Ghanshyam: Kamala Das

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

In panic I asked Dont you want me any longer dont you want me
Dont you dont you
In love when the snow slowly began to fall
Like a bird I migrated to warmer climes
That was my only method of survival
In this tragic game the unwise like children play
And often lose                      
At three in the morning
I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness,
Like bleached bones cracking in the desert-sun was my loneliness,
And each time my husband,
His mouth bitter with sleep,
Kisses, mumbling to me of love.
But if he is you and I am you
Who is loving who
Who is the husk who the kernel
Where is the body where is the soul
You come in strange forms
And your names are many.
Is it then a fact that I love the disguise
and the name more than I love you?
Can I consciously weaken bonds?
The child's umbilical cord shrivels and falls
But new connections begin, new traps arise
And new pains
Ghanshyam,
The cell of the eternal sun,
The blood of the eternal fire
The hue of the summer-air,
I want a peace that I can tote
Like an infant in my arms
I want a peace that will doze
In the whites of my eyes when I smile
The ones in saffron robes told me of you  
And when they left
I thought only of what they left unsaid
Wisdom must come in silence
When the guests have gone
The plates are washed
And the lights put out
Wisdom must steal in like a breeze
From beneath the shuttered door
Shyam O Ghanshyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish...

 

Ghanshyam here is a typical Kamala Dasian poem which is semi-autobiographical, semi-religious and semi-classical in the sense that though she has titled it Ghanshyam, addressed to Krishna, the Blue Boy of Brindaban, but instead of it she transgresses into her personal and private spaces, maybe it that she is saying the things of her heart to the Lord as has Mira, unmindful of what the world says about or not, lost in Krishnabhakti and enjoying the company of sadhus and saints, but the case of Kamala different from Mira as she keeps not their company. The pains of Radha the world felt it not, the pains of Mira, the world knew it not. So, what to say of Kamala Das? The pains of her heart she is saying to Krishna, Lord Krishna. On the one hand, classical love poetry enthralls us with its folklore while on the other the reality is far from golden dreams and flight of imagery we can see the widows of Benares and Brindaban living a miserable life, the plight of the women beyond description.

Addressing Krishna as Ghanshyam, the poetess says that the Lord has settled in the arbour of her heart, taken it to be His place, just like the koel bird builds a nest. What does it mean really? The Lord has chosen it to be His place of dwelling. Krishnaprem is as such that it has coloured the poetess in its colour and she is love-mad. Where to go and what to do? Which way to take to? Her life which has been almost like a jungle is now astir with music. But the path to take does not come to the mind.  The cuckoo is cooingly sweetly and the musical notes are doing the rounds. It is not the bird, but just as a harbinger of His melody it is striking the chords of the heart and it is stringing and she like love-mad Mira and Radha is getting crazier. But whenever nearer to, the Lord turns up not rather vanishes out of sight.

There is beauty and music in the lines when she says that Ghanashyam has built a koel like nest into the harbour of her heart. Her life just like a jungle oblivious of it all gets a charm when the koel starts cooing into the woodland. Now the magic has done wonders and the things seem to be touched divinely in spirit which is but the charm of His. Krishna-Kanhaiya knows it all how to steer across the boat of life. 

Ghanshyam,
You have like a koel built your nest in the arbour of my heart.
My life, until now a sleeping jungle is at last astir with music.
You lead me along a route I have never known before
But at each turn when I near you
Like a spectral flame you vanish.

The flame of devotion keeps it flickering, the prayer-lamp holds the years in captive and she gazes into the red eyes of death laying it bare the bitter truths of life and the world and she seems to be possessed with the questions, what is it life, what is it death as well as gets shot back with the answers, life is blood, water, semen. Death is the last sob of a relative beside the red-walled morgue.

The flame of my prayer-lamp holds captive my future
I gaze into the red eye of death
The hot stare of truth unveiled.
Life is moisture
Life is water, semen and blood.
Death is drought
Death is the hot sauna leading to cool rest-rooms
Death is the last, lost sob of the relative
Beside the red-walled morgue.

How can she take to the life of a yogan? Is it the life of taking to bhajans and the rudraksa rosary? And even if she takes, she will take the tulsimala around her neck and the rudraksha rosary into the hands will just for romance and enactment. Kamala seems to be a modern-day Radha. Sometimes she plays the part of Radha, sometimes of Mira and Sometimes of Draupadi, what she is it is very difficult to reveal.

She has woven a raiment of words for Shyam, Ghanshyam, with the songs representing a sky and with music getting liberated in the oceans. The whole world appears to be attuned to Krishna music. But there is of course a time for flirtation and frivolity for everybody and if it is not, what to do with? She is young, full of flesh and blood but her partner is old comparatively. How to calm sexual lust? She weaves the garments of words for Him dressing and decorating in the best possible manner.

O Shyam, my Ghanshyam
With words I weave a raiment for you
With songs a sky
With such music I liberate in the oceans their fervid dances

But here one can mark the personal talk, how the body is at the root of all. We cannot discern bodily lust and sympathies which we need we most.

We played once a husk-game, my lover and I
His body needing mine,
His ageing body in its pride needing the need for mine
And each time his lust was quietned
And he turned his back on me

If the lover is aged and older, how to expect amorous love from? The age gap will stand as a factor. Lovefully she turns to him each and every time, but frustrated returns she without getting the love reciprocated. She sees with the loveful eyes, but he in turn comes to nought.

