By Rominder Kaur
Introduction
Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan is regarded as one of the gems of Indian English poets. His poems are immensely popular among all lovers of poetry. He remained an iconic figure for the Indian literary community for a long time. After making his mark first as an Indian English poet in the mid-1960s, he won enduring fame in India and abroad for his pioneering translations of classical Tamil poetry, and later, of Bhakti poetry in Tamil and Kannada.
His Life
A.K. Ramanujan was born in Mysore on 16th March 1929 as the son of Attipat Asuri Krishnaswami, an astronomer and professor of mathematics at Mysore University, was known for his interest in English, Kannada and Sanskrit languages. His mother was a housewife. His brother, AK Srinivasan is also a famous mathematician whose contributions to the theory of numbers include pioneering discoveries of the properties of the partition function. His schooling was done at Marimallapa’s High school and later he joined in science first, after the first year his father felt that literature is his best subject and changed the major. Therefore he became a graduate in English Literature. Ramanujan’s wife was Janakiammal (Janaki). Her mother was a friend of Ramanujan’s mother. The marriage took place on July 14, 1909, and Ramanujan’s father was not present at the wedding. A delay in the arrival of Ramanujan with his mother on the day of the wedding, was a cause for anxiety to the parents of Janaki who even thought of another groom for Janaki, to avoid the stigma to the family that the marriage did not take place as planned! The Ramanujan-Janaki wedding was a five-day ceremony and it took place along with the wedding of another sister of Janaki. After the wedding, Komalathammal took Janaki along with her son to Kumbakonam. The young wife was soon back with her parents. She came of age and joined her husband in 1912 after Ramanujan got a clerical job in the Madras Port Trust. They resided at Saiva Muthaiah Mudali Street, in George Town. In May 1913, Ramanujan joined the University of Madras as its first research scholar and he first moved, for about 10 months, to Hanumantharayan Koil Street, and then to Toppu Venkatachala Mudali Street, both in Triplicane. His wife and mother lived with him for some months, at the latter residence, before Ramanujan left for England, on March 17, 1914. Ramanujan was alone in England for almost five years (April 14, 1914, to February 27, 1919) and he fell ill in the spring of 1917 and was treated for tuberculosis. The ongoing first World War prevented the possibility of his wife joining him to take care of him or his being shifted to a warmer country like Italy. Eventually, after the war ended, Ramanujan returned to India, in April 1919, emaciated from prolonged confinement in sanatoria but with a great reputation. Janaki joined him in Madras and nursed him till his untimely death on April 26, 1920. During those months, the household was run by Ramanujan’s mother Komalathammal and grandmother Rangammal. Ramanujan passed away on July 13, 1993, in Chicago, Illinois, as a result of an adverse reaction to anaesthesia during preparation for surgery.
His career
In 1958, he became fellow of Deccan College, Pune and later took Ph. D in Linguistics from Indiana University. He began his career as a lecturer at Kollam, Kerela. Ramanujan taught at various colleges in South India but mainly in Belgaum in the 1950s. In 1958 he went to the United States for his Ph. D in Linguistics at Indianan University. In 1962 Ramanujan was appointed to the University of Chicago where he remained for about thirty years. Besides these, Ramanujan also taught at several other universities such as Harvard, University of Wisconsin, University of California at Berkeley, Carleton College and the University of Michigan. He had also worked in the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Linguistics and with the Committee on Social Thought in 1983.
Major Works by him
A.K. Ramanujan was a bilingual writer. Besides being a poet, he was a translator and essayist. In his poems, one can find the taste of intertextuality and hybridity. At the age of thirty, his first collection of poems titled The Striders was published in 1966. His later collections were Relations (1971), Second Sight (1986) and Collected Poems in 1995. Ramanujan’s translations from Tamil, Kannada and Telegu made him internationally popular. Some of his translations are Interior Landscape (1967), Speaking of Siva (1973), Hymns for the Drowning (1981), and Poems of Love and War (1985) and so on. His very first book was a collection of proverbs in Kannada which was published in 1955. For the next forty years, he wrote extensively on subjects like ‘The Indian Oedipus’, ‘On Folk Mythologies and Folk Puranas’ and ‘Who Needs Folklore?’. These have been collectively published in Collected Essays in 1999. The last book to be published was Folklore of India in 1991.
Controversy regarding his essay
His 1991 essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations" courted controversy over its inclusion in B.A., History syllabus of Delhi University. It was included in 2006. In this essay, he had written about the existence of many versions of Ramayana and a few versions portrayed Rama and Sita as siblings, which contradicts the popular versions of the Ramayana, such as those by Valmiki and Tulsidas. A student wing opposed its inclusion in the syllabus, saying it hurt the majority Hindus' sentiments, who viewed Rama and Sita as Gods and were husband and wife. They demanded the essay be scrapped from the syllabus. In 2008 Delhi High Court directed the Delhi University to convene a committee to decide on the essay's inclusion. A 4-member committee was formed, which subsequently gave its verdict 3-1 in favour of inclusion in the syllabus. The academic council, however, ignored the committee's recommendation and voted to scrap the essay from its syllabus in Oct 2011. This led to protest by many historians and intellectuals and accused the Delhi University of succumbing to non-historians' diktat.
His style of writing
The study of A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry shows him as a distinguished Indian English poet in whom there is a fusion of the rich tenets of his native culture and the detached outlook of the Western thoughts. S. S. Dulai states about Ramanujan who made a multicultural commitment and transcended the limitation of an expatriate poet, in the following words:
His poetry is born out of the dialectical interplay between his Indian and American experience on the one hand, and that between his sense of his own self and all experience on the other. Its substance is both Indian and Western. Starting from the centre of his sense of self and his Indian experience, his poetry executes circles comprehending ever-wider realities, yet maintaining a perfectly taut connection between its constant, and continuously evolving central vision and the expanding scene before it. . . . (Dulai 151)
His poetic self-presents a unique amalgam of the traditional and the modern. If his sensibility is rooted in the Indian heritage, his vision is definitely that of a modernist’s. His credit lies in his remarkable ability to maintain a considerable balance between tradition and modernity. The conclusion of the three chapters entitled “Introduction”, “Deities and Nature” and “Infinite in the form of Finite” comprises of the poet’s attitude and temperament towards the religious, cultural and several other aspects related to Man and his life.
His contribution
A. K. Ramanujan's theoretical and aesthetic contributions span several disciplinary areas. In his cultural essays such as "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" (1990), he explains cultural ideologies and behavioural manifestations thereof in terms of an Indian psychology he calls "context-sensitive" thinking. In his work in folklore studies, Ramanujan highlights the inter-textuality of the Indian oral and written literary tradition. His essay "Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections" (1989), and his commentaries in The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (1967) and Folktales from India, Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages (1991) are good examples of his work in Indian folklore studies.
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