DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
 CONTENT

Page no:

CHAPTER 1

Introduction 1

CHAPTER 2

Analysis 9

CHAPTER 3

Conclusion 26
 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

kamala Das was born 31 March 1934 in Malabar, Kerala. She is recognized as

one of India’s foremost poets and married name Kamala Das, her works are

known for their originality, versatility and the indigenous flavor of the soil.

Kamala Das has published many novels and poems in English as well as a

leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India under the pen name ‘Madhavikutty.

Her popularity in Kerala is based chiefly on her short stories and autobiography,

while her oeuvre in English, written under name Kamala Das, is noted for

the poems and explicit autobiography.

Some of her works in English include the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), a

collection of short stories Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories (1992),

in addition to five books of poetry. She is a sensitive writer who captures the

complex subtleties of human relationships in lyrical idiom, My Mother at Sixty-six

 2

is an example.

She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics

including women's issues, child care, politics among others.

Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense

of guilt, infused her writing with power and she got hope after freedom,

but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. On 31 May 2009,

aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune. Madavikutty was born in Punnayurkulam,

Malabar District in British India (present-day Thrissur district, Kerala, India)

on 31 March 1934, to V. M. Nair, a managing editor of the widely circulated

Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalapat Balamani Amma, a renowned

Malayali poet. She spent her childhood between Calcutta, where her father

was employed as a senior officer in the Walford Transport Company that

sold Bentley and Rolls Royce automobiles, and the Nalapat ancestral home in

Punnayurkulam. Like her mother, Balamani Amma, Kamala Das also excelled in
 3

writing.

Her love of poetry began at an early age through the influence of her

great uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer.

At the age of 15, she married bank officer Madhav Das, who encouraged her

writing interests, and she started writing and publishing both in English and in

Malayalam. Calcutta in the 1960s was a tumultuous time for the arts, and Kamala

Das was one of the many voices that came up appearing in cult anthologies along

with a generation of Indian English poets. English was the language she chose for

all six of her published poetry collections.

Through the 50s and 60s, she continued writing in her signature confessional and

graphic writing style, talking about women's issues - struggling with sexism,

understanding and experimenting with their own sexuality, childbirth, love,

desire, loneliness, being stifled, emotional disillusionment, etc., leaving readers

either awestruck or angered. Indian literature in the 1950s and 60s, and even 70s had
 4

not evolved enough to accept, without struggle, the language of a woman who had

decided to lay her life and its longings bare. Her undeterred style and volume of

poetry-writing led her to earn the label of 'The Mother of Modern English Indian

Poetry' and comparisons to poetry great like Sylvia Plath.

Feminism is a movement which tries to define and establish social, legal

and cultural freedom and equality of women. Gender equality is at the

core of feminist movement.it advocates women’s rights on the ground of

equality of sexes in all spheres of life. Feminism, as a literary movement,

aims to revolt against the patriarchal society which associates masculine

with superiority, strength, action, self-assertion and domination; and feminine

with inferiority, weakness, passivity, obedience and self-negation.

Feminism aims to emancipate women from the chains of subjugation

 5

and domesticity. By depicting domestic violence, sexual harassment,

male ego, etc., in their works the Feminist writers highlight and condemn

the plight of women in the patriarchal society and thereby try to inculcate

a sense of rebellion and self- identity in them.

Robert Webb defines feminism in the following terms: “Feminism isn’t about hating

men. It’s about challenging the absurd gender distinctions that boys and girls learn

from childhood and carry into their adult lives.

Kamala Das, is beyond doubt the greatest woman poet in contemporary Indo-

Anglian literature. Her poetic collection includes: Summer in Calcutta (1965),

The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973),

The Anamalai poems (1985), The best of Kamala Das (1991) and only soul
 6

know She repudiated the archaic and somewhat sterile aestheticism for an

independence of mind and body. Her poetry conveys her aversion to male

domination and to the artificialities of modern life in which she feels suffocated.

Her poetry is remarkably realistic and feministic. The paper aims at a feminist

reading of Kamala Das’s poetry whereby she effectively subverts the ingrained

elements of patriarchy, privileging female will, choice and strength

Kamala Das is a representative feminist poet. The themes prevalent in most

of her poems make her poems highly absorbing, confessional and feminist.

