1. How did you first encounter the
work of A.K. Ramanujan?
In the summer of 1993, after an
overland trip from Spain to India, I was living on a houseboat in
Benares and among the first books I picked up at a bookshop were A.K.
Ramanujan’s volume of translations of medieval Kannada mystical
poems, titled Speaking of Siva, and R. Parthasarathy’s
anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, which included
several poems by Ramanujan.
I was immediately struck by the unusual
imagery and magical power of suggestion of his poems, as well as by
the mysterious quality of the translations which contained ancient
wisdom in a surprisingly provocative fresh language and almost
riddle-like form. So it was the poetry – original and translated
verse –which drew me first to his multi-disciplinary genius. I
wanted to know more about their hidden meanings, layers and
tricks. It was only gradually that I learnt about Ramanujan's
other facets as a folklorist, essay writer, scholar and mentor.
In
an odd coincidence, the same summer I learnt of him, he passed
away unexpectedly in a Chicago hospital (on 13th July
1993). His collection Folktales from India was published
the same year, but The Collected Essays, edited by Vinay
Dharwadker, came out much later in 1999, when I had already started
my doctoral research on Ramanujan's poetry in English.
2. What
made you decide to work on him for a PhD, and what is it about him
that sustained your interest for so many years?
I made up my
mind to undertake serious research on contemporary Indian poetry in
English in the mid-1990s, when I was living in Chennai. I first
enrolled in an M.A. course at Loyola College and completed my
master's dissertation there in 1997, which was a stylistic and
symbolic study of a single poem by AKR titled “Snakes” from his
first poetry book The Striders (1966). I was
fascinated by the way the “meaning” of the poem comes to the
reader in its design, in the particular way the poet-narrator
renders the “experience” through the linguistic structure, while
the symbolism of the snake allows for interpretations from the
psychological (Jungian), philosophical and mythological (Hindu)
perspective. That was Ramanujan's trademark style. His multi-layered
art and poetics came from his being exposed to, and having absorbed
in his poetry, multiple traditions and disciplines, living in India
during his first thirty years and then in America.
My
discovery of AKR’s other talents as an influential scholar and
essay writer, besides his work as a translator of classical and
medieval South Indian poetry, folklorist and bilingual poet (English
and Kannada), further challenged my view of his poetry in English.
This prompted me to focus on his aesthetics and poetics as the topic
of my Ph.D. research under the University of Kerala and the
University of Valladolid, Spain. As I travelled all over India for my
research, at a crucial moment I met Girish Karnad, who had been
Ramanujan's friend since the 1950s.
Girish encouraged me
to travel to Chicago to research the A.K. Ramanujan Papers that
had been deposited at the University of Chicago in 1994. These had
never been described before in any publication, and contained a
treasure trove of data and unpublished notebooks, diaries, journals
and letters which enriched my understanding of AKR as a poet-scholar
and spurred my intellectual curiosity. The Papers are
indeed a repository of the contribution to the fields of linguistics,
anthropology and Indian folklore, culture and literature by one of
India's most versatile and seminal intellectuals and poets.
3. Your book is titled When
Mirrors Are Windows, which I believe is also the name of an
essay by AKR. Why did you choose this phrase as the title?
AKR’s
essay, published in 1989, is in fact titled “Where Mirrors Are
Windows: An Anthology of Reflections on Indian Literatures.” In
this imaginative paper he gives some examples of how the concentric
concepts of akam (love poems, domestic) and puram (war
poems, public) operate in classical Tamil Sangam literature
(first century BC to third century AD), and also points to different
types of co-relations (“responsive,” “reflective” and
“self-reflexive”) between and within structures and systems in
Indian languages and literatures. I changed this phrase slightly
and chose “When Mirrors Are Windows” for the title of my
book, borrowing it as a fitting metaphor and critical tool to assess
AKR’s own (private and scholarly) writings and their
intertextuality.
In another sense of the phrase, it was only
now that readers could get a glimpse of his unpublished diaries and
other private writings. So by exposing them in my book, these
diaries, originally meant for no one else but himself (self-reflexive
“mirrors”), had become “windows” -- opening up new vistas
into AKR`s intimate world and creative process.