But what option is left out here for her without resorting to spiritual love? If there is dissatisfaction in love on the personal level, there lies no way to ventilate the thoughts and ideas otherwise. So, it is better to turn to spiritual thoughts.

When she comes to feel it he does not want her, she starts thinking of migrating to warmer climes which is but the only method of survival. Here she is very controversial and dubious in her wording.

In panic I asked Dont you want me any longer dont you want me
Dont you dont you
In love when the snow slowly began to fall
Like a bird I migrated to warmer climes
That was my only method of survival

She grows personal as well as slanderous when she takes to otherwise while making passing references to her old and aged husband, his declining strength and stamina and her loneliness. She resorts to the nights of love-making as well as desertion of that. There lie in differences in being loveful and in being loveless. When one awakes from a dream or a nightmare, one naturally wants somebody by one’s side to cope up with the repercussions.

In this tragic game the unwise like children play
And often lose                      
At three in the morning
I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness,
Like bleached bones cracking in the desert-sun was my loneliness,

A young wife she complains against her old and aged husband which is but a review of patriarchy and our social norms imposed upon womankind.

And each time my husband,
His mouth bitter with sleep,
Kisses, mumbling to me of love.

Suppose if there is a swap of imagery, how will it look? If he is the Lord and she is also the Lord, how will it appear to be? Who will come to love whom? Perhaps she means to indicate towards the divine state of things. Why will woman come to bear it ages after ages? If the woman is not, how will it be man’s world, God’s creation? How the earthen child and his mother? How the Divine Child and Yasoda? Who cares for whom and how? How the relationship, affection,  bonding in-between? Had the bonding been not, what would it have and for what? The same Krishna as a child of Yasoda, the same Krishna as a lover of Yasoda are but the facts unanswered and asked ages after ages by the conscious souls.

But if he is you and I am you
Who is loving who
Who is the husk who the kernel
Where is the body where is the soul

He is called by so many names and is visible in strange forms beyond the understanding of mankind. But instead of mankind goes calling for. Whatever be that, this is also a fact that man loves just the disguise rather than the real. So, she feels mistaken in loving the Lord by name as it may be misleading too.

You come in strange forms
And your names are many.
Is it then a fact that I love the disguise
and the name more than I love you?

This human life is of connections, biological and earthly. A child’s connection with his mother, can these be shaken off, forsaken? The world is ever fresh, ever new. Just be ready for new beginnings, new connections. The things just get refreshed, renewed.

Can I consciously weaken bonds?
The child's umbilical cord shrivels and falls
But new connections begin, new traps arise
And new pains

If not to say to Him then whom to say to? Who can know it better? Ghanshyam, Shyam is but the  last hope. Referring to Ghanshyam as the cell of the eternal sun, the blood of the eternal fire and the hue of the summer-air, she makes it clear what it is Divinity. But what it can win the heart of a woman when is blessed with a child in her arms. Here the lines refer to Yasoda or may be of a personal reference. How to get peace? Is peace just like an infant lulled into the arms of the mother?

Ghanshyam,
The cell of the eternal sun,
The blood of the eternal fire
The hue of the summer-air,
I want a peace that I can tote
Like an infant in my arms
I want a peace that will doze
In the whites of my eyes when I smile

 

Those in saffron robes have told her of the Lord, but is difficult to be tuned to Hari-name recitation, kirtana and bhajan. The age is not as such, the mood too is not so. How to take to heart? The mind is just in Him, in Krishna, the Krishna of love and love lore. It is difficult to pass youth in Hari-naam.

The ones in saffron robes told me of you  
And when they left
I thought only of what they left unsaid
Wisdom must come in silence

 

She grows personal and referential when she presents the scenery after the guests have gone, plates washed and the lights been switched off opening the vistas and avenues of bridal communion. Wisdom like the breeze stealing the shows peeps in and passes away. If the protagonist’s remembrances be as such, how to pass the nights restlessly without sleep into the eyes? The dreams of love and sex we cannot banish them from the mind. There is something of the bridal marriage day memory in it. But here who is whose bride or groom? Is she talking of the Divine Groom? Or, the earthly love?

When the guests have gone
The plates are washed
And the lights put out
Wisdom must steal in like a breeze
From beneath the shuttered door

 

Shyam, Ghanshyam, what it to do now? The music has the impact of its own. She feels drawn like a fish into the net of the fisherman. The net has been hurled and cast over and the mind is encompassed within its circumference. The enchanted fish must rush towards.

Shyam O Ghanshyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish...

 

One who has no help has but Shyam, Ghanshyam by his or her side. This is but a religious point of view as we have discussed in classical love poetry where there is a point of surrender, total surrender to the Divine. Love for Krishna is good. Something definitely gets purged out while offering to Him, praying to Him and lighting the candle before Him. Such a thing it is in the placing of roses before the altar, the sacred shrine or the tombstone of St.Valentine. To remember him will also suffice to do. Who is the Lover of lovers may the other point of deliberation. Sometimes it also has been seen that the devotee beloved finally thinks of relinquishing the earthly connection for the Love Divine.

If we like to make a psycho-analytical analysis, we shall come to find various things, as for the streaks of abnormal psychology studied and the matter reverting back to psycho-neurotic issues. Sexual dissatisfaction, mismatch marriage, age gap and so on will come out. There is definitely something of the repression and suppression of sexual libido. Restricting and restraining the sexual urges, we cannot channelize our energies towards Divinity. So, such a thing one can study to some extent in Mira too as she was a royal widow. There is something of perverted sexuality which but we cannot deny it.

