Sunita Sinha
Deep Shikha
Kamala Das: The ‘Improper’ Feminine
“The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of Feminity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being. Reared by women within a feminine world, their normal destiny is marriage which still means practically subordination to man; for masculine prestige is far from extinction, resting still upon solid economic and social foundations.”
Simone De Beauvoir
As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex wrote:
Women do not set themselves up as subject and hence have erected to virile myth in which their projects are reflected; they have no religion or poetry of their own: they still dream through the dreams of men.[143]
Defying the prospects of ‘dreaming through the dreams of men,’ Kamala Das blazed a new trail as she epitomised the dilemma of the modern Indian woman. A professed confessional, she celebrated feminity and shattered the image of the woman poet created by her predecessors in an original and uninhibited voice. Though working like Jane Austen on ‘four inches of ivory,’ she has displayed a rare kind of skill in handling her themes.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have included Kamala Das as the only representative from Asia in their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.According to Eunice de Souza in Nine Indian Women Poets-Anthology (1997) women writers owe a special debt to Kamala Das – “She mapped out a terrain for post colonial women in social and linguist terms.”[8] While telescoping the features of Kamala Das’s poetry and analysing her personal self, M.K.Naik in “A History of Indian English Literature,” rightly observes:
“The most obvious colourful feature of Kamala Das’s poetry is the uninhibited frankness with which she talks about sex... (But) Her persona is no nymphomaniac; she is simply every woman who seeks love, she is the beloved and betrayed expressing her endless female hunger the eternal Eve proudly celebrating her essential feminity.”[208]
Das’s protest against the prevalent systems of the society labelled her into a ‘rebel’ and her poetry as a ‘striptease of words.’ Her offended feminine self went on emotional wanderings attempting to explore an identity and freedom. Nevertheless, her traditional make-up of a conventional woman was a factor which persistently forbade her from breaking away completely from the role of a traditional wife. A conflict naturally arose between the passivity and rebellion against the male oriented universe and persisted all through her life. Her poetry was concerned mostly with voice of split self and self assertion. The quest for the self and the fragmentation of the self are central to the poetry of Kamala Das and that of the American poet, Anne Sexton. Their speakers often reveal a psycho-pathological obsession with the self. Most of their personae undergo disintegration of the self: each self splits into the child, the woman and the artist. The conflict between split-selves is a common motif in their poetry. The achievement of Das and Sexton lies in the fact that their feminist and confessional aspects are equally powerful and good. Kamala Das and Anne Sexton reveal the two-fold power of poetry: the reality of the self and the insistence on life. Their poetry breathes life with an ardour of the self and owes its success to the discovery and fusion of the elements that constitute great poetry. Without losing their national identity, they transcend all limits to sing the anthem of the New Woman.
Das’s poems stand testimony to her achievement in disinheriting herself of the sort of poetic diction common in her time — which spoke of the ‘domino dusk of the stalagtite evening’ — to replace it with an easy colloquial style which speaks of ‘endless female hungers’ and the ‘musk of sweat between the breasts/The warm shock of menstrual blood’ without any ludicrous corseting. But despite a preponderance of the conversational tone, her poems have their lyrical moments too, lines such as: “In the fluted heart of shells/Doze the ballads of the sea” (Cerebral Thrombosis) and “where did my love words go/as birds, wing-tired, fly at dusk to roost?” (The Eighty Sixth Birthday). In poems such as “The Dance of the Eunuchs” and “The Freaks,” Das draws upon the exotic to discuss her sexuality and her quest for fulfilment. In “An Introduction,” Das universalizes and makes public traditionally private experiences, suggesting that women’s personal feelings of longing and loss are part of the collective experience of womanhood. In the collection, “The Descendants” (1967), the poem “The Maggots” frames the pain of lost love with ancient Hindu myths, while the poem “The Looking-Glass” suggests that women are the untouchables of love, in that the very things society labels dirty are the things the women are supposed to give. The poem implies that a restrained love seems to be no love at all; only a total immersion in love can do justice to this experience. In The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1975), poems such as “Substitute,” “Gino,” and “The Suicide” examine the failure of physical love to provide fulfilment, to allow for escape from the self, or to exorcise the past, whereas poems such as “The Inheritance” address the integrity of the artistic self in the face of religious fanaticism. In Tonight, This Savage Rite: The Love Poems of Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy (1979), Das invokes Krishna in her explorations of the tensions between physical love and spiritual transcendence. The Annamalai Poems (1985), a series of short poems, rework the classical Tamil akam (“interior”) poems that contrast the grandeur and permanence of nature with the transience of human history. Poems such as “Delhi 1984” and “Smoke in Colombo” evoke the massacre of the Sikhs and the civil war in Sri Lanka. Das is also the author of an autobiography, My Story, a novel, The Alphabet of Lust (1977), and several volumes of short stories in English. Under the name Madhavikutty, Das has published many books in the Malayalam language.
