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Abstract
A.K. Ramanujan’s poetry intricately explores the conflicts between inherited cultural traditions and the unsettling yet transformative influences of modernity. As a poet and scholar who straddled Indian and Western worlds, Ramanujan used his literary voice to examine identity, displacement, familial legacy, and cultural hybridity. This article analyzes how his works dramatize the psychological and existential strains experienced by postcolonial individuals caught between tradition and modern change. Drawing from key poems in The Striders, Relations, and Second Sight, this paper highlights how Ramanujan’s poetry reflects a continuous negotiation between past and present, the local and the global, the personal and the collective. The study also applies postcolonial and psychoanalytic frameworks to underscore Ramanujan’s unique engagement with the dual demands of heritage and self-invention.
This research article explores how A.K. Ramanujan constructs the poetic self through this tension between tradition and modernity. It analyzes selected poems to show how familial relations, cultural symbols, linguistic hybridity, and existential introspection all contribute to a poetic vision that is profoundly ambivalent, yet deeply human. The discussion is structured around key thematic areas—ancestral memory, family structures, linguistic duality, and modernist fragmentation—and draws on theoretical perspectives from postcolonial studies, cultural anthropology, and modernist poetics. Through this exploration, the paper aims to demonstrate how Ramanujan’s poetry becomes a space for articulating the dilemmas of contemporary Indian identity—neither entirely rooted nor entirely free, but suspended in a perpetual negotiation between origins and aspirations.