Three decades after his demise, AK Ramanujan, noted Left-wing poet who had courted controversy through his essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” is making a “comeback” next month. A collection of his hitherto unpublished poems is being brought out by Penguin Random House and the literary world is anxiously waiting for the same.
Titled “Soma”, the poems were discovered and collected by Guillermo Rodriguez, a Spanish intellectual who was infatuated with Ramanujan’s avant-garde style of writing and Krishna Ramanujan, son of the late poet, while sifting through Ramanujan’s archives.
Peter Modoli, Associate Vice- President, Penguin Random House, said in a release on Saturday that the series of unpublished ‘Soma’ poems” differed in style and theme from Ramanujan’s earlier works. Soma is the mysterious plant used by vedic priests to extract ambrosia, an intoxicating drink. Much has been written about the significance of Soma in Rigvedic ritual and Ramanujan used the “divine concoction” to elaborate the culture as he perceived under the drink.
Ramanujan was no ordinary scholar and had proficiency in English, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Sanskrit. The poems he wrote had smooth sailing through the waters of conventional literature as well as modern poetry (where many poets fell by the wayside). ‘Soma’ has, besides the poems, a collection of essays and an interview the late poet had with Malayalam literature’s enfant terrible K Ayyappa Panicker.
The occasion assumes significance because it is rare nowadays for even connoisseurs of literature to remember the post-modern writers within years of their death. “Puritans are likely to disown Ramanujan for his stance on Ramayana but the truth is that he was bold enough to travel in an untested field,” said Sreekumar, Assistant Professor of Sanskrit, Sree Sankara Sanskrit University.
An author who portrays Sri Rama and Seetha as siblings and makes the critics fall in line is not an ordinary person, he pointed out. Interestingly, other than Valmiki Ramayana, Rama Charitha Manas and Kamba Ramayana, all other forms of the epic failed to cut any ice with the readers. That’s what makes Ramanujan distinct from others.
While Soma focuses on Ramanujan’s experimental poems and his creative mindset as an expatriate in America in the 1970s and early 1980s, it also provides a glimpse into a fascinating period in Western Indology when Indian philosophies and traditions were debated, some of which became so ingrained that they influence contemporary culture to this day.
The decision by Delhi University to remove the essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ from the syllabus had created a furore in academic circles with a section of intelligentsia launching an agitation across India demanding freedom of expression.
Ramanujan’s essay ‘Hummel’s Miracle: The Search for Soma’ explores the connections between the poems and the quest for the plant’s identity from the 1960s to the present. ‘The “Ordinary Mystery” Trip: Soma in Ramanujan’s Poetry’ by Guillermo Rodriguez dives deep into Ramanujan’s layered perspective on Soma.
