When God is a Traveller
- Arundhati subramaniam
Hello readers,
Today I'm going to discuss a poem by Arundhati Subramaniam - "When God is a Traveller". This task is assigned by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir. So this Sunday we are going to talk about this poem.
◆Arundhathi Subramaniam◆
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning Indian poet. Her recent book, "Love Without a Story", is forthcoming internationally from Bloodaxe Books in November 2020. Widely translated and anthologised, her previous volume, "When God is a Traveller", was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. She writes on culture and spirituality, and has worked as poetry editor, cultural curator and critic. Her prose work includes "The Book of Buddha", the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life, and as editor, the Penguin anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God. Other awards include the inaugural
Khushwant Singh Prize,
The Raza Award for Poetry,
The Zee Women’s Award for Literature,
The Il Ceppo Award in Italy,
The Mystic Kalinga award,
The Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and
Homi Bhabha Fellowships,
About the book :-
Arundhathi Subramaniam’s poems explore ambivalences the desire for adventure and anchorage, expansion and containment, vulnerability and strength, freedom and belonging, withdrawal and engagement, language as exciting resource and as desperate refuge. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, and all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize, When God Is a Traveller is a remarkable book of poetry. This book actually contains 22 poems from the “Deeper in Transit” section of Where I Live, thus there is substantial overlap in poems between books. Still, there are 29 new poems in this book, and it is a beautiful hardcover with very attractive cover art, making it a nice little book of poetry to carry around. We will look at her poem "When God Is A Traveller" (HarperCollins India).
About the poem :-
In the poem which gives the book its title, “When God is a Traveller,” Subramaniam muses about
“Kartikeya/Murga/Subramania, my namesake.”
Kartikeya/Murga/Subramania is known by all those names, as well as Skanda, and is the son of Śiva, in some legends of him alone, as Ganesa is born of Pārvatī alone, but also often considered the son of both Śiva and Pārvatī. Subramania is the god of war who is also known as Guhā (cave, secret) or Guruguhā (cave-teacher) as he renounces war in some legends and retreats to the mountains. (For stories of Subramania, see Kartikeya as well as the Skanda Purana and for comparison of various legends, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Siva: The Erotic Ascetic). Arundhathi Subramaniam writes in this poem:
*When God Is a Traveller*
Trust the god back from his travels, his voice wholegrain (and chamomile),
his wisdom neem, his peacock, sweaty-plumed, drowsing in the shadows.
Trust him who sits wordless on park benches listening to the cries of children fading into the dusk,
his gaze emptied of vagrancy, his heart of ownership.
Trust him who has seen enough— revolutions, promises, the desperate light of shopping malls, hospital rooms, manifestos, theologies, the iron taste of blood, the great craters in the middle of love.
Trust him who no longer begrudges his brother his prize, his parents their partisanship.
Trust him whose race is run, whose journey remains, who stands fluid-stemmed knowing he is the tree that bears fruit, festive with sun.
Trust him who recognizes you— auspicious, abundant, battle-scarred, alive— and knows from where you come.
Trust the god ready to circle the world all over again this time for no reason at all other than to see it through your eyes.
There is one story about God Ganesha and God Kartikeya. Parvati molded Ganesha from the turmeric paste. There are many stories that revolve around the birth of Lord Ganesha, one of the most popular is that Parvati molded Ganesha from the turmeric paste she used to clear her body with. According to the story, once Parvati asked Nandi to guard the door when she went to bathe. But he being Lord Shiva’s faithful allowed him to enter. With this incident, she lost faith in everyone and hence she collected the turmeric paste that she used to clear her body and molded it into Ganesha.
Once Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvati threw a challenge to both their sons Ganesha and Kartikeya to take three rounds of the universe and come back. The one who completes the challenge first will be awarded the ‘fruit of knowledge’. Kartikeya took his vahana peacock and flew away. While Ganesha took three pradakshina (circumambulations) around his parents and explained to them that for him the whole universe lies in their feet. His answer impressed Shiva and Parvati and hence the fruit was awarded to him.
In 'When God is a Traveller', Subramaniam weaves metaphors, metaphors that are distinctively hers, into language that is simultaneously fluid and simple. Everydayness is woven as a metaphor rife with allusions to the deeper meanings of life. These are poems of wonder and precarious elation, about learning to embrace the seemingly disparate landscapes of hermitage and court, the seemingly diverse addresses of mystery and clarity, disruption and stillness - all the roadblocks and rewards on the long dangerous route to recovering what it is to be alive and human.
These poems explore various ambivalences around human intimacy with its bottlenecks and surprises, life in a Third World megapolis, myth, the politics of culture and gender, and the persistent trope of the existential journey.
Trust him who sits wordless on park benches listening to the cries of children fading into the dusk,
In this stanza Arundhathi Subramaniam said that trust on him who just sits wordless in the park. Benches are listening to the cry of babies fading into the dusk.
Themes :-
Wandering, digging, falling, coming to terms with unsettlement and uncertainty, finiteness and fallibility, exploring intersections between the sacred and the sensual, searching for ways to step in and out of stories, cycles and frames - these are some of the recurrent themes.