The psychology of a young devotee is a factor. To read her mind is to know many a thing. Can a beloved be not a worshipper of St.Valentine? But she will be in the likewise manner. Sometimes one turns to spiritual love for consolation. Broken hearts need to be nourished and embalmed. The candle burning before the Cross can also give solace to the broken soul. The light burning before Krishna can also can console the self.

Ghanshyam is no doubt a beautiful love poem written by Kamala Das and nowhere can we find such a description so poetic and lyrical, so aesthetic and amorous. Krishna, where is Krishna? Krishna is in heart, in our heart. Who can know Him? One who feels Him as His own, considers Him as His own moves so closer to. He will surely come to feel the melodies of His Divine Flute piping slowly and the golden notes breaking, unfolding and unfolding and encompassing with ruptures.
Is it a song of Radha or of Mira? Or, is it of Sarojini or of Kamala? Sarojini has also a poem named Ghanashyam and Kamala too has. But Surdas and Rashkhan, they too are specialists of Krishnite love and devotional poetry. Is Kamala a Vaishnava devotee?

The poetess uses the words, as such ‘a koel built your nest’,  ‘in the arbour of my heart’, ‘a sleeping jungle’, ‘at last astir with music’, ‘lead me along a route’,‘like a spectral flame you vanish’, ‘the flame of my prayer-lamp’, ‘I gaze into the red eye of death’, ‘the hot stare of truth unveiled’, etc. add to the beauty, depth and meaning of the poem.

Even as a bird to fly out, but where to go to? Where to go flying, my Lord? The Lord, You Yourself the Boat and the Boatman, the Reed and the Flute, is the thing discussed in. In the vast sea waters of life the ship is but the only shelter.
 

 

Summer In Calcutta: Kamala Das

 Summer In Calcutta by Kamala Das

What is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass? I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk
Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter? My worries
doze. Wee bubblesring
my glass, like a brides
nervous smile, and meet
my lips. Dear, forgive
this moments lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory. How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.

 

Summer In Calcutta is one of those poems of Kamala Das in which she not only reminisces the summer spent in Calcutta, but compares with the summer felt within bodily with the internal twitches working at the dark consciousness level. Though we call her a feminist writer, confessional and autobiographical, so candid and frank in expression, but she is erotic, obscene, pornographic, sexual and bodily too at the same time as she cannot without talking about sex and sexual love, physical satisfaction and the quenching of the lust. The summer is hot and blazing no doubt, but she too is hot. The heat of the summer not, but of the body lets it not the poetic persona to be quiet. Something is corroding her psychologically and physically and the poetic female persona seems to be crawling after that gratification. Sambhoga to Samadhi seems to be the philosophy of the poetess. The things of the dark consciousness are the main properties of her poetry. Summer siestas full of sweating and heat aggravate sexual love and affection. She is very frivolous and naughty as she plays with double meaning speaking in overtones and undertones. Sex satisfaction is all that ails her internally.   

Summer in Calcutta is not the summer of Calcutta, but the summer feeling of Kamala, who is just after sensuality, madly after love, man-woman relationship. Her summer is one of the bodily summer in which the protagonists act emotionally and abnormally, going after the sun. The gulmohars blooming in summer do not have anything to tempt and charm Kamala, but the summer of the body, the twitches and intrigues of it during the noontime siesta. Sweating and kissing and relishing upon is the thing of deliberation. There is something of The Sun Rising of John Donne in it. Kamala is but the Lady Chatterley of D.H.Lawrence. To put it ironically, the April sun is like an orange and Kamala after squeezing it taking a glass of orange juice. She is a sexist and her poetry an exercise in sexual enterprise; the dreams of sex and love are bound to give pleasure to anybody else who goes through it. Kamala has fallen into a bad company of lovers, readers and critics.

We do not know it who she, the Mira or the Radha in her love for Krishna? Is she  classical or contemporary? Is she a Krishnite or a modern Radha? We know it not nor can we answer it. Is she taking a glass full of squeezed orange or is daydreaming sexually? It is very difficult to understand her drama, the drama of a modern woman. Is the protagonist a sexually dissatisfied woman of D.H.Lawrence’s novels and stories?

Kamala Das as a poetess is Lawrentine, as she draws from flesh and blood contact, attraction and repulsion met in love, love and hate theme, give and take relationship. She is a poetess of the body, not the soul, but wants to liberate the soul of womankind. Her poetry is the poetry of love, the thirst of it. Spiritually she may be sick, but is a poetess of the body.

The politics of poetry and the poet, Kamala is one such name doing politics with poetry, writing the poetry of feminism, a media-savvy politician, a poetry-writer. Poetry as the politics of feminism and the feminist as a leader holds true in this context.

We applaud her for the critical appreciation and admiration which she has received and we are happy to read about it. But there is something to share with and to be said with reservation that we often like to hear, go by the words of Kamala, but not those of her husband. Had we something on his part then justice could have been reached at least. Kamala as a writer draws from D.H.Lawrence, Judith Wright, Sylvia Plath and so on Western feminists and the writers of a confessional slant. Even the summer which she describes in the poem entitled Summer in Calcutta, God knows what summer is it? There is nothing of the season, not even the heat and dust swirling and playing with into the streets. It may be certainly her modern style, but the summer hints towards otherwise. Bodily lust, hunger and craving are the things of her poetry and there is nothing more. Apart from it, she is media-savvy, who can do it all for to be in the media glare and limelight. The summer of the body is the favourite season of hers. To see it otherwise, she is a spiritually sick child. Vatsyayna, Freud and Rajneesh seem to the best choices of hers. A writer of bodily love, she is not Mira or Radha, though we call her. The other thing too is this that we heaped research dissertations on her slender and slim books rather than appreciating the whole genre in full.

