The Context Quarterly e journal of language, literary and cultural studies

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1 The Context Quarterly e journal of language, literary and cultural studies Publication details and instructions for authors: This is an Open Access Journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 The Concept of Time in the Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan Mrs. Tejaswini D. Patil (Dange) Assistant Professor, Arts and Commerce College, Ashta, (Sangli). MS, India. Published online: 01 August 2015 Article Number: TCissn /2.3a078 To cite this article: Paitl, Tejaswini. The Concept of Time in the Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan. The Context, 2.3 (2015): Web Author(s); licensee Magnus Publishing. The electronic version of this article is available at: Abstract A.K Ramanujan, one of the major Indian poets in English and a sensitive voice to the Indian milieu, has treated various themes in his poems ranging from family relations, childhood memories/ past, time, the search for self/roots, the Indianness- through history, philosophy and culture, mythology; East-West encounter, trans-culturation, fear and pain, alienation to the feelings of love and cruelty, and also death and darkness, the absurd and the anti-heroic, the middle age and the theory of poetic creation. Time, is an important aspect through which Ramanujan visits the hinterland of memories revealing his strong bonds with the past time spent in India, present in U.S.A and unknown future. He connects his present with the past using a sudden shift of time He points out the zero, where numbers die or begin. He tries to describe this nothing from where we feel away. Keywords: Concept of Time, Zero 411

2 The Concept of Time in the Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan Mrs. Tejaswini D. Patil (Dange) A.K Ramanujan, one of the major Indian poets in English and a sensitive voice to the Indian milieu, has treated various themes in his poems ranging from family relations, childhood memories/ past, time, the search for self/roots, the Indianness- through history, philosophy and culture, mythology, East-West encounter, trans-culturation, fear and pain, alienation to the feelings of love and cruelty, and also death and darkness, the absurd and the anti-heroic, the middle age and the theory of poetic creation. The different facets of human life have been focused on with equal intensity of concentration. Time, is an important aspect through which Ramanujan visits the hinterland of memories revealing his strong bonds with the past time spent in India, present in U.S.A and unknown future. He connects his present with the past using a sudden shift of time as he does in The Striders, Snakes, Towards Simplicity, Time and Time Again, An Old Indian Belief, Love Poem for a Wife- 1,2, Foundling in the Yukon, August, Saturdays, Birthdays, At Zero, Salamanders, Sonnet, In March, Zero (Images), and From Where? In The Striders, he describes the water-bugs in U.S.A. taking a shift to the prophets referring to India, to the ancient past. To connect to the history he uses the image of museum, as in An Old Indian Belief, Time to Stop, and Museum. He speaks of the process of ants to pick the flesh of a dead cobra to the skeleton, the process of time on human beings when people start thinking of blood as fresh paint, It is time to stop going to museum and in Museum (BH: CP: 256), he depicts the horses in the painting frozen at the time still having ability to prance night after night and to trample the flowers in the emperor s gardens. Love Poem or a Wife 1 and 2 (Rel: CP: 85) are about the past memories, his wife s inability to accommodate with them and his unhappy status. in the morning to be himself again the past still there, Many times, he finds that time makes him move from present to past, to present again, as if - Time moves in and out of me a stream of sound, a breeze, 412

3 an electric current as day and night with their specific social activities of the day to the excuses and blames through the night i.e. personal experiences. (BH: CP: 220) and take me far away from home as time moves in and out of me Similarly, in In march, he undertakes the travel within himself at the state of fever cooling his third degree burns to find in himself, That my (his) Amazon flows savage and treacherous through my (his) Africas, undersea forests and peopled seas In some poems, he seems to take a recap of his life at various stages of life as in August, Birthdays, Saturdays and From Where? Vinay Dharwadkar refers to Ramanujan s fictionalized biography, in which the clear instances offer the base for his thinking which is further related to the ancient history of Rome: In his own fictionalized biography a Saturday is ominous because his mother and one of his brothers supposedly passed away on that day of the week, though on different dates and in different places. In historical time, a Saturday is ominous because the ancient Romans set it aside for their games of death at the Coliseum, from which Syrian Christians- his wife s ancestors could escape only by migrating out of imperial Rome. He interprets the poet s psyche as: (CP: xxiv-xxv) In a moment of ironic superstition and saturnine irony, the poet can imagine his own end as a good omen, since dying on a Saturday would have the force of a predestined or over determined event. Birthdays discusses the notion of birthday in one s life which in the later age becomes reminder of the growing age and death. He also compares the time for birth and death as- (BH: CP: 206) Birth takes a long time though death can be sudden And in August, he talks about the various events taken place in the past which include the birthdays of his three brothers and two sisters in August and September, the death of mother in November and fathers having stroke in December. January was hot inside and cold outside, February-March and April were tepid like the coffee/ in grandmother s village house, April to June burned day and night and July was at warresulting in divorce papers. 413

