Colonial Memory and Cultural Resistance in the Poetry of A. K. Ramanujan

A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) is usually read as a poet of family, memory and linguistic plurality, and as one of the most important translators of classical Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry. This article proposes that these familiar emphases converge in a less often examined concern: the poet's negotiation of colonial memory and his practice of cultural resistance. Born in the princely state of Mysore and educated in English, Ramanujan inherited a colonial formation that he neither repudiated nor celebrated. Drawing on postcolonial theory of hybridity, nationalist thought and collective memory, the article argues that his poetry registers colonialism not as spectacular trauma but as domestic sediment, lodged in family, language and habits of knowledge. It then argues that his resistance operates through three strategies: translation as the recovery of non-colonial literary genealogies, an essayistic and poetic preference for context-sensitive thought over universal abstraction, and an ironic refusal of nativist nostalgia. Close readings of "Obituary," "Small-Scale Reflections on a Great House," "Self-Portrait" and "A River" support the argument, together with a discussion of his translations and essays. The article concludes that Ramanujan models a form of resistance that is plural, self-critical and unwilling to purchase cultural authenticity at the price of simplification.