when god is a traveller by Arundhathi subramaniam

                                     Introduction😊

The poem is about some myth kind of story of shiv and Parvati. so Nature is a metaphor of which things are happening with us .The poem when God is traveller is a very different kind of Title but poem and its meanings are very different. Basically, There are so many people who give his own idea about this poem. The poem has a very unique title  as we know that the God is traveller but the poet has a very different perseptive of the poem that's how she got the Sahitya academy 2021 award.

when we are see the book's page at that time we can feel what's the thing is in her poem. Let us to know that the some biography of  the poet.

 Arundhathi subramaniam

This poem is based on the incident between Lord Ganesha and Lord Kartikeya.Lord Shiva and his consort Parvati had two sons named Kartikeya (Kartika) and Ganesha (Vinayaka). The elder was Kartikeya and the younger Ganesha. In South India Kartikeya is popularly known as Lord Subramanya.

Arundhati Subramaniam's poetry takes us on a journey through different situations, emotions, beliefs, stigmas and compelled you to open the aperture of deep-seated lyrical self underneath our heart.

In 'When God is a Traveller', 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. At first glance, the poems from this collection come across as beautiful but not .

Many readings of this award-winning text exist but they highlight the religious aspect of the text. While it undoubtedly adheres to a certain religious context, it differs widely in terms of the figures of the Hindu pantheon represented, that is, the ones within the text are not really the most popular of the Hindu gods. Moreover, what Subramaniam does is that she uses these figures but challenges the canonical religious stories through her representations, as can be observed in the poem ‘Benaras’, an underappreciated piece. She tries to highlight the personal side of one’s religious beliefs, for instance in the poem ‘How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods’.

    Finally, what especially stands out in Subramaniam’s poetry collection is the imagery. Even when the meaning of the poems eludes the reader, the meaning-making processes remain accessible through the vivid images constructed, which interact with each other to produce meaning. In this text, the meaning is created through the words as well as through the imagery. This gives it a subliminal quality of sorts.

The Life of Arundhathi subramaniam👇

  

   As a source of Wikipedia...

Arundhathi Subramaniam's volume of poetry, When God is a Traveller (2014) was the Season Choice of the Poetry Book Society, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is the recipient of various awards and fellowships, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Prize, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Zee Women's Award for Literature, the International Piero Bigongiari Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga award, the Charles Wallace, Visiting Arts and Homi Bhabha Fellowships, among others. Arundhathi has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for When God is a Traveller .

As prose writer, her books include The Book of Buddha, a bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life and most recently, Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga (co-authored with Sadhguru). As editor, her most recent book is the Penguin anthology of sacred poetry, Eating God.

Her poetry has been published in various international journals and anthologies, including Reasons for Belonging: Fourteen Contemporary Poets (Penguin India); Sixty Indian Poets (Penguin India), Both Sides of the Sky (National Book Trust, India),We Speak in Changing Languages (Sahitya Akademi), Fulcrum No 4: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics (Fulcrum Poetry Press, US), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (Bloodaxe, UK), Anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry^[7( United States ), The Dance of the Peacock An Anthology of English Poetry from India,featuring 151 Indian English poets, edited by Vivekanand Jha and published by Hidden Brook Press, Canada. and Atlas: New Writing (Crossword/ Aark Arts)

When God is a Traveller

Trust the god back from his travels, his voice wholegrain (and chamomile), 

his wisdom neem, his peacock, sweaty-plumed, drowsing in the shadows.

Trust him who sits wordless on park benches listening to the cries of children fading into the dusk, 

his gaze emptied of vagrancy, his heart of ownership.

Trust him who has seen enough— revolutions, promises, the desperate light of shopping malls, hospital rooms, manifestos, theologies, the iron taste of blood, the great craters in the middle of love. 

Trust him who no longer begrudges his brother his prize, his parents their partisanship.  

Trust him whose race is run, whose journey remains, who stands fluid-stemmed knowing he is the tree that bears fruit, festive with sun.

 

Trust him who recognizes you— auspicious, abundant, battle-scarred, alive— and knows from where you come. 

Trust the god ready to circle the world all over again this time for no reason at all other than to see it through your eyes.

Summary of the Poem👇

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.

Central Theme of this poem:💭

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

If we look at the theme of the poem, 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

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