with the revolt” (“Public Works” 13). Such a revolt is temporarily contained by public works (“Now taming / is here”), but eventually leads to a grown-up version of the previous fantasy, with scenes of urban chaos culminating in the carnage of an overturned bus. Similarly, “City Landscape” portrays a landscape of urban decay, where human debris changes, under the feet of the strolling poet, from “Muck, rags, dogs, / Women bathing squealing / Children in sewer water, / Unexpected chicken” to more visionary “miles of dusty yellow / Gravel straight / From the centre of some planet / Sucked dry by the sun, / And as radio-active as you wish” (“City Landscape” 27). Yet
The sea daily changes
From blue to green, to gray,
And breezes vaguely
Pull at the season. The sea holds
Netfuls of possibility,
Silver fish shining
Under a thin skin of water.
(“City Landscape” 27)
Whereas in the former poem the view of the captive sea led to sadistic childhood fantasies of destruction and disarray, the latter ends with a paean to the healing powers of imagination
… My sight
Like an angler’s rod,
Springs across dust and buildings
To claim a few fish.
They tickle the inside of my chest
As I carry them across the city
Dancing on a scooter.
(“City Landscape” 27)
The image of the poet’s sight springing like an angler’s rod “across dust and buildings / To claim a few fish,” suggests, like a previous poem in the same collection (“The Sight Hires a Boat It Sees”), a projective process that finds a more complex and sophisticated expression in the cinematic techniques deployed in Mirrored, Mirroring. In “Hill Station”, the narrator watches a group of monkeys lice-picking and copulating outside his hotel window. His “vision” is both encumbered and enhanced by the meshed window screens, although his attention is really focused on things he “cannot see,” meaning the couple next door, “hideously / Silent through the flimsy / Hotel partition” (“Hill Station” 94). Having met them earlier, and heard their obnoxious, petty bourgeois complaints about the place (the last straw being “The slim, mysterious tribals you see everywhere / They degrade by talk of ‘servant classes’”), he has developed a visceral aversion that now, confronted by their challengingly suggestive silence, conjures images of metaphysical disgust and sheer physical violence (“Hill Station” 95). Yet, instead of breaking down their door, he simply shrugs and enters his own room, there to notice “the monkeys … have hardly stopped,” and to encounter the “quiet, happy glance” of his wife snugly reading comics in bed. This encompassing vision of “[t]he monkeys, us, / And the lurid couple” brings about an epiphanic acquiescence in which “[e]ach ecstatic thrust is / Freely contaminate [sic] with an appetite for lice, / Comics, and many more such distractions.” (“Hill Station” 95)
Published fifteen years after How Do You Withstand, Body, the collection of poems titled Mirrored, Mirroring (1991) marks a passage to the age of retrospection and reconciliation, partly inspired by Patel’s talks and epistolary exchange with the mystic Madhava Ashish (born Alexander Phipps), head of the Mirtola Ashram in the northern state of Uttarakhand. The first poem is a candid statement, ingeniously parodic and tongue-in-cheek, whose profound implications set the tone for the rest of the book.
In the beginning
it is difficult
even to say,
‘God’,
one is so out of practice.
And embarrassed.
Like lisping in public
about candy.
At fifty!
(“The Difficulty” 79)
Once this admission is made, the difficulty becomes “Simple” in the next poem, which consists of a bold, almost arrogant, confession of faith: “I shall not / be humble before God. // I half suspect / He wouldn’t wish me to be so” (80) This is followed by a clear and very simple (although far from simplistic) explanation of what turned the poet away from God (not “arrogance or / excessive / self-regard,” but the refusal of “having my nose ground / into the dirt”) and what brought him back to Him (“I have been given / cleaner air to breathe // and may look up / to see what’s around” [80]). This explanation marks a point of departure from Patel’s previous thematic concerns, and the new direction is indicated by a change in position as well as by a sensory progress: from prostrate submission (with the “nose ground / into the dirt”) and from smell and taste (the “older” and more “primitive” of the five senses), to stand-up sight and seeing (I “may look up / to see what’s around”) as the expression of a more mature and independent form of spiritual quest (80). What makes this progress particularly interesting—and relevant to the collection as a whole—is the role breathing plays in it. The poet may now “look up / to see what’s around” because he has been “given / cleaner air to breathe” (i.e., he has been purified). The nose, from vulgar organ of smell, “ground into the dirt,” has been upgraded, indeed elevated to a complex and sophisticated process of spiritual development, in which breathing represents a link between man and God (“Simple” 80). While anatomy and physiology may be the same, smell represents the sensual stage of breathing, the Purgatory which one may traverse and overcome in order to attain the higher spheres of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment.
