Srinivas Rayaprol was one of the first Indian writers to study abroad after the Independence, but he went to America instead of England. This (and the fact that he landed in California rather than New England, or other parts of the country) gave him the unique advantage of an early, firsthand exposure to American modernism and the San Francisco Renaissance, two movements that would have a significant influence on postcolonial poetry in India.
Born R.S. Marthandam in Secunderabad (Hyderabad), the son of the prominent poet and academic Rayaprolu Subbarao, a pioneer of the Romantic movement in Telugu poetry, Rayaprol studied at Nizam College in his hometown and Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi. There, in the stately palace which the French scholar and musicologist Alain Daniélou and his friend, the Swiss photographer Raymond Burnier, rented from the Maharaja of Rewa, he had a unique opportunity to meet and mingle with their guests, most of them western intellectuals and artists such as the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, a close friend of W.H. Auden and a member of the group that also included Christoper Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis (all authors Rayaprol read around this time). By the time he went on to study engineering at Stanford University, his literary interests had been expanded as well as sharpened by this singular exposure to Anglo-European modernism. At Stanford, Rayaprol started writing poetry and attended a course taught by the influential poet and critic Yvor Winters, a rigid formalist and a scholar of Renaissance poetry. Winters did not approve of Rayaprol’s poetic efforts (no more than Rayaprol agreed with Winters’ pedagogical approach), but he introduced him to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and this eventually led to a decade-long epistolary relationship between the young poet-engineer from southern India and the aging poet-pediatrician from New Jersey—the kind of warm mentoring that one needed and the other was able and willing to offer. In the spring of 1950, after earning a master’s degree in Civil Engineering, Rayaprol moved to Denver, Colorado, where he worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation until his return to India one year later, a reluctant decision that nonetheless proved to be final.
Back in Hyderabad, he pursued a professional career in the public sector, working on projects that would keep him away from home for months at a time. Meanwhile he married and started a family, slowly settling in the kind of life that had concerned him as a young man and would haunt him as an adult, the complicated and contradictory existence of “an engineer by profession and a poet by passion”. While his profession often meant “living in God-forsaken holes building dams, powerhouses and the like”, as he would put it in a letter to Poetry editor Karl Shapiro, his passion initially manifested itself in the literary quarterly East and West, which Rayaprol launched in 1956 and managed to keep alive, both editorially and financially, for five issues published over three years. Although short-lived, East and West featured work by, among others, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Buddhadeva Bose, G.V. Desani, James Purdy, Henry Miller, and Willian Carlos Williams, and represents a significant contribution to the literary history of postcolonial anglophone India. Rayaprol’s involvement in this initiative may explain the delay in the publication of his own poetry. His first collection, Bones and Distances, came out only in 1968, almost two decades after most poems were written in America. This was followed by the much shorter and gloomier Married Love & Other Poems (1972), a wistful, mournful outlook on midlife, and eventually by Selected Poems (1995), which includes the first two collections plus a selection of “later poems,” much of them actually dating from decades before. Starting in the mid-1950s, and increasingly in later years, Rayaprol turned his attention to pre- and post-colonial Telugu literature, of which he translated a selection of poems and short stories that were collected and published after his death.
