Poet as Strider:The Diaspora Sensibilities in A.K. Ramanujan’s Early Poetry

As a seminal representative figure of modern Indian poetry in English, A.K. Ramanujan has been appeared as a diasporic poet right from the beginning of his poetic career and has remained the same till to the end. Constituted with The Striders (1966) and Relations (1971), his early poetry is marked with haunting nostalgia and memory along with the trauma of upischolar_maining and identity crisis manifesting his 'striders' like floating existence in the diasporic location as a displaced individual. The tool that the poet employs as resistance to that dominant sense of loss and dejection is the poetics of return incorporating excessive use of memories and nostalgia for original home and cultural heritage. However, the resulting experience as consequence of that poetics of return is not the soothing recovery of essential cultural identity but hybrid identities and 'diasporic intimacy' manifesting profound uncertainties and split-consciousness embodied with the diasporic space. The strategic edge of such situations can be traced within the double vision of the poet representing his split-consciousness and arising out of the legacy of the past and the impression of the substantial things of the present context of living. The underlying tension between these two forces overpowered by the sense of loss and urge for creating new identities did not open up any resolution for the poet regarding his lost selfhood, identity and belonging; rather they make his diasporic sensibilities more reflective and prolific.