UNIT 3 A. K.
RAMANUJAN
Structure
3.1 Aims and Objectives
3.2 Introductionp
3.3 A.K. Ramanujan
3.4 ‘Looking for a Cousin on a Swing’
3.4.1 Interpretation
3.4.2 Imagery
3.4.3 Versification
3.5 ‘A River’
3.5.1 Interpretation
3.5.2 Style
3.5.3 Imagery
3.6 Let Us Sum Up
3.7 Answers to Check Your Progress
3.1 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
This unit is the third one of this Block on poetry. The poet that we will take
up for detailed discussion in this Unit is A.K. Ramanujan.
In this Unit we will be discussing two poems by A.K. Ramanujan. We will
also teach you to appreciate the development of imagery in the poems, and
establish the links between their different parts.
By the end of this unit you should be able to understand the poems taught
in this Unit and also have a fair understanding of A.K. Ramanujan as a poet.
You should also be able to read his poems with an understanding of their use
of language, imagery and form.
3.2 INTRODUCTION
In the previous three units you studied an assortment of poems by two
Indian poets writing in English i.e. Sarojini Naidu, and Nissim Ezekiel. You
have also read a brief outline of Indian Writing in English.
In this unit we will take up A.K. Ramanujan and his two poems‘Looking
for a Cousin on a Swing’ and ‘A River’.
Having been a Professor of Linguistics, Ramanujan remained scrupulous
about the fine and subtle use of language and expressions. He successfully
forged an oblique, elliptical style of his own. In his creative use of the
English language, he has been able to extend its resources and add a peculiar
pungency to it by Indianising it at places.
The two poems that we have chosen for detailed analysis are:
1) “Looking for a Cousin on a Swing”
2) “A River”
However, before taking up the poems, let us briefly take a look at Ramanujan’s
biography. 27
Poetry
3.3 A.K. RAMANUJAN
Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (16 March 1929 – 13 July 1993) also
known as A. K. Ramanujan was a poet and scholar of Indian literature who
wrote in both English and Kannada. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, a
philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright. His academic research ranged
across five languages: English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit. He
published works on both classical and modern variants of literature and
argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.
Ramanujan was born into an Iyengar Brahmin family in Mysore City on 16
March 1929. His father, Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami, a professor of
Mathematics at Mysore University and an astronomer, had a study crammed,
with books in English, Kannada and Sanskrit. The house was alive with
ideas. On summer nights, the children gathered on the third floor terrace
while their father pointed out and explained the constellations. Sometimes
at dinner, the children listened intently as their father translated for their
mother the stories of Shakespeare and other Western classics into Tamil.
Ramanujan’s mother was an orthodox Brahmin woman of her time, limited
by custom in the scope of her movement and control. In this way she was
a typical housewife. Though she was no intellectual practitioner, she was
neither typical nor limited in her learning and imagination. She was widely
read in Tamil and Kannada, and comfortable in the world of ideas. By the
time his father died, when Ramanujan was only twenty, the older man had
already helped shape his son’s devotion to an intellectual life.
Ramanujan was educated at Marimallapp’s High School and Maharaja College
of Mysore. He was a fellow of Deccan College, Pune in 1958-59 and Fulbright
Scholar at Indiana University in 1959-62. He was educated in English at the
Mysore University and received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana
University.
Having been a lecturer in English at Quilon and Belgaum; he later taught at
the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda for about eight years. In 1962,
he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, where he was
affiliated throughout his career, teaching in several departments. However,
he taught at other US universities at times, including Harvard University,
University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of California at
Berkeley, and Carleton College. At the University of Chicago, Ramanujan
was instrumental in shaping the South Asian Studies program. He worked
in the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Linguistics,
and with the Committee on Social Thought.
In 1976, the government of India awarded him the honorific title Padma
[Link] an Indo-American writer Ramanujan had the experience of the native
milieu as well as of the foreign milieu. His poems like the “Conventions of
Despair” reflected his views on the cultures and conventions of the east and
the west.
A.K. Ramanujan died in Chicago, on July 13, 1993 as result of adverse
reaction to anesthesia during preparation for surgery.