The poetess enquires about the drink it is, the glass of juice she is going to take which is but the April summer sun squeezed like an orange into her glass. This is how the poem begins:

 

What is this drink but
The April sun, squeezed
Like an orange in
My glass?

 

This is her glass she is going to take, this is the juice she is going to sip giving her lips to, tasting the drink and juice. But it is not the soft drink that is going to quell her internal fire. The thirst is internal and very personal even though may be thirsty for which the glass of juice will work it.

She sips and sips, but is still thirsty and wants more, hints it otherwise:

 

I sip the
Fire, I drink and drink
Again, I am drunk

It is not a thing of the common thirst; it is but a matter of bodily thirst, the soul licking the body. The more she has and the more she is thirsty, craving for more and more and thirst turns into otherwise and she feeling it not normally. When she says that she sips fire and keeps drinking, it takes us into the corridors and terraces of secret love and loving where the sick souls speak in whispers speaking the dark mystic poetry of love just like the phantom-listeners sharing among themselves. Having felt the summer, the gold of the suns, she gets puzzled and appears to have taken. Had it been wine, it would have been good. Here the persona seems to be a drinker; a bar girl. What summer can be more gruelling than this summer of the body?

Hot and fiery from within, she feels it unable to bear the fire and heat overpowering her and a time comes when venom seems to be overflowing through her veins:

Yes, but on the gold
of suns, What noble
venom now flows through
my veins and fills my
mind with unhurried
laughter?

The summer is not just the thing doing the rounds, but the sun falling upon and it is now the gold of the suns overtaking her with the imagery. God knows what this strangeness is, why the mind gets filled with this type of laughter.

Her worries start dozing with the situations overpowering matched with the drinking of the drink full of bubbles meeting the lips:

My worries
doze. Wee bubblesring
my glass, like a brides
nervous smile, and meet
my lips.

Whether he turns up or not, which she is expecting so earnestly, but is not fortunate enough to avail of always, she will bear it in the as usual way:

Dear, forgive
this moments lull in
wanting you, the blur
in memory.

Again she talks of fidelity and infidelity in love and the mind brings back the pictures of Adam and Eve and Samson and Delilah:

How
brief the term of my
devotion, how brief
your reign when i with
glass in hand, drink, drink,
and drink again this
Juice of April suns.

 

The term of her devotion may be brief so his faithfulness and sincerity. It is very difficult to be sure of one’s own stint as the things and times changing so the habits and tastes of man. If she commits mistakes after being overpowered by emotions, she must be pardoned as she has developed the habit of taking.

 

Let us see what she means to relate in which context of deliberation. Summer In Calcutta contains in the language of sexual love. The poem shows the poetess as a lover of the body, not the soul. But it is also a fact that the soul dwells it in the body. What can a poor woman do it as she has been made dependent upon?

Summer In Calcutta as a poem takes us to the highest pedestal of thinking in bringing closer to women studies, human rights and violations, freedom of speech and expression, gender bias and equality, feminism and psychoanalysis. Commonly, it is a poem of love and sex and dreams; a poem of lustful summer siestas so full of private and personal twitches and sexuality. But if to see it differently, it is a poem of revolt and rebellion, feministic movement against patriarchy, male domination and bodily possession. Are the women for to be exploited? Why is such a Divine Set-up of things? Is sex not a routine affair possessive and exploitive, dull and monotonous and boring? Can women have not the lone existence of their own? What does a woman do in a marriage dressing as a coy and shy bride? What is it in reality a marriage? A contract, an arrangement for what? The soul is neither a male nor a female. Shiva as Ardhanarishwara, half-male, half-female is the answer to be felt and confided in.

 

An Introduction by Kamala Das

An Introduction by Kamala Das
By
Bijay Kant Dubey

An Introduction as a poem is an introduction of Kamala and she is getting introduced to the readers and critics of Indian English poetry. A confessional poetess, he is laying her inner heart bare, but one should not take it for that she is a simple girl, but is coquettish and intriguing. Her histrionics, theatrical stance, has none come to imbibe. She is a colourful Radha of Indian English poetry; the sad Mira of it. Radha and Kanhaiyya both of them are love-birds, famous for the nautanki of love. Their raslila who do not know it, under the kadamba tree, by the banks of the Yamuna river? At that amorous love does not remain it amorous, but turns it physical.

Kamala is but a politician whether you accept it or not as she makes the things said, relay it otherwise, rounding it off often in a tell-tale narrative and coming to the same point but differently. Even she says that she does not know politics, take it for granted that she knows it and is intriguing. If one does not know politics, how can she take the names of the people in power whose names have been doing the rounds? Her general knowledge is not poor, as she can start from Nehru. Their dates of birth, life-histories and action plans, nothing is hidden from her. After reading An Introduction, one will startle to know that the poet is a politician doing the politics of poetry. For some time she had been in politics holding some chair. She had also wished of becoming an M.P. or M.L.A.  and to be in the media limelight had been the taste of hers. The intentions of Kamala Das are quite clear even though she hides them. She knows the politics of being in power and can grapple with the things in her own confessional way. The eunuchs and transgenders too are the spokesmen of her poetry. Shiva as Ardhanarishwara may be the latent poetic vision of hers; the ghettoed life woman she wishes to rebel against and overthrow. She may be of the view that the soul does not have any gender. What it fascinates her most is the liberation of the woman self from torture. Possessive love bores her. Patriarchal society suffocates the liberties. How to be free? How to liberate is the question? The life of a woman none but a woman can feel it. Pregnancy and abortion deaths, how horrible is it to imagine of them? The contributions of Ram Mohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar we cannot forget them.

