ARSHIA SATTAR - Remembering A.K. Ramanujan 24 Years After His Death
it is Ramanujan’s soft
voice insisting on plurality and the particular we must strive to hear
In April this year, I
was back at the University of Chicago, where I studied under A.K. Ramanujan in
the 1980s. We were gathered to celebrate 60 years of the study of South Asia at
the university and it was a grand reunion of faculty and students across
generations and across disciplines. Many of us who had studied there were now
teachers in our own right, but each of us had returned to honour the place and
the people that had made us who we are.
No one was remembered
with more admiration that weekend than Ramanujan. In all the speeches and the
talks and the anecdotal histories and the informally shared memories, ‘Raman’
was mentioned with affection, with respect and with the speaker’s sense of
sheer good fortune for having known the man and been in his classroom. In the
30 years that he taught at Chicago (and elsewhere for shorter periods),
Ramanujan influenced generations of scholars in literature, history and
anthropology, effectively initiated and sustained an ideology of translation
and changed both the form and the content of South Asian studies in the
American academy. Alongside his scholarly work, he remained a poet, writing
about identity and displacement, about work and play, about the human heart and
it’s carnal sheath, the body.
No one ever forgets
the exhilaration of reading Ramanujan’s translations of Tamil sangam poetry
for the first time – your hair stands on end, your hands begin to shake, your
heart leaps. You know at once that you are in the presence of genius: not
simply the genius of the original work but also the genius of its rendering
into English. You believe these translations were created just for you, that
the images shine brightest in your mind’s eye, that the rise and fall of the
rhythms measures your heart beat more closely than it does anyone else’s.
Soon,
you begin to believe that the poems were written yesterday, in your language,
that they were, in fact, written for you. Ramanujan’s translations do not
‘carry over’ as the Latin root of the word suggests. Rather, his unique talent
as a translator lay in turning the boundaries between languages and cultures
into what he called (in another context) ‘permeable membranes,’ diaphanous
films which allowed ideas and constructs to pass through them, picking up,
reflecting and refracting words and images as they travelled to the other
linguistic shore.
Ramanujan used to say
that he translated impressionistically at first, creating a sense of the poem
for himself, seeking its spirit before he captured its letter. Then, in
subsequent drafts, he would chip away at his own impressions, moving backwards,
closer and closer to the literal words and images with which the poem spoke in
its own language. He encouraged us to translate without fear, to push back
against the source language rather than forward into the target language. He
made us secure in the confidence that the words we needed would find us and not
the other way around. As the universe of translations from Indian languages
opens up with the Murty Library and other publishing projects, this is a
paradigm we need to embrace if we are to do any kind of justice to the strength
and beauty of these works that lie within our reach.
Through his
translations and essays, Ramanujan reminded the academy that there was much
more to the study and understanding of the subcontinent than Sanskrit and elite
Brahminical traditions, far more was needed than the Orientalist lens that
focused on its religious and spiritual traditions. His presentations of
literature from Tamil and then Kannada expanded the idea of the ‘classical’ and
his interest in oral narratives – folk tales, songs, riddles and even jokes –
persuaded us to seek and acknowledge the multiple wisdoms of a culture that
find expression in the so-called ‘little tradition’. For him, the knowledge of
world that women held and shared in their songs and kitchen stories is as vital
as the systems of philosophy and metaphysics created by men. As his students,
we were all subjected to the gentle but probing question, “Tell me a story that
you have only heard, not read.”
A prism for the
truth : Most importantly,
Ramanujan taught us to think in the plural and not in the singular. He insisted
that South Asia had traditions and literatures that sometimes complemented and
sometimes challenged each other and that neither the complement nor the
challenge was a problem. He could say this because he himself constantly used
an insight from one of his fields of study to illuminate another. For example,
his training in linguistics made him familiar with the idea of
context-sensitive grammars.
Ramanujan put that
idea to work in a poetic and existential perception of the individual,
suggesting in his seminal essay, “Is There An Indian Way of Thinking”, that dharma was
“context sensitive”. Dharma is not absolute like Kant’s categorical imperative.
As individuals who are relational selves (wives, mothers, sisters, daughters),
we choose our course of action depending on who we are at that moment.... Read more:
http://thewire.in/50726/remembering-ak-ramanujan/
see more posts on AK Ramanujan
