Kamala Das
Search for:Ghanshyam by Kamala Das (Analysis)
An Introduction by Kamala Das (Analysis)
Kamala Das is her pseudonym, and her real name is Madhavi
Kutty. She was born on the 31st March, 1934 at Punnayarkulam in the coastal
region of Malabar in the state of Kerala. She received her education largely at
home and she came of a very orthodox and conservative family. Ironically her
poetry is most unorthodox and almost revolutionary as compared to the
environment and atmosphere in which she grew up.
She
was married at the early age of fifteen, but her marriage proved an absolute failure.
It was the failure of her marriage that compelled her to enter into
extra-marital sexual relationship in search of the kind of love which her
husband had failed to give her. She believed in marriage as an emotional and spiritual
bond; and her husband’s coldness in this respect led her to feel acutely
dissatisfied and discontented in life. Her poetry is generally called
confessional poetry because it is a record of her personal experiences, chiefly
in the sphere of marriage and sex, though it certainly has a range and includes
a few other aspects of her life too.
Kamala
Das’s poetic output is contained in four volumes of poems which include Summer
in Calcutta, The Descendants, The Old Playhouse and Other poems, and Stranger
Time. She has written her autobiography to which she gave the title My Story.
Although she has distinguished herself as an Indo-Anglian poet, showing an
extraordinary command over the English language, she has also achieved eminence
as a writer of short stories in her mother tongue, Malayalam for which the Kerala
Sahitya Akademi honored her with an award in 1969.
Kamala
Das has written a number of miscellaneous essays which, like her poems, have
made her a controversial figure because of the views which she has expressed in
them. Some of these essays bear the following titles: I Studied All Men; What
women Expect out of Marriage and What They Get; Why Not More than One Husband?
and I Have Lived Beautifully.
Kamala
Das had long been settled in the city of Bombay. She had three grown-up children.
She died on 31 May 2009 in Pune at the age of 75. In his condolence message
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid glowing tributes to Das saying her poems
focusing on womanhood and feminism, gained her recognition as one of the most
noted of modern Indian poets.
Kamala
Das’s poetry is essentially the poetry of a woman. This poetry centres round
Kamala Das as a woman- as a wife, as a sexual partner for many men besides her
husband, and as a mother. Her feminine sensibility is the motivating and governing
force behind her poems; and it is this sensibility which has given her poetry a
distinctive character. Other women too have written poems showing their
feminine sensibility; but Kamala Das is one of the pioneers in this respect and
one of innovators.
Kamala
Das’s feminine sensibility appears most emphatically and forcefully in poems in
which she has described the temperament and disposition of her husband. The Old
Playhouse is one of the poems which are permeated by her feminine sensibility.
Her feminine sensibility revolted against her husband’s manner of making love
of her. Only a bold woman would thus express her disgust with a husband who
seeks only the gratification of his lust. In The Sunshine Cat Kamala Das’s
feminine sensibility compels her to describe her husband as a selfish and
cowardly man who did not love her properly. Her husband, she says, had been
treating her as a prisoner with only a yellow cat (or a streak of sunshine) to
keep her company.
Kamala
Das’s feminine sensibility shows itself also in the two poems which she has
written about the birth of a son to her. The poem entitled Jaisurya is an
expression of a woman’s most precious feelings when she is about to give birth
to a child and subsequently when she has actually given birth to the expected
child. The other poem is entitled The White Flowers.
The
typical feminine themes, and even the images and symbols chosen by Kamala Das,
make her poems distinctly feminine. She regards the human body, both male and
female, as a rare possession, and a gift from God. Her poems are feminine in
theme and feminine in tone. She is sensitive, sensuous, and sentimental. She is
intensely emotional, sometimes emotional without restraint. For instance, her
forgiving attitude in her poem entitled Composition is typical of the Indian
feminine sensibility. In the poem she says that she has reached an age at which
one forgives all and that she is ready to forgive friends and to forgive those
who ruined friendship. Indeed, she has successfully blended fierce female
protest and charming feminine sentiments in her poems.
Her
poetry may be regarded as the poetry of protest. Her protest is directed
against the injustices and the persecution to which women in India have always
been subjected. In a poem entitled The Conflagration, she scolds the Indian
women for thinking that their only function is to lie beneath a man in order to
satisfy his lust. Here she tells the women that the world extends a lot beyond
the six-foot frames of a husband. Thus, her poetry serves a social purpose and
a reformative function too. In this respect too her poetry differs from the
poetry of most other women poets writing in English.
