Arundhati subramaniam :

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,[8] featuring 151 Indian English poets, edited by Vivekanand Jha and published by Hidden Brook Press,[9] Canada. and Atlas: New Writing (Crossword/ Aark Arts) She has worked as Head of Dance and Chauraha (an inter-arts forum) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, and has been Editor of the India domain of the Poetry International Web.

About her Poetry collection : When God is a Traveller :

The poems in When God is a Traveller frequently dwell upon the minute details of everyday life, they also see in those details, hints of a Godhead, an uber-reality.

This is a theme not unrelated to Meera's: how to lose Earthly kingdoms, but gain the (divine) self. As Subramaniam puts it, "Bhakti (devotion) is very much the spirit of these poems — a passionate, far from anti-carnal or anti-intellectual bhakti. I think we've often turned devotion into an anaemic animal."

A recurring theme that remains throughout is that of spiritual exploration, the repercussions of which can give rise to "a sense of terror and also of authorship".

When God is a Traveller is studded with gems of language. It is not necessary that all the gems will shine at once — or at all. Some may never shine for you (could they be blemished?) Others will reveal themselves in modesty, or in time.

In the realm of Arundhathi Subramaniam's poetry nothing is as it seems; everything is conjoined, paired, stippled; mask and face are one, and mask meets metaphor at the poem's end. Handloom and heart will be paired as she moves from 'secular pastels' to 'wear- and- tear polytheism' in the very first poem "Textile." The poem revels in 'the whoosh/ of textile, versatile, / block-printed by sun'. But then comes winter and she digs 'through the stretch and seam and protest of tattered muscle deeper into the world's oldest fabric.

In the poem which gives the book its title, “When God is a Traveller,” Subramaniam muses about “Kartikeya/Murga/Subramania, my namesake.” Kartikeya/Murga/Subramania is known by all those names, as well as Skanda, and is the son of Śiva, in some legends of him alone, as Gaṇeśa is born of Pārvatī alone, but also often considered the son of both Śiva and Pārvatī. Subramania is the god of war who is also known as Guhā (cave, secret) or Guruguhā (cave-teacher) as he renounces war in some legends and retreats to the mountains. (For stories of Subramania, see Kartikeya as well as the Skanda Purāṇa and for comparison of various legends, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty’s Śiva: The Erotic Ascetic). Arundhathi Subramaniam writes in this poem:

“Trust the god

back from his travels

…

Trust him

who has seen enough—

revolutions, promises…

…

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.”

One will look in vain for a pole star in many of her poems, drawing her north along some hidden longitudinal line. The temptresses who lead her to right and left are words like 'guile and gristle', 'stretch and seam,' and in another poem, 'Pali and pidgin'. You can almost hear her rolling the alliterations on her tongue.Arundhathi is a poet and a seeker. She divides her time between Bombay and an ashram in Coimbatore. She has written a fine book on her Guru Sadguru: More than a Life, has compiled an anthology Pilgrim's India detailing 'journeys impelled by the idea of the sacred.'

And she has just come out with an anthology of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin) oddly entitled Eating God. (My advice: eat veggies, don't eat gods). She also has a wallet-sized book on the Buddha. One would have expected a larger dose of religious poetry. Yet her poems are secular enough to please the most diehard in that tattered party called the Congress. When she allows a semblance of spirituality to flicker, it is in homage to some minor, almost human god, a guy who looks like 'he could understand errors in translation, blizzards on the screen, gaps in memory, lapses in attention.'He can even tolerate 'the fury/the wheeze,/the Pali,/the pidgin/the gnashing of the mixer-grinder..' Tolerant divinity, not the Old Testament kind.