Sahitya Akademi

Paradigm Shift in the Reading of Kamala Das's Poetry

Author(s): Bijay Kumar Das
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 54, No. 1 (255) (January/February 2010), pp. 240-248
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
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 Paradigm Shift in the Reading of
Kamala Das's Poetry

Bijay Kumar Das

Das a pioneer of Post-Independence

(1934-2009), Indian
Kamala
English poetry published her first book of poems titled, Summer in
Calcutta in 1965. Together with Nissim Ezekiel, 'a founding father' of

Indian-English poetry (Bruce King's coinage) and A. K. Ramanujan, who

published his first collection of poems The Striders in 1966, Kamala Das
gave as it were, 'a local habitation and a name' to Modem Indian-English
poetry. Her successive books of verse include The Descendants (1967), The
Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), Collected Poems Vol I (1984), The Best
of Kamala Das (1991), Anamalai Poems (1992), and Only the Soul Knows How
to Sing (1996). She won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Collected Poems
Vol 1 for the year 1985. Because of her Autobiography, My Story (1976),
her poetry is often interpreted as confessional and feminist poetry. True,

part of her poetry may be autobiographical, even confessional, but it

is much more than that—defying any particular label. The purpose of
the paper is to show how her poetry has attained canonical status in

Indian-English literature.
Kamala Das's poetry, like the poetry of Shiv K. Kumar, begins in

pain and anguish caused by her loss of freedom to live her life, the way
she liked.Her best known poem, "An Introduction" sets the tone of
her poetry and reveals her mind.

I was child, and later they

Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair. When
I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask

For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the

Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me

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 But my sad woman-body felt so beaten
The weight of my breast and womb crushed me. I shrank
Pitifully. (Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 96)

The abovequoted lines suggest the pain and anguish that crushed
the poet. Later on, she wrote poetry of human love like John Donne

positive poems, negative poems and neutral poems. In positive poems

love is fulfilled leading to orgasm but in negative poems love remains

largely unrequited. In neutral poems she tells womankind how to conquer

men through love—objective, impersonal and detached.
Kamala
Das's love poems are rooted in her defiance of the patriarchal
tradition of our country and especially against male dominance. Her
frankness in expressing the desire of a woman to fulfill her love makes
her a feminist in the western sense of the word. Shiv K. Kumar, the
well known poet and critic, makes an apt observation in the following
lines:
It seems that the past two decades or so have witnessed
an unprecedented upsurge of longing for freedom in
our women's outlook. They have not only claimed parity
with men but have vehemently questioned certain age
old social practices and prejudices. This is the predomi
nant theme in Kamala Das's poetry which exposes male

chauvinism, its persistent endeavour to play the role of

the 'stronger' sex. No wonder, the contemporary woman
writer is never tired of articulating her disgust for the
insensitive, aggressive male. If there is, therefore, a
recurring element of sex in her work, it is more to expose
it as a form of male dominance than to glorify it. All
that Kamala Das is trying to do is to salvage the Indian
woman from the sexual exploitation of man, her
husband or lover. In one of her early poems, titled "The

Freaks", she portrays her lover as only someone who

arouses 'the skin's lazy hungers'.

He talks, turning a sunstained

cheek to me; his mouth, a dark

cavern, where stalactites of uneven teeth gleam; his right

hand on my knee, while our minds
are willed to race towards love;
but they only wander, tripping idly over puddles of
desire... Can this man with
nimble finger-tipsunleash
nothing more than the skin's
lazy hungers?

Bi/ay Kumar Das / 241

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Obviously, the answer is no, but then Kamala Das also suggests 'truthfully,
that in this game of love and hate, the woman is as much to blame
as her male partner, because she too is driven by her sexual urges.

'My body's wisdom tells me,' she says in another poem

('A Relationship') that "I shall find my rest, my sleep,
my peace/ and even death nowhere else but here in my

betrayer's arms...' (6-7)

Kamala Das's revolt against male dominance in love makes her

poetry not only negative but ironical. In "The Stone Age" she compares
the husband to an 'old fat spider' and dramatizes wife-husband relationship
with a tinge of irony:

Ask me, everybody, ask me

What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,
A libertine, ask me the flavour of his
Mouth, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake
Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like
A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts
And sleeps. Ask me why life is short and love is
Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price...
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 67)

The dissatisfaction with the husband and the desire for another man
becomes prominent in "The Stone Age".
Kamala Das is not only a poet of love, she is the poet of body.
Her emphasis on the satisfaction of the body finds support in the work
of the Queer theorist, Judith Butler, who maintains that it is the body
that determines one's nature and character. Our fate lies not in the stars
but in the body. Betrayal in love breaks the heart of the poet. In order
to save the love relationship, she advises women to gift all to men in
a poem called, "The Looking Glass":

Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers.
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 55)

If that does not save the relationship, she advises women, 'Don't cry
embarrassingly loud when /jilted in love'. Her poem, "The Suicide" reminds
us of John Donne's "Aire and Angels" in which the latter lays emphasis

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on body. Das begins her poem playing on the dichotomy between the

body and the soul:

Bereft of soul
My body shall be bare
Bereft of body
My soul shall be bare...
If love is not to be had
I want to be dead, just dead.
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 86-87)

This poem reminds us of the imagery employed by the confessional poet

Anne Sexton. Devendrá Kohli makes an apt comment on the similarities
between Das and Sexton in the following:

The analogy between the lover and water is a vehicle

of the poet's symbolic swimming in the foreverchanging
and elusive realities of life. In its sexual connotations
the image can be compared to the nude swim in a poem

by the same name by Anne Sexton:

I lay on it as on a divan
I lay on it just like
Matisse's Red Odalisque
Water was my strange flower
One must picture a woman
Without a toga or a scarf
On a couch as deep as a tomb.