Kamala Das has always been bold and outspoken. Her chief contribution to modern Indian poetry is that she has criticised the tradition-bound, conservative society and was far ahead of many other Indian writers in her ideas and points of view. It is not only the stunning frankness she betrays in her poems but also the unravelling of the agonies and the information regarding woman’s psychic experience that lay hidden for ages that makes her so interesting .Her poetry constitutes not just a compelling expression of personal experiences and a forceful subjective voice, but more importantly, a phenomenon unlike any other in Indian English poetry. She is the first woman to crack the mould and establish an attitude and viewpoint the Indian readers were quite unfamiliar with. Her first book, Summer in Calcutta was fresh in terms of its exploration of emotions and relationships, which left many spellbound because a woman writing explicitly about sexuality, love and betrayal was uncommon.
It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came
To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals
Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling
Jingling... Beneath the fiery gulmohur, with
Long braids flying, dark eyes flashing, they danced and
They dance, oh, they danced till they bled...
The Dance of the Eunuchs (Summer in Calcutta)
Her poetry glows with the incandescence of moments of uninhibited passion and yearning as in Composition:
Excavate Deep, deep pain.
However, despite her frankness about sex, she reveals, at times, a deep disgust with her own body. She sought love with it, but often it was the impediment she could not transcend:
“The silly female shape had again intervened to ruin a beautiful relationship, the clumsy gadgetry that always, always, damaged bonds.” (183)
Her sense of disgust of the merely bodily union is clearly presented in ‘A Request’:
“When I die
Do not throw the meat and bones away
But pile them up
And
Let them tell
By their smell
What life was worth
On this earth
What love was worth
In the end.”
All confessional poetry springs from the urge to confess, hence these poems are in the words of Robert Phillips, a declaration of independence, or of guilt, or of anguish and sufferings. Like the various American poets, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell, Kamala Das too, delves deep in high subjectivism and remains a supreme specimen of a confessional poet. She had a tendency that shows “depression, self-consciousness and flamboyance as despair alternated with self-assertion.”[King21] From the beginning Kamala Das demonstrates a continuity of theme and expression concerning central division of the self. Her work is a compelling account of the presence of split. Kamala Das speaks out her heart on her own premises. She redefines herself and liberates herself both as a woman and a poet.
Her ‘Self’ is at continuous play and her poems dramatise its myriad moods. From defiant declarations like the opening lines of The Bison at the Water’s Edge:
Who says a marriage must mean only two?
The clement climate of mine was due Not to one man alone but two.
And the self-conscious adoption of a face in An Introduction:
...It is time to choose a name, a role.
Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizophrenia or be a Nympho.
In her famous poem ‘An Introduction’ she brilliantly employs the confessional and the rhetorical modes in order to raise relevant questions relating to a woman’s or an Indian poet’s identity. She unabashedly accepts her ignorance and lack of interest about the larger political/social issues surrounding her:
I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of weeks, or names of months, beginning with
Nehru ....
