Sunday Reading Task

Hello Beautiful People,

Today we discuss about Arundhati Subramaniam and her Poetry Collection titled as When God is a Traveller got Sahitya Akadami 2021 award in English Language so here we discuss about central theme of this poem and also explain this poem and then What is it that the poet wants to say through this poem?

  This Sunday Reading Task is assigned by Prof. Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnkumarsinhji Bhavsinhji Bhavangar University (MKBU).

 

Arundhati Subramaniam:

First when we discuss about “WHEN GOD IS A TRAVELLAR “poem main central theme and explain this titular poem I want to give some brief intro about Arundhathi Subramaniam.

Arundhathi Subramaniam's volume of poetry, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women's Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others.

 

As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha, a bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru). As editor, her most recent book is the Penguin anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God.

Her poetry has been published in various international journals and anthologies, including Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Poets (Penguin India); Sixty Indian Poets (Penguin India), Both Sides of the Sky (National Book Trust, India),We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi), Fulcrum No 4: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK), Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry[7]( United States ), The Dance of the Peacock: An Anthology of English Poetry from India,[featuring 151 Indian English poets, edited by Vivekanand Jha and published by Hidden Brook Press,Canada. and Atlas: New Writing (Crossword/ Aark Arts) 

She has worked as Head of Dance and Chauraha (an inter-arts forum) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, and has been Editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web.

 

About When God is a Traveler: 

When I asked the poet, "What if I called you a modern-day Meera, an agnostic follower of an elusive Krishna?" she laughed, not displeased, but pointed out that her poems also had references to Shiva, Kartikeya and others. Though the poems in When God is a Traveler frequently dwell upon the minute details of everyday life, they also see in those details, hints of a Godhead, an uber-reality. Charmingly elusive avatars of Muruga, Krishna and other divinities appear, composed of the elements of our contemporary reality and occasionally, denied by it. This is also a frank volume of middle age. In 'Epigrams for Life after Forty', Arundhathi Subramaniam eloquently describes how, when life swivels around suddenly, we have to learn to discover profits in our loss.

 This is a theme not unrelated to Meera's: how to lose Earthly kingdoms, but gain the (divine) self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti (devotion) is very much the spirit of these poems — a passionate, far from anti-carnal or anti-intellectual bhakti. I think we've often turned devotion into an anaemic animal."

This bhakti in her poems also reflects a transition in her life since I was last in touch with her, in the 1990s. "Earlier I thought that my public persona would be about 'the Arts', and my private self would be about 'spirituality'. A near-death experience in 1997 and an encounter with a spiritual guide in 2004 have shaped my life on a very fundamental level."

 Many of the old divides blasted away, and the poems in this volume reflect that. But what about the other divide: that between the poet and the reader? "Some would view you as a high-intellectual. How accessible do you think your poems are?"

 Subramaniam recalls that when she was 13, she stumbled across a volume of TS Eliot's poems. She did not understand all of it, but "I knew I was in the presence of beauty, and mystery." She didn't know who Eliot was. For the 13-year-old, he was her discovery.

"We all want mystery as much as we want clarity. There is beauty — and truth — in the patterning of the two. Hundred-watt radiance is fine for shopping malls, not for poems!" Subramaniam adds that she loves Randall Jarrell's comment, that people haven't stopped reading modern poetry because it's difficult: they find it difficult because they've stopped reading it.

 So, how do the poems in this volume score on accessibility? Very well for poetry-lovers. For other readers, there's ample beauty of clear song here, but also some dark, cob-webbed corners that could do with greater clarity. To give the poet the last word on this, "I've learnt to trust the image and the image is much more intelligent than I am."

 And indeed, Subramaniam produces many striking images:

 ... the sacred plunge into a Cadbury's Five Star bar, Kanchenjunga, kisses bluer than the Adriatic, honeystain of sunlight on temple wall, a moon-lathered Parthenon...

 Other images are more intimate: 

I'm wearing my mother's sari, her blood group, her osteo-arthritic knee.

Or, in 'The Dark Night of Kitchen Sinks':

 ...knives and spoons scattered, like mutilated limbs ...

