Welcome readers!
Sahitya Academy announced this Friday (12th March 2021) that Arundhathi Subramaniam has won the award for her poetry collection titled 'When God is a Traveller'. She will be among the twenty writers who will be conferred with the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020.
Arundhathi is an Indian poet, writer, critic, curator, translator, Journalist, writing in English. Her writing is often marked by its unusual combination of landscapes, inconsistent grammars of the body, and lovers feasting on each other while craving release. Her well-known works include-
1. Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry
2014
2. Where I Live: New and Selected Poems
2009
3. Love Without a Story
2019
4. The Book of Buddha
2006
5. Sadhguru, More Than a Life
2010
In India, there is the notion of the 'ishta devata' - a personal god. In one of the interviews, she was asked this question: Tell us something about the travelling god of your collection. Is his a perpetual exile or a home-bound odyssey?
To which Arundhati Subramanian answers,
"I think he’ll get home, eventually. But he’ll be different at the end of it, and consequently, so will be home!
The travelling god in the title poem is Kartikeya, who journeys the world to claim the fruit of knowledge. Unfortunately, his cannier brother, Ganesha, simply circles his parents and claims it first. Kartikeya is slower, more literal, but he needs to make that journey, and I think is wiser at the end of it. So, home does exist—at least, as a promise—in these poems. But some period of exile seems necessary to recognize that home for what it is. At the same time, it isn’t a simple journey from exile to sanctuary. Because home itself is transfigured on one’s return."
This blog attempts to discuss her 2014 work "When God is a Traveller", especially focusing on the title poem 'When God Is a Traveller. The collection includes poems like-
Arundhathi Subramaniam's poems explore ambivalences -- the desire for adventure and anchorage, expansion and containment, vulnerability and strength, freedom and belonging, withdrawal and engagement, language as an exciting resource and as desperate refuge. 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. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize, When God Is a Traveller is a remarkable book of poetry. (Courtesy- Google Books)
As a part of the Sunday Reading Task, our professor assigned us to read the following poem to ponder upon the central theme of the poem as well as to explore the poet's intentions behind writing this poem.
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.
Subramania is the god of war who is also known as Guhā (cave, secret) or Guruguhā (cave-teacher) as he renounces war in some legends and retreats to the mountains. (Source)
1. Can you identify the central theme of this poem?
The central theme of this poem, according to my reading, can be highlighting the fact that the world cannot be centred around parents. The poem seems to emphasize more on trusting Kartikeya, calling him god. Kartikeya is a real (god) in the sense that he circled the world and saw humans suffering, and urged himself to know the essence of humanity while his younger sibling Ganesh just circled around his parents and called them his universe to which his parents were pleased and called him the one who understands everything.
The poem seems to subvert the myth by emerging Kartikeya as the real character who saw the world as it is with its limitations, pain, suffering and gleam. The myth that was god centric is given a human-centric touch in this poem.
Furthermore, knowledge can be the central theme of this poem - the knowledge of real-world experiences and witnessed by one's own self. The knowledge is gained through a lot of struggle, as the poet mentions-
"his peacock, sweaty-plumed,
drowsing in the shadows.
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."
But Can you imagine an age-old god can ever understand the anxiety of the 21st-century modern Covidstruct world human beings' anxiety? Hence, the central theme of the poem is to lead oneself to what one truly is! To the real roots, to the real nature, to the real knowledge about oneself, to liberate oneself from all the binding the clutches.
2. Can you explain this poem?
It is said that all those who wander are not lost. Similarly, if we ponder on the travelling part, the poem perfectly describes the struggle and pain of the process by taking the metaphor of the Kartikeya myth. Focusing on the semanticity of the words, the poem speaks of trust. If the concept of god itself is vague how can we assume of trusting the divinity. Hence, the poem provides illustrations of day to day life, routine hurriedness, etc. and by placing god in the human worried world, the poet seems to synchronize the two worlds- one the busiest human world and the other the mythical world. And perhaps, the human centric world becomes heavier and true to life which obviously on the other hand diminishes the value of the larger than life being.
3. What is it that the poet wants to say through this poem?
The poet perhaps is trying to merge the myth with the modern world and may wish to say that if humans have forgotten their true ways of living then the mythical figure Kartikeya is going to visit the world or is ready to circle the world all over again this time for no reason at all but to see his human beings through his eyes.
It's because only if their personal god visits the place or circle the world, then and then only people will awaken themselves.
In a nutshell, it can be said that the point of the journey is not God, but something else. It is the freedom that we are seeking, it is we who are seeking us.
Thank you.
Post a Comment