She is Kamala, a Malabari Keralite and she can speak in three languages, but can write in two, English and Malyalam. Not an English memsahib, but a brown sahiba is she practicing Indian English. On marking her writing in English, people question her about the validity of choosing an alien language to speak the native things. How can it be? But she takes to not their advice; goes on with her writing. Her English is half-English, half-Indian and to be frank with it is funny. It is as human as she is a human being. She writes in English as she likes it and has found words to express in itself to put her feelings and feelings on a wider platform. At least the voice of an Indian woman the world can read and feel about. She is not at all an animal, the beast of burden, but a self with living consciousness. She is not a nameless person of Jayanta Mahapatra. She is not a purdah nashin girl of Sarojini Naidu. She is not only Sita and Savitri, but Radha, Radha, you are my life, Radha, how to live without you? She is but Draupadi, Draupadi; Kunti, the mother of Karna. Do not underestimate Putana, Hidimba and Surpanakha, non-Aryan heroines. Kamala is but the Draupadi of Indian English poetry; the Radha of it. A shisya of Acharya Rajneesh with the rudraksha rosary and in saffron clothes, she appears to be a modern ashramite. She expresses as the sevadasi of a Vaishanave saint unfolds it. Rajneesh’s sambhoga to samadhi, sex to bliss seems to be the focal point of her story of life.

There is no question of the mother tongue or the father tongue to debate or discuss. The poetess writes as she likes it most. The language she has chosen to write voices forth her feelings, emotions and sentiments and there is nothing as that to compromise on this point. Even if it is broken, it is but hers; even if queer, is but hers. The critics should not complain against the selection of the language. Critics, friends and visiting cousins are requested to leave her alone ruminating poetically. English is also a speech, foreign or native. It is but a medium of expression so there is no fault in choosing it, going for it. English too is a human speech and through it she has chosen to voice her sentiments and aspirations.

With the change in time and growing with the years, the bodily change is sure to take place and it happens with.  She starts growing up and her physique too changes with in appearance. She grows up and so do her limbs. But her coquetry lies in it that she starts describing every organ metaphorically. The woman persona in her feels it beaten and laden. The weight of the organs places her in an awkward position. The breasts and the womb crush her and she feels shrunken pitifully.

When she wears the shirt and the pants of her brother and gets the hair cut short, the family members desist her from doing so. They ask her to dress like feminine beings for which the sari and the blouse will suit it best. A girl should remain a girl; a woman a woman. It is also a feature in Indian homes that the girls live with restricted freedom and liberty. They are not free at all to live a life of own. Under restrictions and pressures, they pass on their lives. Learn embroidery and be an embroiderer. One needs to learn cooking as when she moves out to the other man house, there she will have to cook and to take the domestic responsibility upon. The story of The Ox by bates is the case with. To be a girl is to be a wife; a woman, the mother of man. To be a woman is to be a cook, virtually a quarreller with servants. They advise her to fit in it. They also forbid her to sit on walls or peep through the windows. Kamala should also say that she should not smile after seeing the strangers. She should not talk unnecessarily.

The poetess meets a man, takes him to be her own like every woman who takes to believing even though knowingly who is for whom. Take him to be man whom one meets on the path of life as it is a routine affair for all and there is nothing new in it. He is that who wants a woman for himself and this generic tendency is in all. She too like him is a woman wanting a man. Human hunger and thirst is in it all. The hunger of the stomach and the thirst of the panting soul, what to say about?

Call her Amy or Kamala or Madhavakutty. It is just time to choose a name to play the roles, to enact the drama of life in the theatre of the world. The same girl is as the wife of someone. The times have changed, but she has not, she is the same Kamala, better to be said Madhavakutty, the small Malayali girl from Malabar.

She asks who you are, she asks it everybody. But the outcome comes to be, it is I, I. Here lies it the answer that I is You, You I. Though the trend may be different, but all the paths lead to the same.

Relating to her story, that is the story of a woman, she herself laughs and she herself weeps. It is she who makes love and who too fells it shame. What a destiny of hers! Has she turned into a schizophrenic patient or a babbler?

The mad man’s laughter seems to overtake her when she says that she is a sinner, she is a saint too at the same time changing her stance. She is a beloved as well as a betrayed one. Kamala often puts the blame on her husband, but she is also not a simple one, but a notorious being. Self-scrutiny she does it not. How can it be, a yogi and a bhogi at the same time? Kamala is not a sadhvi, but a political sadhvi of today contesting elections on party tickets. She is not a sadhvi, but a dhongi.

Kamala is sexual, bodily and physical; mad after sex. The body is the soul of her writings. She may be one like the heroines of D.H.Lawrence gone into hysterics. Kamala poses as a Radha, but is not a Radha, she is but Kamala, a Malyali girl from Malabar, so frank and bold, adventurous and daring.

The hungry haste of the rivers is in her, the oceans’ tireless waiting. Who is she? What her identity? What is she? What her introduction? Is she a lonely woman? Is the woman not a soul? Does the soul have a gender?

