Concept of Hybridity and Trans culturalism

The notion of hybridity and transcultural are epitome to the postcolonial studies. Hybridity challenges
the notions of identity, culture, and nation, which exhibit unified notion of historical development..
Hybridization takes many forms: linguistic, cultural, political, racial, etc. In literary discourse
hybridity expresses a state of “in between-ness,” as a person standing between two cultures. Trans
culturalism refers to the idea that cultures are shaped by continual interactions, by overlapping
political, cultural, social relationships, and transformed through specific and individual actions.
Ethnographers used the term ‘transcultural’ to describe how subordinated or marginal groups selected
and invented from materials transmitted to them by the dominant or metropolitan culture.

Ramanujan’s World of Hybridity and Trans culturalism

AK Ramanujan (1929-1993) was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature and Linguistics.
Ramanujan was also a professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago. Ramanujan was a poet,
scholar, Linguist, philologist, folklorist, translator, and playwright.

Ramanujan gives us sensitive renderings of childhood experiences and remembered events. Identity
crisis and dissimilarity between two cultures are some important motifs of Ramanujan’s poetry. He
spoke both good and bad of hybrid culture, which he was acquainted.

Ramanujan’s poetry reflects his deep insight into the cultural patterns, of both east and west. The
Indian perspective and experience towards the human problems find a prominent place in the poetry
of Ramanujan. It is through appropriate images, that he has depicted the human situation,
contradictions and complexities experienced by the people. His poetry is a synthesis of the best
literary traditions of the Indian and the Western world. The combination of the Indian and western
elements has added a new sheen to his poetry. His focus is on the several unexplored areas of human
life, which are generally neglected today. His poetry concentrates on the innermost sentiments of the
people, both in the Indian and western societies. In the poem ‘A River’ Ramanujan juxtaposed Indian
natural calamity and western invention through the frequent occurrence of flood in the river. His love
for India and deep feeling for western world create an in-between state to his identity. So, he
developed his love for past and condemn the old poets to being lack of imagination:

“The poets sang only of the floods. ……………………

and the way it carried off three village houses,

one pregnant woman

and a couple of cows

named Gopi and Brinda, as usual.”

The early poets and their successors tick off the losses as mere statistics, unheeding of the destruction,
suffering and human pain left in the wake of the flood. Their aim, according to the speaker, is simply
to record a sensational event to arrest the momentary attention of the people. He finds this attitude
shocking and callous. “One pregnant woman expecting identical twins” and “different-coloured
diapers” are something unconventional for the reader. How the narrator knows that the pregnant
woman carrying twin baby in her womb and the diapers are little bit uncommon in the Indian society.
These reflect Ramanujan’s hybrid notion toward two different cultures. Ramanujan lived peacefully
on the intersection between two worlds – his internal and intimate world of his core identity that lied
in his Indian reminiscences and memories i.e., his past, and the outer world of his domicile that
chiefly account for his attitude and perspective i.e., his present. It is his inner world of Indian
memories that give the poet the raw material for his poems and it is his mature rational and bold
perspective of his outer world that allows him to treat them with an entirely new angle that other
Indian English poets might not have the courage to bring into light.

"Waterfalls in a Bank" is a poem by A. K. Ramanujan, a twentieth-century Indian poet who lived in

the United States for most of his adult life. The poem was first published in Ramanujan's collection of
poems Second Sight (1986), which is currently out of print. The poem is set in a bank in Chicago,
where the poet's attention is caught by a man-made waterfall. As he gazes at the waterfall, it
stimulates his memory, and much of the poem consists of a stream of varied imagery, including some
scenes from his past in India. "Waterfalls in a Bank," as in other poems by Ramanujan and indeed
other postcolonial writers, metaphor is a primary conceptual and linguistic site of both intercultural
and intertemporal exchange.

"Waterfalls in a Bank" is set in a bank in Hyde Park in Chicago, Illinois. The poet has been in the
bank a while before the poem begins, and the first line, "And then one sometimes sees waterfalls,"
suggests that his glance has just fallen on some kind of decorative waterfall that has been installed in
the lobby. As he looks at the waterfall, he starts to see it metaphorically, influenced by his knowledge
of Tamil poetry (Tamil is an ancient language in India), as "wavering snakeskins" and "cascades of
muslin." Muslin is a fine, thin cotton cloth, also called India muslin. For centuries, muslin was made
by hand in India, but during British colonial rule, the muslin industry was deliberately destroyed by
the British in order to supplant it with imported British goods. In other words, the poet is here
allowing images from the culture of his native India to flood into his mind as he observes the
waterfall. This creates an immediate contrast, not only between present and past but also between
cultures, East and West. (Stanza 1-5)

The stream of images stimulated by the waterfall now ended, the poet reflects, using images that
suggest the financial institution in which he finds himself. Using the language of commerce, he speaks
of himself "transacting with the past," and he is aware of the wide gap, both in time and culture,
between the present and the past. The past is like "another / country with its own customs, currency, /
stock exchange." Continuing the financial metaphor, he states that he is always "at a loss when I count
my change." At a loss can mean that he does not understand what is happening; it can also mean that
in the transaction between past and present, which includes an interchange between two extremely
different cultures, he has come off the loser in the deal. Perhaps change in this instance is a pun,
referring to both coin and the cultural changes wrought over time to the poet's country. Perhaps he
means that what he possesses in the present is less than he had in the past, or that the attempt to bridge
two cultures is in some sense unsatisfactory or confusing. (6-10stanza)

