Kamala Das’ Poetry: A Feminist Perspective

Abstract: In this paper an endeavor has been made to analyze the poetry of Kamala Das with a feminine perspective. Though she composed only a handful of poems yet it is suffice to unleash her feelings. It tells aloud her genuine feelings towards the society she inhabits, the norms and values she was compelled to internalize. Her poems speak not only of her traumatic sufferings but of the entire female folk. Thus, she can be regarded as the mouth-piece of her society. She has set the path to be followed by the writers to come. Thus, this paper seeks to explore the feminine dimension of her poetical composition. Keywords: rebellious, hierarchies, callousness, feminine sensibility,

As a child of colonial cultural hybridity and subject to double marginalisation- colonial as well as patriarchal, Kamala Das uses her poetry as the medium to revolt against the restraints and patriarchal negation in a male-dominated society while discovering and asserting her individuality, identity and freedom.”The mother of modern English Indian poetry” as The Times calls her in 2009, Kamala Das is seen as one of the most formative influences of Indian English poetry. Her poetry that consists of three volumes of celebrated poems- Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendents (1967) and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) launched a literary crusade and in many ways dismantled the so-called conventional submissive and domestic image of an Indian woman while at the same time portrayed the modern Indian woman’s journey from tradition to modernity. Kamala Das in her poetry is simply “every woman who seeks love”. She is ‘the beloved and the betrayed’ expressing her “endless female hungers” and “the mutual whispers at the core of womanhood”(Naik). This paper is an attempt to highlight the underlying notes of feminine impulses on three selected poems of Kamala Das, viz, “Summer In Calcutta”, “An Introduction” and “Forest Fire”.

Kamala Das voices her personal experiences of life in her poetry. The energetic and ranging verse of Kamala Das moves through many issues of the world. First and foremost, it charts the world as seen from women's eyes, as wife, lover, mother and daughter, each role constituting different demands and the different perspective around her. Experiencing all the roles, she channels experience and through imagination explains the emotions, relationships, hopes and despair of many other women in India. The present paper focuses on the feministic issues in Das' poetry collections Summer in Calcutta and The Descendants.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH CULTURE SOCIETY, 2018

Kamala Das has created a permanent place for herself in contemporary Indo-English poetry. Das as a poet treads on familiar grounds, and she never tries to transgress her self-imposed restrictions. Her poems bring to the fore her boldness and freedom in speaking aloud the secret longings and aspirations of womankind. Her woman pleads for domestic security and the inborn desire to be liberated. She also sings of love and the different roles it plays in human life. It can be varied as merely lust, ‘a skin-communicated thing’, a longing and hunger, an overpowering force, a bondage, an escape and a phenomenon which reveals the psychological processes behind both feminity and masculinity. The final impression that Das’ poetry leaves is bold, ruthless honesty tearing passionately at conventional attitudes to reveal the quintessential woman within. It is not strictly the ideology of feminism rather her individualism as a female writer that comes to the fore when she advocates a concept of love that does not impede her impulse to freedom. Her voice is a rebellion against a man-dominated world. A woman has to face puzzling adolescence, the pain of growing up and the problem of inequality with the male world. Kamala Das considers man as an agent of corruption who plays with the emotions of woman. Her poetry functions as a comic-relief in most of the times as it functions in a way to mock at the cruelty of man towards woman.

2016

Feminism basically concerns with women’s marginalised position in society, discrimination faced by them because of the patriarchal culture and way of their emancipation. It involves political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing equal rights and legal protection for women. The literary feminism too deals with cultural, economic, educational and social inequalities of women in the male dominated society and the writers of feminism deal with the problems of women from female point of view.Many modern Indian English women poets raise their voices against the persecution of women in a male dominated society. They are feminists ready to assert their lives in a new and different way. They are worth reading for its fierce originality, bold images, exploration of female sexuality and intensely personal voice. Kamala Das is the pioneer who gave clear, frank and straightforward expression to feminine sensibility and rebels against the conventions and restraints of society. In ...

