Kamala Das' contribution to Indo-Anglian poetry

 Kamala Das' contribution to Indo-Anglian poetry

Her Candid and Bold Confessions and Her Sense of Alienation: 

Kamala Das frankly and frequently confesses in her poetry a large number of things exclusively related to her own self. She really dissects and probes her own female psyche and her 'self emerges powerfully in her poetry. She has described candidly and without the least concealment, her traumatic experiences of love-making and of the sexual act. Poetry for her is something deeply personal. In an intensely confessional tone, she gives us descriptions of her bodily experiences, her joys and failures in love and sex, and her own attitudes towards her husband and towards other men with whom she had sexual relationships. She has revolted against the traditional restraints under which women in India have always been kept. Her unusual frankness in dealing with the subject of sex and her sensitive awareness of her outward surroundings, their sordidness, their ugliness, their horror constitute 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. 

Love and Sex, the Main Theme of Her Poetry: 

Kamala Das is pre-eminently a poet of love and pain, one stalking the other through a near neurotic world. There is an all pervasive sense of hurt throughout. Love, the lazy animal hungers of the flesh, hurt and humiliation are the warp and woof of her poetic fabric. She seldom ventures outside this personal world. Love is the central emotion in woman's heart. She craves for union with man for the fulfilment of love but she is disillusioned and frustrated when it degenerates into sheer lustfulness and bodily pleasures. Her poetry deals with unfulfilled love and the celebration of sex. Her poetry is a recordation of her own experiences and observations, her own unfulfilled love and her now sexual exploitation, frustration and disillusionment that she had to suffer in a male-dominated society. 

Her Creating an Emotionally and Unproductive World: 

She creates a world which is a world of dancing eunuchs who symbolise the suppressed desires within. In them the poetess finds an objective correlative for her own unfulfilled love longings. The dance of the eunuchs symbolises the dance of the sterile and, therefore, the unfulfilled and insatiable love of the woman in the poet. The poetess reveals her own frustration and disillusionment in love through dancing eunuchs. 

Her Belief in Physical and Spiritual Evolution of Man: 

Kamala Das has accepted the Darwinian view of the physical evolution of man. This acceptance on her part has led to her adopting the twin concepts of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. But what may seem to be a contradiction in her, she also believes in the spiritual evolution of man. In a poem entitled Death Brings No Loss, she treats death as a temporary phase which brings no loss. In the poem entitled Ghanashyam, she speaks not only of physical evolution but also of spiritual evolution. Her poems on the Radha- Krishna myth are specifically indicative of her faith in the spiritual evolution of man. In a poem entitled Radha, she speaks of spiritual love and evolution through self-surrender. Radha in this poem represents the spirits of surrender which is the very first step towards spiritual evolution. 

Hostility of the Outer World: 

Like many other confessional poets, Kamala Das regards the outer world as hostile to the world of herself. This hostility receives a full treatment in her poem entitled The Suicide, which, by virtue of its title, its mood, and its theme, contains the most vital elements of confessional poetry. Here the conflict is between the world as it is and the personal experience of the poetess given in terms of the symbols of the body and soul. Suicide occurs to the poetess as the only means of escape from the predicament. Finding it impossible to bring about a harmony between the outer world and her inner self, or between her soul and her body, she thinks of blowing up either of the two. To her, death has none of the attractions of a mystical experience. She finds death desirable because her life is not going to be redeemed or made new. The escapes, which she seeks through sexual relationships, are also suicides in the sense that they can bring about a temporary merging of the dualities within oneself. 

A Singer of Feminine Sensibility and Her Rebelling against the Conventions of Society: 

Kamala Das is a fiercely feminine sensibility that dares without inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world. In her poetry she is intensely conscious of herself as a woman. Her vision is vitally particularised by Woman's point of view. Men do not see women as women but as objects or plaything. Her feminine sensibility craves for fulfilment in love. She is deeply hurt when love is denied to her. Mere sexual union, devoid of love, tries and sickens her. Feminine sensibility is badly bruised and tortured by masculine callousness, heartlessness and sexuality. In her poems of love theme we have seen how her feminine sensibility has suffered poignantly in want of love. Jaisurya, one of Kamala Das' finest lyrics, deals with motherly love and expresses feminine sensibility very nicely. The woman in her adores the child and in it love forgets her pains of bearing it. How happy was the poetess at the birth of her son! What a fine expression of feminine sensibility: 

"And, then, wailing into light 

He came, so far, a streak of light thrust 

Into the faded light.”

