Sunday Reading: Arundhati Subramanian "When God Is a Traveller"

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 ☆ INTRODUCTION  OF ARUNDHATI SUBRAMANIAN: 

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet, writer, critic, curator, translator, Journalist, writing in English.

 Arundhati Subramaniam won the award for her poetry collection ‘When God is a Traveller’ in English. Poet Arundhathi Subramaniam is among the 20 writers to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2020, reported PTI. The National Academy of Letters announced the names on Friday at its annual ‘’Festival of Letters’’ event.

Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry: On 25 January 2015, Arundhathi won the first Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry for her work When God is a Traveller. The prize was announced as part of ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival.

Apart from Subramaniam, the others who received the award in poetry include Harish Meenakshi (Gujarati), Anamika (Hindi), RS Bhaskar (Konkani), Irungbam Deven (Manipuri), Rupchand Hansda (Santali), and Nikhileswar (Telugu).

☆ "When God Is a Traveller"

Arundhati Subramaniam

 (wondering about Kartikeya/ Muruga/ Subramania, my namesake)

 Trust the god back from his travels, his voice wholegrain (and chamomile), 

his wisdom neem, his peacock, sweaty-plumed, drowsing in the shadows.

 Trust him who sits wordless on park benches listening to the cries of children fading into the dusk, 

his gaze emptied of vagrancy, his heart of ownership.

Trust him who has seen enough— revolutions, promises, the desperate light of shopping malls, hospital rooms, manifestos, theologies, the iron taste of blood, the great craters in the middle of love. 

Trust him who no longer begrudges his brother his prize, his parents their partisanship. 

Trust him whose race is run, whose journey remains, who stands fluid-stemmed knowing he is the tree that bears fruit, festive with sun.

 

Trust him who recognizes you— auspicious, abundant, battle-scarred, alive— and knows from where you come. 

Trust the god ready to circle the world all over again this time for no reason at all other than to see it through your eyes.

I should say that I understood it without properly understanding. Some level of complex texture is involved in her works which I feel is the one which makes a good poetry.A love for language and a knack for fusing disparate realities is evident in Arundhathi Subramaniam's new collection of poems.

These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness - all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human.Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes.

These poems explore various ambivalences - around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey.

Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, Where I Live: Selected Poems (2009), drew on her first two books published in India plus a whole new collection. When God Is a Traveller is her fourth collection of poetry.

‘A sense of wonder and striking contrasts pervade the Indian poet’s fourth collection. The sacred meets the everyday, cerebral wordplay delivers full-blooded emotion, and ancient Hindu myths run alongside contemporary urban life. Breathtaking in scope, taking in religious faith, friendships, love affairs and existential themes.

In 'When God is a Traveller', Subramaniam weaves metaphors, metaphors that are distinctly hers, into language that is simultaneously fluid and simple. Everydayness is woven as a metaphor rife with allusions to the deeper meanings of life.The allusions of Hinduism do leave scope for criticism.

And she has just come out with an anthology of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin) oddly entitled Eating God. (My advice: eat veggies, don't eat gods). She also has a wallet-sized book on the Buddha.The Hindu ‘… a strong personality and an individual voice; her poems feel as if they are meant to be read aloud as well as on the page.’ Bruce King, Journal of Postcolonial Literature ‘Few poets capture contradictory impulses so convincingly

These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, and all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human.

Thank you...