"When God is a Traveller "- by Arundhati Subramanian

 Hello friends,

I would like to share basic information about " When God is a Traveller "  by Arundhati Subramaniam than I wrote this blog .

About author :

Arundhathi Subramaniam is an Indian poet, writer, critic, curator, translator, Journalist, writing in English. 

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, she mostly lives in Bombay (a city she is perennially on the verge of leaving). She has published two books of poetry in Britain with Bloodaxe, Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009), which combines selections from her first two Indian collections, On Cleaning Bookshelves and Where I Live, with new work, and When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, won the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize at the Jaipur Literary Festival, and was awarded the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy. Her latest collection, Love Without a Story, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020. 

    

 She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010), co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English, and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011) and Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (2014). In 2006 she appeared at London’s Poetry International festival and gave readings throughout Britain on a tour organised by the Poetry Society. She also took part in the T.S. Eliot Prize reading at London’s Southbank Centre in January .

Poem's introduction :

This poem is based on religion. "When God is a Traveller" is a collection of poems from one of the leading contemporary poets of our time.She wields the English language with such a lyrical Indian touch.

                               This is one of the best collections of contemporary Indian poetry.

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.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.

         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.

Though the poems in When God is a Traveller frequently dwell upon the minute details of everyday life, they also see in those details, hints of a Godhead, an uber-reality. Charmingly elusive avatars of Muruga, Krishna and other divinities appear, composed of the elements of our contemporary reality and occasionally, denied by it. This is also a frank volume of middle age.  Life after Forty', Arundhathi Subramaniam eloquently describes how, when life swivels around suddenly, we have to learn to discover profits in our loss.

She described about religions and the allusions of Hinduism do leave to criticism.  She wrote this poem in easy language , Than readers understany very well and got moral message from the poem . 

Themes of the Poem :

"When God is a Traveller" in this poem Arundhati wrote many themes . We can see some of themes like  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 themes in this poem.

  This poem central theme is spirituality .

This is a theme not unrelated to Meera's: how to lose Earthly kingdoms, but gain the (divine) self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti (devotion) is very much the spirit of these poems — a passionate, far from anti-carnal or anti-intellectual bhakti. I think we've often turned devotion into an anaemic animal."

'When God is a Traveller',  Arundhati Subramaniam weaves metaphors, metaphors that are distinctly hers, into language that is simultaneously fluid and simple. Everydayness is woven as a metaphor rife with allusions to the deeper meanings of life. 

A recurring theme that remains throughout is that of spiritual exploration, the repercussions of which can give rise to "a sense of terror and also of authorship".

Author's review / thought on the poem :

       Poet says about poem , in poem she does not say about one particular religion or god. She asked about every religion .

This bhakti in her poems also reflects a transition in her life since I was last in touch with her, in the 1990s. "Earlier I thought that my public persona would be about 'the Arts', and my private self would be about 'spirituality'. A near-death experience in 1997 and an encounter with a spiritual guide in 2004 have shaped my life on a very fundamental level."

Many of the old divides blasted away, and the poems in this volume reflect that.

Conclusion :

      "When God is a Traveller " is a Arundhati Subramanian 's best work in this contemporary Indian Poetry. This poem describe spirituality & emotions. She wrote this poem in easy language than every readers has easiy read it .