Several Characteristics Of Ramanujan's Poetry example essay topic

Nissim Ezekiel (December 24 1924 - January 9, 2004) was a poet, playwright and art critic. He was considered the foremost Indian writer in English English-language of his time. Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Books by Nissim Ezekiel 4 Some of his well-known poems Early life Ezekiel was born in Bombay (now Mumbai Mumbai). Ezekiel's father was a botany professor and his mother, principal of her own school. He belonged to Mumbai's small 'Bene Israel' Jewish community. In 1947, Ezekiel did his Masters in literature from Wilson College, University of Mumbai.

In 1947-48, he taught English literature at Khalsa College, Mumbai and published literary articles. After dabbling in radical politics for a while, he sailed to London in November 1948. He studied philosophy at Birkbeck College. After a three and half years stay, Ezekiel worked his way home as a deck-scrubber aboard a cargo ship carrying arms to Indochina. He married Daisy Jacob in 1952. In the same year, Fortune press (London) published his first collection of poetry, A Time to Change.

He joined The Illustrated Weekly of India as an assistant editor in 1953 and stayed there for two years. Soon after his return from London, he published his second book of verse Sixty Poems. For the next 10 years, he also worked as a broadcaster on arts and literature for All India Radio. Career He published his book The Unfinished Man in 1960. After working as an advertising copywriter and general manager of a picture frame company (1954-59), he co-founded the literary monthly Imprint, in 1961.

He became art critic of The Times of India The-Times-of-India (1964-66) and edited Poetry India (1966-67). From 1961 to 1972, he headed the English department of Mithibai College, Mumbai. The Exact Name, his fifth book of poetry was published in 1965. During this period he had short tenures as visiting professor at University of Leeds (1964) and University of Chicago (1967). In 1967 while in America, he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, probably as a means to expand his writing skills. He finally stopped using them in 1972.

In 1969, Writers Workshop, Calcutta published his The Three Plays. A year later, he presented an art series of ten programs for Mumbai television. On the invitation of the US government, he went on a month long tour to the US in November, 1974. In 1976, he translated poetry from Marathi, and co-edited a fiction and poetry anthology.

His poems The Night Of The Scorpion, and The Patriot, are used as study material in Indian and British schools. Ezekiel received the Sahitya Akademi cultural award in 1983 and the Padma Shri in 1988. He was professor of English and reader in American literature at University of Mumbai during the 1990's, and secretary of the Indian branch of the international writers' organization PEN. After a prolonged battle with Alzheimer's disease, Nissim Ezekiel died in Mumbai, January 9 2004 at age 79. When he began his writing career in the late 1940's, his use of formal and correct English was criticized, given its association with colonialism. After 1965, he began experimenting with exaggerated 'Indian English'.

Ezekiel, being a member of the Jewish community, approached poetry as an outsider and was different from the nationalistic Indian literature of that time. Most of his poetry was that of the urban India, issues of alienation, love, marriage and sexuality. He acted as a mentor to younger poets, such as Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Give Patel. In the last few years of his life, he was deeply involved in helping Mumbai poets, his advice being forthright, but seldom blunt. Books by Nissim Ezekiel. Time To Change - 1952.

Sixty Poems - 1953. The Third - 1959. The Unfinished Man - 1960. The Exact Name - 1965. The Three Plays - 1969 Some of his well-known poems. The Patriot.

Night of the Scorpion. The Professor. Case Study. Enterprise. Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher. Background, Casually.

Poster Prayers Atti pat Krishna swami Ramanujan. K. Ramanujan, born in Mysore, India in 1929, came to the U.S. in 1959, where he remained until his death in Chicago on July 13, 1993 (Ramazani, 1988). Not only was Ramanujan a figure, but he was also a trans-disciplinary scholar, working as a poet, translator, linguist, and folklorist. Although he wrote primarily in English, he was fluent in both Kannada, the common public language of Mysore, and Tamil, the language of his family, as well. Ramanujan received his BA and MA in English language and literature from the University of Mysore. He then spent some time teaching at several universities in South India before getting a graduate diploma in theoretical linguistics from Deccan University in Poona in 1958. The following year, he went to Indiana University where he got a Ph. D. in linguistics in 1963.

In 1962, he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he was affiliated throughout the rest of his career. However, he did teach at several other U.S. universities at times, including Harvard, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of California at Berkeley, and Carlton College. At the University of Chicago, Ramanujan was instrumental in shaping the South Asian Studies program. He worked in the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, Linguistics, and with the Committee on Social Thought.

In 1976, the government of India awarded him the honorific title 'Padma Sri,' and in 1983, he was given the MacArthur Prize Fellowship (Shulman, 1994). Major Works A.K. Ramanujan's theoretical and aesthetic contributions span several disciplinary areas. In his cultural essays such as 'Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?' (1990) he explains cultural ideologies and behavioral manifestations thereof in terms of an Indian psychology he calls 'context-sensitive' thinking. In his work in folklore studies, Ramanujan highlights the of the Indian oral and written literary tradition. His essay 'Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward an Anthology of Reflections' (1989), and his commentaries in The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology (1967) and Folktales from India, Oral Tales from Twenty Indian Languages (1991) are good examples of his work in Indian folklore studies.

