Swetha Antony
“Without A Pause”: The Poetry of Kamala Das
If we have to look for a woman writer who has dominated the Indian English Poetry scene, post independence, one name stands tall – Kamala Das. With a poetic career spanning four and a half decades, she was among the first generation of Indian English poets who launched Modern Indian Poetry in English. She began her foray into Indian English poetry with the publication of the collection Summer in Calcutta (1965). It was followed by The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996). She collaborated with Pritish Nandy for Tonight, this Savage Rite (1979) and with Suresh Kohli for Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation (2009). She is a prolific writer with many collections of shorts stories, novels, an autobiography, and numerous works in Malayalam to her credit. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 1984 for her inimitable poetry. She continues to be a strong presence in the Indian Literary scene even after her death in 2009. As Nila Shah & Pramod K Nayar says in the introduction of Modern Indian Poetry in English: Critical Studies:
Kamala Das, indisputably India’s best women-poet to date, shocked and mesmerized audiences with her confessional mode. . . Writing a poetry that was remarkably sensual . . . and constantly interrogating the “persistence” of English in her deeper thoughts, Das helped launch a different woman’s voice . . .
(Shah and Nayar 12)
Poetry, as a genre, is attempting new styles, yet the poetry of Kamala Das still holds strength. She entered the literary scene when the debate was on about contextualizing the Indian Writers in English. However, she was of the opinion that there is no need to classify writers as Indians, English or Indo – Anglicans. For her, the language one employed was not important but what was more important were the thought contained by the words. Kamala Das opened up a new horizon to language and many questions regarding the same with her self- reflexive and experimental poetry. Even though there is a commonality of the term “English”, the writers under this umbrella term “Indian English” have an Indian Language to fall back on and its shades inevitably color the English they write, in the case of Kamala Das, it was Malayalam. As Carol Rumens notes in the article ‘Dislocated Carnality’, Kamala Das:
. . . uses both Malayalam and English for her fiction, but English only for her poetry, a factor which suggest that English is her mother-tongue. The voice operates between idiolect and dialect. It is outside standard norms of poetic diction, yet inward enough with the language to conjure a sense of these more familiar dialects, sometimes assimilated, sometimes hovering at the edge (Rumens 35)
It is quite clear now that her play with language made her a unique writer. This paper attempts to look at how she does it.
A different voice’ - The Language of Loss in Kamala Das
Eunice de Souza says in her introduction to the section on Kamala Das in Nine Indian Women Poets: an Anthology:
Women writers owe a special debt to Kamala Das. She mapped out the terrain for post-colonial women in social and linguistic terms. Whatever her vernacular oddities, she has spared us the colonial cringe. She has also spared us what in some circles, nativist and expatriate, is still considered mandatory: the politically correct ‘anguish’ of writing in English. (Souza 8)
The poetry she writes is inevitably never free from the grip of Indian words, that aid in conveying an experience quintessentially Indian. It reinvents the language English to suit the needs and demands of local imagination. It rejects to a certain extent English as the normative language and brings in sensibility Indian to the core. When we say Indian English, it is neither Indian nor English; it is a unique dovetailing of two discourses and yet different from both. Language here is not in being or in the present, but rather is in the process of perpetual becoming. It is in the process of being defined and redefined. Even when referred to as Indian English, it shifts its contours as it changes hands.
At this juncture, the idea of the minor literature as explicated in Deleuze and Guattari’s “What is a Minor Literature?” is a point to be dwelt upon. In the essay, they are referring to Kafka a Czech writing in German. His ambivalence in using another language led to his greatness as a writer. According to them, a minor literature does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language. This literature is far from being a minority. It is a literature that is in the process of becoming. Thus, the minor literature cannot be dismissed as a refuge; it is something that is in the process of being constantly created. Being ‘Minor’ it has the audacity to be open, free and experimental. Hence, the horizons opened by minor literature under Indian English are many to be ignored. The ambivalence in defining Indian English Literature is a positive sign as it points to its greatness and immense possibilities. Once a language is associated with a particular group of people, it becomes re-territorialized. Indian English literature can never be that as the Indian English used by Kamala Das would be different in the hands of A.K.Ramanujan or Imtiaz Dharkar. Highlighting the ambivalence in Indian English Literature are the questions from the essay:
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? . . .how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? (Deleuze and Guattari 19)
Kamala Das proclaims the answer, when she uses a ‘deterritorialized language’ as her strength as says in the poem “An Introduction”,
I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,
English is not your mother- tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. (Summer in Calcutta 62)
As is evident from the lines above, poetry for Kamala Das is a ‘gut response’, tinged with a blatant honesty and an inherent sarcasm. Her poems seem to be informed by a sense of conflict inherent within herself. Most of her poems deal with the idea of love, lust and longing. However, there are certain ways in which she shifts the contours of English to suit her purpose, a language in the process of becoming.
