Mirrors and Fragments. An Investigation into A. K. Ramanujan's Poetry

Abstract

My work will be concerned with the life and works of A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), I will especially take into account his poetry works. A. K. Ramanujan is an Indian writer who belongs to that fundamental generation of poets who set the basis to what we now call Indian post-colonial literature in English language. Beyond being a writer and a poet, he was a translator, an essayist, a folklorist. He was professor of linguistics in the University of Chicago and lived the most part of his life in the U.S. Being born in an Indian environment and having spent his life in a Western context made him developed a list of alienations that will form the main themes of his poems. From his first publication he reveals his high sensibility about his Indian experience where family subjects and private memories converge, but he also shows conflict and a sense of detachment from his familial environment. Memory is one of the recurring themes in his poems which he handles with both sense of irony and scepticism. His poems are also about fears, anxieties, personal experience and the search for the self swinging between an alien land and a distant home. I will also briefly compare his work as a translator with that of a poet, and trace those elements that influenced his poetry output. I will conclude summing up the points that make A. K. Ramanujan a post-colonial and a postmodern poet.