Language, Spirituality and Cultural Identity in Contemporary India: An Interdisciplinary Study of Arundhathi Subramaniam's When God Is a Traveller

Abstract: In modern Indian English poetry, the medium can be seen to be increasingly being used to negotiate issues of culture, identity, spirituality and belonging. When God Is a Traveller (2014) by Arundhathi Subramaniam is, therefore, an important and significant poem in this poetic topography as it is a poem of the sacred and the mundane, the Indian philosophical tradition and the present, the myth and the modern, the individual's uncertainty and spiritual quest. In this paper, the relationship between language, Subramaniam's spirituality and cultural identity is discussed in an interdisciplinary approach to language. It upholds the notion that language is not simply a means of articulating spiritual concepts but is a place where the contemporary Indian identity is negotiated and re-constructed. The language of Subramaniam, like his poetry, is distinctive, using a range of devices including diction, metaphor, imagery, cultural references, mythological allusions, irony, and the use of ordinary and sacred vocabulary to create a poetic idiom that defies the boundaries of the spiritual and the secular. Poems like ‘How Some Hindus Find Their Personal Gods', ‘Eight Poems for Shakuntala', ‘Benaras', ‘Bhakti' and ‘When God Is a Traveller' illustrate this reinterpretation of inherited cultural and spiritual traditions in a fresh, contemporary use of the English language. The study also examines how the journey is reoccurring as a metaphor for self-discovery, spiritual questioning and identity formation. The paper is a conclusion that Subramaniam's poetry is a dynamic expression of the present time's cultural awareness of Indians in which the space of English is flexible for negotiating tradition, modernity, spirituality and individual identity.