“Many scholars find powerful feminist imagery in Das’s poetry,

focusing on critiques of marriage, motherhood, women’s relationship

 7

with their bodies and control of their sexuality, and the roles women are

offered in traditional Indian patriarchal society.”2 Kamala Das’s poetry

artistically portrays her unhappy, dissatisfied life.

Her poetry is a critique of patriarchal prejudices and discriminations. Even as a

child, Kamala Das experienced the bitterness of sexism. Her parents considered

her as a burden and compelled her to become a premature wife and mother. She

was married to a relative when she was only a school girl.

She complains about it in her poem Of Calcutta Against Self-Assumed

Superiority of the Patriarchal Society Kamala Das exposes the supposed

and self-assumed superiority of the patriarchal society in her poems.

 8

Sexual exploitation, betrayal, and the lack of love in man-woman relationship

are the major themes in her poetry. She portrays a loveless relationship as

unbearable and as a means of oppression. In the words of Prasantha Kumar:

“Kamala Das conceives of the male as beast wallowing in lust with a monstrous

ego under which the woman loses her identity.

The strong desire for freedom, including the freedom to rebel, forms the central

strain in many of her poems. She enumerates the male felonies in her poems and

builds up a structure of protest and rebellion in her poetry. Several poems of Das

convey the tedium and monotony of sex within and outside marriage.

Their love is disgusted lust, a poor substitute for real love.

She died in 2009 at 75, succumbing to a bout of prolonged pneumonia.

 9

Her writing was both fantastical and feminist, but I think it was the

fantasy that defined it and the feminism was merely incidental. As

she wrote: “The essence of the writer eludes the non-writer. All that the

writer reveals to such people are her oddities of dress and her emotional

excesses. Finally, when the muscles of the mind have picked up enough power

to read people’s secret thoughts, the writer shies away from the invisible

hostility and clings to her own type, those dreaming ones, born with a fragment

of wing still attached to a shoulder.”

CHAPTER 2
 10

ANALYSIS

The life of Das’s persona may be considered a tale of her experiments with

love and repeated Indifference of Man to Woman’s Miseries Kamala Das

exposes the patriarchal prejudice of the male-dominated society by portraying

the indifference of man to woman’s miseries in her poem The Stone Age.

brief history of Kamala Das’s life will tell you that she was a woman

always looking to reinvent herself. She is credited with unravelling the

complexities of marital life, childhood, sex, love, and desire with her book

My Story (1976), which thrusted her into a fierce public gaze — with time,

it softened and began to appreciate her craftsmanship.

Kamala was among the first women in India to speak frankly about sex and

negatively of marriage in a deeply conservative society. My Story instantly drew

criticism after its release for being ‘obscene’ and designed to encourage adultery.
 11

The ambivalent childhood, early and ill-fated marriage, and the burden of being a

woman. In confessional prose, she wrote of trysts with women, her husband’s

sexual ineptness and preference for men, And her yearnings for requited

love. These themes spilled into her poetry, too. In visceral verse, she writes

of providing bodily pleasure in ‘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.” The nature of her writings — she published over 25 books and

collections of poetry — reveals a woman unafraid of honest expression, and

whose progressive stance on sexuality was ahead of her time.

In 1984, she was invited to the Adelaide Writer’s Festival, and went on

in 1994 to read out her poetry in 3 universities in Germany.

She also did readings in Jamaica, Singapore, and London. In the same

lifetime, she dabbled in politics, contesting unsuccessfully in the 1984

 12

elections, and then converted to and embraced the rigidities of Islam

“I have given up my freedom”, she declared in

an interview in 1999, aged 65. “It has made me feel so shabby. Islam is not a

lenient husband. Islam is rigid, very stern, I think of Allah as my master. I am his

subservient handmaiden. I delight in being subservient. “Her abrupt change of

heart might strike some as odd, but it only reinforces an observation her son made

of her, that the “only mind she felt compelled to obey was her own”.

Ppathways of the sky...”

