About Author: Arundhati Subramaniam
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. Winner of the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry in 2015, the Raza Award for Poetry and the International Piero Bigongiari Prize.
This poet Arundhati Subramaniam and her Poetry Collection titled as When God is a Traveller got Sahitya Akademi 2021 award in English Language. This is a titular poem from the collection.
Poem: When God Is a Traveller
By Arundhati Subramaniam
(wondering about Kartikeya/ Muruga/ Subramania, my namesake)
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.
1. Can you identify the central theme of this poem?
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.
2. Can you explain this poem?
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.
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 Gaṇeśa 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 as he renounces war in some legends and retreats to the mountains.
3. What is it that the poet wants to say through this poem?
Thank you….
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