Indeed, one might link Kamala Das not only with Sylvia
Plath, but with Anne Sexton who "is a truer example
of the confessional mode." (Kulshrestha 195-196)

Vrinda Nabar makes a comparison between Kamala Das and Sylvia

Plath as confessional poet. She writes,

A comparison with Sylvia Plath at this point may be

relevant. No matter how much is written about the content
of Plath's confessions, all her critics agreed that she
transforms them into poetry of the most extraordinary
complexity and variety. It is ultimately the poetry that
matters,with all its direct and metaphorical implications.
In Kamala, on the other hand, it is the confession that
matters, and sometimes it seems that poetry is incidental,
. . .The overwhelming majority of her Indian readers
respond largely to her personality. (104-105)

Bijay Kumar Das / 243

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 Notonly in sexual imagery but in the choice and collocation of
words, Kamala Das makes innovation in Indian-English poetry. Words
like warm shock of menstrual blood' 'the musky sweat between the breasts,'
'the jerkyway he urinates,' 'my pubis,' 'lesbian,' 'frigid,' 'queer,' 'sandal,' 'scent,'

'lipstick,' 'breast,' 'flesh,' 'lips,' 'kiss,' 'embrace,' 'honeymoon,' 'womb,' 'eunuch,'

'bloodstain,''schizophrenia,' 'eczema,' 'anaemia,' 'isehernia,' 'urine,' 'cabaret,'
and the likening of husband's hand to a hooded snake that 'clasps my

pubis' suggesting violence, and the likening of heart to an empty cistern

'waiting through long hours fills itself with coiling snakes of silence' and
love, to a 'swivel door' 'when one went out, another came in' are certainly
uncommon in Indian-English poetic diction. This is Kamala Das's con
tribution to Indian-English idiom.

Apart from love, family becomes a major concern in her poetry.

Like A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das deals with the theme of family

relationship in a number of poems such as "Composition", "The Old

Playhouse", "A Requiem for My Father", "My Father's Death" and "Blood".
Her grandmother and great grandmother remain for her the centre of
the family. In "Blood" she says,

For I love this house, it hurts me much

To watch it die
When I grow old, I said
And very very rich

I shall rebuild the fallen walls

And make new this ancient house

My great grandmother
Touched my cheeks and smiled.
She was really simple.
Fed on God for year.
(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 72)

KamalaDas anticipated the Diasporic writers when she dealt with

the theme of 'home' in some of her poems. In "Home is a Concept",
Kamala Das describes the plight of expatriate, immigrant and diasporic
writers for whom the concept of home has become burdensome. An

immigrant or diasporic writer may accept another country as his home

but does that country accept him as its own on par with the natives?
Some are torn between the country they left behind and the country

they adopt as their own. Hence, they are suspended between two worlds—
never at home, here or there.

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 The unwanted wait here, and there for aeroplanes

clutching at heavy briefcases that hold

the papers to be read at seminars,

passports, visas and photographs of laughing

children. The unwanted carry heavy bags
and overcoats but the heaviest luggage
they tote is pain. If home is a concept

they shall not know it...

(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 105)

Having discussed the poetry of Kamala Das, the question that lurks
in the mind is that how to rate her as a poet. Paul Valerey once said
that a poem is never complete but abandoned. This applies to Kamala
Das's poetry. Most of her poems end with three dots which invite the
readers to expand them.
E.M.W. Tillyard divides poetry into two types: direct poetry and
oblique poetry. Direct poetry is that in which the surface meaning is the
same as deep meaning but in oblique poetry one thing is stated in terms
of another. Though Kamala Das has written a few oblique poems, she
excels in her direct poems. The strength of her poetry lies in her frankness
to say the ordinary things of life without ambiguity. Clarity of thought
and felicity of expression go together to make her poetry immensely
readable.
Supremely confident of her ideas about love, lust, body and
man-woman relationships she knows that she can come closer to readers

by revealing her life poetically. Thus, she writes:

I know it is no use regretting now

or feeling ashamed
I also know that by confessing\
by peeling off my layers

I reach closer to the soul

and
to the bone's

supreme indifference.

Only those who like to listen

listen
what I narrate are the ordinary
events of an

ordinary life.
("Composition")

What is significant in her poetry is that by speaking for herself,

she speaks for womankind as well. If she expressed her disappointment

against male hegemony in some of her poems, she also accepts the value

Bijay Kumar Das / 245

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of wife-husband relationship as a norm in family-life. Both the attitudes
are expressed in the same poem, "A Widow's Lament":

My man, my sons, forming the axis

while I, wife and mother,
insignificant as a fly
climbed the glasspanes of their eyes.
He 'was a sunshade, he was my home,
now I walk naked as a babe.

(Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 125)

Kamala Das's poetry has social implications. This reminds us of

Edward Said's assertion that 'texts are worldly.' In The World, the Text and
the Critic, Said says,

My position is that texts are worldly, to some degree they

are events and even when they appear to deny it, they
are nevertheless, a part of the social world, human life
and of course the historical moments in which they are
located and interpreted. (4)

Kamala Das's texts are worldly. They are about contemporary reality.
She writesabout women who are discriminated against by men in
the society in our time. Hence, her poems can be termed topical
poems. She was disturbed by the riots in Delhi in 1984 and the killings
in Sri Lanka. Poems like "Delhi 1984", "If Death is Your wish" , "After
July", "Smoke in Colombo" and "The Sea at Galle Face Green" reveal
her concern for suffering mankind and anguish for senseless violence.
There is variety in her poetry. If in some poems she denounces love
that becomes the other name of lust, in others she accepts it when it
becomes tender. If love becomes 'skin-communicated thing' in her negative
poems, in her positive poems she feels the absence of the husband. She
writes;

Do I miss him?
Of course, I do, for larger than life
was he.

('Larger than Life')

In "Anamalai Poems" she likens herself to mountain to realize the

significance of love. 'At times I feel that I hide behind my dreams I

as the mountain does, behind the winter's mist,' she writes and then goes
on to say,

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 There is a love greater than all you know

that awaits you where the red road finally ends

(Anamalai Poem X)

K. Satchidanandan's apt observation that, 'Kamala's whole oeuvre

thus becomes a declaration of the greatness of love that even while being

expressed through the body also transcends the body:' ('Transcending the

Body', Only the Soul Knows How to Sing) seems to be valid.

Kamala poetry defies exact classification. She is the feminist
Das's
— at once, all these
poet, a confessional poet, a poet of body and soul
and much more. Writing her obituary in Front Une (July3, 2009), K.
Satchidanandan has underlined this aspect:

Kamala Das denounced the extreme forms of feminism

as she could not imagine a world without men or think

that replacing male hegemony with female hegemony

would create an egalitarian world.... She is deeply aware

of her difference as woman but would see it as natural

rather than glorify it (118).

To conclude, I wish to seek an answer to two questions: (i)What

significance has Kamala Das for contemporary Indian-English poets? and

(ii) Can she continue to be a source of inspiration to poets in the twenty
first century? To my mind, Kamala Das's significance as a postcolonial

poet lies in her ability to bring feminism and postcolonialism closer for

exploring new themes and images. Both women and the colonized were

oppressed by men and colonialists respectively. She brings them together

by speaking for them and showing them the way. The key word of
her poetry is resistance—but it is resistance leading to reconciliation, not
confrontation. Eunice de Souza underlines this aspect of her poetry in
the following words:

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 correa 'anguish' of
writing in English. And in her best poems she speaks
for women, certainly, but also for anyone who has known

pain, inadequacy, despair. (8)

Kamala Das has attained canonical status in Indian-English poetry.

She has successfully assimilated the contemporary women's attitude to

Bi/ay Kumar Das I 247

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live in the texture of her poetry so that it ceases to appear strange to
us. In his well known book, The Western Canon, Harold Bloom ponders
over the question, 'What makes the author and the works canonical?'
and says, 'the answer more often than not, has turned out to be strangeness,
a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated or that so assimilates
us that we cease to see it as strange' (Bloom 3). In a way Kamala Das
assimilates us and we take her poetry as authentic representation of women's

problem of coming to terms with love in contemporary patriarchal society.

That is the hallmark
of her originality.
Das will always be a source of inspiration for Indian-English
Kamala

poets and writers in the twenty-first century for her daring portrayal of
love and body in straightforward language. It is her emphasis on body
that becomes an eye-opener for Indian-English writers who openly and

frankly describe the contours of body in their work. She knows that 'life
is too short! for absolute bliss'. Hence, we should explore more and more
to understand and experience it in the world going beyond the dictates
of the society. We should live our lives to the full. That seems to me
the message of her poetry.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. London: McMillan,, 1995.

Das, Kamala. Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: DC Books,
1996.
Kohli, Devendrá. "Kamala Das". Contemporary Indian English Verse: An
Evaluation. Ed. Chirantan Kulshrestha. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann,
1980.
Kumar, Shiv, K. ContemporaryIndian Literature in English. Shimla: Indian
Institute of Advanced Study and New Delhi: Manohar Publications,
1992.
Nabar, Vrinda. The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das. New
Delhi: SterlingPublishers,1994.
Said, Edward. The World, the Text and the Critic. Harvard University Press,
1983.
Satchidanandan, K. "Transcending the Body." 'Preface.' Only theSoul Knows
How to Sing. Kottayam: DC Books, 1996.
- - -. the Body". Front Line 26: 13 (June20- July3, 2009).
"Beyond
Souza, Eunice de. Nine Indian Poets: An Anthology. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997.

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