There are two sides of the poem, An Introduction. One is the personal while the other for a greater cause. If the former is one in acceptance, the latter a study in rebellion and protest, all the angers directed against predicament. The life of a woman none but a suffering can but say it from childhood to adult age to old age. The pain of the eunuchs none has come to understand them. Bu the hidden reality is that the soul is genderless. Shiva as Ardhanarishwara is the best piece to say it all that. ‘Bharat Ki Vidhwa’ poem by the Hindi poet Nirala explains it best. Kabirdas himself had been the illegitimate child of a Brahmin widow who abandoned him as for public gaze and glare. The woman is not only a wife, but a mother, a sister and a daughter too. While thinking about her and taking sides with her, it appears whatever she is saying, she is but truly. We feel the pains of Mira and Mahadevi Verma through her. The Sati system, the child marriage, honour killing, female foeticide, still strike us with pain. The Arabic and Asiatic taboos and restrictions have damaged womankind.

But it is a major drawback of Kamala that she is spiritually sick and morally bankrupt. The sleaze stuff leaves her. Kamala has not risen from the body level and is submerged in lust, infatuation and erotic love. She seems to be a disciple of Acharya Rajneesh and Vatsyayana.

Kamala Das: Life

Kamala Das, also known as Kamala Suraiya, the sophisticated Indian poetess was born on March 31, 1934. She is a distinguished Indian writer who composes in English as well as Malayalam, her native language. Kamala Das is looked at as one of the exceptional Indian poets writing in English, even though her reputation and esteem in Kerala is based primarily on her short stories and autobiography. Much of Kamala Das`s writing in Malayalam is published in the pen name `Madhavikkutty`. Kamala Das was born in Malabar in the maritime state of Kerala. She was born to V. M. Nair, an ex- managing editor of the widely-distributed Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess. A notable feature included in Kamala Das`s character analysis is that she is perhaps the first Hindu woman ever to blatantly and candidly talk about sexual desires of Indian women, making her an iconoclast of her generation.

Born into a conservative Hindu Nair (Nallappattu) household possessing royal ancestry, Kamala Das had embraced Islam in 1999 at the age of 65 and assumed the name Kamala Suraiya. Just like the subjects of her stories, conversion in religious faith too had provoked much heat and storm in the social and literary circuits. Kamala Das also took active participation in politics in India and had launched a national political party, called the Lok Seva Party. The foremost aim of the party is to focus wholly on humanitarian work, as well as provide refuge to orphaned mothers and promote secularism. In 1984, Das had contested the general elections to enter parliament, but lost.

Kamala Das`s journey from being an elegiac child to turn into a respected Indian poetess is pretty long one. Her love of poetry began since early childhood under the influence of her great uncle, Nalapat Narayan Menon, a well-known writer. Das had spent most of her early days in Calcutta, where her father was employed. Das reminiscences watching her great uncle "work from morning till night" and thinking that he led "a blissful life". Kamala Das was also profoundly impressed by the poetry of her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma and the sanctified writings preserved by the matriarchal community of Nayars. She received private education until the age of 15, when she was married to K. Madhava Das. She was barely 16 when her first son was born, to which she states that she "was mature enough to be a mother only when my third child was born". It is also known from the poetess`s autobiography that Das`s husband used to often assay a fatherly role for both Das and her sons. Due to the huge age difference between Kamala and her husband, Madhava Das often encouraged his wife to stay associated with people of her own age. Kamala Das corroborates this information and says that he was always "very understanding". When Kamala Das wished that she should begin writing, her husband supported her decision to expand the family`s earnings. Since Das belonged to the group of the `fair sex`, she could not utilise the `morning-till-night` agenda enjoyed by her great uncle. Hence, she had to wait until nightfall after her family had gone off to sleep, after which she would write until morning. There was the availability of only the kitchen table, where she would cut vegetables and after all the plates and things were washed up, Das would sit there and start typing. This scrupulous schedule weighed upon heavily upon the poetess`s health, but she viewed her illness from the optimistic side. Her illness gave her more time at home and hence, more time to write. Such was Kamala Das`s dedication, only after which did she attain the elevated Indian poetess status. As her career escaladed towards the high, her husband always remained her greatest supporter. Though he was sick for three years before he passed away, his presence brought Das remarkable joy and comfort. She avowed that there "shall not be another person so proud of me and my achievements".

Kamala Das`s achievements do broaden well beyond her verses of poetry. According to Kamala Das, "I wanted to fill my life with as many experiences as I can manage to garner because I do not believe that one can get born again". True to her word, Das has made herself successfully involved in painting, fiction and even politics. Though she had failed to win a place in Parliament in 1984, yet, she had witnessed much more success as a syndicated columnist. She has moved farther from poetry because she claimed that "poetry does not sell in this country (India),". However, opportunely, her forthright columns did and still do. Kamala Das`s columns were based upon everything from women`s issues and child care to politics.

Kamala Das`s mysterious honesty is wholly extended to her exploration of womanhood and love. According to her, womanhood calls for a specific set of collective experiences. Again, Kamala Das`s attention towards eroticism is magnificently coupled with her exploration of women`s needs. According to her, love should be determined by a fanatical kind of unconditional honesty. An encumbered love seems to be no love at all; only a total raptness in love can do justice such varied experiences. Much like the makers of ancient Tantric art, Das made no effort to conceal the sensuality of the human form; her work appears to commemorate its cheerful potential, while acknowledging its co-occurring perils.