(The Old Playhouse, 1)

The poem highlights and condemns the miseries of a woman, a wife, who is expected

to play certain conventional roles, and her wishes and aspirations are not taken into

account. Kamala Das exposes the callousness and the hollowness of patriarchal

society in this poem. The miserable condition of a woman in a patriarchal society has

elegantly been portrayed in the poem, The Old Playhouse, which can be read in full
 13

here, Kamala Das shows her total disenchantment with her married her married life

and its disastrous consequences on her life. It is an open protest against her

egotistical husband who does not think beyond the gratification of his sensual

desires.

The female persona accuses her husband for domesticating her like a swallow after

marriage in a well-planned manner. She also blames him for depriving her of the

thrills of romantic love and the desired woman’s freedom. He has intentionally done

it so that she cannot only forget the fury of the winter and autumn seasons but also

snap all her ties with the life before marriage. He has spared no efforts to make her

forget her colorful past in which she enjoyed perfect freedom and distinct identity. He

wants to make her forget her true nature as well as the very desire to move about

freely in the infinite spaces of the sky.

This first section of the poem points to the disastrous fate of the mismatched

marriage. Marriage is not an institution limited to the gratification of the sensual

desires only. It is not a unilateral but a bilateral relationship based on mutual-trust

and mutual understanding. There is no place for the exploitation and dehumanization

of any partner in love.

 14

"There is No more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old

Playhouse with all its lights put out. The strong man's technique is

Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,

For, love is Narcissus at the water's edge, haunted

By its own lonely face, and yet it must seek at last

An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors

To shatter and the kind night to erase the water"-old play house(poem)

In this fourth section, the female persona has suffered both physically and mentally at

the hands of her self-centered and selfish husband. She has lost all her freedom, self

–respect and identity as a woman and is reduced to the level of a dwarf. She has to

work like a caretaker to satisfy his daily needs. She is almost crushed under his

unchallenged monstrous ego. It was a period of winter in her life. For Kamala Das, life
 15

has come to a stand-still. All her romantic dreams of the marital life are shattered and

she faces a complete vacuum in her life. There is no space for singing or dancing in

her colorless and meaningless life. Her life is like an old playhouse filled with

impenetrable darkness. She is all fed up with the stereotyped and mechanical

technique of love-making of her husband. He offers love in fatal dozes which will

ultimately kill his wife.

Kamala Das – Aloof from the Ordinary Concerns of a Woman

Feminist strain in the poetry of Kamala Das is manifested in her highly individualistic

sensibility and her aloofness from the ordinary concerns of a woman. Her hatred and

repugnance that she feels for traditional roles assigned to women gets an artistic

expression in

her poem An Introduction:

“Then... I wore a shirt and my

Brother’s trousers, I cut my hair short and ignored

 16

My womanliness.”

(The Best of Kamala Das,)

To avoid its load, she tried to become a tomboy by adopting the attire of males.

but it was not led by her in-laws. they started taunting her. She was commanded

to dress in sarees, and thereafter when she opts for male clothing to hide her

femininity, the guardians enforce typical female attire, with warnings to fit into the

socially determined attributes of a woman, to become a wife and a mother and get

confined to the domestic routine. She is threatened to remain within the four walls of

her female space lest she should make herself a psychic or a maniac. They even ask

her to hold her tears when rejected in love. She calls them categorizers since they

tend to categorize every person on the basis of points that are purely whimsical.

Women ‘s literature is different from Feminist literature. Women ‘s literature

which results out of women ‘s identity struggles create new awareness in

men and women whereas feminist literature expresses the shared experiences of

women ‘s oppression. ―Feminist literature highlights and condemns the inequalities

and
 17

injustices in the treatment of women–the disadvantages women have to bear on

account of their gender. Its emphasis is on the ideology rather than on the

literariness of the text. Feminism is customary for the much-centered aesthetic to

consider

artistic creation as act analogous to biological creation. Thus an art work is the

product of the interaction between the male artist and the external world which is

regarded as feminine. A literary text in this view is the outcome of a generative act

involving the phallic pen and the

virgin blank page. A woman writer feels artistic creation as a form of violation,

resulting in the destruction of the female body. In women ‘s writing sexuality is

identified with textuality. As a woman judges herself through her body, the female

self is always identified with the female body in women ‘s literature beloved as an

opposition to patriarchy or the dominant sexist ideology.