(‘An Introduction’)
In this context, Bruce King observes:
“Das’s themes go beyond stereotyped longings and disappointments... are part of a larger than life personality, obsessive in its awareness of its self, yet creating a drama of selfhood.”[147]
However, calling Kamala Das a purely confessional poet means not doing justice to her vision as a poet. As we have seen in the preceding observation, Kamala Das has the capacity to transcend the purely personal and embrace the non-personal and finally merge with it. While her quest for identity makes her a confessional poet, many of her poems express deep sympathy for the sufferers – be it about an old woman’s ‘longing lingering look’ from behind the window bars, or be it about a bleeding brown comrade in Sri Lanka, her poems initiate the fusion of herself with the surrounding.
Her passionate demand for love becomes the nucleus of her poems epitomizing the need to assert, to conquer and to dominate. Bruce King rightly evaluates the creative impulse of Kamala Das and says: “In her poetry love and hatred are often neighbours, just as an assertion of sexual freedom sits near feelings of self disgust expressed through depression. The theatre of Das’s poetry includes the revelations, the confessions, the various contradictory bits and pieces.”[150]
Search for love is the principal preoccupation of Kamala Das’s poetry. She confesses with utmost candour that she “began to write poetry with the ignoble aim of wooing a man.”[Qtd. by Reddy]
As a result love becomes the pervasive theme and it is through love that she endeavours to discover herself. As she concerns herself with various facets of love, her love poetry can be divided into two phases. While in the first phase her obsessive concern with physical love is quite prominent, in the second; her drift towards ideal love can be discerned. By ideal love, she means the kind or relation that exists between the legendary Radha and Krishna. She pines for such a love which does not impede her impulse to freedom. Her concept of ideal love is rooted, in the poem The Old Playhouse:
... Love is Narcissus at the waters’ edge, haunted
By its own lovely face, and yet it must seek at last
An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.
In the narcissistic phase, the lovers do not develop their egos which emerge as barriers preventing their merger. They are fettered modifications looking for “total freedom.” It is in the second phase of ideal love that the lovers collapse the boundaries of their egos or narrow selves to merge with each other, as such merger ensures total freedom. The poet beholds such an outstanding relation in the love between Radha and Krishna. She surmises herself as Radha who goes in search of Krishna, the ideal lover, in spite of her marriage.
According to O.J. Thomas: “Kamala Das’s story is the story of a woman who was denied love, when she valued nothing but love in all her life. Love and affection remained a craze, a longing and a dream for her. She got almost everything in life-name and fame, a degree of wealth but she could never get love, as she saw it. It is in this background that she writes about love in all her writings.”[Qtd. byBhatnagar183]
Many critics and readers alike attribute the label ‘feminist’ to Das because the themes she delves into in her poetry concern a woman’s feelings. Interestingly, though, she never associated herself with any school of feminism. Clearly, for a woman who was against being labelled, Kamala Das let her poetry do all the talking. For her the experience of letting go and being with ‘another man’ does not essentially mean that she is ignorant of her moral obligation. On a more humane level, one can connect with the intricacies that bring one human being nearer to another — both imperfect and with flaws. The following verse, in many senses, depicts the searching eyes of society:
When you leave, I drive my blue battered car
Along the bluer sea. I run up the forty
Noisy steps to knock at another’s door.
Through peep-holes, the neighbours watch,
they watch me come
(The Stone Age), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
In ‘The Music Party’ her feminine self wants to be loved with warms feelings. As she says:
“Music in front –
A pale Girl in pink
Beside the Harmonium;
Behind me,
Your stillness,
Nothing else,
No reason
Why my ears
Should have ignored
The girl’s signing,
And sucked in
With wild greed
The whisper,”
Summer in Calcutta
Here her feminine self does not want to disregard the ‘singing because she is gaining a wild sensuous pleasure in ‘stillness.’ Her proclivity to physical hungers in search of the search of her genuine self brings suffering for Kamala Das. Her creative self wants to develop a balanced relationship that can soften her wounded psyche. But her creative self gets repulsion instead of a perfect lover which can lead her to a frenzied search.
