Sivaramakrishnan Murali

Biography

Dr. Murali started writing at a very young age, drawing suitable inspiration from his ardent enthusiasm for natural history, especially ornithology, and his exceptional talent for sketching and painting. His early poems are replete with imagery of nature: animals and birds, mountains and forests, the sea and the sky, all find their place in his work alongside the human. He loves to travel and sketch people and places. His earliest significant poem – Night Heron – appeared in Chandrabhaga, and the poet Jayanta Mahapatra noted it mainly for its singular appeal and original voice. Another longer poem 'Ganga' was published in Chandrabhaga in the early eighties. From then onwards, Murali's poems have appeared in many reputed journals and periodicals. Whatever his other preoccupations, he has been writing poems fairly regularly.

He received his PhD from the University of Kerala (1990). Murali's first volume of poems Night Heron: Poems and Sketches appeared in 1998. [Calcutta: The Writers' Workshop, 1998] Conversations with Children (2005) and Earth Signs (2006) followed.

In her full length review of these poems (World Literature in Review) Syamala Narayan writes: His first book of verse, Night Heron (1998) had some drawings. Conversations with Children (2005) his second collection, had no illustrations but was distinguished by poems featuring characters from the Mahabharata like Ekalavya, Amba, Karna, and Krishna. Earth Signs is profusely illustrated, with the poet’s line drawings adorning almost every page. The collection reveals the naturalist in Murali; it also contains three poems written in Gotha, Germany in 1998.

The East Facing Shop and other poems (Kolkata: Monfakira, 2010): What marks out these poems are their genuineness in feeling and form—They stand testimony to a life lived from the inside, a life struggling to be relieved of the burdens of a past and a future equally alike, a sensitive will to be uninhibited by regret, remorse and misgivings. They are definitely poems from India, but they would communicate with any sahrdaya in any part of the world. They are set forth in a language free from any jargon and technical terminology. The inner and the outer aspects of a human's being are the territory that these experiences tread. Poems like these are ample proof that the poetry of the world is never dead—strong feelings and emotions can still be felt deep in our inner being!

[From the Foreword to The East-Facing Shop] Murali Sivaramakrishnan is not the kind of poet who assails the reader with shocking images, challenges her to interpret his ambiguous lexical and semantic games or indulges in pure fantasy at the cost of intelligent reflection on man's being on earth. His poems are meditations on the states of existence, not only of human beings whose hubris makes him imagine himself as the focal point of the universe and the acme of God's creation, but of the whole created world where objects, plants and animals are by no means casual and peripheral to an anthropocentric universe, but are organic parts of a wholesome design. The poems in The East Facing Shop are spiritual without being dogmatic, tender without being sentimental, philosophical without being pedantic, communicative without being loud and well-crafted without being clever.

S MURALI is also a painter and critic—a specialist in Indian aesthetics and literary theory. With a language skill par excellence, he received his PhD from the University of Kerala (1990) and is a scholar of national repute deeply concerned with indigenous values and environmental issues. His book The Mantra of Vision: An Overview of Sri Aurobindo’s Aesthetics (Delhi: B R, 1997) has come to be recognized as a valuable contribution to the study of Indian poetics and comparative aesthetics. He has also authored a collection of critical essays on area studies, South Indian Studies (1998) and three volumes of poems and sketches, His paintings have gone on display at several major exhibitions in India and abroad. He has authored numerous articles on art, literature, and ideas in journals of international repute. He has also coordinated seminars and conferences in the field of literature, eco-aesthetics, ecocriticism, Sri Aurobindo's writings literary theory, postmodernism and culture studies. He has participated in significant international conferences in Jamaica, Spain, Taiwan, Austria and Brussels, and lectured in the University of Salamanca, Valladolid, and Extremadura in Spain and the University of Umea in Sweden. He has held two solo exhibitions of his works in Germany and many in India. Dr Murali has as much involvement with nature and environment as with painting and poetry. Currently he is Professor and Head of the Department of English, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India. He is a member of the scientific committee of English studies, University of Valladolid, Spain. He was also a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti, New Delhi and an Associate of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He is member and coordinator of research of the Herman Hesse Society of India.

Dr S Murali is the founder President of ASLE India (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). He has also offered courses for exchange students in Indian Art History and Aesthetics. Further he has designed and introduced an interdisciplinary course called Green Voices: Literature and the Environment. Dr Murali has been awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Travel Grant to teach and do research in the University of Nevada at Reno(2006–07).He was invited to read his poems as part of the inauguration of the International Conference on Poetic Ecologies, held in the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, in May 2008. Murali's sculpture (cast in fibre) of Prof CD Narasimhaiah now adorns the conference hall of Dhvanyaloka, Mysore.

Publications

S. Murali's academic publications include:

S. Murali's Poetry Volumes:

Awards and Recognitions

Affiliations