Where God is a Traveller

 ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM :-

Arundhathi Subramaniam is the award-winning author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including the recent poetry volume, Love Without a Story, the acclaimed sacred poetry anthology, Eating God and the bestselling biography of a mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life. A well-known prose writer on Indian spirituality, she has been a long-standing arts critic, anthologist, performing arts curator and poetry editor. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the Sahitya Akademi Award, 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. She has written extensively on culture and spirituality, and has worked over the years as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic.Arundhathi is the author of six books of poetry,most recently Love Without a Storyand, andWhen God is a Traveller.As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha, the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga . As editor, her most recent book is the Penguin anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God.

Subramaniam won the award for her poetry collection ‘When God is a Traveller’ in English.Poet Arundhathi Subramaniam is among the 20 writers to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award for 2020, reported PTI. The National Academy of Letters announced the names on Friday at its annual ‘’Festival of Letters’’ event.Subramaniam won the award for her poetry collection When God is a Traveller in English.The 2020 winners’ list includes seven books of poetry, four novels, five short stories, two plays, and one each of memoirs and epic poetry in 20 Indian languages. The awards for Malayalam, Nepali, Odia and Rajasthani will be announced later, said the Akademi.Apart from Subramaniam, the others who received the award in poetry include Harish Meenakshi (Gujarati), Anamika (Hindi), RS Bhaskar (Konkani), Irungbam Deven (Manipuri), Rupchand Hansda (Santali), and Nikhileswar (Telugu).

Congress leader M Veerappa Moily also received the award for his epic poem Sri Bahubali Ahimsadigvijayam in Kannada.Other winners included novelists Nanda Khare (Marathi), Maheshchandra Sharma Gautam (Sanskrit), Imaiyam (Tamil) and Sri Hussain-ul-Haque (Urdu).The Akademi named Apurba Kumar Saikia (Assamese), Dharanidhar Owari (Bodo), Hiday Koul Bharti (Kashmiri), Kamalkant Jha (Maithili) and Gurdev Singh Rupana (Punjab) winners in the short stories section. Gian Singh (Dogri) and Jetho Lalwani (Sindhi) received the award for their plays, while Mani Shankar Mukhopadhyay (Bengali) got it for his memoir.

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When God Is a Traveller :-

'When God is a Traveller', Subramaniam weaves metaphors, metaphors that are distinctly hers, into language that is simultaneously fluid and simple. Everydayness is woven as a metaphor rife with allusions to the deeper meanings of life. At first glance, the poems from this collection come across as beautiful but not oh-my-god-this-blew-my-mind-away. Not yet. But there is a vulnerability, an intimacy in this text which so exquisitely and slyly draws you in like a comfortable Ikat kurta until you are “drowning in verse” .

Many readings of this award-winning text exist but they highlight the religious aspect of the text. While it undoubtedly adheres to a certain religious context, it differs widely in terms of the figures of the Hindu pantheon represented, that is, the ones within the text are not really the most popular of the Hindu gods. Moreover, what Subramaniam does is that she uses these figures but challenges the canonical religious stories through her representations, as can be observed in the poem ‘Benaras’, an underappreciated piece in my opinion. She tries to highlight the personal side of one’s religious beliefs, for instance in the poem ‘How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods’.

Finally, what especially stands out in Subramaniam’s poetry collection is the imagery. Even when the meaning of the poems eludes the reader, the meaning-making processes remain accessible through the vivid images constructed, which interact with each other to produce meaning. In this text, the meaning is created through the words as well as through the imagery. This gives it a subliminal quality of sorts.

All in all, a delightful read. The allusions of Hinduism do leave scope for criticism. However, I think the Hinduism in the text alludes to the Bhakti tradition, a countercultural movement to the canonical tradition. But oh, the words, the language, the imagery- they entrapped me, an unsuspecting reader and I have zero regrets.

This book actually contains 22 poems from the “Deeper in Transit” section of Where I Live, thus there is substantial overlap in poems between books. Still, there are 29 new poems in this book, and it is a beautiful hardcover with very attractive cover art, making it a nice little book of poetry to carry around. The 22 duplicate poems are worth reading again, anyway. “Leapfrog” and “Catnap” were quoted in my review of Where I Live. Writing about gods, goddesses, and heroines as well as daily life, and a favourite topic of writing on writing, this little book is well worth reading and travelling along the various textual references which lead to empty space, which is the terrain of gods, goddesses, and heroines.

The book cover features a rich, blue, green, and gold peacock, feathers spread across about one-third of the cover, flowers blooming on a shrub in another corner, above darkness with the silhouette of a hunter shooting an arrow into a stag leaping in death throes. In “Eight Poems for Shakuntala,” Arundhathi Subramaniam pens some modern lines on Shakuntala whose story is told in the Mahabharata. One day King Dushyanta shot a stag with an arrow and pursued the wounded animal through the forest, when instead of his prey, he stumbled across Shakuntala and fell in love with her and married. Dushyanta gave her a ring, but left back to the palace, saying he would return later to fetch her. In the meantime, Shakuntala, pining for her absent love, accidently insulted a holy man who cursed her, that the man who gave her the ring would not remember her, unless she were to show him the ring he gave her. Time passed and Shakuntala lost the ring while crossing a river and when she arrived to court, Dushyanta did not recognize her. Heart-broken, she returned to the forest and gave birth the child she had conceived on Dushyanta’s first visit. A fisherman found the ring in the belly of a fish, presented it to the king, who then remembered his lost bride and searched for her, finding her again and meeting his son, and thus the family was reunited. Poems 3 and 5 in the series capture the longing of Shakuntala whilst waiting in the forest for Dushyanta’s return.

Subramaniam often writes about the mundane as well as the sublime in her poems, and often there ends up being a poem or two about a cat. In “I Knew a Cat” she writes of the pain of losing a beloved furry friend

In the poem which gives the book its title, “When God is a Traveller,” Subramaniam muses about “Kartikeya Subramania, my namesake.” Kartikeya Subramania is known by all those names, as well as Skanda, and is the son of Śiva, in some legends of him alone, as is born of  parvati alone, but also often considered the son of both Śiva and parvati . Subramania is the god of war who is also known as he renounces war in some legends and retreats to the mountains.

This is a theme not unrelated to Meera's: how to lose Earthly kingdoms, but gain the  self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti  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.

Thank you ,

Dilip Barad sir

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