 A recurring theme that remains throughout is that of spiritual exploration, the repercussions of which can give rise to "a sense of terror and also of authorship".

When God is a Traveller is studded with gems of language. It is not necessary that all the gems will shine at once — or at all. Some may never shine for you (could they be blemished?) Others will reveal themselves in modesty, or in time. But you're likely to find at least one or two that go off like an explosion: an explosion that may help launch you, like:

 ...a tadpole among the stars,

 unafraid to plunge deeper

if it must –only if it must –

 into transit.

 

Titular poem of  When God is a Traveler :

 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.

“Trust the god

back from his travels,

his voice wholegrain

    (and chamomile),

his wisdom neem,

his peacock, sweaty-plumed,

drowsing in the shadows.”

That is from the titular poem, When God is a Traveller, and as I saw God sitting “wordless on park benches/listening to the cries of children”, as one “who has seen enough”, someone who knows “he is the tree/that bears fruit, festive/with sun”, I grew fidgety in my curiosity about God’s soiled feet. No, it wasn’t there. How does God travel then?

 Arundhathi Subramaniam, it must be remembered, is the editor of Pilgrim’s India, an anthology of writing devoted to “journeys impelled by the idea of the sacred”, and more recently, of Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry. She has also authored the Book of Buddha and Sadhguru. The knowledge of these signposts is necessary to understand the personality of the “God” in the title of her collection of poems as well as the poems through which “God” travels.

 As a traveller with flat feet who wonders incessantly about footwear and the length of journeys, I found myself reading her poems about shoes. Wearing High Heels, for instance, begins with the recollection of wearing heels “to the Class Eight jam session”, and ends with this near matter-of-fact realisation: “I have grown/too tall for heels”. In the space of that time, travel is the history of changed classmates and a changed self. It is almost as if the shoes, their height, if not their size, have remained the same, like god or his likeness, but all else have changed. In this, the shoes become a transferred epithet for travel. It is a pattern that runs through her poems — the everyday object is moved from its familiar position, and the poem, almost like an epiphany, places it on an altar.

Do pilgrims and worshippers take off their shoes in places of worship because God doesn’t wear shoes? (Behind this recurrent question in my mind is a classmate singing ‘Put on the dancing shoe’ every time our Bangla teacher explained Shiva’s tandava nritya to us.) And if gods wear shoes, what might those shoe boxes look like? 

   Here is A Shoebox Reminisces: “I renounced shape/a long time ago,/chose/bagginess,/endless/recess—/ivity,/but there are days/when the longing/returns/and I cannot abide/the sterile cynicism/of the Anti Couples Club,/the smug peddlers/of Uni-sole Advaita./I know it means/the saga of/two old shoes/all over again,/their grubby leather unions,/tales of childhood,/prejudice, toe jam, politics,/laces in a perpetual snarl/of knots,/footprints,/footprints. …” Note how the word “footprint” occurs twice, like footprints actually do, and you are suddenly made aware, again, of Subramaniam’s faith in language as a loyal mirror of experience.

 The poems that will continue to walk with me are those about middle age, not as ailment as it is represented in contemporary discourse, but age as scripture:

 

“When yesterday’s scripts

strike back,

coil,

clingfilm the body.

When you spring up again,

temple builder, house builder, empire builder,

thickly spreading the pores of that old need …

the need

to consume,

belong, be loved.” (And Here’s Middle Age Again)

This relation between the accumulations of years that might aid and abet religion’s travel itinerary marks Subramaniam’s new poems. In them, wisdom comes as it must — without knocking or intimation of its travel plans. “There are fewer capital letters/than we supposed” (Epigrams of Life after Forty).

What gives Subramaniam’s poems their surplus, therefore, is their parallel lives — how the poems are different things on different levels, taut like starched cotton and also with “holes” (for holes are also “matter”, as the last poem in this collection will tell us). Soul and sole, union and unions, spirit and spirits — everydayness turned into a religion, the best there is. 

In a television interview, when asked why she turned to the spiritual, Subramaniam said that she needed “something deeper than poetry”. This is a rich record of those experiments and accidents, one we are grateful to her for making public.

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