Showing Her Concern for Disease, Sickness and Death: 

There is an all-pervading feeling of loneliness, or incompleteness. The poetess feels that loneliness is eternal and that we are born with great hollows that need to be filled, for us to feel to be complete. The burden of convention-ridden life and domesticity, dull routine, loveless sexual bouts, none-fulfilment of love and subsequent frustrations and disillusionments cast a melancholy shadow over her poetry and make her think about decay and death. The Testing of Sirens reveals Kamala Das' intense feeling of loneliness and disillusionment: 

"Shut my eyes, but inside eye-lids, there was 

No more night, no more love or peace, only 

The white sun burning, burning, burning... 

Ah, why does love come to me like pain 

Again and again and again." 

Her last volume, entitled The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, is mainly concerned with disease, sickness and death. After the Illness which was written after the poetess' recovery from a serious illness is concerned with the theme of ageing and decay: 

"There was 

Not much flesh left for the flesh to hunger, the blood had 

Weakened too much to lust, and the skin without heath's 

Anointments, was numb and unyearning." 

In The Sunshine Cat, the poetess shows how she pined away in secret grief, became lean and thin, merely a shadow of her former self. She became cold and half dead. Her youth and beauty decayed and she was no longer of any use to men. The Invitation contains death wish. She feels like lying on a funeral pyre/with a burning head. In The Looking Glass, she shows how a women's body, whose emotional fulfilment is denied prematurely grows old and decrepit. 

Her Bold Suggestions to Women to Display their Naked Body before Lovers and Her Own Experience: 

In An Introduction, she speaks about matters in respect of which most people, and even most poets, would speak in a veiled manner. She here tells us that, when she grew up from a child to an adult and when she felt the need of love, a man pulled her into the bed room, closed the door, and performed the sexual act with her in such a rough manner that she felt beaten and bruised. And she then: "The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me." Subsequently her sex life became so reckless that people began to describe her as a schizophrenic and even a nymphomaniac. The Looking Glass is another poem in which she speaks frankly about sex. She does not mind suggesting to women to stand nude in front of a mirror, with their lovers also standing nude by their side, in order to look at their reflections in the mirror. She then urges women not to keep their sexual yearnings to themselves but to let their lovers know what they expect from them. She would want a woman to let her lover smell the scent of her long hair, to smell the musk of sweat between her breasts, to feel the warm shock of her menstrual blood, and to feel all her endless female hungers. 

Her Significant Contribution to the Art and Technique:

Apart from her mastery of the English language and the wide range of the poetic effects which she is capable of producing in her poems, 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. 

Cultivated Style Characterised by a Colloquial Simplicity and Clarity: 

She shows a remarkable command over the use of English. Words effortlessly come to her and she spontaneously begins to write when emotions come to her. In the choice of words, she 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. Her poetic diction has nothing to do with philosophical musings or religious chants. 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. Since English is most familiar to her, she naturally and skilfully uses it to express her emotions, her feelings, her reminiscences, her love and sexual experiences, her frustrations and disillusionments. In her sex 'style is the man'. English authentically mirrors her life. She employs English to communicate varied shades of her emotions and experiences. She remarks, "The language one employs is not important. What is important is the thought contained by words." 

Her Using Repetition Vocabulary: 

Her intense yearning for love in An Apology to Gautama is revealed through the repetition of love thrice; "I must/hear you say, I love, I love, I love." The repetition of 'I' in the concluding lines of An Introduction asserts the poetess' identity. The repetitive vocabulary in 'Substitute' suggests both the pains and joy of living: 

"It will be all right, it will be all right 

It will be all right between the world and me. 

It will be all right, If I don't remember 

The last of the days together." 

The repetition of one word or phrase creates the maximum emotional effect and a sense of drama. 

Her Control over Rhythm: 

Kamala Das' best poems display a strong feeling of rhythm. The poem entitled An Introduction employs the rhythms of conversational speech, with the attempt of Kamala Das' family to define a role for her in life: 

"Be Amy, or be Kamala, Or better 

Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to 

Choose a name, a role, don’t play pretending games..." 

And then the poem moves suddenly into the urgent driving rhythm which is characteristics of some of Kamala Das' best work.