His ideas about Indian sociolinguistics, language change, and linguistic creativity can be found in his 1964 essay written with W. Bright, 'Sociolinguistic Variation and Language Change. ' Finally, a collected works of his poetry was posthumously published in 1995, The Collected Poems of A.K. Ramanujan n, which includes poems from several previously-published volumes of poetry as well as some previously unpublished poems. 'Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?' is a cultural essay that appears in social anthropologist, McKim Marriot's India Through Hindu Categories (1990). Ramanujan's ultimate answer to the title question is yes; it is what he calls 'context-sensitive' as opposed to 'context-free. ' These terms, he takes from linguistics, in which they refer to different kinds of grammatical rules. In applying them to cultures or ways of thinking, Ramanujan relies primarily on a text-based analysis.

He cautions that they are 'overall tendencies. ' 'Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor guiding the behavior' (47). Context-sensitive is, he suggests, the more appropriate term for what others have taken for an Indian tendency toward inconsistency and hypocrisy, as well as, perhaps tolerance and mimicry. Ramanujan cites Said's Orientalism here, suggesting a European source for these stereotypes created out of a necessity to essentialize and the Eastern world.

Context-free thinking, which he attributes to Euro-American culture, gives rise to universal testaments of law, such as in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the European philosophical tradition, e.g. Hegel. Context-sensitive thinking, on the other hand, gives rise to more complicated sets of standards such as the Laws of Manu, by which appropriateness depends on various factors, especially factors of identity and person hood, such as birth, occupation, life stage, karma, dharma, etc. Ramanujan stresses that this difference in philosophical outcome is not a symptom of irrationality, but a different kind of rationale. Folklore Studies Context-sensitivity is a theme that appears not only in Ramanujan's cultural essays, but also appears in his writing about Indian folklore and classic poetry. In 'Where Mirrors are Windows,' (1989) and in 'Three Hundred Ramayanas' (1991), for example, he discusses the 'inter textual' nature of Indian literature, written and oral. By this, he means that Indian stories refer to one another and sometimes to other versions of the very story being told.

He says, 'What is merely suggested in one poem may become central in a 'repetition' or an 'imitation' of it. Mimesis is never only mimesis, for it evokes the earlier image in order to play with it and make it mean other things' (1989,207). It is important for Ramanujan to note that these inter textual influences do not occur in a unidirectional pattern. Ramanujan's Poetry Ramanujan wrote poetry almost entirely in English. Reviewer Bruce King called Ramanujan, along with two other trans cultural poets, 'Indo-Anglian harbingers of literary modernism' (cited in Patel, 1992: 960). This description highlights several characteristics of Ramanujan's poetry, perhaps less common in other trans cultural poetry.

Characteristics of his modernist style include an almost jarring realism and hints at a kind of confessional style. While Reviewer Geeta Patel agrees with King's description of Ramanujan's work, she faults King for failing 'to plumb the ramifications of writing and the reconstruction or retrieval of the fantasies of tradition... that are characteristic of writing in a postcolonial transnational world' (Patel, 1992: 961). Themes of hybridity and are highlighted in the following two poems, both from Second Sight (1986). Ramanujan discusses the first poem, 'Astronomer,' in 'Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?' (1990). He says that this poem is about his father, Srinivas Ramanujan, who was a famous mathematician. He describes his father: He was a mathematician, an astronomer.

But he was also a Sanskrit scholar, an expert astrologer. He had two kinds of visitors: American and English mathematicians who called on him when they were on a visit to India, and local astrologers, orthodox pundits who wore splendid gold-embroidered shawls dowered by the Maharaja. I had just been converted by Russell to the 'scientific attitude'. I (and my generation) was troubled by his holding together in one brain both astronomy and astrology; I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn't seem to care about, or even think about. (4) 'Astronomer' is an attempt to make sense of his father's seemingly contradictory image. The following poem 'Chicago Zen,' exemplifies the theme of trans nationalism, and might be an attempt to imagine himself as another hybrid image.

'Astronomer' (Second Sight, 1986) Sky-man in a manhole with astronomy for dream, astrology for nightmare; fat man full of proverbs, the language of lean years, living in square after almanac square prefiguring the day of windfall and landslide through a calculus of good hours, clutching at the tear in his birthday shirt as at a hole in his mildewed horoscope, squinting at the parallax of black planets, his Tiger, his Hare moving in Sanskrit zodiacs, forever troubled by the fractions, the kidneys in his Tamil flesh, his body the Great Bear dipping for the honey, the woman-smell in the small curly hair down there. 'Chicago Zen' (Second Sight, 1986) i Now tidy your house, dust especially your living room and do not forget to name all your children. ii Watch your step. Sight may strike you blind in unexpected places. The traffic light turns orange on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble, you fall into a vision of forest fires, enter a frothing Himalayan river, rapid, silent. On the 14th floor, Lake Michigan crawls and crawls in the window. Your thumbnail cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane from your daughter's hair and you drown, eyes open, towards the Indies, the antipodes.

And you, always so perfectly sane. Now you know what you always knew: the country cannot be reached by jet. Nor by boat on jungle river, hashish behind the Monkey-temple, nor moonshot to the cratered Sea of Tranquillity, slim circus girls on a tightrope between tree and tree with white parasols, or the one and only blue guitar. Nor by any other means of transport, migrating with a clean valid passport, no, not even by transmigrating without any passport at all, but only by answering ordinary black telephones, questions walls and small children ask, and answering all calls of nature. iv Watch your step, watch it, I say, especially at the first high threshold, and the sudden low one near the end of the flight of stairs, and watch for the last step that's never there.