Moreover,
AKR was quite obsessed with the metaphors of glass and mirror. They
appear throughout his poetic oeuvre, such as in the famous
“Self-Portrait” poem which I reproduce in manuscript form in the
opening of my book. Ultimately, the mirror/window-glass metaphor
stands for the self and for poetry, for as AKR observed: “Poetry
contains, transforms, and returns our reality to us, and us to
reality, in oblique ways.”
4. Your book contains a quote
from Ramanujan that runs: “I write in two traditions and I belong
to at least three.” He seems to bring together the Indian
classical, the regional and the Western traditions in a way that
might be unique. Could you say a little about these different
influences on him, and how they emerged in his work?
As a
Tamil Brahmin who grew up in Mysore, AKR was surrounded by four
languages (Kannada, English, Tamil, Sanskrit) and received a
trilingual formal education (Kannada, English, and to a less extent
Tamil). He did not learn Sanskrit formally, but absorbed it as a
religious language from his father. He wrote poetry in two
languages -- English and Kannada -- and translated mainly from
Kannada and Tamil into English. His father was a mathematician and
was also steeped in Indian philosophy. Kannada was AKR's first
literary language and he wrote plays in Kannada in his early college
days in the 1940s, before becoming part of the navya (new)
modernist poetry scene in Kannada in the 1950s. He was also deeply
influenced by the oral literatures and the
medieval Virasaiva Kannada bhakti poetry which
appealed to his rebellious nature in his youth. By the time he was 30
he had become somewhat tired of being a professor of English in
Indian provincial towns, and in 1959 he went to the US as a Fulbright
scholar to pursue his studies in linguistics. It was there that he
studied Tamil formally and learned to translate the Tamil
classics.
As I state in the book, many Indian writers of the
twentieth century had been brought up in a similar milieu of multiple
layers (regional, pan-Indian, English). What is unique about AKR is
how he made use of these traditions in a profoundly rich, yet
apparently simple, natural way; how he creatively absorbed and
displayed these layers in his English-language poetry; and the
success with which he translated between these languages (of
different cultures and literary periods). More so, he relentlessly
encouraged others to do the same, at a time when no one paid
attention to some of the lesser-known Indian regional and oral
traditions.
5. How do we think about his Brahminical
upbringing – including his father’s Sanskrit training – with what
he himself chose to study as a scholar: Dravidian linguistics and
folklore? Was it an oppositional stance?
AKR renounced his
Brahmin-ness as a teenager in 1946, throwing away his sacred
thread. As a young student he evinced an innate urge to compare
and contrast divergent points of view and he never embraced any
particular dogma. As U.R. Ananthamurthy once told me, Ramanujan was
“a man of ideas, not of ideology... he liked to play with opposite
ideas.”
From his formative years, he was drawn to what he called
the 'mother-tongue’ traditions, including folk wisdom, women's tales
and diverse oral literatures. And he was fascinated by the
anti-establishment of the Kannada poets of the medieval Virasaiva bhakti tradition.
But I
would not define this as an oppositional stance. Throughout his life
and career, AKR strove to come to terms with his (father's)
Brahminical heritage and explored the complex issues of identity as
an Indian living in a modern western world. In fact his entire
scholarly work aims to project a model for Indian literature that is
not based on opposition but on dialogue (which includes quarrels, of
course), permeable membranes and intertextuality in a
cross-fertilising network of traditions. And I think these issues are
still very relevant today in Indian literary and cultural
studies.
6. How did his multilinguality – or what he
calls his multiple monolinguality -- affect his worldview and his
work? How did he fit languages to genres he wrote in, or vice
versa? What we might be in danger of losing as a younger
generation of poets and scholars in India seems to be becoming
increasingly monolingual?