While English is the language of his creative works, Tamil and Kannada are
the mediums of his translation. He has two volumes of verse: The Striders
28 (1966) and Relations: Poems (1971). The former immediately establishes
Ramanujan as a poet of striking imagery and perfect language. His poetic A. K. Ramanujan
voice tends to be vigorous and his sensibility remains essentially modern.
His poetry shows a marked sophistication born of an urban surrounding.
After having looked into Ramanujan’s biography it is pertinent to take stock
of two of his best poems in order to see the poet at practice. The selection
of these poems here does not indicate in any way that Ramanujan’s other
poems are not worthy of attention; on the contrary this merely indicates that
these selected ones are definitely his gems.
The two poems chosen for detailed analysis are:
1. ‘Looking for a Cousin on a Swing’
2. ‘A River’
Check Your Progress 1
1) Give a biographical sketch of A.K. Ramanujan.
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3.4 ‘LOOKING FOR A COUSIN ON A SWING’
Let us first read the poem “Looking for a Cousin on a Swing”
Looking for a Cousin on a Swing
When she was four or five
She sat on a village swing
And her cousin, six or seven,
Sat himself against her;
With every lunge of the swing
She felt him
In the lunging pits
Of her feeling;
And afterwards
We climbed a tree, she said,
Not very tall, but full of leaves
Like those of a fig tree,
And we were very innocent
about it.
Now she looks for the swing
In cities with fifteen suburbs
And tries to be innocent
About it
Not only on the crotch of a tree
That looked as if it would burst
29
Under every leaf
Poetry Into a brood of scarlet figs
If someone suddenly sneezed.
Glossary
lunge : swinging movement
pits : deep feeling that one sometimes experiences in the area around
the stomach
fig : soft sweet fruit
suburbs : area of a town or city which is not close to the centre
crotch : the part of the body between the top of the legs
brood : group
scarlet : red
3.4.1 Interpretation
“Looking for a Cousin on a Swing” is a short piece of barely 23 lines. It is
notable for its simple diction and unadorned style. The poem, is an irregular
metre. There are two characters in this poem, a boy and his female cousin.
And there is the narrator, who is most probably the boy himself. As in many
memory poems, there is a “then” and “now”, a “before” and “after” in this
poem as well. A scene is described when the boy is six or seven and his
cousin four or five. They are on a village swing, sitting against or facing
each other, but this is probably “innocent” as the poet says. It tells us about
the peculiar sensation felt by the premature girl and the little older boy. After
this sensation, they climb a tree which is not very tall, and which is ‘full of
leaves’. They were innocent about all that they did on the tree. The poet
remembers events from his past in India, while located abroad. He tries to
reconstruct these events, to make sense of them, to rearrange them in such
a manner as to help consolidate his present identity. But, in the process, his
attitude to his past is revealed to be neither sentimental nor nostalgic, but
coolly aloof and ironic. The impact of the poem comes from what’s happened
to the cousin, the little girl who was “innocent” about feeling her cousin or
climbing up a tree. The poet says that the girl, now a grown woman is still
looking for that experience, but its innocence is all gone. There is an air of
disapproval in the poet’s tone as he describes her forays in “cities with
fifteen suburbs” and the clearly ironic repetition of “innocent” in line
seventeen. Very wittily, the poet tells us that the same girl now having grown
into a mature woman lives in a city and goes on hunting for companions of
her lust. She is ever ready to ‘give’ herself to anyone but for asking if
someone suddenly sneezed”. The following stanza is interesting enough to
deserve comment;
Now she looks for the swing
In cities with fifteen suburbs
And tries to be innocent
About it
Evidently the girl is taken to task for trying to perpetrate her initial crime.
The tone become suddenly ironical here, especially in the extract ‘and tries
to be innocent/about it’.
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The poem is clearly on the theme of love. But nowhere is it stated explicitly. A. K. Ramanujan
It has the charm of understatement—‘we climbed a tree’, and implicitly ‘did
the rest’ (which is missing). The poem which starts on a casual note drifts
towards the laming imagery of passion at the end. The turbulence of passion
in the now grown up woman is carried home through the choicest use of
phrases—‘swing’, ‘crotch’, ‘burst’, ‘scarlet figs’ and ‘suddenly sneezed’.
