Family, the Main and Central Metaphor:
Family is given an eminent place in Ramanujan's poetry. In this respect he stands a comparison with Nissim Ezekiel who lives in India and is committed entirely to the Indian reality. Ramanujan, on the other, has been living in U.S.A. for over two decades. He has, thus been living in immediate isolation from his roots. Although he has striven to his best to accommodate himself to his adopted country, he feels an intense yearning for his Indian roots and familial connection.
He is so thoroughly Indian that even his dead body would not assimilate with dust after burial and would not flower into jasmine and fruits in the alien soil. In his famous poem Death and the Good Citizen, he writes with a touch of subtle irony :
“Or abroad
They'll lay me out in a funeral
Parlor, embalm me in pesticide,
bury me in a steel, lock
me so out of nature
till I'm oxidized by left ---
over air, withered by own
vapors into grin and bone.
My tissue will never graft,
will never know new print,
never grow in a culture,
or be mold and compost
for jasmine, eggplant
and the unearthly perfection
of municial oranges.”
Ramanujan's Finding His Roots in Indian Myth and Tradition:
Distance lends historical charm and nostalgia to his family poems. He looks across an alien culture and a vast ocean, to find his roots in Indian myth In Ramanujan's case apparent “alienation from the immediate environment " has meant “continuity with an older ideal”, i.e., with Indian historical tradition. Past always haunts his poetry. He cannot build history out of an unhistorical past. Ramanujan relates his personal and familial conflicts and frustrations to the Indian intellectual environment, both present and past. History for Ramanujan contemporizes itself largely through the intricate network of familial relations with the figures of the father and mother dominating the interior landscape, a parental authoritarianism with atrophies, ironically, the poet's marital relations.
In poem after poem, Ramanujan remembers his childhood and boyhood and presents his experiences and events derived from Southern India. His memories of his past, and especially of his relatives, figure in his poems most prominently. He recalls his mother, his father, his wife and several other relatives.
Ramanujan's Recollections of His Mother:
In the poem entitled Of Mothers, Among Other Things, the poet conjures up various images of his mother from the dark vortices of memory. He remembers his mother's youth when she wore silk garments and ear - rings studded with diamonds. The diamonds shone and glittered, as if radiating light. Then he remembers his mother's running back from the rain to the cradles in which lay her babies who were crying because she had left them. The hands of the mother had become wet in the rain and they resembled a wet eagle's two wrinkled and twisted feet (or claws), with one claw having been severely damaged because it had got caught in a garden - trap which had been laid there to catch a rat which had become a nuisance. He remembers that the saris of his mother no longer clung to her flesh as they used to do when she had a strong and robust body. Now due to being old, her saris hung upon the body loosely just as a bird's feather. The poet's recollections of his mother fill him with distress and pain.
Poet's Recollections about His Wife, Her Father and Other Relations:
Love Poem for a Wife - 1, like several other poems by Ramanujan shows his interest in family life. This poem is an exposure by the poet of the deficiencies, shortcomings, and faults of the woman whom he has married. He broods over the emotional alienation with his wife, with whom he was married long ago. He could not find emotional fulfilment with his wife. He narrates nostalgically various incidents about the early years of his married life. He tells about his father who has been dead for the past several years and, so far as the wife's father is concerned, the old man is no longer irritable but has softened in his temper. He reminisces one evening when a number of their cousins met together and kept gossiping till at night. The poet was envious of his wife's childhood because she used to enjoy dog rides and the wonderful stories she told of her seven crazy aunts. The knowledge of his wife's affair with a Muslim boy made the poet jealous and unhappy. He remembers how she and her brother James started a drag out fight regarding the location of a bathroom in their grandfather's house in Alleppy. In this discussion he and his sister in - law were ignored.
