In The Hall Of Mirrors

It was an unsettling experience for me to read Ramanujan’s Kannada poems in English. But it’s hard to say why. One writes not only in a language but into the literary and cultural ambience of the language. Much of the poetry in Kannada before Ramanujan used to be in high pitch with no room for hesitant and tentative understatement. The flaw in some of them, particularly in the long-winded works of minor imitative poets, is that they can be lampooned. Ramanujan’s poems are so self-conscious, ironic and witty that they cannot be lampooned. Ramanujan not only wrote memorable poems in that mode but enlarged our sense of poetry in Kannada, and changed the way we look at poems. Therefore the meaning and significance that they have for me when I read them in the context of Kannada literary sensibility cannot be felt in English. But even so, what is impressive in these poems are the unusual connections they make.

The unusual details catch the poet’s eye everywhere. In On the Bathroom Sink, which surprised Kannada readers when it first appeared, his father’s forgotten new set of dentures smiles at him generously; in A Meditation on Doors, a free association of walls and doors makes images into ideas and ideas into images tentatively and unobtrusively without poetising any image. A Father’s Gift has larger meanings only when you look for them; otherwise it’s a delightful and witty narration. Inchworm Story, Heard in America moves like the subject of the poem, inch by inch, relentlessly on and on, from line to line and it is a delight to read it aloud in Kannada, and in its English translation too.

The eye that sees the world in these poems is eager and perplexed and sceptical, whether it looks at the West or at India. It is fascinated by the phenomena that it encounters and brings freshness to our own perceptions. The poet is truly a ‘sakshi’, a witness in our times of the East meeting the West.

Ramanujan has written in English too and he is perhaps the most unique Indian poet in English. I have a strong feeling that the theme and tenor of his poems in these two languages are distinct because the challenges offered by these two languages too are different. Many of us are bilingual but not many of us are truly creative in two languages. Like Nabokov, Ramanujan’s writing in both languages has a distinct flavour in each. In his narrative gift he is profoundly Indian, deeply influenced by the folk stories he has collected and edited. He can make what he sees into a fable. Two contradictory qualities—the fabulous and the sceptical—dwell together in his imagination.

This is true of his writings in both the languages. But what they dwell on, the sharp perception and humour, produces the difference in theme and tenor. He mixes his American experience and Indian memories to shed light on each other and stands apart from both in ironic contemplation. This multi-faceted act of his creative imagination is made possible by abandoning the egotistical sublime which Keats criticised in Wordsworth and Milton (and which regulates much of Indian writing).

Daniels-Ramanujan has perceptively commented on this negative capability in her introduction to Someone Else’s Autobiography. A mock autobiography, the novella has kkr as its unheroic hero who meets his double akr. akr sets him to write the autobiography. The story is a hall of mirrors where there is a search for the true self. Its tone follows a prescription in the novella: "A poem ought not to poeticise, a drama must not be too theatrical".

The novella seems confessional but is not really so, for these are the confessions of an unreliable narrator. An intense sympathy is produced for a rickshaw-puller, a sweating and exhausted human engine, but very soon we learn that he too is a bawdy exploiter. There is the story of a tortured aunt—atthe—but as she grows old, we find her triumphant, "wearing a three-diamond nose ring, and ten-diamond earrings". The writer of the memoir has a hunger for self-individuation and for finding truth and justice. Yet he also worries "that (the readers) might see these concerns of mine as bourgeois thoughts and ascribe them to my American wife’s influence".

A.K. Ramanujan puts everything he did as a linguist, as a translator, as a folklorist, as an anthropologist to creative use in his novella and poems. We come out of this superb collection admiring the genius of the self-effacing and self-searching author and the loving job that the translators have done in rendering his Kannada into English. This is not just Kannada, for it houses intimate Tamil experience. To confront such complex experience in hospitable English is indeed a great pleasure.