Most of her poems are autobiographical, influenced by her sudden uprooting from her ancestral home in Malabar to the major cities like Calcutta and Bombay. The longing for her past and her roots has been inscribed within herself and her poems seems to be an attempt at capturing what she seems to have lost. However, a sense of failure at articulating the loss of her roots is evident in some of her poems. Most of her poems do not bring out a unified sense. They seem to be collages of images captured from around her. When she dovetails certain words or nuances that are central to Indian sensibility was she inducing a ‘becoming process’ as explicated by Deleuze and Guattari. The following lines are crucial in such a respect:
Even when it is unique, a language remains a mixture, a schizophrenic melange, a Harlequin costume in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can't be said; one function will be played off against the other, all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out. Even when major, a language is open to an intensive utilization that makes it take flight along creative lines of escape which, no matter how slowly, no matter how cautiously, can now form an absolute deterritorialization.( Deleuze and Guattari 26)
The way she creates a particular medium of articulation is evident from her poems. To point out a few instances would be her use of colloquial idioms, the use of everyday language and comparisons, the dovetailing of the new and the old and specially her take on the Radha Krishna Myth.
Everyday Epiphanies
For Das the everyday and everything around her can be poetry. Her poems are epitomes of striking observations, which is normally felt as life. However, when she makes poetry out of it even the everyday brings in new revelations. An instance would be the poem “The Bangles”. It is clear from this and many other poems that when describing an urban set up she deliberately brings in something that is unique to the Indian sensibility. In the poem, she is describing a scene set in a flatlet in a town:
Over the
Front door protruding into street
Like a cervix, she hangs some
Mango- leaves. They will bring us luck,
She tells the pock-marked man who took
Took her in. He is confused. He
Does not know whether to smile
Or sulk. (Summer in Calcutta 34)
She uses striking images that are essentially symbols having meaning only in India – the mango leaves and the bangles. The bangles in India are a symbol of integrity to married women. There is a custom among Hindus of breaking the bangles when someone’s husband dies. The mango leaves on the threshold supposedly brings in good luck as the poem says. She brings in many such elements that take us back to the roots of India. However, as the lines in the end say there is confusion and conflict inherent within as if unsure about what to do – to believe in it or not.
Another instance would be a few lines from “In Love”
-- and at
Night, from behind the Burdwan
Road, the corpse – bearers cry ‘Bol
Hari Bol’, a strange lacing
For moonless nights, while I walk
The verandah sleepless (Summer in Calcutta 12)
She uses simple language, yet the images do stand out with certain Indianness whether it is the words used or the situations described. As Deleuze and Guattari points out, what can be said in one language cannot be said in another, and the totality of what can and cannot be said varies necessarily with each language and with connections between these languages. This could be why she says in the poem Wood Ash: “. . . in this new world i lack coherence/ listen differently for what i have to tell/ let your blood listen and from within/ your descendants shall hear me” (Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 34)
Throughout many of her poems, she brings in images of Indian beliefs rooted in old traditions. Her preoccupation with death and the rituals connected with it is one of them. In the poem “The Joss- Sticks at Cadell Road,” she describes a typical Hindu funeral procession, and the burning of the body on the funeral pyre, but ends the poem “My husband said, I think I shall/ Have a beer, it’s hot, /Very hot today” (The Descendants 29). The poem becomes a mélange of the old and the new the old losing its significance in the midst of the new and the paradox where both co-exist with an uneasy peacefulness.
Bottles and Wine – A mélange of the old and the new
If we read deep into Das’s poems, her roots seem to be lie with her grandmother and the days she spent in her ancestral home. For her, it was the time of completeness, as against the loss she feels now, which is evident in the poem, “My Grandmother’s House”:
There is a house now far away where once
I received love . . . That woman died,
The house withdrew into silence, . . .
. . . I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved … I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to
Receive love, at least in small change? (Summer in Calcutta 13)
Her grandmother and her ancestral home play a significant role in the many images that she evokes in her poems. In some poems, it is on the verge of the mythical, as in the prose poem “The Swamp”:
… the bhagavatis oracle took two steps forward to swing back again the chosen one with the long hair the waistlet of bells and the scimitar he spoke to my grandmother in a warble not his own I shall protect your descendants from illness and untimely death. . . (The Old Playhouse and other Poems 52)
Das creates a verbal picture of a traditional Kerala scene. There is a belief that the local deity (bhagavati) visits every home in the locality by possessing a man or a woman, through whom the predictions, blessings or curses happen. The peculiarity of Das is that she does not explain it in any way – not with any translation or footnotes. Just the Malayalam word is used. Maybe she is trying to state that the essence, the magic lies in that one word. She does not want to lose the significance by translating. Again, in this poem she mourns her past and says:
… i have no name of my own and my past is a desolate terrain where memory like tall trees grow to my Malabar home years ago on hot noons the devil dancers came walking past the bright rice fields behind them the pariahs reed wailed a long wail rising from the heat like a ribbon of pain. (The Old Playhouse and other Poems 53)
The way she manipulates the language is noteworthy. Her poems are the abode to many such local imaginative figments. These images highlight the strangeness of its use in another language. The sense seems to be misplaced when used in English. As Deleuze and Guattari says:
This language torn from sense, conquering sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense, no longer finds its value in anything but an accenting of the word, an inflection. . . . The sound or the word that traverses this new deterritorialization no longer belongs to a language of sense, even though it derives from it, nor is it an organized music or song, even though it might appear to be.(Deleuze and Guattari 21)
However, there are a few poems where she mourns the loss of something – at times it the language, at times it is their home, which stood for something more pure and precious. As in the poem “The Family Name”, she says “. . . We were too poor/ to maintain our heritage,/ too poor to seal the cracks on the walls.” (Closure 22).