Kamala Das`s poems when focussed upon love treat it within more panoptic ranges of themes, more realised settings and with deeper feeling, bringing to it an intensity of emotion and speech. The rich, full complexity if life is wholly grasped in Das`s writings. Her themes travel beyond stereotyped yearnings and complaints. Even her feelings of lonesomeness and distress are part of a larger-than-life personality, obsessive in its consciousness of its self, yet, weaving a drama of selfhood.

Significantly, many of her poems in English are about the warmth of her childhood and the family home in Kerala. Similar to other South Indian writers, this Indian poetess was also fond of writing about memories of childhood, family relations, and the family`s great house. In Kamala Das`s poetry there lies an idealised time of childhood in My Grandmother`s House, when she felt the sanctuary of love within familiar surroundings innocent of sexual fears and frustrations. Despite the fickle alterations of mood, attitude and self-respect in her poetry, there is an inner nucleus of identity to which Das refers: her name and aristocratic blood, her mother`s family, life in the South and her youth in contrast to her marriage.

There lies a dualism in Kamala Das`s writings in English, in which soul is contrasted to body. She seemed to imagine overwhelming this dualism only through death; Das`s poems are filled with yearnings for death, especially to drown in the sea, water being connected in her mind with an all-encompassing universal calmness, formlessness in contrast to the conscious mind and body of the anxious individual. The dualism results from the fall from childhood innocence into the adult realm of sexuality, marriage and life amongst strangers. Rather than a poet of free love, Kamala Das elucidates the disenchantment of sexuality.

The uniqueness of Kamala Das`s English poetry is not the story of sex outside marriage, but the volatility of her feelings, the way they rapidly shift and assume new postures, fresh attitudes of defence, attack, explanation or celebration. Kamala Das`s poems are placed neither in the act of sex nor in feelings of love; they are instead entangled with the self and it`s wide-ranging, often conflicting emotions. They often range from the yearning for security and intimacy to the assertion of the ego, self-dramatisation and feelings of humiliation and depression. Writing is a means of etching a place in the world; the use of the personal voice and self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Das had opened domains in which previously outlawed or ignored emotions could be elucidated in ways which reflected the true voice of feeling; she showed how an Indian poetess could establish a space for herself in the public world. Kamala Das brought a sense of locality to her poems.

Surpassing every sphere in Indian English literature, Kamala Das`s most remarkable achievement is her own sense of writing in Indian English. Often her vocabulary, idioms, choice of verbs and some syntactical constructions are part of what has been termed the `Indianisation of English`. This is indeed a feat of accomplishment for Das. It has served as an important phase in the development of a national literature.

Kamala Das is also popularly known as Madhavikutty in her mother-tongue, Malayalam. She is counted as one of the principal short story writers in Malayalam. In any given listing, Das numbers amongst the top five writers, even after bearing in mind personal choices and socio-cultural background of her readers. Kamala Das`s writing technique is indeed economical and the utilisation of language is pretty precise. Her vastly applauded stories in Malayalam include Pakshiyude Manam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal. Das also wrote a few novels, among which Neermathalam Pootha Kalam excels every other, which was received positively by the readers as well as the critics. It reanimates the nostalgia of an old ancestral home with it adjoining snake shrine. It is often stated that even Kamala Das`s casual talks falls in the genre of short stories. Such is the Indian poetess` creative genius that even after buckling under several unwanted controversies, she remains a widely admired figure.

Kamala Das: Confessional Poet

“Call her Kamala Das, Madhavikutti or Surayya, but the woman by any name” whose introduction is given by herself in the poem “An Introduction”:

“I am Indian, very brown, born in

Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

two, dream in one”.

Kamala Surayya (the name means Saptarishi or the Ursa Major, in Persian) took the literary world by storm in the mid-sixties, has created a permanent place for herself in the contemporary Indo-Anglian poetry; who was awarded P.E.N.’S Asian Poetry Prize (1963); Kerala’s Sahitya Akadami Award (1969) for the poem Thanuppu, meaning Cold; and Central Indian Sahitya Akadami Award (1985) for Colletcted Poems (1984). Though Surayya has produced only four volumes of verse to date, which is clear indication of her poetic energies getting dried up to some extent, she has been one of the most popular poets of India who have gained ground even in the West.

Kamala has surely outgrown Victorian models and accepted sex and sensuality as an integral part of poetry. Many of her poems are suffused with warmth and passion, with heat of an unrequited Love and unfulfilled desire. The frequency of Love theme may evoke repudiation from nuns and spinsters and breed boredom in the minds of general readers, but like Sappho in Greek literature, Elizabeth Barret Browning in English letters, and like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath in modern American poetry, Mrs. Das offers us a feast of vivid images of Love couched in felicitous language. No doubt, Love is her Forte in poetry.

Like the British Classic Poets, who had the obsession of writing epic, Kamala is obsessed with writing autobiographical poem which are, says Iyengar, “aggressively individualistic”; William Walsh calls it “self centered’; M Elias concludes that, when Kamala Das speaks, it is “rather the Nair maiden unburdening her collective nightmare”. For a candid articulation of her sexuality and identity as a woman, has earned her the sobriquet of Kerala’s ‘Queen of Erotica’. Critics have written at the length about her ‘desperate obsession with love’ (Sarang) or ‘more appropriately with intimacy’ (Raveendran). This made her “a prisoner of her loneliness,” says Dwivedi.

