‘This drink raises me like a fierce wind. Have I consumed Soma?’
‘This drink lifts me up like swift horses raise a chariot. Have I consumed Soma?
These verses, from the tenth book of the Rig Veda, translated by the great French Sanskritist Louis Renou, impart the thrill and elation that may have accompanied those who partook of the mysterious, probably hallucinogenic, and now inexorably lost substance known as Soma. Soma was of course not just a plant, or a drink made from a plant, but also a king, and a god, who was sacrificed at the altar of fire during solemn Vedic rituals, to the accompaniment of ceremonial chanting and a complicated apparatus of gestures and words. By the time it enters the historical record, however, it had already become something of a rare, endangered commodity, until eventually only the name and fragmentary recollections of its effects remained.
Hallucinogens, and the altered states of mind they induced, were at the centre of several ancient religious practices, from the Eleusinian mysteries of the Greeks, the magical trances of Siberian shamans, the Peyote cults of Northern Mexico, or the Ayahuasca rituals of Amazonian tribes. While these practices largely faded out of public memory or were actively suppressed in the intervening centuries, they remerged, first slowly, and then with explosive consequences, at the heart of Western culture in the 1960s. The poet, scholar, and literary translator AK Ramanujan was living in Chicago, where he taught linguistics at the University, when interest in psychedelics, and the counter-cultural values they were associated with, peaked in the United States.
Aldous Huxley was one of the first “serious” literary figures to write about psychedelics in The Doors of Perception, detailing the effects of a Mescaline trip he took in the Spring of 1953. Ramanujan had read Huxley, and taken inspiration from his experiments with consciousness-altering substances. He had also quite possibly read another book, published in 1967, by the ethnomycologist R Gordon Wasson, with an important contribution by a young Wendy Doniger, called Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Doniger’s contribution, regarding the “post-Vedic history of the Soma plant” has been wisely included in this volume as well, and provides fascinating insights into early Indological speculations about the identity of the Soma plant, and the nature of its effects.
Poetic vision
This book, and the poems contained in it, are the fruit of a series of experiments, in the pharmacological, literary, as well as editorial domains. They arose out of Ramanujan’s encounters with Mescaline in August 1971, and his attempt to transcribe his experience in verse. He worked on these “Soma” poems over the following decade, developing them into a sequence of works that tied the rippling aftereffects of a psychedelic drug, a longstanding scholarly interest in Indian mythology, personal and familial upheavals, and his own journey as an individual, poet, and artist together. Ramanujan, who passed away in 1994 at the age of 64, left most of these poems unpublished and scattered among his papers.
We can read them now, thanks to the efforts of his son Krishna, and the Ramanujan scholar Guillermo Rodríguez, who have previously collaborated to publish the writer’s diaries in Journeys. Like that volume, this edition also constitutes something of a literary milestone, offering a new, and freshly contextualised look at the late poet’s oeuvre. The Soma poems might be read sequentially, as variations on a singular theme, through which the writer operates a series of shifts in both tone and register and can return to consider a theme that has been broached and left behind a few pages before.
In a way, it is reminiscent of that other great world-girdling masterpiece, “Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda” which cuts across space and time and moves from the rapturous to the ordinary and back again. In these poems, Ramanujan also stops to eat a breakfast of “coffee” and “eggs” (both “runny” and “poached”), invokes Siva and Visnu – revered deities of the bhakti saints he tirelessly read and translated – cites his own translation of the Tamil poet Nammalvar, and moves seamlessly between Beirut, Munich, and Istanbul. As Arvind Krishna Mehrotra perceptively writes in an essay for this volume, the mind-altering effects of psychedelic substances, which casts everyday objects in an extraordinary light, aligns well with Ramanujan’s own poetic vision, which constantly transfigures the quotidian.
It is why an abiding refrain in one of these sequences marvels at this very duality – “Soma, once eye of heaven,/ now a mushroom at my feet”; or why gods and goddesses in their many-hued avatars can suddenly occur to him “at the corner of 57th street,/ talking about chickens/ to a butcher”. One is also left to marvel at Ramanujan’s poetic erudition, which binds the likes of the 17th-century English mystic poet John Donne, Ezra Pound, Saivite mythology and sculpture, and the anonymous Vedic seers into a single continuum. It is also interspersed with the kind of psychedelic imagery (“bud of the thousand petal lotus in the brain”) that one associates with the 1960s and lyrics to songs by The Grateful Dead.
A composite creature
This book, like what Mehrotra writes of one of the poems in it, is something of a “composite creature”; equal parts cultural history, literary criticism, scholarly treatise, and of course poetry. Other texts included in this book are Guillermo Rodríguez’s essay, a virtuoso close reading of the first of the Soma poems, while Krishna Ramanujan, an accomplished science writer, provides a worthy addendum, and update, to Doniger’s essay, detailing more recent, scientific investigations into the identity of the Soma plants, and its plausibly hallucinogenic nature.
This text is timely in other ways, coinciding with a renewed interest in psychedelic drugs, and their potential therapeutic uses. With some of the stigma associated with the first wave of psychoactive substances fading, at least in the West, the moment is opportune to open a conversation about their role in shaping culture and science. Ramanujan’s poems and the essays that accompany them serve as a useful reminder, that these substances, and the altered states they produced, might once have been at the heart of some of the most ancient, and revered texts of Indian civilisation as well.
Soma: Poems by AK Ramanujan, edited by Guillermo Rodríguez and Krishna Ramanujan, Penguin India.