A.K. Ramanujan’s Insightful Observations on Various Aspects of the United States of America. Looking Briefly at the Diary Entries
Abstract
Attipat Krishnaswamy Ramanujan (16 March 1929-13 July 1993) travelled extensively in peninsular India, collecting folktales from rural regions. Since he was already on the move, as a folklorist and as a teacher who taught in several colleges in South India consecutively, it wasn’t difficult for him to set sail for the United States of America when he received the Fulbright Travel Fellowship and Smith-Mundt Grant in 1959, to continue with his studies in linguistics. On 1 July 1959 he boarded the Strathaird in Bombay and undertook a land-journey through France to reach Southampton where he boarded the SS Queen Elizabeth which took him to New York on 28 July 1959. He wrote about experiences and observations during this journey in his “Travel Diary, 2 to 27 July 1959, Bombay to New York”, in the anthology Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (2018). The first-ever travel overseas, to the US, was full of excitement and anxiety for the young man of thirty. This journey was the initiation for his passage to the country he was to inhabit for the rest of his life, as a teacher in the University of Chicago—a transition from the familiar world (his interior landscape, akam) to the unfamiliar country (the world outside his self, the puram). The article shall focus on Journeys: A Poet’s Diary and A.K. Ramanujan’s unpublished diary to explore his observations and experiences of life in the US. These reveal the way in which his inner self met the new space he entered, followed by his expressing, through his creative and critical self, the interface and intermingling of the two. These travel writings go beyond mere records of observations—they are cultural artifacts left behind by a truly transnational traveler — as a man from a South-Indian milieu; who had been exposed to the British system of education; who was exceptionally intelligent, a poet and critic; and, a keen observer. Theories which engage with the akam-puram paradigm, environment (Buel), culture in a liquid modern world (Bauman) and cosmopolitanism (Appiah) shall be used as tools to analyse and assess the select texts.
Keywords
akam; puram; environmentalism; culture; cosmopolitanism
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Vidyasagar University India
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8751-0067
Jolly Das, M.Phil., Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India. Travel writing by Indians, within and outside the country, is one of her areas of study. She has published articles on the travelling mendicant saints, Kanakadasa and Purandaradasa, who belong to the Bhakti tradition of Karnataka, as part of her research on A.K. Ramanujan (who published translations of their songs) and Girish Karnad (who made a documentary film on them). Her present research interests include A.K. Ramanujan as a traveller in India and the United States of America, which has stemmed from her research in the discipline of English Literature focusing on Girish Karnad and A.K. Ramanujan’s intimate academic and creative bonding. Diverging from here, in a broader sense, she is interested in drama, travel writing, folklore, environment and literature, and revisionist mythmaking. She has published monographs on T.S. Eliot (Eliot’s Prismatic Plays: A Multifaceted Quest. Atlantic, 2007) and Girish Karnad (Tracing Karnad’s Theatrical Trajectory. Paragon, 2015) besides twenty-two peer reviewed articles in listed journals and eighteen chapters in anthologies. She translates fiction from Bengali to English, with special focus on the representation of Adivasi/Tribal life in the writings of Bengali authors. She has delivered twenty-five invited talks in academic fora. She has been the Chief Editor of the UGC-CARE listed Journal of the Department of English, Vidyasagar University, for three successive issues (2020-2022) and is a member of editorial boards of listed/reputed journals.
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