A.K. Ramanujan’s 1971 mescaline experiment is recorded in notes among his papers, and it became one strand of a longer poetic inquiry. The poems he drafted and revisited from the 1970s into the early 1980s were gathered in 2023 as Soma: Poems by A.K. Ramanujan, which includes eighteen original, previously unpublished Soma poems. The title refers to the Vedic god and sacred drink as well as to the experience that prompted Ramanujan to think about poetic inspiration. The poems are related to that experience, but they are not a transcript of an intoxicated episode.
What Ramanujan did in 1971
The experiment is dated to 1971. Literary scholarship on the episode, including a profile hosted by the University of Hyderabad and written by Guillermo Rodríguez Martín, says Ramanujan recorded the experience in notes and that its effects persisted in his thinking for years afterward. Those notes are treated as archival material in their own right, separate from the poem drafts.
A 2019 literary feature in Scroll.in gives a narrative account of the experiment and its later literary effects. It is a secondary account and is useful as corroborating context rather than as documentation of the episode itself.
The accounts are literary and historical, not clinical. They describe how one poet thought about an experience. They should not be read as a medical record, and they do not establish a general finding about psychedelics and creativity.
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The Soma poems
According to the Penguin Random House India catalogue, the 2023 collection contains eighteen original, unpublished Soma poems discovered in the A.K. Ramanujan Papers. Scholarship places the drafting and revisiting of this sequence from the 1970s into the early 1980s, which means the poems span a decade rather than a single afternoon of writing.
Soma as a Vedic god and drink
In the Vedic tradition, Soma is both a divine being and an intoxicating drink used in ritual. The poems take up that double meaning. Ramanujan treats Soma as a religious and literary concept first, and the psychedelic experience becomes one way of approaching it, not the subject in itself.
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Inspiration, possession and ordinary experience
Rodríguez’s scholarship reads the sequence as a set of questions about inspiration and possession: where poetic power comes from, how it takes hold of a writer, and how it relates to ordinary, everyday experience. The poems move between these larger questions and the more familiar texture of daily life, which is why they read as meditations on perception rather than as accounts of altered states.
How the editors describe the poems
The catalogue says the editors, Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, believe the 1971 experiment influenced Ramanujan’s poetry beyond that single event. The catalogue also describes the unpublished poems as having a style potentially freer of formal, aesthetic and cultural constraints. Both are the editors’ judgments, and they are presented here as such.
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Poems, notes and experiment: what is and is not established
Several claims circulate around this material. The table separates the ones the evidence supports from the ones it does not.
| Claim | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| The mescaline experiment took place in 1971 | Supported | Literary scholarship (Rodríguez, University of Hyderabad profile) |
| Notes documenting the experience are preserved among Ramanujan’s papers | Supported | Literary scholarship; publisher catalogue |
| The Soma sequence was drafted and revisited from the 1970s into the early 1980s | Supported | Literary scholarship |
| The experience influenced the later poems | Stated by the editors and scholar; not a clinical finding | Publisher catalogue; Rodríguez scholarship |
| Every Soma poem was written under the influence of mescaline | Not established | No source makes this claim |
| The poems show that psychedelics affect creativity in general | Not supported | The material concerns one poet |
The poem drafts and the experience notes are related but distinct. Treating them as one document would misstate what survives in the archive.
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The 2023 book
The collection is a poetry book, not a film or a guide to drug use. Its publication details are below.
| Detail | Information | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Soma: Poems by A.K. Ramanujan | Publisher catalogue |
| Editors | Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan | Publisher catalogue |
| Publisher and imprint | Penguin Random House India, Viking imprint | Publisher catalogue |
| Publication date | September 2023 | Publisher catalogue |
| Format | Hardback | Publisher catalogue |
| Pages | 208 | Google Books bibliographic record (2023); publisher catalogue |
| ISBN | 9780670098040 | Publisher catalogue |
| Unpublished Soma poems | Eighteen original, discovered in the A.K. Ramanujan Papers | Publisher catalogue |
| Additional content | Essays and an interview providing literary and historical context | Google Books bibliographic record; publisher catalogue |
| Contributors named in the bibliographic record | Krishna Ramanujan, Guillermo Rodriguez, Wendy Doniger | Google Books bibliographic record |
The publisher catalogue spells the drug “mescalin,” while the scholarship uses “mescaline.” This article uses the standard spelling, mescaline, for the drug.
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Reading the collection
The book suits readers who want the Soma poems in the context of Ramanujan’s wider work. The essays and interview are part of the volume and help place the poems in their literary and historical setting.
- Read the poems as a sequence about inspiration and perception, not as a record of a single session.
- Use the essays and interview to follow the Vedic background of Soma, which the poems take as their starting point.
- Treat the editors’ claims about the experiment’s influence and the poems’ style as interpretation, and weigh them against the poems themselves.
- If you are looking for a documentary treatment of the 1971 experiment, the evidence reviewed here establishes a book and its context, not a film.
Checking current stock and format before buying is worthwhile, since availability can change after the publication date given here.
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