Rebellious Attitude of Kamala Das in Her Poetry

Kamala Das' Rebelling against the Exploitation of Women: 

Kamala Das' confessional poetry is the poetry of protest in the sense that it conveys her strong and vehement disapproval of the way in which women in India have been treated for ages and ages. Kamala Das' marriage proved failure because her husband treated her merely as a means of providing himself with sexual gratification while giving her no real love or affection. She has described her husband's unemotional and mechanical way of performing the sexual act with her, thus undoubtedly satisfying her sexual urge but denying to her the love and affection which every woman expects from husband and the want of which brings not only disappointment to her but also misery and even torture. She rebels against the exploitation of women in a male-oriented world. She is aware of her feminity and asserts it in poem after poem. She is a social rebel who opposes all conventions, traditions and accepted norms of society. Her failure to realise fulfilment in love and security and her sexual exploitation, imposed on her by the time-honoured institution of marriage, disillusionment and frustrations turned her into a social rebel. She has been unconventional both in her life and poetry. In her own life she sees reflection of the entire suffering womanhood. She, thus, generalises the particular. She is every woman: 

"It is I who laugh, It is I who make love 

And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying 

With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner, 

I am saint. I am the beloved and 

the Betrayed."        (An Introduction)  

Poems Presenting Her Extreme Protest: 

The Poem “The Freaks” Is an Expression of Poetess' Intense Emotions Poignancy: 

The poetess expresses her emotions with great intensity and poignancy. Love is an illusion in a woman's life. Her passionate yearning for love always remains unfulfilled. The lover and the beloved or the husband and wife are alone together. The lover, who in Kamala Das' poetry is betrayer of love and an embodiment of sheer lustfulness, is portrayed through images of ugliness and repulsion. 

“The Freaks” is a confessional and autobiographical poem which authentically records the lovelessness, emotional sterility and disintegration, the frustrations and disillusionments, the pretension of flaunting, at times, a grand, flamboyant lust in the poetess' married life. It is a faithful poetic statement of feminine sensibility, humiliated and exploited in male- dominated society. 

“The Sunshine Cat”, a Pathetic Story of Her Life: 

The present poem also narrates the very pathetic story of Kamala Das who suffered much sexual humiliation in her life and could never seek emotional fulfilment with any of the men with whom she had physical contact. Her husband as well as other men with whom she had intimate contacts used her sexually but none of them loved her. She loved one of them but he too was only interested in exploiting her sexually and did not respond to her love. Her husband too was mean and callous like others. She was so disgusted with all of them that she wanted to wipe out even their memories—their shameless lusts, their smells and the ugly hair on their chest. 

Kamala Das wanted to isolate herself from the piercing eyes of the world. She was confined to the prison of domestic life that her husband had built around her. She remained confined to a room full of books, where here only companion was a streak of light which seemed to her disturbed eyes to be yellow cat. She was forced to play the conventional role of a wife within the four walls of her house. Such is the life of a woman in a male-dominated world.

The Poem “In Love” Dealing with the Tension between Love and Lust: 

This poem deals with defilement of sex. It reveals the workings of feminine consciousness. True love is spiritual. But in this harsh, sterile and male-dominated world love is defiled in sex, and sex results in disgust, frustration and disillusionment. In Love, the poetess reveals her own futile yearning for love, her involvements in barren and sterile sex, her subsequent agonies, tortures, disillusionments and death-wish through the women persona. 

The joyless repetition of the sex act bores her and she thinks of corpse bearers chanting "Bol, Hari Bol" which is prelude to getting consumed by fire. Since she cannot fulfil herself in love and sex irks and disgusts her, she wants to die and to be consumed in fire. Funeral fire alone can give her rest. 

Her Complaining in the Poem “Glass”: 

In the poem entitled “Glass”, Kamala Das complains that a man, wanting to perform the sexual act with her, had drawn her towards himself rudely and hastily, treating her as "an armful of splinters". She says that man's behaviour had hurt her and caused her much pain, so that she had felt like broken glass.

Her Protesting against Timidity of Indian Women in “An Introduction”: 

Kamala Das has protested against the passivity and timidity of the Indian woman and against her subservience to her husband. In some of the most resentful lines in this poem, she writes that her husband surely did not beat her in the course of the sexual act but that her body yet felt badly beaten, and that the very weight of her breasts and womb crushed her. 

Kamala Das' Advocating the Liberty and Right of Women: 

Kamala Das' tone of resentment and indignation in these poems certainly shows her own sense of injustice against the social order but it also stresses the desirability and the need of the recognition of the claims and rights of the Indian women in general. Thus, Kamala Das may be described as a feminist, and a forceful and vehement feminist. She may be regarded as a champion of the rights of women and as a strong supporter of the movement for the liberation of women from the chains of slavery to men. When Kamala Das wrote these poems, the movement for women's liberation from male domination was in its initial and intermediate stages, though today the success of that movement has gone beyond the wildest dreams of women themselves. Today the Indian woman is as liberated as her counterpart in Britain and the U.S.A., but, at the time Kamala Das wrote her poetry, the Indian woman was subservient to her parents or her husband, while the question of having extra-marital relationships did not arise at all. Kamala Das was among the foremost Women to claim such freedom. 

Her Treating Marriage as a Game of Cruelty: 

Kamala Das is iconoclastic in her approach to marriage. She treats marriage as a game of cruelty on the part of a husband. Her female ego comes to the surface when she ruefully depicts her loss of liberty through marriage. In the poem entitled “Of Calcutta”, she exposes the intricacies of her inner pangs caused to her by her husband. Her husband, she says in this poem, treated her as a 'walkie talkie' to warm his bed at night. She felt that she had been reduced to a trained circus dog, and she asks: 

"Where is my soul, 

My spirit, where the muted tongue of my desire?" 

Her Regarding Marriage as a Chastisement and a Punishment: 

In the poem entitled “The Stone Age”, she laments the loss of her identity through marriage. Her female ego cannot tolerate male domination, and so she raises a voice of protest, sharply defining the gulf between the two worlds, one masculine and the other feminine. In The Stone Age, the note of rebellion and defiance is strongly expressed. The husband, devoid of love, is spoken of as: 

"Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind, 

Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment." 

In the poem entitled “The Descendants”, she asks if it is any happiness for a woman to lie beneath a man for the sexual act, and points out that the world extends a lot beyond her lover's six-foot frame. She intends to escape from this prison into a world of new love and infinite ecstasy. In the poem entitled “The Prisoner”, she says that she must someday find an escape from the snare of a husband's or lover's physical attractions.