America provided Rayaprol with the geographical and cultural distance necessary to confront his demons (Brahmin background, paternal authority, sexual identity), and to articulate in poetry (his father’s literary medium) and in English (his own chosen literary language) what would have been less compelling—and less challenging—to say in prose and in Telugu (his mother tongue), and possibly more difficult to state in India, and in Hyderabad, at the time. The use of the English language (or, more precisely, the American idiom), combined with his creative urgency, led him naturally, indeed inevitably, to choose free verse over regular meter, and Williams over Winters as role model and mentor. The result was a peculiar, sharp-edged, syncopated and knotty poetic style, unconstrained by metrical features but also free from obvious or predictable influences (not only Williams, but also Pound or Stevens, two other early modernists Rayaprol profoundly admired). Equally unconcerned with prosodic effects and formal devices (except perhaps bebop phraseology and improvisation), he endeavored to forge his own distinctive poetic voice and identity in a language that, in newly independent India, was still widely seen as “colonial” and “foreign” (despite the fact that it had been used as a literary medium for over a century). The same caustic foreignness applied to Rayaprol himself, the poetic alter ego of R.S. Marthandam the government engineer, who eventually found himself to be a stranger in India as much as he had been in America. Leery of native subjects (“I have been asked about the Indianness of my poems. And I am puzzled and do not know what to say,” as he put it in a footnote to Selected Poems), suspicious of national ideals and ideas of progress, and at odds with “conventional” feelings, whether filial, familial or romantic, he essentially wrote under the spell of one overarching theme, which found expression in the candid, open-ended statement “Love is all, but”—almost too deceptively simple as a creative concept, except for that connective key word, but, and its ambiguous potential. Quantitatively speaking, the word love, in various nominal, verbal or adjectival forms (lover, loved, beloved, unlovely, etc.), appears no less than sixty-six times (titles and footnotes excluded) in the seventy-six poems that make up Rayaprol’s published output. It opens his debut collection as a rallying call—“Go love!”—and then it is repeated six more times, of which three in the closing tercet: “Go love, do not let / go love, for love is all / for a dog in the rain”. Yet in the following “Four Love Poems,” where the word appears five times, the hyperbolic and straightforward “love is all” is drastically reduced, as well as complicated, by the conditional “Love is all / But only / In the particular moment // Of surrender or deceit, etc.” This is the beginning of a long and tortuous poetic itinerary, in which the L word keeps cropping up, sometimes programmatically, other times unexpectedly, but always probing, questioning, unsettling and haunting the poem as well as the poet (let alone the reader), and where it is often juxtaposed or combined with other charged words—anger, blindness, selfishness, impotence, anger, pity, hatred, ennui, death. Tormented by “a kind of idée fixe” (i.e., that love should be more than just a battle between the flesh and the spirit), Rayaprol strove to overcome this dualism by talking about love from inside as well as from outside the traditional, received, codified and institutionalized ideas of “love”. In his incursions, diversions and insights, love is alternately blind and selfish, altruistic and indifferent, exhilarating and sad but always, to some extent, distressing, deceptive and open-ended. It is a “private pain … / Living under the surface like an unhealed wound” (“Sometimes”), or “an infliction / We impose on ourselves to release certain / Vague desires” (“Crabs in the Seine”), and more prosaically it “dies when desire ends” (“Not Yet the End”). If suppressed or denied, it may feed hatred (“The Hatred in My Heart’’); yet it “is such a funny thing [that] when you / feel it most you least can tell”. This light-hearted, Cole-Porterish couplet falls towards the end of “I Am All That I Love”, a sort of poetic manifesto in which Rayaprol addresses the four individuals who, we are to believe, represents the main recipients of his love, that is, his mentor Williams, his close, late friend Christopher Sripada, his father (the “absent one”), and his mother, whom he has almost forgotten but to whom he promises he shall give himself “without subtraction”. The same cavalier attitude marks the opening (“I am all that I love / if for an instant’s being”) and the closing (“I am all that I am that I love, / Well, yes, of course…”) of the poem, with the difference that, through a process of confrontation and assimilation, the simple statement “I am all that I love” becomes the more complex and ambiguous “I am all that I am that I love”.
