Sahitya Akademy Awardee Poet Arundhati Subramaniam: Where God is a Traveller

 

In this Poem when God travels often focuses on the minute details of everyday life, but also sees in those details, the hints of Godhead, an Uber-reality. When I asked the poet, "If I were to call you the Mira of the modern age, would I be an ignorant follower of Prapancha Krishna?" He laughed, not annoyed, but pointed out that his poems also mention Shiva, Kartikeya, and others. Muruga, Krishna, and other divinities appear to be enchanting incarnations, made up of elements of our contemporary reality and sometimes denied by him. This is also evident in middle age. In 'Efigrams for Life After Life', Arundhati Subramaniam clearly describes that, when life suddenly turns, we will learn to find profit in our losses.

 

This is a theme that has nothing to do with Mira: How to lose the kingdom of the earth but regain the (divine) self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti (devotion) is the spirit of these poems - away from an enthusiastic, functional or intellectual antithesis of devotion. I think we have often turned devotion into an animus animal." This devotion in his poems also reflects the transition of his life since I came in contact with him in the 1990s. "Previously I thought my public personality would be about the 'arts', and my private self would be about 'spirituality.' Many different splits exploded, and the poems in this volume show it. But what about the second part: between the poet and the reader? "Some will see you as highly intellectual. How accessible do you think your poems are?"

 

 

Subramaniam recalls that when she was 13 years old, she met T.S. Part of Eliot's poems was stumbled upon. She didn't understand it all, but "I knew I was in the presence of beauty and mystery." She did not know who Eliot was. For 13 years, she was his invention.  "We all want as much mystery as clarity. Beauty - and truth - are in the pattern. Both a hundred-watt luster is good for shopping malls, not for poetry!" Subramaniam adds that she likes Randall Jarel’s comment, people don’t stop reading modern poetry because it’s hard: they find it difficult because they stop reading it.