Transcript: AK Ramanujan: The Isolation of a Poet

Do you know this man?

His name is AK Ramanujan. A former Padma Shri awardee, he was one of modern India’s greatest intellectual exports to the west who made folklore accessible to us back home thanks to his study in Linguistics and interest in poetry, social anthropology and Indian folk legends.

Thanks to him, we know more about the pluralistic tradition of the Ramayana after reading his essay- 300 Ramayanas. He was also instrumental in opening up the world of Lingayat Vachana Poetry in Kannada to the world with his translations along with other significant period works from Tamil, Telugu and Sanskrit.

AK Ramanujan was also a celebrated poet. His book- Collected Poems- won the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1999.

But there is a massive difference in knowing about a man and KNOWING a man. The human side to Public Figures has often been shrouded in mystery. We realised this when the good folks at Penguin gifted us a sample of their publication- Journeys.

The book is a collection of AK Ramanujan’s journal entries into a loose diary maintained through the course of his life. Edited by his son Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez, the book has evolved into something more than just an artistic academic’s musings. It is a vast compendium of sorts, delving into topics that are intimidating in their scope; some of them being cultural observations and critiques, linguistics, history, academics, poetics and art, philosophy, etc.

But the architects of this book have taken great care to never allow these topics to overshadow the stage-light projected on the writer. AK Ramanujan is still very much the subject matter throughout the book as you learn more about him through his repertoire of knowledge and his personal reflections on the purpose and meaning of his life, his relationships, his art and his academics.

Ultimately, like all empaths blessed with an intuition out of their control, he grapples with the human condition and the problems posed by its existentialism.

A brief window into this internal conflict is visible in the following excerpt from the book-

*Re-reading the above- sickening that one’s thoughts, cravings and self-reproaches have remained the same, said in the self-same words, while everything in one’s circumstances have changed — marriage, children, divorce, travel, a career of twenty years, new intimacies, suicides and ageing of friends, books written.*

But when we read his diary entries, we were able to empathise with the well-spring of its psycho-narrative. AK Ramanujan clearly took his writing seriously and poured out his soul in each sitting. What moved us the most was how a lot of it came from a place of isolation.

Isolation.

Isolation is a popular motif in the legends of intellectuals throughout human history. That’s because a lot of what they have had to say during their lives was way ahead of their time. Such intellectuals have always been ahead of the curve. Their zeitgeist has always arrived long after they have passed on.

Due to this lack of understanding surrounding their discourses, they have rarely managed to enter public imagination. Most of their work has been against the prevailing dogma of their age. And this has always been used to great advantage by men in power circles hungry for political mileage. They have always had these intellectuals castigated, exiled or worse.

Socrates. Jesus Christ. Galileo. Leonardo da Vinci. Whether forced by external circumstances or borne out of personal choices, they have all faced isolation during the pursuit of their arts.

And so it is not surprising that Ramanujan felt the strain of isolation quite early on in his life. Having been raised in a conservative Brahmin household that didn’t quite understand the form that his early sensitive, artistic disposition was taking, it isn’t surprising to note how he eventually turned inward to confide in his diary.

From his journal entries recorded in the book, AK Ramanujan’s anxiety about isolation continued well into his life up until his untimely death. The window into what he was going though can be best viewed through his conscious recording of his dreams in his journal after 1987.

Check out this excerpt which lays out his artistic isolation-

*Dream. A child wants to write poetry, gets lost in the woods. Father goes to bail him out.*

Or his social isolation-

*A Chicago landlord refuses to renew my lease. (I have to leave this apartment in Ann Arbor; and I have no place in Chicago of my own.)*

Or even an isolation from his own self-

*Dream. Someone came into my room and it was me, and my mouth was full of blood when I spat a cupful in the sink.*

But what moved us especially was how isolated he felt intellectually in India during the early parts of his life. He did not need to record his dreams to make it amply clear.

Check out this incisive excerpt recorded as early as 1959.

*I was telling a young Australian how isolated an Indian intellectual is- with 16.6 per cent who can read at all, and an overlapping 20 per cent who are in cities like him, and only about 2 per cent English-knowing, and still fewer having his rationalist views; with fathers highly educated and mothers ignorant but strong in their gold over him; [with] every prudent man having a caste and insisting on it, and he having none, [but] not modern enough to be entirely abreast of Western Ideas, because books don’t come too fast to India.*

These problems are still faced by the intellectually inclined and the curious today in India.

But in a different form along the same analogy.

The ignorance of Ramanujan’s time has given way to an intolerance in ours. His own essay on the plurality of the Ramayana tradition is its posthumous casualty. Censorship, Social Justice Pacifism, Militant Radicalism and absence of Constitutional Absolutism today has weakened the voices of Artists, Academics, Speculative Philosophers, Journalists and Activists alike.

Also- the majority of their consumers opt for populist cultural satisfactions in Bollywood and Social Media which require low attention spans and even lower intellectual depths.

The other problem is that Mainstream Media today is partisan. The fourth estate has become private property and propagandist machines. They field paid panellists who parrot the same narrative on different channels. They form an exclusive coterie, and play out a neat little game to hook our viewership. This drives rating points for media outlets.

Civil society has never been weaker.

We face a cultural emergency in India today; it’s something not many seem to be worried about. Salman Rushdie, Tasleema Nasreen, MM Kalburgi, MF Hussain, Narendra Dabholkar, Gauri Lankesh among countless others have either been exiled by death threats or have succumbed to them.

All of these factors have come together to dilute the vitriol in art, academics and public discourse in favour of political correctness, mass commercialism and self-censorship out of fear.

Dissidence is the need of the hour. India’s argumentative spirit needs to be revived.

We need colour back in our culture.

Sadly, we face the same intellectual isolation AK Ramanujan felt 60 years ago.

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Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZUzuOSQmv0