UNDERGRADUATE  1ST  YEAR    

 
SUBJECT:  English  Language  &  Literature    
TOPIC:        A  River  by  A.  K.  Ramanujam  
Duration:  30:19  min  
 
 

 
  
 

A  River  
MODULE 1—ABOUT THE POET
[Link] (1929-1993) is regarded as one of the most versatile literary
figures in original writing as also translations. Educated in Mysore he later took his
Ph.D from the Indiana University, Bloomington, and then joined the University of
Chicago. He assumed many distinguished academic positions here. These include
William [Link] Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and
Civilisations. Proficient in Tamil and Kannada, [Link] acquired in these
languages an inwardness few could achieve and perhaps none excel.

The uniqueness of Ramanujan lies in the fact that he was not only a poet in English
but also a translator into English of many areas of Tamil and Kannada literature.
About all, he was also a critic of exceptional eminence who looked at literature as
an inseparable part of one’s culture, religion and myth as well as literary and social
traditions. Thus his published work includes original poetry in English published in
Striders (1966), Relations (1971) Selected Poems (1976), and Second Sight (1986).
His Collected Poems was published posthumously in 1995. Among his translations
of poetry from Tamil and Kannada are: The Interior Landscape, (1967), Hymns for
the Drowning of Siva (from Kannada). Ramajunan also translated
[Link]’s acclaimed Kannada novel Samskara. He also made
significant contribution to the tradition of Folklore as is evident in the collection
entitled Folktales from India (1992).

From this rich background one should study A RIVER. It has blended subtly many
of the strands and streams which we noted above.

MODULE 2—FEATURES OF HIS POETRY IN GENERAL

A glance at the rich volume of his writings shows that the poetry of Ramanujan has
some remarkable features unique to him. First of all, his rootedness in his own
native literary traditions gave him an insight into the rich literary heritage of the
past. This heritage included rich awareness of not only literary but also critical
traditions of India’s heritage. The classical, the medieval and the modern became
streams in his assimilative consciousness. This gets richly evoked and expressed in
  
 
the poem A RIVER. Moreover, another of Ramanujan’s traits evident in his poetry
is his background in linguistics. Awareness of the evolution of a language, its
syntax, its vocabulary, its lexical uniqueness all gave him insight into how prose
and poetry acquire their qualities over the centuries. Moreover, since English is
used by Ramanujan for both his original poetry and translations, one can notice his
multifaceted expertise in using images and expressions from his Tamil and
Kannada backgrounds.
This suggests that Ramanujan’s poetry derives its creative originality from the
awareness, the unfailing memory of his past and his physical displacement as a
result of his being based in another country, and another culture. This is not only
what critics call bilingual and bicultural situation but also a rich sensibility capable
of holding the bicultural situation as the creative springboard. Themes which are
therefore prominent can be described as family and its traditions which are still
traceable to the past. But these traditions are now more hangovers from the past
honored in letter and not in the real spirit. Thus, the family theme gives rise to the
question of the poet’s identity: “I resemble everyone/ but my self,” says the poet in
his Self-portrait. It is this loss of identity which Ramanujan sees in the outer
landscape and its immemorial past of which A RIVER is a poetic portrayal.

MODULE 3— ASPECTS OF THE POEM

A poem needs to be read in terms of language, structure, symbols – all related to
the theme, the basic content which supports the theme; we should also be alert to
the fact that poetry is extremely suggestive. For the present purpose and context A
RIVER needs to be read as a specific and not, an amorphous river. It is a river
which is culture-specific, flowing in Tamil Nadu; to be more specific in Madurai.

Ramanujan’s poetry reflects a comparative view of the past and the present.
Initially, it is in English that he tries to capture the basic emotions which arise in
him when he sees a city like Madurai—a very important, historically holy, temple
town of Tamil Nadu. The city has countless images, icons and religious symbols
which have survived the ravages of time. In short, the timeless and the temporal,
the past and the present are kept in tension without a futile longing for the past or
an equally fruitless disquiets with the present.

