Paper 14; Module 12; E Text (A) Personal Details Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof. Tutun University of Hyderabad Mukherjee Paper Coordinator Prof. Asha Kuthari Guwahati University Chaudhuri, Content Writer/Author Abdul Mubid Gauhati University (CW) Islam, Content Reviewer (CR) Dr. Anjali Daimari, Dept. of English, Gauhati University Language Editor (LE) Dr. Dolikajyoti Assistant Professor, Gauhati Sharma, University (B) Description of Module Item Description of module Subject Name English Paper name Indian Writing in English Module title Memory/Voice Module ID MODULE 12 Module 12 Memory/ Voice Introducing the poets: Attipak Krishnaswami Ramanujan was born into an orthodox Hindu Brahmin family in 1929 in Mysore. After receiving his education at Maharaja’s College, Mysore, he went to the United States in 1962 with a Fulbright Scholarship in the prestigious Indiana University. He then obtained a Ph.D in Linguistics in 1963. Later, he became the professor of Dravidian linguistics in the University of Chicago. Ramanujan’s literary tastes had their origins in the multi-lingual culture of his family which familiarised him with the literary traditions of the South such as Kannada and Tamil besides Sanskrit and English. Ramanujan’s poetry is basically philosophical in outlook as one finds a fusion of the contemporary scientific outlook with the peculiarly profound Hindu awareness of the spiritual and the metaphysical in human nature. He consciously keeps himself away from elaborating sentiments in his poems which intensifies the repressed quality of his poetry as there is always a deliberate intent to keep a powerful inner turmoil under check. The precise and tight structure of his poems gives the idea of a quiet tone that is further beautified by the use of minimal imagery. His published works include The Striders (1966), Relations (1971), Selected Poems (1976) and Second Sight (1986). Apart from poetry, he has also co-edited The Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry with the additional credit of being a fine Tamil translator which is to be found in Fifteen Tamil Poems (1965), The Interior Landscape (1967), Speaking of Siva (1972), Samskara (1976), Poems of Love and War (1984) and a famous novel by U.R.Anantha Murthy. He received the prestigious Padma Shri award in 1976. He settled in Chicago where he continued teaching till his death in July 1993. Breaded Fish Specially for me, she had some breaded fish; even thrust a blunt-headed smelt into my mouth; and looked hurt when I could neither sit nor eat, as a hood of memory like a coil on a heath opened in my eyes: a dark half-naked length of woman, dead on the beach in a yard of cloth, dry, rolled by the ebb, breaded by the grained indifference of sand. I headed for the shore, my heart beating in my mouth. (A.K.Ramanujan) Critical Appreciation In the poem Breaded Fish, Ramanujan recaptures and gives expression to the way he recoiled at the sight of a breaded fish served to him by a lady who had prepared the dish especially for the poet. Ramanujan’s treatment of nature in his poems has a revolting nature and is never serene and pure like that of Sarojini Naidu. In this poem, nature is first represented by the fish meant for consumption and later by an extended metaphor of the cobra and its devilish nature bent on action. Although the fish is edible and common to both an Indian and a Western, there is a difference in the way it was prepared for consumption. This is evident from the manner of sprinkling bread crumbs on the fish before baking which clearly indicates that the lady in question is Western. It was therefore not similar to the way the poet was habituated to having fish. Besides, it was not only the preparation of the fish according to western appetite and taste but also the look of the dish that prejudiced the poet from having the breaded fish. According to the speaker (who in all probability is the poet himself), the sight of the dish was as horrible and gruesome as the sight of a dark half-naked woman lying dead on the beach which he had witnessed on a previous occasion. The intensity of the gruesome look of the half-naked woman “...a dark half-naked/ length of woman, dead/ on the beach in a yard of cloth” contributes to the degree of the poet’s abhorrence at the sight of the fish. The poet’s intention to sketch a horrid picture of the breaded fish assumes greater dignity when he describes the flashing image of the dead woman screening his memory in terms of the hood of a cobra. The flash of the memory was as quick as the rapidity with which cobras set their hoods into action. The emphasis is intensified further when