Radha Krishna – the varying avatars
Kamala Das highlights the Indian myth of Radha and Krishna, the epitome of eternal love. She gives the myth an earthly and bizarre touch. The poem “Radha Krishna” goes thus:
This becomes from this hour
Our river and this old Kadamba
Tree, ours alone, for our homeless
Souls to return someday
To hang like bats from its pure
Physicality…(Summer in Calcutta 39)
In “Ghanashyam”, she says:
Shyam o Ghanashyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish. . . (Tonight, This Savage Rite 24)
In both the poems the image evoked for comparison is quite striking. Das evolves Radha through her poems. The images are that of bats and a fisherman. When a traditional myth is planted into another language, it gets defamiliarised. Whatever is familiar to us is mapped out in a strange way.
For instance in the poem “Radha” she presents Radha who, “. . . in his first true embrace” says, “O Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting/ Nothing remains but/ You.” When it comes to the poem “The Maggots”, Radha answers to the question:“do you mind my kisses love, and she said/no, not at all, but thought, what is/it to the corpse if the maggots nip?” . Das describes Radha in the first poem as “. . . she was girl/ And virgin crying” and in the latter “That night in her husband’s arms Radha felt/ so dead . . .” (The Descendants 15, 28) The words used highlight the contrast that sets in a relationship’s evolution, from an elation of love to pure sarcasm at its intense physicality.
Even when talking about the immortal love of Radha and Krishna she gives Radha the touch of any woman and links it with her own experiences. In “The Cobwebs” the transformation of Radha is so down to earth she can be ant women who is jilted in love, “Do not look into Radha’s eyes O friends/ For her soul lies dead inside/ as cobwebs block the doorways, unused,…” Radha is defamiliarised in many ways. Das connects it to the common people also when she says, “Vrindavan lives on in every woman’s mind” (Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 128,154). She brings in closure through these lines from the poem “Radha’s Dream”:
Oh Krishna
I did not for a moment believe
that you were a dream.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
when you entered
I became your home,
a woman doomed to live as stone. ( Closure 9)
This could be what Deleuze and Guattari meant when they said that a minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and does not conceptualize until afterward. Expression must break forms, encourage ruptures and new sprouting. When a form is broken, one must reconstruct the content that will necessarily be part of a rupture in the order of things. By being unconventional Kamala Das did bring in a deterritorialisation of English. Her aim was to do away with the sense of loss that was at the core. She did succeed in that as is apparent from the words of Pritish Nandy,
She wrote of what it was being a woman, a poet, a person torn between two tongues, two cultures, faithful to neither. She never wrote the English that others expected her to. She wrote it as it came to her. It was an unlearnt, unkempt language which turned into magic in her hands. It was the true language of poetry and it made Kamala Das what she was, one of the finest and truest poets of her generation. (Tonight, this Savage Rite 102- 103).
Apart from that by expertly molding the language to her needs, she proved that it is possible to bring out much from a language, from any language, from a mélange of languages. As they say “. . . perhaps the debate – now almost ancient - over the Indian poet’s use of English is resolved this way: they use it not only because they are comfortable with it, but because they are good with it.” (Shah and Nayar 25)
Works Cited
Das, Kamala. Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: D.C.Books, 1996. Print.
---. Summer in Calcutta. New Delhi: Everest Press, 1965. Print.
---. The Descendants. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1967. Print.
---. The Old Playhouse and Other Poems. Madras: Orient Longman, 1973. Print.
Das, Kamala, and Pritish Nandy. Tonight, this Savage Rite. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, 1979. Print.
Das, Kamala, and Suresh Kohli. Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation. India: Harper Collins, 2009. Print.
Delueze, Gilles and Felix Guattari: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986. Print.
Rumens,Carol. “Dislocated Carnality”, Poetry Review,vol.83,no.1,Spring 1993.
Shah, Nila, and Pramod K. Nayar. Modern Indian Poetry in English, Critical Studies. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2000. Print.
Souza, Eunice De. Nine Indian Women Poets, an Anthology. Oxford University Press, USA, 2003. Print.