Summoning the multiple relations of resemblance in nature (American and Tamil waterfalls), culture
(the U.S. and India), and time (ancient and contemporary), Ramanujan compares such metaphorical
"transactions between contexts" to money exchanged in a bank:

As I transact with the past as with another

country with its own customs, currency,
stock exchange, always
at a loss when I count my change....
In exchanges between past and present as well as one culture and another, one is transformed by the
transaction; here, the poet is punningly "at a loss" to understand his profound "change," both
impoverished and enriched by his submission to an alien economy. In a later essay, Ramanujan again
compares the mutually transformative experience of cross-temporal encounter with the
anthropological experience of cross-cultural encounter.

Ramanujan spent his few decades of his later life in United States. He tried to capture his experiences
and resembled them with Indian culture. He believed that one could never disconnect himself from
the memories. His expatriate experiences did not in the least dissuade him from his Indian culture. But
possessing a rational mind, he was able to inculcate a practical approach towards his own culture.
A.K. Ramanujan also describes the worship and reverence of the animals including serpents in India,
as they are the symbol and ornament of lord Shiva. Even the festival Naag Panchami is celebrated to
show the dedication and reverence to them. The reminiscences of the past are crucial in deciding upon
one’s identity. When he was walking through museums or libraries in US, he saw snakes that take
shelter in the museums, bookshelves, glass-shelves, etc. and tried to compare it to Indian snake that he
had gone through in his childhood. In the poem ‘Snakes’ he says:

“Mother gives them milk

in saucers. She watches them suck

and bare the black-line design

etched on the brass of the saucer.”

Bruce King has corroborated this poetic feeling in his own words: “The poem presents an image, a
complex of feelings, distilled memories and events which are not elaborated or commented upon. But
as it begins in the present ‘now’ of museums of book stacks which contrast with rural India and
family life, the poem celebrates the liberation from the fears of the past, ‘ghosts’ from which
Ramanujan now feels safe.” He compared the intermittent hissing of the snakes to the little clouds of
dust that arise one walks along a dusty road. Ramanujan’s poetry suggests an entirely novel vision for
the expatriate Indian English poets that their poetry must integrate the necessary verve, augment, and
continuity. He can blend the two cultures together beautifully. He has the exceptional outlook by
virtue of which he can keep in synergy two worlds, entirely different in their cultures and dogmas. His
persona is a theatre decked in occidental backdrops where oriental scenes depicting familial relations
in all hues are staged, and the poet himself is the audience and the critic too, watching and analysing
with a detached interest. “He is a poet who juxtaposes the duality of eastern and western sensibilities
within himself and perfectly arbitrates between the two. Neither is he an Indian conformist nor a
revolutionary modernist advocating westernization- he is rather an envoy who elucidates the East to
the West and vice- versa with perfect composure.”

Ramanujan was very critical about the cultures of east and west. He knows that though there is
cultural transmission and transformation among the subordinated or marginal groups through material
culture, there are superstitions, poverty, and lack of education in the new transcultural society. So, he
doesn’t hesitate in criticizing certain superstitious facets of his religion. In “ Obituary” he
commemorates the death of a father, and makes satirical remarks on customs and rituals linked with
the cremation of the deceased:

he burned properly
at the cremation
as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn't
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons
to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
He equally satirizes the western traditions too. He talks about the western motif of modernity like the
advocacy for the freedom to seek out a vent for sexual desires, the medium of entertainment through
the motion pictures and the indifferent pursuit of science like the protest nuclear tests. He confesses
that he must follow the so- called modern trends of the west to save himself from being labelled as a
foreigner there:

Trans culturalism is not only mean gaining cultural dominance by the marginalized from material
wealth, but also the suffering of poor from such cultural gains. The poor are subjugated, exploited and
subordinated by the metropolitan material culture.

Conclusion

E.N. Lall Remarks “Ramanujan’s poems take their origin in a mind that is simultaneously Indian and
Western -- Indian mode of experiencing an emotion and the western mode of defining it.” In the
world globalization western hegemony has been challenged through the transcultural. The feeling of
hybridity and nostalgic apathy become an obstacle for Indian expatriate writers like Ramanujan and
others. So, they tried to look back their past to establish their lost identity in the cosmopolitan world
and struggling to create an identity, not ‘the other’ nor ‘in-between’, but fully an Indian by heart and
soul. Ramanujan has criticized many aspects of Indian culture while living in the multicultural
advanced world but at the end he backs his homeland and expresses his gratitude for his motherland.
He sings the praises of about his experiences in India: “my first thirty years in India, my frequent
visits and fieldtrips, my personal and professional preoccupations with Kannada, Tamil, the classics
and folklore give me my substance, my inner forms, images and symbols.”

Metaphor and Postcoloniality: The Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan (cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com)

King, Bruce. Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, Dom
Moraes. Madras; New York: Oxford UP, 199
Parthasarathy, R. "How It Strikes a Contemporary: The Poetry of A. K. Ra- manujan." Literary
Criterion.