Abstract: After gradual receding of the romantic tradition, a new wave came in the field of Indian poetry in English. It appeared in the beginning of the post-independence Era. Among these new Twentieth century Indian poets Kamala Das is one of the most audacious poets in her protests against patriarchy and exploitation of women. Kamala Das is often referred to as the icon of Indian Feminism. Kamala Das, a bilingual poetess established herself as a strong new voice. Her poems are confessional in tone. In her poems, feminine sensibility and yearning for true love is continually reflected. This paper is an effort to study some of Kamala Das' Poems dealing with the theme of feminine sensibility. In her poem “'The Freaks'”, movement is slow but Das depicts her indifference to sex clearly and at the end, she compromises. Her tone becomes impulsive when she says that she hates his love making as she has to surrender like a victim but at the same time, she has to pretend that She enjoys it.She is compelled to do so because of the demand of social customs. In a male dominated world, a married woman has no right to raise her voice against filthy experience she has. She writes that she feels like being an object, a property and can’t give voice to her inner feelings. Kamala Das accepts a new standard of expression reflecting denial and rejection of the conventional poetic expression. She is an honest poetess in the expression of anger while attacking male dominance. For her, motivating force is her frustrating experience of love. In “'The Freaks' she depicts disappointment, torment of a woman who craves for true love. She revolts against cruelty of her companion. Her poems are a revolt against the male dominance. She bravely emphasizes feminine sensibility too. Kamala Das is truly a free Woman representing the modern woman who feels that it is every woman's right to get fulfillment of sexual desires and psychological security. In “My Grandmother's House” Kamala Das depicts nostalgic desire for her family home in Malabar, Kerala. She misses love and affection of her grandmother. Thus the close study of “Freaks” and “My Grandmother's House” reflects Das'’ feminine sensibility clearly. Keywords: Feminine Sensibility, Bilingual poetess, Confessional tone, The most audacious poetess, Yearning for love

2013

The paper deals with the hunger for love, identity and freedom in Kamala Das poetry. Her poems deal with women's liberation from sexual exploitation, dehumanization, suppression and depression. She yearns all through her life for true love and affection. She has been enormously free and confident in expressing her physical needs though she is seriously criticised. She points out the unspoken gender partiality and male chauvinism which have an effect on the lives of women in all the aspects such as their standing in society, security, education. This paper explores her intention in her poetry for gender identity in various aspects.

Kitaab, 2020

This paper attempts to analyse the feminist tones in the poetry of Indian-English writer and poet, Kamala Das, particularly focusing on the expression and problematisation of gender roles in her 1965 poetry collection, Summer in Calcutta. It argues that her gendered identity manifests itself in her poetic style and aesthetic, wherein she questions the patriarchal expectations of gender - of women rooted in immanence and domesticity and of men rooted in transcendence and the public sphere. The custom of arranged marriage, domestic emotional abuse, confinement to the private sphere of domesticity, and daunting standards of feminine beauty, are some of the gendered expectations in the Indian woman's experience that Das' poetry interrogates. The confessional movement of poetry in the West, iconised in the poetry of women writers like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, also appears to influence Das' mode of expression, since she emphasises on the 'I' in her poems, while voicing the experience of not only her own self, but also of women as a community who have been disenfranchised socially, linguistically, politically, or culturally due to the gendered roles and expectations imposed upon them.

The 'defiant' stance of the Post-colonial Indian women poets is manifest in terms of bold pronouncement of feminine urges, feelings, experiences, perceptions and viewpoints in their poetic expressions. Among the modern Indian women poets writing in English, Kamala Das is the first one who dared to speak out for those women who refuse to be tethered to the orthodoxy of tradition. The present paper appreciates Kamala Das's rebellious attitude in her poetry with reference to the socio-literary background of Indian woman-hood. It is interesting to analyze her poetry in the perspective of various socio-cultural factors that have shaped the feminine consciousness of Indian women through the ages resulting into the evolution of a poetic tradition of their own. Das tears herself off from the romantic-idealist tradition of the pre-Independence women poets and offers a realistic and concrete portrayal of contemporary feminine experience, particularly in the ambit of man-woman relationship. The poet gives voice to those who strive to come out of the identity crisis as woman positioned in a patriarchal frame of reference.

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2016

This paper is going to argue that the selected poems of renowned Indian poet Kamala Das are inclined to relocate both feminine and masculine identity through the politicized representation of body. Kamala Das' representation of body in her poems has always been viewed as a medium of re-historicizing the pain, sufferings, and psychological trauma that a woman goes through in a patriarchal society. Though apparently female body seems to be submissive under patriarchal dominance but this paper reveals how female body in Das' poems acts as a powerful agent over the male body. The objective of this paper is to analyze and evaluate kamala Das' representation of body to understand the gender reality in a patriarchal society, to question the existing discourse of sexed/gendered identity, to find a new way of viewing to both female and male body. Echoing Beauvoir, Judith Butler and Hall, this paper is going to analyze how Kamala Das represents body as an important factor in her poems to fight back the normative concept of identity based on patriarchal sex and/or gender stereotypes.

