Kamala Das as a Feminist Poetess

 

Kamala Das as an Indian Female  Poetess 

Kamala Das has never striven to be merely Indian in her poetry. Her concern has been the existential anguish and anxiety of humanity as revealed mainly through woman’s relationship with man and the male-dominated society. Her poems are about desire, love and emotional involvement. Her first collected poems created a minor storm when it was released, but won her instant recognition with her uninhibited treatment of sex. Pain, anguish and anxiety are woven into the fabric of her poetry. Her anguished affirmation of independence is available in her autobiography, My Story. Her quest for identity is directly the progeny of an old social set up, oriented towards the total annihilation of the feminine personality. Love and sex are, no doubt, the leitmotif of her poetry but the depth of her distress seems to have left her identity with a certain tincture of pangs. The attempt of this research is to explain the feminist voice through some of her poems in which she has projected a new device to liberate the women from the anguish and anxiety in a male-dominated society. An astounding assertion of individuality of feeling and exceptionality of emotion marks her poetry. As Prof. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar says she is “aggressively individualistic”.¹⁰ She is essentially “a poet of the modern Indian woman’s ambivalence,”¹¹ portraying nakedly the Indian life and culture. 

Kamala Das was nurtured in an atmosphere of poetry. Poetry came to her effortlessly and in later life she had only to decide the medium of its expression. She is a bilingual writer. Apart from her poems in English she has also published a number of short stories in Malayalam known for their provocative themes and crisp, enchanting style .She started writing poetry at the age of six. Her first poem was, as we gather from My Story, about a doll that had lost its head and had to remain headless for eternity. She believes that just as God leaves a ‘potent fragment’ of himself in his creation so does the poet. This potent fragment of the poet represents his personality. This is why, in My Story Das asserts that: ‘A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay but her own personality.’ 

Kamala Das’s published collections include: The Sirens (1964), Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996). With Pritish Nandy, she published Tonight This Savage Rite: The Love Poetry of Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy (1979). Collected Poems was published in 1984 and her autobiography My Story in 1976. She has published novels and short stories in Malayalam, under the pen name Madhavikutty. Her Alphabet of Lust (1977) is a novel in English. A Doll for the Child Prostitute (1977), and Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992), are two collections of short stories.

Commenting on the poetic style of Kamala Das Prof. Laila Jaya Chandran has remarked very perceptively:

The artist creates something of the infinite, but that

closeness is not the infinite to itself. The infinite can be

understood as permeated by finite through art only in

terms of paradox, Kamala Das achieves this end purely

through a language which on the surface looks natural

and innocent. A common place experience is examined in

a casual seemingly effortless manner. It is the language

of honest thought, however disagreeable the thought

may be. The images are shocking but the intention of the

poetess is honest . In order to explore the emotions

honestly the language should be penetrating and

intensely bold. The reader is led to poetic experience

through clarity in  Intent. It is this honesty that lifts

Kamala Das‘s poem into Prominence. ¹²

Bruce King is right when he writes:

Das’s themes go beyond stereotyped longings and

complaints. Even her feelings of loneliness and

disappointments are part of a longer than life

personality obsessive in its awareness of its self,

yet creating ;a drama of selfhood .¹³

          A close look at her poems will show that love, sex, marriage, and companionship were important subjects to her. Hari Mohan Prasad and Chandra Prasad Singh have understood these points clearly when they write:

Her poetry has often been considered as a gimmick

in sex or Striptease in words, an over exposer of

body or ‘snippets of trivia’. But the truth is that

her poetry is an autobiography, an articulate

voice of her ethnic identity, her Dravidian culture.

In her, the poet is the poetry fully obliterating

and the mind creating ‘A poet’s raw material’,

she says, is not stone or clay; it is her personality.

I could not escape from my predicament even

for a moment.¹⁴

In short, Kamala Das is a contemporary Indian poetess quite conscious of her artistic design and purpose as well as of her responsibility towards the hopes and oppressions, the concerns and anguishes, of womankind. Explicitly, she writes about love, sex and marriage- all within her experience and awareness. Her poetic voice imbued with feminist anguish and anxiety sensibility is typically her own and it cannot be confused with anyone else’s.                 

Hence, it is clear that Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das were raised in totally different milieus, yet both had to suffer more or less the same pressures. Being bold, they protested and expressed their anguish and anxiety through the medium of poetry. Their journeys were the same though with different endings. What is common between them is their resistance to traditions and patriarchal society. The difference lies in their style of protest. While the issues addressed by Plath are very broad, the range of themes and concerns dealt with by Kamala Das are comparatively narrower. Plath likes to use symbols to express her biography whereas Kamala Das uses realistic biographical details in her poetry.