I also know that by confessing

By peeling off my layers

I reach closer to the soul…

I shall some day see

My world de-flashed, de-veined, de-blooded…

As the above lines shows, Kamala Das is a Confessional poet, whose poems are compared with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath etc. According to William Walsh “Her poetry is self centered and unabashedly sexual although the sexuality seems more fascinating to the poet because it is hers than because it is sexual”. She speaks of her sexual experiences in a tone that “you cannot believe darling”, which are both self-indulgent and truculent:

Ask me, everybody, ask me,

What he sees in me, ask me why he is

Called a lion”.

M.K. Naik also calls her confessional poetry “sex dominated” referring nonchalantly to ‘the musk of sweat between the breasts’, ‘the warm shock of menstrual blood’. Poem after poem she hammers hard at the husband-lover and articulates her intense desire of escaping from his clutches and attaining freedom. She confesses that due to the failure of husband’s love, her  

“Love became a swivel-door

When one went out, another came in

  Then I lost count, for always in my arms

Was a substitute for a substitute”.

The kisses of her husband on her cheeks are the “maggots” rolling over “the corpse”. She knows only the ‘physical’ kind of love, without trying to make any emotional and spiritual contact with her. This sort of “openness and frankness” is hardly to be found in any other Indo-English woman poet. The resultant emerging picture is a man or a woman of flesh and blood, a living biological reality, with no distortions or twists. Naturally, Kamala is at her best here as a poet of love and sex as Iyengar remarks “her poetry is aggressively individualistic”

Kamala's Confessional poetry is obsessively mulling over love and ‘the body’s wisdom’ like Whitman that is why Iyengar calls her a ‘Femme Fatal’ whose poetry is of pelvic region. In her poetry, Love appears in several roles such as ‘skin communicated thing’, as overpowering force, an escape, a longing and a hunger resulting in satiety. Dwivedi remarks “She is verily a celebrant of the human body, and her poetry is glutted with images and symbols of love and lust”.

Kamala’s Confessional poems show that she is ‘every woman who seeks love’. She is ‘the beloved and the betrayed’, expressing her ‘endless female hunger’, ‘the muted whisper at the core of womanhood’. A Confessional poet often writes about death, disease and destruction. Kamala Das also has written quite a few poems on decay, disease and death.

Although a Confessional poet—that Kamala Das is—can make use of any subject for his treatment, he mostly confines herself to the regions of his own experiences. He hardly ever writes about ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’, as Wordsworth and his band of followers did. That is why Confessional poetry sounds so appealing and so convincing. It is frequently takes resort to personal failures and mental illness of its composer and Kamala’s verse is a brilliant illustration of it. In My Grandmother’s House, the following lines click: 

“…………………………I who have lost

My way and beg now at strangers’ doors to

Receive love, at least in small change”.

Adil Jassuwala says “Kamala wrights almost exclusively of love, sex and loneliness in the tone of insistent confession”. M Elias concludes that, when Kamala Das speaks, it is “rather the Nair maiden unburdening her collective nightmare”. Ramakrishna aptly says: “Kamala always deals with private humiliations and sufferings which are the stock themes of confessional poetry”.

Vincent and Harrex also finds her poetry “confessional poetry”; and Anisur Rahman thinks, she “mirrors her life in all its nakedness” but Nabar thinks “Kamala does not have the range of self analyses… She may be utterly sincere and make confessions which are unquestionably courageous in the Indian context, but they do not add up to a credo. She seems to describe her suffering and to provide the social context to some extent, to her experiences.”

Nabar also writes that Kamala is not confessional poet like Sylvia Plath but Kamala's poetry has a clear resemblance of Eunice de Souza whose poetry “has the anger, the frankness, the willingness, to confront unpleasantness in social as well as personal relationships” again, like her “Kamala is not being confessional but assertive”. But “the most striking single aspect of Kamala's writings is the need to bare herself, to hold nothing back as it were, to erupt in an intimate, confessional frenzy, to “have no secrets at all” from the reader”. (Nabar)

Sunanda Chavan in The Fair Voice observes an “almost exclusive concern with the experience of personal love in her poetry.” Varinda Nabar in The Endless Female Hungers reinforces the same idea when she states that in her later poetry Surayya “withdraws increasingly into a world of purely personal grievances…because they are what her love poetry embodies” and even shows an impatience with the poet’s tiresome attitude and penchant of role playing. It would be unfair to restrict that poet to a narrow confession, while ignoring other significant dimensions that call for special consideration because of her unique place among the women poets of India. 

Kamala is a versatile woman who has experimented with various forms of art—poetry, fiction, drama, painting—she has now moved to being a newspaper columnist, a “professional writer”, in order to survive because “poetry doesn’t sell in this country”, as she remarks.

All in all, Kamala is one if the pioneering post-independence Indian English poets to have contributed immensely to the growth and development of modern Indian English poetry. She is one of the modernist writers to assert her femininity as a human in Indian literature; she has been something of a cult figure in her home state and a source of great inspiration and emulation for women with literary aspiration. Her life has been long drawn battle against a religious and cultural orthodox that frowns upon the somewhat uninhabited life style of his apparently forthright persons.

To conclude, Kamala Das is a typical Confessional poet who pours her heart into her poetry which is largely subjective and autobiographical, anguished and tortured, letting us peep into her sufferings and tortured psyche. Thanks to her that a reliable poetic voice has been heard in contemporary Indo-English verse at long last. Dwivedi remarks “there is a strong autobiographical touch in it, which makes Mrs. Das a Confessional poet of the first order”.