International Journal of English and Literature, 2013

Kamala Das belongs to the first generation of modern English poets who evolved a new poetics for themselves and made a new start both in theme and technique around the 1960s. The first phase of Indo-Anglican poetry ended in the 1950s. To the poets of this period the spirit of modernism was almost alien. Their main preoccupation was the spirit of nationalism and the war of independence, partition of country. It was only in the sixties that things began to take a new dimension where a new generation of young poets took control of the Indo-Anglican poetic realm. Kamala Das is one of the most powerful voices of this post-colonial era. In Kamala Das's poetry we find the best expression of feminine sensibility, its suppression in a male dominated society. So her poetry is confessional and autobiographical to a great extent, but at times she universalizes what is personal. The main themes of Dharker's poetry include home, freedom, journeys, communal conflict and gender politics. Purdah and other poems deal with the various aspects of a Muslim woman's life where she experiences injustice, oppression and violence engineered through the culture of purdah. This mixed heritage and itinerant lifestyle is at the heart of her writing: questioning, imagistic and richly textured poems that span geographical and cultural displacement, while also interrogating received ideas about home, freedom and faith. This research paper would unfold how both above mentioned poetesses rebel against the conventional restraints of society which are meant to exploit women in this man made world. "An Introduction" and "Stone Age" are two of Kamala Das's poems where she is intensely conscious of herself as woman, and by writing about the self she challenges the accepted notions of the female and redraft general opinion of the feminine mystique."Purdah" and "Living Space" are Imtiyaz Dharkar's poems which show the passion of an undaunted rebel, not to retreat and not to fail. The intensity and eloquence of her life and poetic accomplishment have dumbfounded the male-chauvinists and have left her female counterparts in soaring spirits not only inside the Islamic social, cultural and religious setup but also outside it. That is why her life and poetry make a fascinating study in the crushing indictment of the suppressive prescriptions against the freedom, dignity and respectful living of women, especially in the Muslim society. Imtiaz confirms our convictions that socio-cultural and socio-religious restrictions on women have robbed them of all their potentialities, leaving them not only physically and mentally handicapped but also psychological wrecks age after age. The lived experiences of Imtiaz have been honestly expressed in her poetry with the courage of conviction.

Kamala Das is one of the foremost Indian English woman poets. Like a great number of progressive individuals from different walks of life who have contributed for the gender equality and woman empowerment in India, Kamala Das occupies a unique position among the Indian women poets who championed for the cause of women and their status in the society. Being a member of the traditional Indian patriarchal society, she not only experiences but also becomes a subject of humiliation and suppression inflicted by the practitioners of social dogmatism. She refuses to submit herself to such traditional beliefs. In contrast, she exhibits courage and an indomitable spirit through her inherent creative ability to fight against the illogical traditional norms that are designed to dominate women. Her bold and fearless exhibition of self is incomparable and therefore an inspiration for every Indian woman in their fight for empowerment, self-identity, self-dignity and equality of status. This paper tries to analyse the poetic works of Kamala Das in the light of gender equality and woman empowerment. It is assumed that the study would throw light on literature as a tool for social rectification.

TRANSSTELLAR JOURNALS, 2018

The study focuses on Kamala Das' uncanny honesty of exploring womanhood in a patriarchal world. It presents "An Introduction" and "The Old Playhouse" as Das' weapons of raising her vigorous voice and fighting against the male ego as well as the orthodox, conservative society. Considering Kamala Das as an ardent spokesperson for women's freedom this paper examines her poems "An Introduction" and "The Old Playhouse" as the echoes of the pitiable condition of women and movements of emancipating the Indian women. This paper looks at the inner-meanings of these poems in the light of Das' personal experience in order to argue that these poems have contributions in uplifting the deplorable condition of Indian women in a society where they can enjoy freedom without any restrictions. The findings reveal kamala Das as the poet who universalizes her personal issues to stimulate Indian women to establish their own individuality going beyond the shadows of patriarchal hegemony and substantiate Das' poems "An Introduction" and "The Old Playhouse" as new trials of emancipation for Indian women.

Alluring slogans like "Feminism is Dead" are not really relevant in the context of developing societies like India where this 'ism' has not really even been born. Unlike the West where excesses and eccentricities of some women_ libbers have resulted in 'backlash against feminism', India, with her skewed gender-ratio and increasing heinous crime and violence against women, stands much in need of such revolutionary and consciousness-raising literature which is instrumental in creating a gender_equal and egalitarian society. The issue of ' female identity' in one form or another has become an inevitable part of the contemporary Indian literary and critical discourse.