In the interviews and notes AKR
explains how each of his several languages “specialised” in a
particular “area of experience” and simultaneously engaged the
other in a continuous dialogue. The practice of reading and writing
in Kannada and English in such dissimilar cultural contexts as India
and the US implied a degree of code-switching and exchange in his
writing (structural, stylistic, thematic) that is yet to be addressed
by critics of his work in English and Kannada. Though AKR felt like
an “alternating monolingual” in each of the languages he wrote
in, it was not his aim to separate them: “All my writing, of
course, is concerned with the three languages I have… they are
constantly interacting,” he said. And it was more of a cultural,
rather than purely linguistic, interface between the three languages
he worked in. It was both an unconscious and conscious process.
As
a poet, for instance, he believed that the use of one language or
another was determined by a complex combination of personal, cultural
and contextual factors. Writing a poem in a particular language was
not a question of choice or control, as poems could not be willed
into one language or another. They were originally triggered by a
particular situation, an incident, a real experience. And then, once
the poem was nurtured, groomed and polished, it had a delightful
mosaic-like quality, wrapped up in a deceptively simple,
conversational style. It is this richness of cultural reverberations
in his verse that present-day Indian writers who may not be exposed
to more than one language, or one culture, are in the danger of
losing.
7. You've studied both Ramanujan's poetry in English
and his English translations of the Sangam poets and the poetry of
Nammalvar (from Tamil) and the medieval mystic Virasaiva poets (from
Kannada). How did his poetics inform his translations – and vice
versa?
There are multiple techniques, images, motifs, styles
and themes that AKR absorbed into his English-language poetry which
derive from the Indian poetic traditions he translated. To name just
a few, he imitated conventions from Tamil classical literature
such as the Sangam poetics (metonymic “inner landscapes,”
understatement, poetic economy, dramatic scenes, poetry cycles etc.),
the Tamil prayer forms (in mock prayer-poems such as
“Prayer to Lord Murugan”), and the fourth century Tamil Kural (in
the couplets used in poetic sequences in his collection Second
Sight). He also emulated the meta-poetic play with words as “body,”
poetry as possession, and the changing “flow” of forms and
metaphorical “immersion” of the Tamil Alvar saints. And
much of his poetry was preoccupied with the concept of “grace”
and anubhāva (mystical experience) found in the medieval
Kannada Virasaiva poets, and the paradoxical notion of
poetic inspiration as an “ordinary mystery”.
On the other
hand, his double vocation as a poet and linguist was decisive in his
translation work. Though he believed that “only poems can translate
a poems”, his training in linguistics was fundamental to
“transpose” the original faithfully into a new “poetic body”
making use of syntactic devices, modulation, but also structural and
visual design, texture, and images.
Some have charged AKR with
infusing his translations, especially the early 1970s renderings of
the Virasaiva vachanas (sayings) with a modernist,
ironic style which distorts the original voices. These critics say he
could not free himself from his Western modernist attitude a
la Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound. But we
should not forget that he was living in Chicago and translating into
the idiom of the American reader of the 1970s. His translations,
widely admired as marvels of exquisite craftsmanship, were said to
communicate the spirit of the original as only true poetry can. They
made these unknown South Indian poetic traditions come alive in a
contemporary language. Even the British poet Ted Hughes was
profoundly influenced by them. And his translational technique had an
enormous impact on a whole generation of translators.
8. Would
you explain the Akam-Puram divide, and how and why you find it useful
in analysing Ramanujan's body of work?
Akam and puram traditionally
denote two poetic genres in Tamil Sangam poetry, poems of
love and poems of war, but the terms also stand for the private and
public spheres in life, that is, for the world of the self and that
of others, and for the codes of conduct and expression appropriate to
one or the other.
I adopt these concentric concepts as two
converging approaches to analyse AKR. He was a scholar and a poet,
and his writings contain personal matters (private diaries, journals
etc.) and academic material (published essays, linguistics
etc.).The akam-puram paradigm is therefore not a divide,
but a conceptual model that provides two different entry points into
the same world of mirror reflections and textual interplay in AKR`s
work. One can look at AKR`s aesthetics and poetics through his
“inner” forms (life experience, his first thirty years in India,
family, etc) or through the “outer” forms (linguistics,
anthropology and other scholarly disciplines). Yet, as he himself
observed, “they are continuous with each other” -- and more
often than not, he could not “tell what comes from where”.