3.4.2 Imagery
The imagery for which Ramanujan is well known is conspicuous in the
lines, “Not only on the crotch”. It evokes the images of a terribly unforgettable
past, of the nasty associations of childhood. It was on the ‘crotch of a tree’
that the children had met to feed their sensation in innocent days. The
passion raging hard within the woman is beautifully translated into words in
the subsequent lines. The last lines of the poem are strongly suggestive and
evocative. The term sneezing is full of implications. On the one hand, it
indicates the consummation of passion on the tree; on the other, it hints at
one of the popular love-pranks in the street. Ramanujan’s verse displays the
quality of indirection and suggestiveness which goes with an unusual aesthetic
appeal. The lines above are rich in erotic suggestiveness.
3.4.3 Versification
Ramanujan is a deliberate writer who takes his tools into account before
letting them appear on his page for the reader. He chooses monosyllabic
words for the sake of effect and concentration. He employs rhyme and
rhythm to enhance the charm of his art. There is no superfluous word or
phrase in his poems. Terseness is the hallmark of his verse. Subtlety is his
touchstone and wit and irony makes his poetry lively and delightful.
The poem is delightfully readable for its lucidity of language and for its
employment of literary devices shorn of embellishments. The lines and stanzas
vary in length and thereby keep monotony and roughness at bay. A stanza
may be of ten lines or of only one. Clearly, this sort of variation has been
a favourite device with ‘new’ poets, and Ramanujan falls in their line. He
opts for free verse in place of regular rhymes, and for stress-rhythm in place
of traditional syllabic rhythm. This poem is no exception to his general
practice. Very deftly, he shifts the scene in this poem from a ‘village’ to
‘cities’ where one has an immense scope of sin and corruption. The swift
change of years is also skillfully arranged in it. The girl has now matured
in age. As a full-blooded woman, she is out to seek illicit love in cities.
Adulthood has come for her not without its repercussions. Seen in this light,
the poem becomes kaleidoscopic, and the total effect created by it is almost
astonishing.
3.5 ‘A RIVER’
The second poem which we shall now take up for detailed discussion is “A
River”. Let us first read the poem:
A River
In Maduria,
City of temple and poets 31
Who sang of cities and temples:
Poetry Every summer
A river dries to a trickle
In the sand,
Baring the sand-ribs,
Straw and women’s hair
Clogging the Watergates
At the rusty bars
Under the bridges with patches
Of repair all over them,
The wet stones glistening like sleepy
Crocodiles, the dry ones
Shaven water-buffalos lounging in the sun.
The poets sang only of the floods.
He was there for a day
When they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
Of the inches rising,
Of the precise number of cobbled steps
Run over by the water, rising
On the bathing places,
And the way it carried off three village houses,
One pregnant woman
And a couple of cows
Named Gopi and Brinda, as usual.
The new poets still quoted
The old poets, but no one spoke
In verse
Of the pregnant woman
Drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
Kicking at blank walls
Even before birth.
He said:
The river has water enough
To be poetic
About only once a year
And then
It carries away
In the first half-hour
Three village houses,
32 A couple of cows
Named Gopi and Brinda A. K. Ramanujan
And one pregnant woman
Expecting identical twins
With no moles on their bodies,
With different-coloured diapers
To tell them apart.
Glossary
trickle : flowing slowly in very small amounts
baring : exposing/laying bare
clogging : blocking
lounging : relaxing
precise : exact
cobbled : made of cobblestones which are stones used for making roads
etc.
moles : dark spot on the skin
diapers : piece of soft towel worn by babies around their middle.
3.5.1 Interpretation
This is a slightly longer and more complicated poem. Here we see some of
Ramanujan’s erudition as a translator of Tamil verse. The poem is ostensibly
about a river, in the ancient city of Madurai, in the heart of Tamil Nadu.
Madurai is described as a “city of temples and poets”, but these are poets
who sing of “cities and temples.” There is thus a sort of circularity to these
poets and their themes. In a city of temples and poets, the poets sing of cities
and temples. There is, in other words, self-absorption, and stagnation in their
writing.
