Nakul Krishna - Reading the Small Print: The literary legacy of an Indian modernist
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.
The essay by AK Ramanujan censored by DU's Academic Council
The essay by AK Ramanujan censored by DU's Academic Council
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...
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Ramanujan’s poetic schooling went well beyond the American modernists he was reading in Chicago. Early in his academic career, he was asked if he could teach Tamil; he protested that he knew Tamil only as a mother tongue, but agreed in the end. Uncomfortable with his lack of facility in classical Tamil, he descended into the basement stacks of Chicago’s Harper Library “in search of an elementary grammar of Old Tamil”. In his narration, the story of what happened next acquires all the qualities of a religious experience:
The University had just acquired a large collection of books from a famous South Indian historian. It was still uncatalogued, even undusted. As I searched, hoping to find a school grammar, I came upon an early anthology of classical poems … I sat down on the floor between the stacks and began to browse. To my amazement, I found the prose commentary transparent; it soon unlocked the old poems for me. As I began to read on, I was enthralled by the beauty and subtlety of what I could read. Here was a world, a part of my language and culture, to which I had been an ignorant heir. Until then, I had only heard of the idiot in the Bible who had gone looking for a donkey and had happened upon a kingdom.
The poems to which he refers were composed almost two thousand years ago in a language recognisable as an ancestor of modern Tamil. They were compiled in eight anthologies and produced in three ‘Sangams’, or literary academies, in Madurai from the 1st to the 4th century AD. They were not, or not primarily, religious in character—there are few references to mythology, and even fewer to any esoteric philosophy. Historians even today know little about the people who wrote them except what the poems themselves allow us to infer: a sense of the landscapes they inhabited and associated with a rich pattern of symbols—the hills, the coasts, the forests, the fields, the desert—and of the details of their everyday lives—romantic love, gossip and war...
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of The Interior Landscape (1966), a collection of Ramanujan’s translations from the Kuruntokai, one of the Sangam anthologies. Ramanujan’s influential afterword made his claim for them with a persuasive elegance:
In their antiquity and in their contemporaneity, there is not much else in any Indian literature equal to these quiet and dramatic Tamil poems. In their values and stances, they represent a mature classical poetry: passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, leanness of line by richness of implication. These poems are not just the earliest evidence of Tamil genius. The Tamils, in their 2,000 years of literary effort, wrote nothing better... Read more