This convoluted ambivalence displays an estrangement from one’s self that affects all other relationships. “What do I know of you / What do I know of myself that I can say?” asks Rayaprol in “Crabs in the Seine”, a question that foreshadows the “moment / out of space … within and without / the self” evoked in “Bones and Distances”. This simultaneous and solipsistic dual gaze ultimately defi(n)es the poet’s view of the world, shaping his “landscapes of the heart” (as Rayaprol characterized the Indiannes—or lack thereof—of his poems in the footnote mentioned above). These are real Indian landscapes, although filtered through the lens of a very personal, indeed intimate, situation, conflict or trauma. In “Nagarjunakonda”, a visit to an archeological site that was partially submerged by the construction of a dam (a civil engineering triumph with problematic consequences for the environment) sets the stage for a bitter assessment of a frayed father-son relationship. A comparison between “Poem” and its original draft (titled “Lines for a Mother” and enclosed with a June 10, 1950 letter to Williams) shows how a simple, individual portrait of “a mother” is raised to represent an entire social condition with the addition of a few indicative elements: “In India / Women // Have a way / Of growing old // My mother / For instance // Sat on the floor / A hundred years, etc.” This is the most accomplished of a few poems Rayaprol devotes to his mother, which tend to be more explicit and emotionally charged than other, enigmatic portraits of women, such as “The Widow in Washington Square,” “For a Nun in a Waiting Room” and “Valdstejnska Hospada, Praha” (but also the ekphrastic “Blue Woman”, after a painting by Jamini Roy). A very different portrait is the one Rayaprol presents of himself in “Godhuli Time”, using a familiar trope to articulate a sense of estrangement from a human and cultural landscape that Indian poets (such as Rayaprol’s fellow Hyderabadi Sarojini Naidu) and artists have celebrated as quintessentially “Indian”. The difference between the opening of Naidu’s “June Sunset” (“Here shall my heart find its haven of calm”) and the closing of Rayaprol’s “Godhuli Time” (“While my thoughts travel towards / The home that I have never had”) shows the distance that Indian poetry in English has traveled from the pictorial Orientalism of the early twentieth century to the cinematic modernism of post-independence discontent and alienation.
Rayaprol’s publications in little magazines throughout the 1950s, culminating with two appearances in Poetry (Chicago) and the inclusion in an “Indian” supplement of the Atlantic Monthly, paved the way for his first two book collections, to be followed by a third one almost a quarter of a century later. None of this, however, seems to have helped him establish his reputation as a poet, and by the time the literary scholar Bruce King met him in the early 1980s, while researching his book on Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987), Rayaprol had virtually disappeared from the literary scene, a situation that would continue until a decade after his death.
Dom Moraes may have had a point when, reviewing Selected Poems in May 1996, commented upon the fact that “Indian poetry in English has always been produced in the large cities: Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Madras. Had Rayaprol lived in one of these, it is possible that he would have found encouragement and incentive to continue as he began. That he failed to do so is attributable to the circumstances in which he lived”. These circumstances may be considered to include Rayaprol’s career in civil engineering, which was professionally rewarding but prevented him from participating in traditional and institutional networks such as publishing and academia. Another factor may be Rayaprol’s lifelong sense of belonging to a wider cultural horizon, centered somewhere between Paris and New York, and his consequent efforts to maintain meaningful contacts from his American past (especially Williams, James Laughlin, and Poetry magazine), which ultimately did not pay off (or not in the way or to the extent expected). Only in 2005, with his inclusion in a selection edited by Jeet Thayil for the international literary annual Fulcrum, Rayaprol started to appear in major anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry in English, such as 60 Indian Poets and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008), both based on the Fulcrum selection; Both Sides of the Sky: An Anthology of Post-Independence Indian Poetry in English, edited by Eunice De Souza (2002), and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry, edited by De Souza and Melanie Silgardo (2012). Also in 2008, the establishment of the Srinivas Rayaprol Literary Trust, which administers the annual Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize in conjunction with the University of Hyderabad’s Department of English, has made possible the publication of some of Rayaprol’s translations from the Telugu (2016), his correspondence with William Carlos Williams (2018), and the British and Indian editions of his selected poems and prose (2020 and 2022, respectively). Leaving canonical considerations aside, this turn of the tide has added a significant figure to the landscape of post-independence Indian poetry, and one that helps better understand its international connections.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bones and Distances. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968.
Married Love & Other Poems. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1972.
Selected Poems. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1995.
Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories. Translated by Srinivas Rayaprol. Edited by Alladi Uma and M. Sridhar. Margao, Goa: Under the Peepal Tree, 2016.
Angular Desire: Selected Poems and Prose. Edited by Graziano Krätli and Vidyan Ravinthiran Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2020.
Random Harvest: Selected Poems and Prose. Edited by Graziano Krätli. New Delhi: Copper Coin, 2022.
Krätli, Graziano, ed. Why Should I Write a Poem Now: The Letters of Srinivas Rayaprol and William Carlos Williams, 1949-1958. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018.
Krätli, Graziano. “‘You in the Face and the Intimacy of the World’: William Carlos Williams’ Indo-European Connection.” William Carlos Williams Review 37, no 1 (2020): 17-33.