9. A
related binary that Ramanujan occupied both sides of was the
scholarly and the creative. You suggest that there were several
instances in his lectures and scholarly texts where “biographical
and domestic elements enter the public sphere”. Did the
academic self ever percolate into his poetry?
Indeed in his classroom presentations
and public lectures it was quite typical of AKR to disclose personal
details and autobiographical stories to place himself as the
specimen, the object within the scholarly exposition. He used this
method also in some of the published papers where he discloses
incidents about himself and his multilingual upbringing, his
childhood, the family house, mother or father, to illustrate an idea.
In the inverse direction, AKR occasionally muses over academic issues
and scientific questions in his private journals and diaries.
But
the “academic self” enters his poetry only in as far as the
act of writing is a natural extension of a person's entire learning:
“A poem comes out of everything one learns, not just a little part
of you,” was AKR's conviction. As a linguist he was of course very
much aware of the language structure and texture, and it shows in his
clinically polished verse. But according to him, there cannot be
anything like “academic” poetry; it would not be poetry. Most of
the poetic process was not a self-conscious act, though “the
conscious and unconscious elements are very hard to de-segregate.”
This unrelenting openness to miscellaneous areas of knowledge
(academic and scientific matters, life experiences, stories, even
television) kept his scholarly mind as well as his poetic creativity
in constant motion.
10. Did moving to the US shaped
Ramanujan's writing, or his sense of self?
It was linguistics
that took AKR to America in 1959. He became Professor of Dravidian
Studies at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s. His was a
self-chosen exile, and he took it as a mediating role between Indian
and American scholarship and as a dialogue in himself. Being
suspended between two worlds was both a double resource and a source
of tension for him. Despite inevitable disconnections from his native
culture, family relations, etc, he believed that no part of the self
could be isolated from the other. And this notion permeates his
creative writing, where the different components of his cultural
knowledge (America, English literature and diverse Indian traditions)
interacted in a creative give-and-take. He even called himself
half-seriously “the hyphen in Indo-American Studies” to
illustrate the “splits and connections” that nurtured his
existence as a poet and scholar equally at home in America and India.
In fact, the experience of being
between worlds added another skill to his “miscellaneous
criss-crossing:” he became an expert in the art of translating
little-known ancient texts into a contemporary English idiom, or
rather, a specialist in 'transposing' his readers – and himself --
into other cultures, voices and literary traditions. At the
University of Chicago his two-fold academic and poetic vocation was
able to thrive in a natural extension of the early environments of
his past. And ironically, it was in the US that AKR discovered Tamil classical poetry when, in 1962, he chanced
upon an anthology of Sangam poets in the basement of
University of Chicago Library. That’s his story of creative twists
and turns, just like a good folktale, or poem…
11. And finally, which of his
writings would you recommend as a starting point -- for someone who
has never read any Ramanujan?
Among the essays, I would start
by recommending “Where Mirrors Are Windows: An Anthology of
Reflections on Indian Literatures” (1989) and “Is There an
Indian Way of Thinking. An Informal Essay” (1989). These are two of
his most influential essays and the opening pieces in
his Collected Essays (OUP, 1999). Lovers of
folklore and popular wisdom should not miss his marvellous
collection Folktales from India: A Selection of Oral Tales
from twenty- two Languages, first brought out by Penguin in
1991. Of his books of translation Speaking of Siva (first
published in 1973 by Penguin) quickly became a backpacker's favourite
-- and has by now turned into a classic. One should not fail to read
the introduction to this anthology, for its insights
into bhakti poetry as well as his own poetic
preoccupations.
The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan (OUP
1995) covers all of the poems published during his lifetime and some
of the posthumous compositions. The poems do not need to be read
chronologically, but it is interesting to observe how his early poems
(for instance “Self-Portrait”, The Striders”, “Snakes”,
“Anxiety” or “Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House”)
share a common “language within a language” with the later poems,
such as “Chicago Zen”, “The Black Hen” and “Children,
Dreams, Theorems.” We find AKR in a continuous dialogue of
selves, always quarrelling with the work of art, with memory/images,
and with his multiple 'reflections'.