A Hindu, On the Hindoos

AT the time of his death in 1993, A.K. Ramanujan left behind 148 poems on threecomputer disks. Many of these were finished poems, some were fragments, exercises.According to his daughter Krittika, the earliest were written in 1989, in Michigan, andthe latest in March or April 1993, just weeks before his death. This by any standards is alot of poetry over a relatively short period. ‘Birth takes a long time’,Ramanujan says in one of these late poems, ‘though death can be sudden,/andmultiple, like pregnant deer/shot on the run.’ Ramanujan’s death wassudden, multiple. He was, among other things, putting the finishing touches to a newcollection of poems when it happened. This new collection, The Black Hen, was neverpublished as an independent volume but appeared as part of Collected Poems in 1995. Thereare 60 poems in The Black Hen and the selection was made by an eight-member committee, twoof whom are the editors of the present volume. Uncollected Poems and Prose adds a further32 poems to the corpus.

Does this mean that we now have all of Ramanujan’s poems, everything that hewished to preserve? I am not so sure. There is at least one poem I am aware of, Stranger,published in the Winter 1990/91 issue of the Poetry Review (London), which doesn’tfind a place in either The Black Hen or Uncollected Poems and Prose. It must have slippedthrough the net, as poems tend to do. The poem is about a man who returns home everyevening punctually at ‘five fifteen’. One day, as he routinely slides the brasskey in a keyhole, he discovers he has been transformed into another person, into someonewho has a falcon tattoo on his right hand, whose left hand middle finger is missing, andwho swears in Spanish. The poem is about the many nasty selves we carry inside us andwhich seize us when we least expect them to. It’s a subject Ramanujan wrote aboutoften, but each time coming at it with undiminished keenness and from a new direction.

Apart from 32 poems, many of them, like Invisible Bodies, Lying, Becoming, and Orangesas good as any he wrote, Uncollected Poems and Prose also contains an essay, The Ring ofMemory, a eulogy to the Sanskritist Barbara Stoler Miller, and two interviews. The firstis by Chirantan Kulshrestha and was done in 1970; the second is by A.L. Becker and KeithTaylor and was done in 1989. They are not the least of the book’s surprises, thoughnot if one has read Ramanujan carefully before.

Ramanujan’s father was a mathematician, but he knew Sanskrit well and, though notvery religious, recited the Gita and read the Ramayana in the morning. He was also anastrologer. “Which part of this life did you share? Was it the religion? The prayers?The astrology?” Becker asks him. And the reply is: “No, I was very much againstastrology. I said astronomy was good, but astrology—throw it away.” Ramanujanthen describes the arguments they would have. Asked if his reaction was “a reactionagainst India”, he says: “Against Hinduism. And, of course, I had the notionthat only a kind of modern rationalism was the answer to all the problems that wehad.”

“My unconscious agenda,” he says in answer to another question, “hasbeen to diversify our notions of Indian civilisation.... If you look at something likeSpeaking of Siva, you find it more democratic. It is fiercely critical of Hindu positionsof ritual and priests, the privilege of temples, and the rich men who support thetemples—of the whole caste system.”

This outspokenness is to be found also in the early poems, where it is hidden behindwhat looks like innocent wordplay. In them, Ramanujan makes a distinction between a Hindulike himself, and he was perhaps the greatest 20th century interpreter of Hinduism to theworld, and the ‘Hindoo’. The ‘Hindoos’ are one of us, except that thecolonial spelling signifies that they are not quite. Long before it happened, Ramanujansaw them dancing on top of mosques with iron implements, like savages. This is how TheHindoo: The Only Risk, published in Relations (1971), ends: ‘At the bottom of allthis bottomless/enterprise to keep simple the heart’s given beat,/the only risk isheartlessness.’