A River:-

A.K Ramanujan, a trained linguist, chats a course entirely different from the effusive romanticism of
Derozeo or Sarojini , for his is a muted,measured dispassionate and some would say inhibited response to
life. He is also the very antithesis of Ezkiel in his use of natural, realistic and vivid details. As R.
Parthasarathy observes, “he has an eye for the specific Physiognomy of an object of situation which he
then reveals with telling detail” (Ten-Twentieth Century Indian Poets). The terseness of his diction , the
skillful use of rhyme and assonance, and the precision of crystallized images make him one of the greatest
Indian poets of the second half of the twentieth century. All these qualities come together in
“A River” the tradition at Indian River being the point of departure for ironically contrasting the attitudes
of the old and new poets, both of whom are arraigned for their biased, romantic and ultimately heartier
attitude.

Ramanujan begins with precise locale, there by conferring the river with a local habitation. The location is
Madurai, the city of rich cultural and religious tradition, famous also for its greatest architectural artifice,
the Meenakshi temple. When Ramanujan call Madurai ‘city of temples and poets / who sang of cities and
temples’, the circularity of the language betokens a monotony of repetitiousness of approach and this is a
thrust directed at the usual river poet.

Yet the present poet’s own description of the river Vaikai is unusual in its stark realism, one which is
almost Zolaesque. The poet does the unthinkable, describing not the flooded river majestically carrying
everything in its wake, but the shrunken, dried up from. The Psychological image of sand ribs is
particularly opposite reminding one of the emaciated Indian, though there is a comic undertone in the fact
that baring the ribs has become fashion able of late. The graphic realism continues with its description of
the straw and womens hair clogging the sluice gates , which again areobserved in minute detail as being
rusty . the poetic lens appears to catch even the signs of repeated patchwork repairs on them. But the vivid
description is endowed with poetic sensibility by the use of simile while the dry stones jutting from the
river bed resemble shaven water-buffaloes, the wet stones resemble sleepy crocodiles.

Since the poets, both ancient and modern, sang ‘only of the floods’ and observer within the poem turns
his eye to an occasion when there was indeed a flood. This dispassionate observer notes that people, were
excited by the rising of the river inch the number of cobbled steps now submerged and the inundation of
villages. They also discussed the carrying away of three village houses of one pregnant woman and a
couple cows.

The third person observer within the poem notes also that the new poets do not differ from the old. The
make no attempt to describe the pregnant woman or to imagine the unborn children in her womb. The
observer therefore caustically observes the reality of a river which has water enough to be poetic only
once in a pear. And that poetic wreaks havoc with lives. He is more poetically imaginative than the
putative poets in his fancying the possibility of their being twins in her womb, perhaps identical and with
neither the moles nor the post natal diapers yet to distinguish them.

Humor and irony pervade the texture of the peom. These are directed at the Indian situation and the
people as well as the poets. People are excited by floods and talk animatedly about the floods, but do not
engage in any action that may helps those affected. The mention with great numeric precision the number
of houses, the number of women and cows carried away. The concern with the number may signify their
uncomplicated simplicity or the sense of wonder, but at another level it may imply that their concern is
with the quantitative rather than with the facts and not with the sutteing . The unusual naming of the cows
Gopi and Brinda is an occasion for humor. Yet the association of the cows with the woman, as well as the
namelesner of the woman may also suggest their indifference to the woman in general.

Even more caustic irony is directed at the poets both old and new. Such poets are unrealistic in their
approach , describing only the floods and never the shrunken state of the river. Further these poets speak
of the power or majesty of the swirling river, but evidently they have little human sympathy or human
imagination. They evidently think the mention of individual human suffering to be inappropriate for
verse. The discussions of the demotic people would be too trivial, too sordid, for their high flown notion
of poetry. They lack pity, the sense of tragedy and never imagine of a life yet unborn. They do not have
the Eliotean realization that poetry unveils not only the beauty but also the ugliness, the seminer,