The changes over time are difficult to accept, since the past is usually associated
with grandeur and glory, what the poet’s creativity has to do is to shape his
frustration in a detached way. If he glorifies the past, it is pointless because it is
  
 
nonexistent. If he condemns the present as a barren wasteland, it will be a futile
escape into nostalgia—a pointless love of a glorified past. Glorified with
justification because Madurai in the past (an abode of goddess Minakshi) was
imbued with glory which is real. It is an epitome of the high levels of Tamil
culture—a culture which is shaped largely by religion and a high standard of Tamil
language and literature.

MODULE 4 — THE POEM: PART ONE

The opening lines of the poem suggest a paradox: Madurai is a city of temples and
poets—poets who sing about cities and temples, but here the river dries to a trickle
in the summer.
If one reads these lines carefully, one notices that the poet’s basic attitude is one of
recording and reporting and skillfully introducing elements—that is juxtaposing—
details which are not cultural but natural. For instance, cities are human creations,
so are temples, cities represent the varied facets of culture, civilization, arts, civic
governance, citizens, infrastructure, transport, education and so on. Both mental
and environmental factors count.

Notice also the exquisite art of Ramanujan in giving endless suggestive potential
by simply playing (or reversing, repeating) the same words: “suggestion through
reversion” we can call it. The poets sang of cities and temples: they are based in
cities and worship in temples but in their poetry too they make no exception: the
material for their poetry is connected to what they live in: cities and what they
believe in, the symbol of which is the temple. In short, these are city-based poets
writing about their cities. Or, even if they live outside the city, their theme is life in
the city and faith in the temple and the religious motifs which they represent. .

The poet highlights what Madurai represented in Tamil consciousness and culture;
how the images of cities and temple evoke several motifs of an urban context
through symbolic motifs. The poets sang makes it clear that it is an oral tradition
and poetry was not closet poetry read in the privacy of one’s house for few friends
or connoisseurs. It was a public event and the music of the poem came alive when
the poem became a song sung before an appreciative audience. In other words, one
has to note the art of reading a poem as consisting of paying attention to every
word. Poetry in the past was meant to be sung, as a kind of performative art:
Sahitya and Sangita, both the arts blended in rich harmony to form the spontaneous
  
 
delight of listening and the cultivated art of contemplating the content of what was
being sung.

MODULE 5 — THE POEM: PART TWO

The next question which arises, naturally, is: how does the poet respond to the
natural factors when they bring about misery to humans. He responds by an ironic
use of the word ‘sang’ in the last sentence of the first stanza: “The poets only sang
of the floods”.

The river is a natural phenomenon which has both the gift of providing endless
quantities of drinking water and causing destruction through floods. The
succeeding lines give a deeply moving panorama of human misery. There is, first
of all, “summer” which every year “dries [the river] to a trickle in the sand” and
bares” the sand ribs”—a pitiable condition. The other components which a dried up
river makes us see are listed—the straw, a woman’s hair which clogs the
Watergates, the bridges with patches on rusty bars, the patches are marks which are
left as residue after repair work to the bridge is done. In short this technique of
piling up detail after detail—like a prosaic catalog of goods at a mall and not
human elements—shows the intense detachment with which the poet evokes
human and natural misery.

In this collocation or juxtaposition of living things and inanimate objects: in

exquisite images of crocodiles and water buffaloes, Ramajunan evokes the
nonchalance, the indifference of the poets to the bleak landscape as an existential
context of misery instead of responding to and launching into doing something
about it. The sleepy crocodiles collocated with the wet stones could be taken to
apply to the poets: they are sleepy, drowsy to human and other elements of a dried
up river: they are only alert to the material which a dried up river yields to form a
good poem. In other words, the human elements are sleepy, stony; yet they
“glisten”, glow but like stones, stones standing for glittering diction and images in
a poem. The dry stones are like “shaven water-buffaloes” ironically starved of
water because the “river dries to a trickle.” This section ends with two very
suggestive images: “lounging in the sun” (buffaloes) and the poets.

If we consider this poem in terms of such observations, emotion is trigged when

there is a situation which is representative of human emotions such as fear, sorrow,
love, amusement, etc. But emotions themselves do not make a poem. The original
  
 
personalized emotion needs to be generalized and humanized. Then the literary
piece becomes accessible to reading and reflection on its meaning and significance.
Generalization in this poem can be seen by the poet’s choosing of Madurai. It is a
specific city in Tamil Nadu. It has a past, a history, and a present.

