The Dance
of Eunuchs
by Kamala Das
(Summary)
Kamala Das was the poetess of ‘The Modern Age’ or
‘the Age of Interrogation and Anxiety’. The general characteristics of this age
are:
·
Anxiety and
interrogation,
·
Art for life’s
sake,
·
Growing interest in
the poor and the working classes,
·
Impact of
socio-economic conditions on literature,
·
Stream of
consciousness,
·
Impact of the two
world wars &
·
The two world wars.
The general characteristics of poetry of this age are:
·
Tradition and
experiment,
·
Imagism,
·
Symbolism &
· Pound and Eliot tradition.
The modern poet includes: transitional poets, war
poets, Georgian poets, poets of imagism, poet of symbolism, oxford poets and
the poets of Neo-Romanticism.
Kamala Das was born on March 31, 1934 in Kerala. She
received her education at home. She had no formal education but she is one of
the most distinguished Indo-Anglican poets. She inherited the poetic talents
from her parents, who were both poets. At the age of fifteen, she was married
and was shifted to Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi and settled in Trivandrum in
Kerala. In the last stage of her life, she adopted Islam as her religion and
changed her name Suraiyya.
Selected
Poems by Kamala Das (Ed. Devendra Kohli)Summary
‘The Dance of Eunuchs’ is the opening poem of her first collection of poems – ‘Summer in Calcutta’. Through this poem and in a familiar situation, she expresses her own desires and feelings for the social life of common Indians. She expresses her own sense of sexual disgust. The dance of eunuchs is symbolic for her own life.
Confessional
Poetess: Kamala Das and Sylvia Plath by Anupam (Author)‘The Dance of Eunuchs’ is a narrative poem, in which
the poet tells the readers about the dance of eunuchs on an extremely hot day.
These eunuchs dance on auspicious occasions of Indian societies. In the opening
lines of the poem, the poet describes the day, when they come to dance. The day
was very hot when they dance. Their wide skirts go round and round, they clash
their cymbals and their anklets were jingling. The eunuchs were dancing beneath
the Gulmohar tree, which was covered with the red fiery flowers. Their long
locks were flying as they were dancing and their dark eyes were flashing. They keep on dancing till their feet start
bleeding. The poetess gives more details of their physical appearance and says
that they have tattoos on their cheeks and the flowers of jasmine in their
hair. Some of them are dark and some are fair in color. Their voices are harsh
and they sing melancholy songs. They sing about the dying lovers and of those
children, who are left unborn. Some of them are beating their drums and some
their sorry breasts. They twist their bodies as if they are in acute mental
agony. The poetess describes them and says that their limbs are thin and dry
like the half-burnt logs of a funeral pyre. The poetess says that these eunuchs
have nothing in them except drought and rottenness. She closes the poem by
discussing the surrounding situation and says, that their dance makes the crows
sit silent on the trees and the children to see their dance with wide eyes.
Finally in the last few lines of the poem, Kamala
Das changes the atmosphere and the season and says, that while they dance the
sky crackles and this cracking is followed by thunder and lightning and a
meager rain. This meager rain does not bring any coolness but-
“The smell of dust in attics
And the smell of urine of lizards and mice and….”
The poetess has given the description of the dance
in a very graphical manner. The characters of the poem are neither male nor
female, they are without hope. The poetess sees something common in their and her
life. She finds an emotional vacuum in their life (her life).
The poem is written in free verse form having no
regular stanza and rhyming pattern. The simile like ‘half – burnt logs from
funeral pyre’ is appropriate and suggestive. The word ‘drought’ and
‘rottenness’ suggest the meaningless life of the eunuchs.
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