The many personas of A K Ramanujan

Reading A K Ramanujan’s diary is like meeting the many personas of the same person. The persona is a concept he explains in one of his earlier essays, which appears as an “Afterword” to his translation of Poems of Love and War from classical Tamil. According to Tolkappiyam, the oldest book of grammar and poetics in Tamil, the speaker of an akam (a genre of poetry in classical Tamil referring to the interior, heart, household) is not an individual poet but a persona. The speaking voice in the diaries, however, is certainly A K Ramanujan, known to the public world as a distinguished poet, translator, and linguist. Yet one of the things Ramanujan says about the speaker in an akam poem certainly applies to the “speaker” in this book: “The speaker seems to be half talking to herself, yet addressing a confidante. It is like a speech in a play.” 

The theatrical metaphor is apt for his diary: The reader is a listener of a play that Ramanujan narrates. The play: The theatre of Ramanujan’s life. The form: Soliloquy. Ramanujan speaks and we, the readers, listen to him. It is because this book, a selection of Ramanujan’s diaries, was published posthumously, without Ramanujan’s explicit editorial eye. The result is that the “confidant” is no longer Ramanujan himself but the wider reading public. In earlier diary entries, Ramanujan reveals that he was jealous of his peers who could act, and this was what prompted him to switch to writing. Reading this book, I couldn’t help but wonder how Ramanujan would react to the accidental theatre that is this book.  

The authorship of this book, however, does not solely lie with Ramanujan. The editors are his son Krishna Ramanujan and scholar Guillermo Rodriguez. The diary entries have been selected by them and interspersed with published or unpublished poems, some of the latter appearing for the first time in print. These selections have been annotated thoroughly. 

The diaries also reveal how Ramanujan wanted to be perceived by the external world. For a person who is so specific about boundaries (in one place he says he cannot allow students into the private world of the household), he has famously described himself as the hyphen in the phrase Indian-American. Similarly, he is a poet, linguist, translator, folklorist, all at the same time, and expects to be seen that way. But the lines are also drawn. He says that Kannada does not interfere with his English when he is writing in English. But as the hyphen flows from one to another, boundaries are staked out.

Like all great writers, what Ramanujan’s diary reveals is not restricted to himself. “It’s too personal now, the ‘I’, not large and non-personal,” he rebukes himself, and outlines his task: “To enlarge self without mysticism, pomposity, generality, etc”. The self he constructs, I’d argue, is a very Hindu self. In the poem, “Conventions of Despair”, also included in this book, he says, “I must seek and will find my particular hell in my Hindu mind...” This is also perhaps why he chose to translate Samskara, U R Ananthamurthy’s classic novel about the existential crisis of a Brahmin. The identity of the Hindu is a marker for much political talk these days, so it’s even more important that we pay attention to Ramanujan. When he separates his sense of rootedness from patriotism — “This is no reversion to patriotism; patriotism is a primitive evil; I am thinking of a rooting of the cultivated mind” — he, perhaps unknowingly, makes a makes an important statement for our contemporary time. 

The Hindu way of life is a recurring description in his poems. Everyday chores such as bathing (sometimes in the Ganges, a predominant image in some of his poems), and such realities as urine, human waste, gastronomic matters, and their association with his father, grandfather, and other members of family are his ways of sketching a lineage for himself. Given that the economy of waste in the Hindu world order is also closely related to the caste system, Ramanujan’s writing is also important for what it leaves out. His writings, or at least this selection from his diaries, appear to lack any self-awareness of the social systems of oppression the Hindu social order creates. Like the history of Hinduism itself, the diary is also important for its omissions. But Ramanujan also represents the best of what a “particular hell” the “Hindu mind” has to offer. Those who self-identify with the same word for political dividends are a far cry away from the possible meanings of that word.

Journeys

A K Ramanujan; Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez (Eds)

Penguin; 351 pages; Rs 599

The reviewer is a poet and translator. He occasionally tweets @souradeeproy19