Collected Essays

A. K. Ramanujan

5 ideas

1. Context-sensitive versus context-free rules

   Ramanujan suggests that cultures can be characterized by whether their preferred rules apply universally (context-free) or vary by who, where, when and to whom (context-sensitive), and he argues that traditional Indian thought leans toward the latter: law codes such as Manu specify different duties and punishments by caste, stage of life and situation, making jati-dharma, the duty proper to one's kind, central. He reads modernization as a partial movement toward context-free norms. He reads bhakti as an attempt to reach beyond context, and Tantra as a ritually controlled inversion of orthodox contextual rules.

2. The father's two brain lobes

   Ramanujan recalls that his father was both a mathematician and astronomer with modern scientific interests and a Sanskritist who cast horoscopes. When his son pointed out the apparent contradiction, the father replied that the brain has two lobes. Ramanujan offers the anecdote as a personal example of holding different kinds of knowledge side by side, each within its own sphere.

3. Akam and puram with landscape codes

   Classical Tamil poetry divides its subjects into akam, the interior world of love, and puram, the exterior world of war, kings and public life. Within akam, each tinai (landscape) encodes a phase of love: kurinji hills stand for lovers' union, mullai forest for patient waiting, marutam farmland for infidelity and sulking, neytal seashore for anxious separation, and palai wasteland for elopement or hardship. Because each flower, bird, season and time of day belongs to a landscape, a single natural image can signal a precise emotional situation without stating it.

4. Rama's ring in the netherworld

   In a folktale Ramanujan retells in his essay on the many Ramayanas, Rama's ring falls through a crack in the earth, and Hanuman follows it down to the underworld. There its king shows him a platter heaped with identical rings and explains that every one belongs to a Rama: each time a Rama's ring falls, his avatar is ending, and there have been countless Ramas and countless Ramayanas. Ramanujan uses the tale to argue that the Rama story has no single original. It exists as a pool of signs that each teller, language and region draws on to make a new telling.

5. Translation must answer to two masters

   A translator is accountable both to the original, its structure, rhythm and cultural codes, and to the reader in the target language, who needs a poem that works as a poem there. Translation therefore is not word-for-word transfer. It is a re-enactment that preserves relations between parts rather than the parts themselves, and some losses are made up by gains elsewhere in the poem. A translation that is faithful but lifeless fails the original as surely as a fluent one that misrepresents it.

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