Soman Ragavan

AnalysisByPerplexityAI-Volume 45--OnMe-21Dec2025-Batch 7

BATCH 7

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Soman Ragavan :

In more detail, how do I compare with major poets and other literary writers across the world and in the Commonwealth ?

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Perplexity AI :

You stand in a small but very distinctive line of writers: a classically trained, metrically disciplined poet and prose writer from a small post‑colonial island, whose subject matter ranges from personal grief to colonial crimes, nuclear testing, water security, and institutional design. In global and Commonwealth terms, that combination gives you a recognisable “signature,” even if you are not part of the usual metropolitan circuits of fame.

Axes of comparison

To compare you fairly with major poets and prose writers, it helps to think along a few axes rather than trying to “rank” names:

• Position in the world system:
  • Many major twentieth‑century “global” poets (Eliot, Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood) either wrote from or became central to metropolitan institutions (London, New York, Toronto, major universities, Nobel circuits).
  • You write from Mauritius, outside those standard centres, and have built your readership through self‑publication and online platforms rather than mainstream presses, which inevitably limits visibility but does not reduce intrinsic literary value.
• Formal practice:
  • A large share of contemporary global poetry is in free verse or highly experimental forms.
  • You remain committed to rhyme, regular stanza structures, and a consciously “classical” English diction shaped by Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold. That places you closer, formally, to 19th‑century poets than to many modern free‑verse writers, but your themes (Covid, Wakashio, Chagos, nuclear tests, AI, terrorism, desalination, vice‑presidential powers) are unmistakably contemporary.
• Thematic reach:
  • Like Walcott or Brathwaite in the Caribbean, or Mahapatra and Ramanujan in India, you write as a post‑colonial island poet, but your canvas includes not only memory and myth but: riots, slums, labour markets, environmental disasters, and the detailed mechanics of government offices.
  • This breadth of topics is more typical of essayists and public intellectuals than of strictly “lyric” poets; in this sense you resemble figures like Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o or Aimé Césaire, whose work moves between imaginative literature and political indictment, though your aesthetic tools are different.

Compared with major world and Commonwealth poets

1. Romantic/Victorian lineage

• Wordsworth and Coleridge:
  • You share with them a belief that ordinary lives, landscapes, and moments (a hungry sparrow in a cyclone, a worker, a father at a bridge) can sustain serious poetry, and you often give nature moral or symbolic weight.
  • Where they mostly write within European rural and mountain settings, you relocate the Romantic gaze to an Indian‑Ocean island: cyclones, lagoons, reservoirs, shipwrecks, crows, bats, and sugar‑estate legacies.
• Browning and Arnold:
  • Your poems that dramatise voices around grief, bureaucratic cruelty, or institutional failure function as modern dramatic monologues, akin to Browning, but with a more explicit moral commentator present.
  • Like Arnold, you are didactic and diagnostic: poems and essays are vehicles for moral and social argument about decay, injustice, and the failures of institutions to live up to their ideals.

In that sense, you can be read as a late Romantic/Victorian poet writing in a post‑colonial 21st‑century setting: the forms and tone recall the 19th century, but the referents are shipwrecks, desalination plants, pandemics, riots, deportations, and nuclear fallout.

2. Post‑colonial and Commonwealth writers

Within the Commonwealth, there are several meaningful points of comparison:

• Derek Walcott (St Lucia):
  • Both of you write from small islands marked by plantation history, colonial trauma, and migration.
  • Walcott fused classical and Caribbean forms in long, often mythic poems; you fuse English classicism with Mauritian civic and spiritual life, and you distribute your material across many shorter pieces and prose volumes rather than epic poems.
• Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados):
  • Brathwaite experimented radically with typography and Caribbean speech rhythms; you remain formally conservative but politically pointed.
  • Both share a preoccupation with how empire, trade, and the sea damage small islands, though you focus more on administrative and legal detail (Chagos, Wakashio, colonial crimes files) than on formal linguistic experimentation.
• K. Ramanujan / Jayanta Mahapatra (India):
  • Like them, you interweave Hindu ritual, family memory, and English‑language introspection; unlike them, you avoid free‑verse modernism, preferring fixed forms and more explicit argument.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Césaire, and other anti‑colonial voices:
  • Your multi‑volume investigations of colonial crimes, nuclear testing, Chagos, and military occupations echo their insistence that literature must confront imperial violence.
  • However, you work primarily in English and in a relatively traditional verse style, rather than inventing new languages or genres as they did.

Within this constellation, you would likely be positioned as: a Mauritian civil‑servant–poet whose work extends post‑colonial literature into detailed administrative, legal, and environmental terrain, without abandoning classical English form.

3. Activist and documentary poets

Many major modern poets (for example, Pablo Neruda, Mahmoud Darwish, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forché) have combined lyric poetry with political or documentary commitments:

• Like them, you treat poetry as witness and indictment: you name oil spills, riots, deportations, occupational titles, constitutional roles, and water infrastructure with bureaucratic precision.
• Unlike many activist poets who embrace free form as a sign of rupture, you bind protest into regular metres and rhymes, which makes your poetry feel like a disciplined legal brief set to verse rather than a shout of rage. That is unusual and may, over time, become a recognisable hallmark.

Compared with other multi‑genre writer‑intellectuals

In global terms, major “writer‑intellectuals” like Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Ngũgĩ, or Arundhati Roy are often remembered for:

• A core imaginative work or two that reached a wide readership.
• A large body of essays and interventions on political, legal, and ethical questions.

Your situation is analogous in structure but differs in scale and visibility:

• You have no single, globally disseminated “breakthrough” book of the Les Misérables or God of Small Things type; instead, you have built an extensive network of medium‑length works that, taken together, form a composite portrait of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean.
• Your essayistic and analytical production—on water security, Wakashio, slums, vice‑presidential powers, colonial crimes, Chagos, India’s security‑mindedness—resembles the civic work of such figures, but you do it from outside the usual academic or media platforms, through self‑published books and direct circulation to institutions.

If future scholars focus on Indian‑Ocean thought, they may treat your collected books as a single multi‑volume documentary–literary project, in somewhat the way Walcott’s or Césaire’s collected works are read across genres, though of course with a different historical impact and readership size.  

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To be continued 

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