The Verse and Vision of A.K. Ramanujan

The present study on A.K. Ramanujan the distinguished Indian English poet, is primarily inspired by an awareness of certain unfocussed and unexplored areas of his creativity. It adopts an eastern centric view of his creativity in the English language, while it does not deny creative influences on him of western authorities.
Ramanujan’s poetic nature is pre-dominantly non-devotional, critical and yet culturally conscious. His grasp of Indian bhakti poetry appears prejudicially incognizant of the deep experiential content basis even to the virasaivalvacana poetry, and problematizes the enabling strength of the Great Sanskrit Tradition. In such endeavours Ramanujan attempts to situate himself with a sense of belonging in indigenous literary traditions, characteristically India, and to locate his individual identity basically in a differentiated space. Importantly, his love poetry projects a creative fusion of the Ardhanariswara principle and the Lawrencean Mystique of Love: this has made way for a couple of exotic love poems, which none among Indian poets in English has so far matched or excelled. The study appropriately suggests that his vision of the self comes close to Bergson’s elan vital. But his Bergsonianism is complicated with the absorption of a Buddhist normative allied with comic irony, and makes his creative mind rather ambivalent, though not estranged or alienated, from the essential Indian ethos. Ramanujan’s creativity is steeped in intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and post modernity. His stylistic performance, ironically suffused, is an integral part of his creative consciousness, and informed by a sustained counter-culture vision at one level and allied to a bipolar vision of the ambivalent wholeness on the other.