MODULE 6 — THE POEM: PART THREE

Keep this in mind and let us go to the second section which gives us a specific
instance of who the narrator is. It begins: “He was there for a day / when they had
the floods.” We wonder: who is this “he”? Is he the poet or a friend of his who
reported the incident to him? One way to understand this is the literary structure
known as “persona”: the assumption of a personality both attached and detached
from an experience or event. The first stanza had poets who wrote choosing floods
and they are from the past. At the second movement of the poem, we have another
who obviously belongs to the present and “who” was there “for a day / when they
had the floods”. The past slides into the present tense, almost. And this persona is
perhaps not a poet at all. He could be a keen observer, a reporter, a media person
who is covering the floods and reporting it. But he is the poet, too because he is
doing more than reporting or recording; he is evoking a whole complex emotions
ensuing from the rising of the flood and its consequences.
Like the earlier juxtaposition of dried up river and floods, there is another: earlier
the poets sang about the floods, now the people who watch the floods talk. The
persona records both. People talk of rising flood water, the cobbled steps and the
bathing ghats submerged by the water. But the more alarming items are: the village
houses, one pregnant woman and a couple of cows. These are given names; Gopi
and Brinda but ironically these names also are those of Lord Krishna’s devotees,
his gopis, as they are called.
The characters figuring in the poem are now: the old poets, the poet’s persona,
women (one pregnant) washed away by the floods, people talking about the floods,
the buffaloes, crocodiles, (related to Vishnu’s legend: “Gajendra Moksha”).
In the penultimate part of the poem there is a suggestion again of the absence of
any pragmatic activist social concern on the part of the poets. The new poets—
representing the present—show their concern in repetition and remembrance of
what the old poets said. They only recall what the old poets said. No one
recognizes and therefore no one speaks about the devastating effect of the recurrent
floods.
What does this poet / persona say? “No one spoke in verse” he says. Why is the
word ‘verse’ chosen as a substitute for poem or poetry? Can we not say that the
  
 
new poets lack both the inner sensibility of a poetic kind and the social awareness
which responds to calamities and impels them to do something to remove the
suffering inflicted by floods, to the extent possible? If the new poets are unable to
socially respond, at least they could have tried their hand in writing even mediocre
poetry. The older poets are poets, but may not have bothered about social concern
and activism. But the new poets, taking the same subjects as material for poetry
turn out only to be versifiers. They seem to be incapable of even versified social
comment!
MODULE 7 — CONCLUSION
A RIVER thus brilliantly brings together the past and the present as common
materials for poetic creation: human misery and anguish caused by uncontrollable
natural calamities: drought on one side and floods on the other: both are calamities.
Then what remains: pregnant women continue to perish, carrying children:
“striking at blank walls / even before birth”. Then are mentioned the cattle Gopi
and Brinda, whose association with gods is obvious.
The conclusion of a poem is always a significant part. Many critics see the poem as
a portrayal of the impact of westernization and modernization on traditional values.
According to this reading, the new poets dissociated poetry from human concerns.
Even if it is successful poetry, it is sterile in terms of human values. In such poetry,
to quote [Link], “words slip, slide, perish, do not stay in place.”
When Ramanujan says that the river has “water enough / to be poetic / about only
once a year “, obviously there is scarcity of real, authentic poetry. If earlier poets
sang of cities and temples, there was at least poetry. Now there is no authentic
poetry except versified cataloguing of calamities and crises. The pregnant woman,
with twins in the womb, the cattle, and other items are still carried away by the
floods. Also, perhaps Ramanujan likes to say, there is no enduring poetry.
However, this is not the complete truth. Because, even when written in English
(which could also threaten native, natural linguistic sensibility). A RIVER is one of
the most memorable Indo-English poems. So it comes full circle. There are
poetasters and brilliant poets like Ramanujan. His poetry retains its Indian roots yet
uses with distinction “the tongue in English chains”. There are no chains of
alienation here but only acute, accurate eye for Indian sensibility.