References to smell and breathing (as well as to elevation, death and departure) recur throughout the book, adding a physical dimension to its meandering and inquisitive spiritual journey. In “From Bombay Central” (81-82), a poem whose “visual, auditory and olfactory impact” has been noted by railway historian Ian J. Kerr (317), the “odour of human manure” that pervades the railway station, but “does not offend,” anticipates the more substantial “eternal / station odour[s]” permeating the second stanza. “Hitting the nostrils as one singular / Invariable atmospheric thing,” this mixture of odours acts like a “divine cushion,” buffering the poet-passenger as he sinks in his “hard wooden / Third-class seat,” there to begin a “meditation / On the nature of truth and beauty.” This liminal experience finds an equivalent and ultimate complement in the desire, when “Time’s Up” (119), to have “my / soul / carried away … by transport // none other / than / Indian Railways: a / third-class carriage / with open windows / on a day / not / too crowded.” The same window of a train “Speeding” (109) offers the opportunity to “Best enjoy Nature from a distance … So each detail is spared you, / And elation results” (109). Such (or similar) is the “fate of God / … to see His universe so, / In overview” and to “find it good” (109). But good is neither good nor godly enough for God, thence “the temptation to rain Himself down, disguised / As the hundred godlings of mythology, down / From a pristine vision of the Creation, / Vulgarly to mingle with us, to become / Embroiled in detail” (109). The telling, graphic sequence of examples simultaneously links back, to the many previous examples of abuse, assault and violation, and looks forward, in the form of a theological meditation on the truth and tragedy of divine descent, of “God / Rooting into the intoxication of His Dump” (109). What in How Do You Withstand, Body marked the progress from a pathological to a political view of life, Mirrored, Mirroring turns the political into a spiritual, if not a theological, exploration of God’s experience of his own creation.
Past excursions in the dissection hall and the torture chamber provide the reformed anatomist with the material and the experience to argue that
It makes sense not
to have the body
seamless,
hermetically sealed, a
non-orificial
box of incorruptibles.
Better shot through and through!
Interpenetrated
–with the world.
(“It Makes” 107)
A few pages later, Patel uses the same phrasal verb to describe the intimate, violent, and overpowering experience of a (possible) divine revelation: “God or / something like that / shot / through each part of you” (“God or” 117). Both the language and the dubitative element come from the bhakti tradition, while the invasive approach and bodily interpenetration draw upon the anatomical knowledge and experience of doctors (“Sticking their fingers up / Everywhere”) and torturers. For a comparison with other (especially Western) forms of religious devotion, we must turn to “A Variation on St. Teresa” (111), which describes a subjective condition rather than a sudden occurrence:
Whenever You withdraw
only a little way from me I
immediately
fall to the ground.
I wait upon
the strings You hold.
(…)
My limbs
at best may be infused
by an outer force; and so
inconsolably
I await Your storms, etc.
True to its title, Mirrored, Mirroring spreads a net of specular relationships and references, both internal and to poems in the two previous books. Typical Patelian themes, motifs, and “permanent obsessive foci” are reworked, updated, alluded to, or sublimated into more spiritual or philosophical concerns, as the poet is trying to make sense of the possibility and plausibility of God in this world, while simultaneously visualizing his own departure from it.
When he published Mirrored, Mirroring, Patel was fifty-one. Another twenty-six years passed before he added nineteen “new poems” to a collected edition that brings the total to one hundred and five. It is unlikely that more poetry will appear in the form of a posthumous book; or that, if such a book materialized, it would expand or enrich a canon that, while quantitatively modest, represents one of the peaks of Indian poetry in English. But it is not unreasonable to expect, or hope for, a collection of Patel’s translations (of medieval and modern Gujarati poetry), criticism, and prose, to complement and round off his remarkable achievement as a poet.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
Poems. Bombay: Nissim Ezekiel, 1966.
How Do You Withstand, Body. Bombay: Clearing House, 1976.
Mirrored, Mirroring. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Collected Poems. With an introduction by Arundhati Subramaniam. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.
Plays
Mister Behram and Other Plays. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2008.
Edited volumes
Poetry with Young People. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007. A collection of poems written by students of the Rishi Valley School, in Andhra Pradesh, where Patel taught an annual poetry workshop for many years.
Prose
“The National School of Drama.” Quest 54,July/September 1967, pp. 63-66.
“Contemporary Indian Painting.” Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4,Fall 1989, pp. 170-205.
“To Pick Up a Brush.” Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1985, pp. 9-16.
Secondary sources
De Souza, Eunice. Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kerr, Ian J. “Representation and Representations of the Railways of Colonial and Post-Colonial South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies, vol.37, no. 2,May 2003, pp. 287-326.
Subramaniam, Arundhati. “Introduction.” Gieve Patel, Collected Poems. Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2017.
Cite this Essay
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 16th 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 (10th century CE) and Tamil Alvar poetry (6th to 9th centuries CE), as well as of the Tamil classical Sangam poetry (3rd century BCE to 3rd 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
