Still Another View of Grace by A.K. Ramanujan- An Analysis

 

Still Another View of Grace

                                                          -A.K. Ramanujan

About the Author
            A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) was an Indian poet, translator, folklorist, and scholar. He wrote both in English and Kannada. He is celebrated for his ability to bridge Indian traditions with modern sensibilities. His poem often explore memory, culture, sexuality, morality, and identity. He was deeply interested in the tensions between tradition and individual desire.

About the Poem
       The poem “Still Another View of Grace” appeared in Ramanujan’s first collection The Striders (1966). This volume established his reputation as a major Indian English poet. The poem’s central idea is the conflict between moral upbringing and bodily desire. It also shows how desire can overpower inherited notions of purity, sin, and social order. Further, the poem deals with the themes of sexuality, transgression, rebellion, and cultural guilt.

Analysis
          At the beginning of the poem, the speaker confesses an inner struggle: “I burned and burned.” This metaphor of “burning” suggests suppressed desire or passion. The thought he catches is personified as a woman with “screams of her hair.” This imagery conveys both attraction and danger. The speaker warns against “gentleman’s morals” and advises her to marry within social approval—a priest or even “any beast in the wind.” It highlights his own conflict between societal respectability and basic instinct.

Next, the speaker’s Brahmin background is described. He has been raised among “singers of shivering hymns.” In his household, desire is policed and suppressed. He is trained to fear “hungers that roam the street.” However, his desire/lust breaks through. The turning point arrives when the woman “stood upon that dusty road on a night lit April mind” and looks at him. Her presence dismantles all commandments. Here, the speaker recalls his father’s moral failures. Desire is embodied in her “tumbled hair.” Her hair feels as “silk” in his hand. So he “took her behind the laws of my land.” Here, the poet admits that he yielded to his lust against his religious and social prohibitions.

Conclusion

Thus, the poem “Still Another View of Grace” portrays the triumph of physical desire over inherited morality. Grace here is not divine, but the grace of yielding to passion, a human and forbidden grace. Further, this poem talks about the sexual freedom in a constrained world in the name of family tradition.