| I | IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIMES that it took a dreary battle in one of India’s interminable ‘culture wars’ to make AK Ramanujan’s name familiar to readers of the broadsheet newspapers. Someone decided that it was a bad idea for a scholarly essay of Ramanujan’s from 1991 about the many tellings of the Ramayana story in South and Southeast Asia to be on the undergraduate syllabus for history students at Delhi University. The essay was removed from the syllabus in October 2011, and sure enough, the usual round of angry protests and smug op-eds followed. Now, it is easy enough to see why the essay, with its narratives of Ramayana traditions that show a striking irreverence for the figure of Rama, could prove a source of controversy. But it is a shame how little was made of the teachable moment even by Ramanujan’s academic defenders. Shortly after the university decided to exclude the essay from its syllabus, the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in the Indian Express: The exclusion of A.K. Ramanujan’s great essay from the syllabus of the Delhi University highlights the ways in which both the Left and the Right have reduced a great tradition to an impoverished political totem. In the process, both have elided larger questions. The deeper crisis is that our public culture no longer has even the minimal intellectual resources to engage in a serious debate over different “meanings” of Ramayana. The invocation by the Left of a diversity of traditions is technically correct. But in this invocation, diversity is merely a formal gesture. We like the fact that there are diverse Ramayanas. But we don’t want to have the space to discuss any one of them. This was not the first time Ramanujan’s work, which spanned five decades, two countries, and at least three disciplines, had been reduced to its political significance. In July 1966, Ramanujan, then teaching at the University of Chicago and fresh from the excellent reviews of his first book of poems in English, wrote an excited letter to his friend and editor Bonnie Crown at the Asia Society in New York. Last week I read a Kannada novel which moved me more than anything I have read in that language. It is by a young writer and was published a couple of months ago. It is about a sinful Brahman’s death in a Brahman colony, and the problem is who should perform the funeral rights [sic] of the sinner. This involves the entire Brahman community and raises all sorts of complex and ultimate questions. I would like to translate it, though it is going to be very difficult because of the interweaving of Brahmanical mythology and daily ritual in the telling of the story. But if this is translated I am sure it will be important as it is intense, complex, rich and absolutely authentic. I hope to write to the author who is a good friend of mine, now in England on a doctoral fellowship. Are you interested? Crown was very interested in the novel—its Kannada title was Samskara—and Ramanujan wrote to its author, UR Ananthamurthy in Birmingham: I have thought of writing to you many times, especially after reading your recent novel which moved me greatly … I would like to know whether you would permit me to translate your new novel into English? … I hope you have had an exciting and creative time in England. … With every good wish … The translation was published in 1976, subtitled ‘A Rite for a Dead Man’, one of the many meanings of the Sanskrit word Ananthamurthy had chosen for a title, and followed by an afterword, one of Ramanujan’s shrewdest essays of criticism. He was enthralled by the predicament of the novel’s central character, Praneshacharya—a learned Brahmin thrown by a series of disquieting events into an unfamiliar form of self-reflection. As Ramanujan saw it, in the person of Praneshacharya, “brahminism questions itself in a modern existential mode (a mode rather alien to it, in fact); and the questioning leads him into new and ordinary worlds.” Having committed the ultimate infraction of sleeping with a lower-caste woman, he is forced to confront questions for which his learning provides no simple answers. “Will he, can he, ever integrate it with his old ways, his past samskara? We do not know.” Ramanujan’s translation was serialised in the Illustrated Weekly of India, then edited by Khushwant Singh, and immediately misunderstood. One letter to the editor described the book as a “witch-hunt for the brahmin … written in supercilious, deprecating, ridiculing and pontificating style”. Of course, the book deserved none of these charges, the author’s qualified sympathy for his Brahmin characters and their world making it something quite different from a work of political satire. The letter-writer appeared unable to tell a novel from a polemic, to see that Ananthamurthy’s aims were not political but ethical. For his part, Ramanujan was indifferent to the novel’s politics. In his mind, Samskara was neither pro- nor anti-Brahmin: it was concerned with the fate of the self in the modern world. As Ramanujan’s afterword had it, we see Praneshacharya mutating, changing from a fully evolved socialized brahmin at one with his tradition towards a new kind of person; choosing himself, individuating himself, and “alienating” himself. We are left “anxious, expectant”, like the Acharya himself at the end of the novel. It was natural that Samskara would move Ramanujan. The world of the novel, too full of mythic symbolism to count as strictly realistic, was directly continuous with the world of Ramanujan’s early poetry. The narrator of ‘Still Another View of Grace’, the most resonant of the poems in his first collection The Striders (1966), is introduced as having been “Bred Brahmin among singers of shivering hymns” and “shudder[ing] to the bone at hungers that roam the street / beyond the constable’s beat.” The poem then trudges to its violent, brooding conclusion: But there She stood … and gave me a look. Commandments crumbled as in my father’s past. Her tumbled hair suddenly known as silk in my angry hand, I shook a little and took her, behind the laws of my land. Is this a political poem? An attack on Brahminism? The question is beside the point. The projects that dominated Ramanujan’s life—poetry in English and Kannada, translation from Tamil and Kannada, collecting the folklore of South India—were political only by their deliberate avoidance of politics. When Ramanujan died, 20 years ago, the result of an adverse reaction to being under anaesthesia for a minor surgical operation, the flag in the main quadrangle of the University of Chicago, where he had taught and worked for the previous 30 years, flew at half-mast—a recognition by his Chicago colleagues of the magnitude of their loss. At the funeral, an early poem, ‘Prayers to Lord Murugan’, was read out: Lord of the headlines, help us read the small print. Lord of the sixth sense, give us back our five senses. Ramanujan’s was not a system of thought—he mostly abhorred the systematic—but a way of being, and a way of seeing. There was no philosophy separate from what is expressed in the poems he wrote and the life he lived. And ‘Prayers to Lord Murugan’ came closer than most of his poetry to expressing, if not quite his philosophy, what we might call his sensibility. caravanmagazine.in/reportage/reading-small-print#sthash.hZ4ewMCP.gbpl
Posted on: Mon, 12 Aug 2013 06:03:02 +0000
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