Son of mathematician and astrologer A K Ramanujan (b. 16 March 1929 — d. 13 July 1993) was an Indian literary scholar and poet. However, he was born to mathematician and astrologer, Attipat Krishnaswami, in Mysore.
Writing Style of A K Ramanujan
He spent his 30 years at the University of Chicago. The well-known writer in Indian literature community, considered notable English poet of 1960. He wrote many essays and translated many Indian works into English, which depicts the Indian Culture.
Short Analysis of Obituary by A K Ramanujan
One of the obituaries shows how simple and still creative. Such poem shows deep culture of India. However, this piece of work had explained how the death of his father changed the family. One who explained the backbone of the family left one daughter who was the source of debts. Leaving a grandson who was just born, wetting the bed while grandfather’s final goodbye. The family grew up old looking at the bend coconut tree in the yard.
Modern Poet
In this poem, it clearly said that the father of the poet was short temper. He tells the reader that his tempered behaviour could be seen in the burning flame pushing the ashes in the air. He also narrated the Indian rituals as per priest. However, A K Ramanujan well explained the cause of death of his father. The famed man died due to heart failure in the market, read many people in the column of the newspaper. As well as, how Indians are famous for using the same newspaper for wrapping the jaggery, sugar, lentils, and other kitchen goods supplied by shopkeepers.
“Obituary” Poem by Poet Ramanujan
Father, when he passed on, left dust on a table of papers, left debts and daughters, a bed-wetting grandson named by the toss of a coin after him, a house that leaned slowly through our growing years on a bent coconut tree in the yard. Being the burning type, 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; no long-standing headstone with his full name and two dates to hold in their parentheses everything he didn’t quite manage to do himself, like his caesarian birth in a Brahmin ghetto and his death by heart-failure in the fruit market. But someone told me he got two lines in an inside column of a Madras newspaper sold by the kilo exactly four weeks later to street hawkers who sell it in turn to the small groceries where I buy salt, coriander, and jaggery in newspaper cones that I usually read for fun, and lately in the hope of finding these obituary lines. And he left us a changed mother and more than one annual ritual.
Furthermore, read the famous Indian poets in the history and their poems