he compares this memory to a “coil on a heath”. Just as the fish is sprinkled with bread crumbs, likewise the body of the dead woman too was disjointedly covered by a yard of cloth and sand. The expression “breaded by the grained indifference of sand” refers to those tiny sand particles or granules that appear on the surface of the body and that are indifferent to the lady. And it is this indifference that the poet locates in his picturization of the breaded fish. That he finally headed for the shore with his heart beating in his mouth establishes the contrast between the East and the West not only in their food habits but also in whatever constitutes social milieu and culture. The observation that Ramanujan’s Breaded Fish is a recollection in emotionalised untranquiltiy is worth the study as the poet’s emphasis is on one of his past experiences having its bearings on the present. The emotion is not tranquil because neither the sight of the dead woman’s body nor the look of the breaded fish generates feelings of rehabilitation. Both the sights trigger horror and disgruntle the poet. The contention that the memory of a moment of horror can be transmuted into a disturbingly vivid poem is thus firmly established. From the technical angle, Ramanujan’s untranquil emotion is clothed in an imagery that shocks and frightens. The images in the expressions “hood of a cobra”, “coil on a heath”, “half-naked woman”, “yard of cloth”, “rolled by the ebb”, “grained indifference of sand”, “heart beating in my mouth” are interwoven to sketch a horrible and uncanny picture of the breaded fish. Introducing the poet: Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in February 4, 1949. He was educated in the University of Kashmir, University of Delhi and upon arrival in the United States in 1975, in the Universities of Arizona and Pennsylvania. It was in the University of Delhi that Shahid Ali befriended the noted Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh and the bond of friendship grew so strong that in his parting moments Shahid Ali entrusted Ghosh to remember him through the ‘living records of memory’. Hence, to commemorate the eternal bond of their friendship, Ghosh wrote a moving essay “The Ghat of the Only World” which is now prescribed as a text in the Indian high schools. Shahid Ali was a poet known for the pure lyricism that beautified his poetry. Being greatly influenced by Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Begum Akhtar and Firdausi, one finds a true blend of Urdu and Persian poetry in his work. It was in fact Shahid Ali who made an honest attempt to introduce the Urdu genre of the Ghazal as a significant creative genre in English poetry. In a sense, Shahid Ali’s poetry breathes the finer air of the quintessential artistic expression that goes to the making of an aesthetic experience of reading world literature. His published works include Bone Sculptor (1972), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other poems (1979), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), A Walk Through the Yellow pages (1987), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003) and The Veiled Suit: Collected Poems (2009). He passed away leaving a void in the artistic world on December 8, 2001 after being diagnosed as suffering from brain tumour. Learning Urdu Form a district near Jammu, (Dogri stumbling through his Urdu) he comes, the victim of a continent broken in two in nineteen forty-seven. He mentions the minced air he ate while men dissolved in alphabets of blood, in syllables of death, of hate. ‘I only remember half the word that was my village. The rest I forget. My memory belongs to the line of blood across which my friends dissolved into bitter stanzas of some poet.’ He wanted me to sympathize. I couldn’t, I was only interested in the bitter couplets which I wanted him to explain. He continued, ‘And I who knew Mir backwards, every couplet from the Diwan-e-Ghalib saw poetry dissolve into letters of blood.’ He Now remembers nothing while I find Ghalib at the crossroads of language, refusing to move to any side, masquerading as a beggar to see my theatre of kindness. (Agha Shahid Ali) Critical Appreciation: Agha Shahid Ali’s constant preoccupation with the theme of “dislocation” and “identity’ is best reflected in this poem where the poet tries to assert the prime significance of a language as not just a means of reciprocity between people or groups of people in the communication of ideas or correspondence but also to formulate the historicity of a socio-political climate that has resulted in the fragmentation of identity along the prescribed rules of borderline conflict.