Kamala
Das is pre-eminently a confessional poet and, in this respect, she may be
regarded as an outstanding Indo-Anglian poet comparable to the American Anne
Sexton and Sylvia Plath. A confessional poet is one who takes the reader into
confidence about his or her personal and private life, and reveals those facts
of her life which an ordinary person, even if that person be a poet, would keep
strictly to himself or herself because of the delicate nature of those facts. A
confessional poet has to shed all of his or her inhibitions and restrictions
and restraints which the social code and the conventions of society impose upon
him or her.
Kamala
Das has a lot to confess in her poetry, and she does so in the most candid
manner conceivable. Indeed, her poetry has no precedent so far as her frankness
and candour in revealing herself to the readers are concerned. She has expressed
her intense desire to confess in a very graphic manner by saying that she must
‘striptease’ her mind and that she must exude autobiography. Her confessions
pertain to her role as a wife, as a mistress to relationship with her husband,
and of her extra-marital sexual relationships. The themes of most of her poems
are love or lust, and marriage. In dealing with these themes, she hides
nothing, and in dealing with this subject-matter, she makes use of language
freely, without any scruples, and even unabashedly. The orthodox reader would
even accuse her of being immodest, shameless, or brazen in her use of the
language through which she lays bare the secrets of her private life. Her
poetry is the poetry of introspection, of self-analysis, of self-explanation, and
of self-revelation.
Kamala
Das as a confessional poet has rendered some valuable service to the female sex
by making them conscious of their dormant sexual desires and their suppressed
discontent with their husbands from the sexual point of view. She has thus
given a sort of incentive to women to assert themselves or at least not to
suppress themselves. In these confessional poems Kamala Das appears as a
feminist, indirectly advocating the liberation of women from the conventional
social restraints and taboos.
Two
of Kamala Das’s poems contain her feelings as a mother. The poem entitled
Jaisurya expresses her feeling of exultation when she is going to give birth to
a child and her feeling of pride when the child comes out of the darkness of her
womb into this bright world lit by sunlight. During the child-birth, Kamala Das
felt that to her at that time neither love was important nor lust, and that the
man or men, who had been betraying her by gratifying their lust and then
forsaking her, did not matter to her at all. She found child-birth to be a
glorious phenomenon. The other poem about her motherhood has the title of The
White Flowers.
Confessional
poetry is written by a poet under an internal pressure in order to give vent to
his or her grievances or feeling of resentment or a sense of the injustice
experienced by him or her. Kamala Das’s poetry is replete with a powerful force
of catharsis and protest. This is so because of Kamala Das’s intensely
confessional quality and her ultra-subjective treatment. Kamala Das raises her confessional
traits to the level of a specific universal appeal. The struggle of herself
ultimately becomes the struggle of all mankind, and herein lies her forte
because the best confessional poetry is that which rises above the
subject-matter to achieve some sort of victory over pain and defeat.
Every
poem of hers, whether it be The Looking-Glass or Substitute, has come directly
from experience. She has not written propagandist poetry; she has not written
any poem deliberately as a sponsor or advocate of any social cause. She went on
writing poems because of an inner urge to reveal her personal life and its
secrets; and it is just an accident that her poetry has turned out to be poetry
in which the rights of women have emerged as an important theme.
Contribution to Indo-Anglian Poetry
Kamala
Das is one of the most original Indo-Anglian poets, and she has certainly made
a name for herself by virtue of her craftsmanship as much as by the novelty of
the innovative quality of her treatment of her themes. Hers is the poetry of
introspection and self-analysis; and in this respect she equals poets like
Nissim Ezekiel while she surpasses them in her frankness and candour in
expressing the thoughts, ideas, longings, yearnings, and disappointments which
lay in the depths of her hearts by which she has most effectively been able to
bring to the surface. Her unusual frankness in dealing with subject of sex and
her sensitive awareness of her outward surroundings, their sordidness, their
ugliness, their horror constitutes the strength of her poetry which shows her
complete and absolute alienation from those surroundings as well as from the
social context in which she has always lived. Even in respect of the feeling of
alienation from her social environment she seems to have gone far beyond Nissim
Ezekiel.