In the light of feminist critical theory it can be argued that Das has provided Indian English poetry, a new discourse, the discourse of woman’s body language from the point of view of woman. Of all the women poets of the present in India, Das projects herself as a fervent feminist poetic voice always exacting for a dignified place of hour, a respect for the naturalistic freedoms and choices. Her poetry contributes for the strong reactions and justifications for the most needful awakening of woman as a living entity in being-in-the world. As Helen Cixous talks about “Female experience” which happens to be repressed and needs a free expression and argues: “Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetoric, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve discourse.”[256] In much the same way, Kamala Das, “has a fiercely feminine [female] sensibility that dare without inhibitions to actuate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world.”[Iyengar680]
One characteristic feature of Kamala Das’s poetry is that it is Indian in sensibility and content. In Modern Indian Poetry in English, Bruce King stakes a large claim for Das’s poetry – “Kamala Das’s most remarkable achievement, however, is writing in an Indian English. Often her vocabulary, idioms, choice of words and some syntactical constructions are a part of what has been termed the Indianisation of English. This is an accomplishment. It is important in the development of a national literature that writers free themselves from the linguistic standards of their colonizers and create a literature based on local speech; and it is essentially important for women writers. Such a development is not a matter of national pride or a linguistic equivalent of ‘local colour’: rather it is a matter of voice, tone, idiom and rhythm, creating a style that accurately reflects what a writer feels or is trying to say instead of it being filtered through speech meant to reflect the assumptions and nuances of another society.”[153]
It deals with the Indian environment and reflects its mores often ironically. The total freedom that language could offer was her search and she used language to express herself fully in all her paradoxical and complex situations. Her revolt as a woman against the traditional concept of womanhood matched with her revolt as a poet against the conventional medium of mother tongue for poetry. Interestingly enough, Srinivasa Iyengar believed that “the women poets of India who wrote in English were poets first and only women by birth. Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia, Anna Sujatha Modayil, Sunita Jain, Rina Sudhi, Gauri Pant, Meena Alexander, Lalitha Venkateswaran are some of the names he mentions in his volume Indian Writing in English.”[721] The commendable achievement of Kamala Das is the apt Indianisation of English through ‘choice of verbs and some syntactical constructions.’ This rather creates poetry based on local speech. Panday’s remarks are worth quoting in full: “Her poetic excellence can be seen in her realisation of life’s predicaments in the directness of expression and in the emphatic use of new diction, in which she surpasses even the male contemporary poet like Ezekiel and Dom Moraes.”[Pandey]
Many critics and readers alike attribute the label ‘feminist’ to Das because the themes she delves into in her poetry concern a woman’s feelings. Interestingly, though, she never associated herself with any school of feminism. Clearly, for a woman who was against being labelled, Kamala Das let her poetry do all the talking. For her the experience of letting go and being with ‘another man’ does not essentially mean that she is ignorant of her moral obligation. On a more humane level, one can connect with the intricacies that bring one human being nearer to another — both imperfect and with flaws. The following verse, in many senses, depicts the searching eyes of society:
When you leave, I drive my blue battered car
Along the bluer sea. I run up the forty
Noisy steps to knock at another’s door.
Through peeP-holes, the neighbours watch,
they watch me come
(The Stone Age), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
Kamala Das in her much discussed autobiography, My Story pointed out: “poet’s raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality.” In direct contradiction to Eliot’s theory of poetic creation, Mrs. Das affirms that her poetry is subjective and through it she voices forth her strains and stresses. This, however, does not mean a selfish preoccupation with the self but a melioristic view that is shocked and repulsed at the condition of fellow mortals. Her sensitive soul is deeply affected by the maladies that lie deeply embedded in the social matrix.