This poem is on the river Vaikai which flows through Madurai, a city that
has, for about two thousand years been the seat of Tamil culture. As an
evocation of the river the poem succeeds admirably. At the same time, the
river becomes “a point of departure for ironically contrasting the relative
attitudes of the old and new Tamil poets, both of whom are exposed for their
callousness to suffering, when it is so obvious, as a result of the floods”. (R.
Parthasarthy, ed. Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976, p. 95)
Summarily speaking, the poem consists of 39 lines in all. The first three
lines tell us about the location of the river Madurai, a city of ‘temples and
poets’. These poets usually sang of ‘cities and temples’, indicating thereby
that they were invariably city-bred people.
In the succeeding lines they bring out the incalculable amount of loss and
havoc wrought by the devastating floods. When the river grows lean and dry
during the summer, it bares to the sight the sand, ribs, straw and women’s
hair clogging the watergates, the bridges with patches of repair, and the wet
and dry stones glistening in the sun. The poets of yore sang only of the
floods, not of the ruins and ravages caused by them. These ruins and ravages
are highlighted in the lines that follow (He was there….as usual).
The old poet (used in the singular to show the haphazard, unorganized mode
of his visit) paid a casual visit to the river when it was in its full fury, and
33
when the people talked of its speedy rising, submerging the ‘cobbled steps’
Poetry and the ‘bathing places’, and when the stories were whispered around about
the sweeping off of the ‘three village houses’ and the drowning of ‘one
pregnant woman’ and ‘a couple of cows/named Gopi and Brinda’. His visit
was no more than a pleasure-trip or a curiosity-trip undertaken in a sportive
mood, for he remained totally indifferent towards the losses and sorrows of
the people.
The same sort of attitude has also been adopted by the new poets. These
poets never versified the agonies and miseries of the people—of the drowning
of the pregnant woman, with perhaps twins in her belly who died before
their birth, of the carrying away of the three village houses and a couple of
cows. Of course, they waxed rapturous and poetic over the ruins and floods,
but they had no time to think of the destroyed innocent creatures.
For one thing, this poem is a welcome attempt at showing the poet’s concern
about the sufferers and the bereaved. Skillfully it shows his sympathy for
them. It is, thus, a realistic portrayal of the people’s unmerited suffering at
the hands of cruel and uncontrollable Doomsters, who often heap ‘travails
and teens’ on humanity. The poet’s love for all creatures not only for
human beings, but also for animals—comes out clearly here.
One thing, however, seems to be clear. The poem is less about a river than
about poetry itself. The river, which figures in the works of the poets of
Madurai, is, to all appearances, not much to write about. It becomes a trickle
during the summer, and floods rarely during the year. Instead of writing
about the “reality” of the river, about its changing shape and size, of what
is exposed when it dries up and what it carries away during the floods, the
poets stick to literary conventions rather blindly. The new poets quote the
old ones and still write only about the river in flood. But even when they
do so, they don’t talk about the pregnant woman drowning or the cows
carried away by the river.
This job of actually describing the river is left to the main character in the
poem, the outsider, who like Ramanujan, is the dislocated poet, non-resident
alien. But what does this poet achieve except a comic embellishment, which
at times is suggestive of insensitivity? Isn’t there just this hint of tragedy,
about what happens to the pregnant woman? Perhaps, she commits suicide
because she is pregnant. Men don’t seem to drown in this river. If the
woman hides her “shame’ by drowning herself, it’s not very nice, is it, to
joke about her unborn twins. What opinion do you form about the poet after
reading this?
3.5.2 Style
The poem ‘A River’ uses a sweet and simple language. There is nothing to
be read between the lines. The variation in the length of lines and stanzas
is to be seen here too, as usual. The poet’s compassion is conveyed directly,
without the help of imagery or symbolism. The tone is obviously ironical,
particularly into the portrayal of the indifferent attitude of the old and new
poets towards the destructive role of the river. They are equally to blame for
being ‘poetic’ at the cost of human lives and property. The false assumptions
of the poets who live in ivory towers are exposed herein. The poem hits hard
at them and their vanities. Their false notions are partly due to their ignorance
of the rural life and its acute problems, since they are born and bred in cities.
