Crisis of Identity and Quest of Root in the Poetry of R. Parthasarathy: A Critical Reappraisal from Postcolonial Perspective

Abstract

Parthasarathy's poetry primarily deals with the crisis of identity ensuing from expatriation. The poet's personal feelings of isolation, dissatisfaction and bitter experiences of racial discriminations during the years he spent in England occupy a considerable portion of his work. He also portrays how such feelings make him cast retrospective glance at his past and origin. Here the poetry of another South Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan proved handy for him as it provided him with a model of how to use the past creatively, particularly the complex memories of the nuanced pattern of South Indian familial relationships, in order to emote a native sensibility in alien language. As the very title of Parthasarathy's Rough Passage clearly indicates, the metaphor of journey is crucial to the understanding of the entire book. The journey is here as much physical as it is internal, charting the constant changes and gradual evolutions in the poet's psychological states parallelling the shifts in the physical locale, as he travels from home to foreign leads and finally back home and in different cities of his homeland. The journey is finally directed towards the exploration of the identity of the poetic self disgruntled with a long-drawn phase of detrimental infatuation with a foreign culture. This zest for genuine self-representation, which is the ultimate object of this selfexploratory inward march, is part of what Ellek Boehmer calls the necessity for 'cultural self-definition' (Boehmer 176) and 'demands for political self-determination with a quest for cultural and geographic authenticity' (Boehmer 178) in the wake of independence of the erstwhile colonies. The cultural and linguistic dilemma, resulting in a kind of crisis of identity of the former colonial subject bifurcated with bicultural upbringing, is finally resolved as the poet re-roots himself within his native cultural tradition which was lying submerged, almost obliterated, under the choking impact of the coloniser's culture. The decolonised creative impetus attempts to overhaul the master's language to accommodate a native sensibility, ransacking the El Dorado of native tradition and its rich cultural and linguistic heritage through a process of 'cultural revivalism' (Boehmer 179), in order to forge an identity essentially embedded in both familial and racial past predating the colonial encounter.