Thus, in the light of feminist critical theory it can be argued that Das has provided Indian English poetry, a new discourse, the discourse of woman’s body language from the point of view of woman. Of all the women poets of the present in India, Das projects herself as a fervent feminist poetic voice always exacting for a dignified place of hour, a respect for the naturalistic freedoms and choices. Her poetry contributes for the strong reactions and justifications for the most needful awakening of woman as a living entity in being-in-the world. Women’s social unrest in respect of education and career, sexual desire and frustration, suffocation of a caged loveless marriage, numerous affairs, the futility of lust, the shame and sorrow of not finding love after repeated attempts, the loneliness and neurosis that stalks women especially and such other things which were not spoken of candidly are powerfully dealt with for the first time in her poetry. Those who say that theme in the poetry of Kamala Das is love and for Kamala Das love hardly goes beyond sex and lust do not do justice to her as they tend to neglect the seriousness of purpose in her poetry. Kamala Das protests against the marginalization of women and social injustices and communicates a powerful female sensibility in her poetry. Das celebrates the female body and female desire. Hers is an attempt to re-state in material terms the positive nature of what in masculine terms, is described negatively as “other.” As she states: “…now here is a girl with vast sexual hungers/ a bitch after my own heart.” (The Descendants, 38) Though some might label Das as “a feminist” for her candor in dealing with women’s needs and desires, Das “has never tried to identify herself with any particular version of feminist activism.”[Raveedra47-54]Love, according to Das, is a deceptive passion that shackles a woman into an unsure and uncertain conjugal connection. She believes that women have the potential for the collective effort to overcome their limitations and accomplish and enjoy a just and impartial society. In unambiguous terms she mocks at women who express tender feelings and suggest that a literary woman should rise spontaneously above the rigours of beauty and courtesy if she is to satisfy her inner urge of self expression. In a Rediff Interview (dated 9 March, 2007), an interviewer asks her, “Didn’t you feel loved when you were young.” Das’s reply to this echoes the core thoughts of her writings:
“Not enough really. That’s why I leapt into several relationships which were not very correct, probably hoping to be loved. Because there was this capacity in me to love, to envelop something with love, and there wasn’t anyone strong enough to reciprocate adequately.”[Das Interview]
I would conclude by K. Satchidanandan’s remarks which put her on a pedestal:
“Kamala Das (Kamala Surayya in her last few years and dear Madhavikkutty for the Malayalees) was an exemplary new woman in many ways: she was bold, uninhibited, full of creative energy that she sustained to the very end, as is proven by her last few poems in Closure, and secular enough to try another religion in the last days of her life and also declare she had Krishna in her intact still. Her burial in the mosque at Thiruvananthapuram was a great lesson to those with insular minds: people of all religions congregated there to pay their last homage to a writer they adored, a feat few secularist campaigners have managed to achieve....”[Online The Tribune]
In this context, Juliet Mitchell’s remark seems quite relevant-
“We have to know where women are, why women have to write the novel, the story of their own domesticity, the story of their own seclusion within the home and the possibilities and impossibilities provided by that.” [289]
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone De, The Second Sex, Vintage, 1989
Bhatnagar M.K. Indian writing in English, Vol. – VII, Atlantic Publishers, 2001
Cixous, Helen. The Laugh of The Medusa: In New French Feminism. Harvestor: Brighton, 1976
Das,Kamala. As quoted by K. Indrasena Reddy. A Study of Her Themes (unpublished M. Phil. thesis). Kakatiya University, Warangal, 1981.
Das, Kamala, The Rediff Interview, 9 March, 2007
De Souza, Eunice. “Kamala Das” Osmania Journal of English Studies, Spl. No. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. Dept. of English, Osmania University; 1997
Iyengar, K. R. Srinivas. Indian Writing in English, 5th Ed. New Delhi:Sterling Publishers Private Ltd.,1990
King, Bruce, Modern Indian Poetry in English. Rev. ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987
Mitchell, Juliet. Women: The Longest Revolution London: Virago Press, 1987
Naik, M.K.: A History of Indian English Literature; Sahitya Akademi Publication, 1997
Pandey, Mithilesh K. “Kamala Das:” “A Study in Evolving Vision,” Indian English Poetry: New Perspectives (ed.) K.V. Surendran, New Delhi: Sarup & Sons, 2002.
Raveedran, P.P. “Text as History, History as Text: A Reading of Kamala Das’s Anamalai Poems.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1994
Satchidanand,K.www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100530/spectrum/main1.htm, Spectrum. The Tribune, Sunday, May30, 2010.