34 The three village houses, the pregnant woman, the coins, and the river itself
are part and parcel of the rural life. And then, the old city of Madurai owes A. K. Ramanujan
greatly to the river for it being the ‘seat of Tamil culture’. If we keep the
cultural efflorescence of many big Indian cities in mind, we shall discover
that it was mainly due to the positive contributions of the rivers and the seas,
which served as the real source of conveyance and transportation in those
good old days.
The big cities of India like Delhi, Agra, Kanpur, Allahabad, Varanasi, Patna,
Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, Madurai, and many others are all situated on
the banks of the rivers and the sea. The attitude of the poets becomes all the
more laughable and despicable when we consider these cities as the direct
result of the positive role of the rivers and the seas. The poet cannot think
of the sand-ribs, straw and women’s hair clinging to the watergates, the rusty
bars under the bridges with patches of repair all over them. They have, in
fact neither time nor leisure for such things. They move about in this world
like elfins or spirits, having no concern with the tragic sides of human
existence. This is the sum and substance of the poem. What sets Ramanujan
apart from other poets is his unique tone of voice, a feather that accounts for
the characteristic style of his poetry. In ordinary speech it is the tone that
expresses attitudes through the modulation of voice. Tone, therefore, expresses
the speaker’s attitude towards his subject and towards his audience and
sometimes towards himself. The person who is speaking takes into account
the particular situation and the situation determines how the thing is to be
said. As in speech, so too in poetry, tone is an important factor. Instead of
the expressive human voice, words perform this function in a poem. And the
speaker in the poem expresses an attitude through his particular use of the
language, by his choice of words, imagery and syntax. Since poetry is after
all the specialization of language for the communication of attitudes, the
determination of the exact shading of tone in a poem becomes important.
Look at the following lines of this poem:
The new poets still quoted
The old poets, but no one spoke
In verse
Of the pregnant woman
Drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
Kicking at blank walls
Even before birth.
The reality of the floods doesn’t seem to affect anyone; its havoc goes
unnoticed even by the ‘new’ poets who, one would have thought, could be
expected to be socially conscious but are not. Their claims to be new or
modern are exposed. Unable to shake off the burden of the past, they only
repeat what the old poets have said.
The poem is thus an oblique comment on the sterility of much of
contemporary Tamil Poetry—an opinion which isn’t overtly stated. It is the
speaker’s attitude in the poem that helps us to make this inference.
3.5.3 Imagery
Now, the poem moves to the description of the river, which is the ostensible
subject of the poem. The river “dries to a trickle/in the sand,” every summer.
Obviously, it is not a very grand or impressive river, but what it exposes or 35
Poetry leaves behind when it dries up is described in great detail, in very vivid
language. The river’s “sand ribs” are bared, its water gates are clogged with
“straw and women’s hair,” and the wet stones thus exposed glisten “like
sleepy crocodiles,” while the dry ones look like “shaven water-buffaloes
lounging in the sun.” as you can see, these images, which are fresh, original,
and memorable, constitute a different sort of idiom than what the poets of
Madurai are writing about.
As if to confirm this suspicion, the poet says in the very next line, which is
actually a stanza set off from the earlier one, “The poets sang only of the
floods.” The poet goes on to add that he visited the city for a day when they
actually had the floods. Again, we are given some vivid images of the rising
river, of the pregnant woman being carried away, and of the almost comical
pair of cows called Gopi and Brinda. Now that the floods have actually
come, what do the poets of Madurai write about? “The new poets still
quoted/the old poets” he says. These poets ignored what all the people were
talking about, but Ramanujan, like in the earlier poem, embellishes what
happened during the floods by making the pregnant woman expect twins.
Check Your Progress 2
1) What is the poet trying to convey through the poem ‘A River’?
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3.6 LET US SUM UP
In this Unit we look up two poems by AK Ramanujan, an extremely talented
poet, who has given us sensitive renderings of childhood experiences and
remembered events. These are presented without sentimentality and nostalgia.
These qualities are definitely praiseworthy in a poet.
3.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS
Check Your Progress 1
1) Refer to 3.3
Check Your Progress 2
1) The poem is ostensibly about a river, but through it the poet passes his
ironical judgment about other poets who stick to literary conventions
blindly.
36