Kamala
Das has helped the Indian women of her time to liberate themselves from
domestic restriction and restraints and from social taboos. This may be
regarded as her chief contribution to Indo-Anglian poetry. She has established
herself as a leading feminist poet. Her protest against the way she has been
treated by her husband and by her other sexual partners, are, by implication,
strong arguments in support of the rights of women. But she has made a
significant contribution to the art and technique of writing poetry as well. A
part from her mastery of the English language and the wide range of the poetic
effects which she is capable of producing in her poems, she also shows herself
to be a master craftsman. It is true that much of her poetry is marred by her
omission of punctuation marks, especially commas, thus making her poetry
difficult for the average reader. Her poetry is also marred by the varying
length of her lines and the omission of capital letters at the beginning of the
lines. In the technical sense, her poems are extremely irregular and often
bewildering because there may sometimes be only one word in a line or two
words, thus making the reader wonder why this method of composing a poem has
been preferred to the usual manner of writing. Of course, she shares these
faults and lapses with most of the other Indo-Anglian poets who take a special
and perverse pleasure in violating the norms of poetic technique.
In
the choice of words, Kamala Das exercises a special care; and her words and the
combination of those words into phrases, clauses, and sentences, she shows a
rare understanding of the meanings, the appropriateness, and the subtleties of
words. Her words are neither splendid nor glittering, nor conceived on a
gigantic scale. She is a poet in the confessional mode and her diction is therefore,
most often colloquial. Diction is not a tool in her hands but a poetic medium
pure and simple. The words come to her effortlessly, and become one with her
emotions. This is evident in My Grandmother’s House and A Hot Noon in Malabar.
Every epithet in this poem is effective and glows with emotion; and there is
also a perfect fusion of sense and sound here. At the same time Kamala Das’s
poetry reveals a mastery of, and a control over, rhythm. Her best poems display
a strong feeling of rhythm.
Das
emerges on the Indo-English poetic scene more as in anachronism and iconoclast,
presenting through her writings in general and her poetry in particular, a
critique of culture, worn-out values, customs and canons of poetry. As she
advances in her poetic journey, she disentangles herself from her gender
identity and feels greater need to “look beyond the chilling flesh” until she
“gatecrashes” into the precincts of others’ dreams.
Awards and other recognitions
Kamala
Das has received many awards for her literary contribution, including:
1963:
PEN Asian Poetry Prize
1968:
Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Story – Thanuppu
1984:
Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature
1985:
Kendra Sahitya Academy Award (English) – Collected Poems
1988:
Kerala State Film Award for Best Story
1997:
Vayalar Award – Neermathalam Pootha Kalam
1998:
Asian Poetry Prize
2006:
Honorary D.Litt by University of Calicut
2006:
Muttathu Varkey Award
2009:
Ezhuthachan Award
Novel
1976:
Alphabet of Lust
Autobiography
1976:
My Story
Short
stories
1977:
A Doll for the Child Prostitute
1992:
Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories
Poetry
1964:
The Sirens
1965:
Summer in Calcutta
1967:
The Descendants
1973:
The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
1977:
The Stranger Time
1979:
Tonight, This Savage Rite (with Pritish Nandy)
1984:
Collected Poems
1985:
The Anamalai Poems
1997:
Only the Soul Knows How to Sing
1999:
My Mother at Sixty-six
2001:
Yaa Allah
Punishment
in the kindergarten
Malayalam
1964:
Pakshiyude Manam (short stories)
1966:
Naricheerukal Parakkumbol (short stories)
1968:
Thanuppu (short story)
1973:
Ente Katha (autobiography)
1987:
Balyakala Smaranakal (childhood memoirs)
1989:
Varshangalkku Mumbu (novel)
1990:
Palayan (novel)
1991:
Neypayasam (short story)
1992:
Dayarikkurippukal (novel)
1994:
Neermathalam Pootha Kalam (novel)
1996:
Kadal Mayooram (short novel)
1996:
Rohini (short novel)
1996:
Rathriyude Padavinyasam (short novel)
1996:
Aattukattil (short novel)
1996:
Chekkerunna Pakshikal (short stories)
1998:
Nashtapetta Neelambari (short stories)
2005:
Chandana Marangal (novel)
2005:
Madhavikkuttiyude Unmakkadhakal (short stories)
2005:
Vandikkalakal (novel)
2019
: Ottayadi pathayum vishadam pookkunna marangalum
Search for:Ghanshyam by Kamala Das (Analysis)
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