4 In the poem From Where? he narrates the major events of his life. He remembers his first awareness about Human Rights because of his fights over blue kinder garten kites, and then he watches his mother looking at desolate peapod when he had just heard of the World and Hitler s packs. He also remembers the day when his father died on May 14, 1965, and his mother s hour of widowhood took away her identity connected to her husband and mixed her face with the Hindi man, Chaudhuri, who was burnt in the burning wood. He is anxious to know the origin of life-cycle as the images wobble, roll and lay still- Where did they come from? These events are related to his becoming aware of the world around, his personal sphere at every stage of life; but the question seems to be answered by himself in Salamanders which handles the concept of zero remarkably. He points out the zero, where numbers die or begin. He tries to describe this nothing from where we feel away, yet wish for, work towards, / build ships and shape whole cities with? Like Salamanders, we too are satin to the eye and velvet to the touch who burn and eat fire no less than salamanders. So, the answer of the question in From Where? is we, the fleeing mice come from nothing and move towards nothing or zero. Traces also underlines the theme of time where the traces of the origin of this earth are marked through The Tempest, Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe coming to the conclusion- The earth itself has layers of time, shelves of fossils that carry traces of anything that will leave a trace to give themselves a past and a family tree Zero a sub-poem in Images provides multi-religious views about the Zero. They are reported through a dialogue with his father as the Mayans having a glyph for zero, the Hindus thinking it as holy, for Jews the God was one while Buddhist, He was Zero- Zero a complete figure which remains the same, though subtracted by zero and his father a mathematician, saying, zero has no value until it follows a real number! This conceptualization is further exemplified in At Zero.(BH:CP: 200) At Zero, the clocks stop showing time or any movement as the brahmin-widow s face outwardly, her organs don t move or don t show any agitation still inside, there is a plane waiting/ for take-off. This state of mind is, further explained with the example of the Samadhi state of the potter saint Gora Kumbhar from Maharashtra. (BH: 201) at zero, as when the potter- saint singing hymns, dancing his god, kneaded with his feet the soft red clay, burning alive his youngest child. 414

5 The state of mind, when all the world around seems to stop, can be called as Samadhi which is described as zero state by Ramanujan. In the poem, Foundlings in Yukon, he refers to the actual incident in Yukon Territory in northern Canada, one of the coldest inhabited regions on earth, where a group of miners discovered some seeds sealed off by a landslide/ in Pleistocene times. When these seeds were planted, six of them, which were in deep freeze hibernation for at least ten thousand years, took root/ within forty-eight hours/ and sprouted/ a candelabra of eight small leaves. The process of their growth is described in such a way that the time lapsed in hibernation, they wanted to cover-(bh: 196) as it long deep burial had made them hasty for birth and season, for names, genes, for passing on.. these new aborigins binding their time for the miners night light to bring them their dawn, these infants compact with age, older than the oldest things alive having skipped a million falls and the registry of tree rings suddenly younger by an accident of flowering than all their timely descendants The seeds being oldest have broken the time scale to become younger by an accident. Vinay Dharwadkar has pointed out how Ramanujan has mingled the measures of time in a fascinating way- (1994: xxviii) The long movement from Towards Simplicity and Death and the Good citizen to poems like Saturdays, At Zero and Foundlings in the Yukon - which takes us from the clock inside the human body to the earth s elemental clock- strongly questions the common modern assumption that time is linear. As the poems approach human and natural processes from various angles, they uncover forms of repetition, cyclical departure and return, as well as continuity and disruption that dismantle the whole scientific and technocratic myth of progressive temporality 415

6 So, time plays a role of a persona in the life of the poet. He presents various facets of Time in his poetry. Works Cited Dharwadkar, Vinay. Preface, A. K. Ramanujan s Collected Poems, New Delhi, OUP, 1995: Print. Ramanujan. A.K. The Striders. London: Oxford University Press, Print. --- Relations. London, New York: Oxford University Press, Print --- Second Sight. New York: Oxford University Press, Print. --- Collected Poems. New Delhi, OUP, 1995: Print. 416