Gestures

The following interview was in the main conducted in 1970, at the University of Chicago, by CHIRANTAN KULSHRESTHA.

IT seems to me that the fact of your writing poetry in English in America raises certain interesting questions about your attitude as a poet to the audiences of two different cultural milieus. On the one hand, you belong to a representative group of Indian writers who have chosen English as a medium of their art and produced a body of writing with a colour and character all its own. In a way you are part of this group and these writers are your compeers. On the other hand, you have lived in America a long time, have published here, and to identify you exclusively with the Indo-Anglians seems a little far-fetched. In this sense your real compeers are contemporary American poets, since very probably you are not unaware of the experiments they are conducting in their techniques, and even unconsciously their work affects your orientation as a poet. I would like to know how you react to this situation.

Opinions are only a small expression of one's attitudes. They are an uncertain, often rigid expression. One is more, and often less, than one's opinions. And they don't often match other things in oneself. So please read them as gestures.

Now to your question: You speak of "Indian writers have chosen English". The language of one's writing is not a matter of choice. Poems don't come to you abstractly and then you ask: "Shall I write in Tamil, English, or Kannada? Which is the best language for this?" I think a lot of the controversy about Indian writing in English is mistaken. Some Indians wish to write in English and others accuse them of writing in English; both of them seem to believe there is a choice in the matter. The question is not whether you wish to write or not, but whether you can. If you can, you will. And if you do, you must be judged by results.

Why do I write in English? Many reasons - none of them literary. The simplest and most mentionable are (a) my long years of education in English and (b) having lived away from my first- language areas for nearly 20 years, making English my chief language of conversation with my peers and even my family. Though by a curious perversity I read Tamil constantly in the Kannada area, Kannada in the Tamil area, studied and taught English in India, and India and Indian languages in the U.S. Such perversity, I suppose, serves to keep alive the immediately absent parts of me.

Now, because the selection of the medium of your poetry is not really a matter of choice but a certain kind of inner compulsion, would it mean that you were not confronted with the problem an Indian writing in English is usually confronted with - the problem of conveying a certain native sensibility in a foreign language because of the differences in nuances?

The language of a poem is not a matter of conscious problem solving and New Year's Day resolutions. If you have a problem, it shows in your work. No amount of thinking about grammar and idiom can resolve these problems because you are not putting together a composition. You are actively composing - or decomposing, Indians writing in English are mostly writing in a second language, and it raises several questions. A second language clearly has disadvantages for a writer - some of them disastrous. To enumerate a few: Usually a second language is not learned in childhood. When one writes in a second language not learned in childhood, superimposed on a first, one may effectively cut oneself off from one's childhood. A great deal of what we are in life and in writing goes back to that period when language was being formed inside, forming us, forming the world of concepts, the style of our perceptions. No man can deny or insulate that source of his sensibility without peril.

How did you escape it?

Thanks, but I don't know if I've escaped it. A great deal of Indian writing is upstairs English, platform English, idiom-book English, newspaper English. With no slang available, they are stuck in a "register", a formality, a learned posture. It often reminds me of certain deep sea fish that can only live in a narrow band adapted to a certain depth, they can go neither up nor down - and if by chance they are thrown up to the surface, they burst their bellies - they can't stand the change in pressure. A second language speaker often speaks and spells much more correctly than a first language speaker - see the errors in Keats' or Yeats' letters. Such "rectified language" isn't always a good thing for a creative writer. One of the articles in a recent Indian Literature issue says this situation has changed in recent Indian English poetry. I don't see the change. Nothing like the efforts of Raja Rao in Kanthapura to write a Kannada English, or of Desani in Hatterr to write a full-blooded comic Indian English, has happened in Indian English verse. Even those two efforts haven't stuck; they were successful freaks. First- rate, especially Desani - yet, a freak.

Uncollected Poems and Prose: A. K. Ramanujan, edited by Molly Daniels, Ramanujan and Keith Harrison, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 107, Rs. 325.

* * *

Waiting

Waiting for a friend from 
Milwaukee
to pick me up on Sunday
I looked out the window. 

A family of four, young bearded father,
tall mother slim in white shorts,
son practising imaginary baseball
on the sidewalk as he walks ahead,
and daughter, small and busy, trying
cartwheels on the strip of new grass
between sidewalk and the car-
ridden road. They were waiting
for nothing, while I waited, as always
for someone to arrive from somewhere
and take me somewhere else.
As I watched them
turn into 57th street, I too waitedfor nothing for a moment. 

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