His History of the Ancient Family:
In the poem entitled Small Scale Reflections On A Great House, the poet reminisces about the peculiar family house, where things that came into the house never went out. The new things got completely lost into things that came earlier and thus the historic continuity was maintained. He presents a bizarre account of books in the library, which were brought in and were never read. The poet remembers how epilepsy which ran in the family and passed on from generation to generation. Sons - in - law who forgot their mothers, continued to stay in the House to check accounts or work as tutors or children. There were women too who came as wives from other houses, and then stayed in the great family house for ever. There was another category of things which went out but which always returned to the Great House. Even ideas left the house and came back to the House in the form of rumours. Beggars who came in singing or their violin, stayed in for their bawdy songs. Daughters who were married, returned as widows because they were married to short - lived idiots. The sons of the Great House ran away as boys, got married and sired children. They returned to the house in the form of their children who performed various services for elders in the family. The poet very skilfully mingles the comic and the pathetic in the account of the occasional return of the nephews who had won laurels on the battle - field, and who ultimately returned to the great house in the form of corpses on a perfectly good chatty afternoon.
Poet's Depicting His Father:
In the poem entitled Obituary, the poet remembers his father long after his death and thinks over the legacy he left for his sons and daughters. His father did not leave a huge bank balance and other material possessions for his heirs. He left no legacy except a table full of dust and papers, left debts to be repaid, a sickly bed - wetting grandson and an old decaying house. The poet describes his father's poverty, the observance of social rituals which needed money. The poet exposes the futility of social customs. Remembering his father, the poet says that he did many things in life, but he did not actually do them, rather they happened to him. He tells about the birth of his father who was born through a Caesarean operation in a slum. He also describes his father's death in the fruit market.
Depicting Various Members of Poet's Family and Objects connected with His Childhood:
In the poem entitled History, the poet vividly remembers the day when his Great Aunt died. He had his own childlike impressions of that day. He had clear and sharp memory of the Great Aunt. All happenings of the day of her death were clearly imprinted on his memory. The poet's opinion about the Aunt changed after the conversation with his mother. On the day of her death the child poet was in the house. He was playing and moving about like other children. He saw his dead aunt “laid out, face incurious / eyes yet unshut”. The poet came to know about the greed and callousness of the aunt's two daughters, who were blood of her blood and flesh of her flesh. Other relatives too talked of the dead aunt's will and what they would get out of it. There is a tinge of satire, and irony in the description of the close relatives’ greed who were concerned about their share in her property and were totally indifferent to the dead aunt. The poet sarcastically exposes skeletons in the cupboard of his family.
Depiction of Poet's Mother and His Own:
In the poem Snakes, the poet thinks of a basketful of cobras which were brought into his house by the snakes man (or the snake charmer) at the behest of his mother who fed the snakes with milk and watched them suck the milk from the saucer. The speaker's mother belonged to that category of Hindu women who never killed a snake and who, on the contrary, offered milk to them as a kind of religious ceremony. But while the poet's mother thus fed the cobras, the poet, who is evidently describing an experience of his days of boyhood, screamed with terror. Having seen the cobras during the day, the speaker's sleep at night was disturbed by his dreams of them. He imagined that he was seeing ghosts. Then he felt panicly as he imagined his foot trampling upon a snake and crushing it to death. This act of his brought him complete freedom from fear, and he then imagined frogs jumping upon the dead snake and flies hovering upon it.
The Poet's Experience of Boyhood:
The poem entitled Breaded Fish describes an experience of the poet whose desire to eat roasted fish was on one occasion completely crushed and frustrated. The housekeeper, who might have been the poet's mother had prepared some breaded fish for him, and had even thrust one piece into his mouth with the very rod on which it had been roasted. This poem is based upon an actual personal experience of the poet when he was yet a boy. It shows that a strong desire in a human being, even if the desire be a wholesome one, may be frustrated by a recollection of something horrifying or grim. The poem shows indeed the poet's great talent for condensing his material. In just twelve lines he has compressed certain human feelings, an awful picture of a dead woman, a picture of the sea - beach with its sand, and the picture of a snake on a heath, apart from the picture of the mother trying to force the young lad to eat the breaded fish which he is resisting.
Thus, ultimately it can be observed that Ramanujan's poetry is full of family relations. His memories of his past, and especially of his relatives, figure in his poems most prominently.
