Time as Poetry :

                An Analysis of A K Ramanujan's Poetic Discourse

                                                                                                                Akshaya Kumar

In his poetic writings, A K Ramanujan evinces a clear understanding of the possible bearings of time on fine arts. For instance he is aware of the entropy-principle of time and the decay entropy sets in a system: "For entropy, a 'linear' progression or decay within each unit of cycle is part of cyclical systems: "the days of a week, or the seasons in a year or yugas in cosmic time are linear, but weeks, seasons, yugas, etc. are cyclical." In his essay, "Food for Thought: Towards an Anthology of Hindu Food-images," he underlines the simultaneous operation of twofold time frame - the linear and the cyclical, in a poem "Food Chain" from Taittriya Upanishad thus: "Our first poems expresses this twofold order very effectively: it moves towards a climax till the middle of the poem, and then repeats itself, miming the cycle and then ends with a second climax." In his another thought-provoking essay, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?", the relationship of Indian arts with time has been vehemently argued for: "As hour, month, season, year, and aeon have their own properties as contexts, the arts that depend on time have to obey time's changing moods and properties." He cites examples from Tamil Sangam poetry and Indian ragas where moods are invariably associated with hours of the day and times of the season.

Different frames of time, available to Ramanujan from both West and India, do shape his metaphors, and go into the making of his rather nonconformist, maverick poetic arguments. But as he 'mounts upon the swift steed called time', he tries different strategies, both indigenous and foreign, to negotiate with the galloping time. He does not allow time a free run; with his postmodernist learnings, he contests the acceptable ways/modes of time. In the postmodern/postcolonial scheme of things, time is discontinuous and highly asymmetric. It can speed up, it can take a leap, it can slow down., it can even stop and stand still. Infinite and unpredictable are the ways in which time can manifest itself. Time's arrow can take a loop and hit back at itself. It can disappear altogether and reappear all of a sudden in a changed form. Instead of operating within any given structuralist frame of modern sciences, time becomes a discourse of vertiginous (im)possibilities.