A woman considers her role of mother more important than a wife. Wholly

dependent on man in the world of his making, woman craves to have a child
 18

for self-expression as self-affirmation. In addition to sexual exploitation and

betrayal the lack of love in man-woman relationship is an improvised form of

male oppression. Loveless relationships are unbearable for women. In the

words of Prasantha Kumar: Kamala Das conceives of the male as beast wallowing

in lust with a monstrous ego under which the women lose her identity.

The strong desire for freedom, including the freedom to rebel, forms the

central strain in many of her poems. She enumerates the male felonies in her

poems and builds up a structure of protest and rebellion in her poetry.

Several poems of Das convey the tedium and monotony of sex within and

outside marriage . Their love is a disgusted lust, a poor substitute for real love.

The life of Das‘s persona may be considered a tale of her experiments with

love and the repeated failures of her experiments force her ego to be resentful

and defiant. She looks upon each encounter as a substitute for the real

experience of true love

Even as a child, Kamala Das experienced the bitterness of sexism.

 19

She was a victim of patriarchal prejudice. In her autobiographical book My Book,

her father was an autocrat and her mother vague and indifferentt. Her parents

considered her a burden and responsibility and she was given in marriage to a

relative when she was only a school girl. Thus, she was compelled to become a

premature wife and mother. She complains about it in her poem ―Of Calcutta

"You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her in the long summer of your love so

that she would forget Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind,

but Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless Pathways of

the sky". . . (The Old Playhouse 1)

The woman cannot change her body; so, the poet changes her dress and tries to

imitate men. But the voices of the tradition would force her back into sarees,

the saree becoming here a sign of convention. She is pushed back into her

expected gender roles: wife, cook, embroiderer quarreler with servants: the

gender role also becomes a class role.

 20

The husband transforms the wife into the contemptible canine status of a housewife.

To quote from the poem ―Of Calcutta Here in my husband ‘s home, I am a trained

circus dog Jumping my routine hoops each day. (Collected Poems)

Kamala Das is exclusively concerned with the personal experience of love in her

poetry. ―For her ideal love is the fulfilment of the levels of body and mind. It is the

experience beyond sex through sex. The tragic failure to get love in terms of sexual-

spiritual fulfilment from the husband leads her to search for it elsewhere. Each

relationship only intensifies her disappointment faced with the sense of absolute

frustration and loneliness‖ (Iyer 203). Though she seeks the perfection of masculine

being in every lover, it ends in failure because of the impossibility of realizing this

ideal in human form. The experience of frustration sets the psyche in the attitude of

rebellion. Kamala Das‘s aim as a poet is to underline the predicament of

contemporary women beset by the crisis of divided selves. She wants to bring

harmony out of this existence. Her poems are remarkable because they reveal her
 21

feelings of anxiety, alienation, meaninglessness, futility, acute sense of isolation,

fragmentation and loss of identity. Modern Indian woman ‘s ambivalence is

presented through her poems.

She seems to have a good deal of the conventional woman in her. She seems to have

the combination in herself—wish for domestic security and the desire for

independence. Alongside her unfulfilled need for love there is the need to assert, to

conquer and to dominate. While her poems describe a longing for a man to fill her

dreams with love, she is also proud of her being the seducer, the collector especially

of those men who pose as lady killers (Iyer 193-194).

My Story: An Autobiography

In 1973, her autobiography ‘Ente Kadha’ (My Story) was released in Malayalam. It

consisted of a compilation of her weekly columns in Malayalanadu that had already

become a sensation across the state. Fifteen years later, it was translated into English
 22

with more text added, many parts rewritten and published with the title ‘My Story’. K

Sachithananthan, in his forward for the book, concludes: “I cannot think of any other

Indian autobiography that so honestly captures a woman’s inner life in all its sad

solitude, its desperate longing for real love and its desire for transcendence, its

tumult of colors and its turbulent poetry.”

A zunapologetically about everything the conservative Kerala society had managed to

box in for very long. It managed to evoke such a widespread reaction which was

equal parts shock and equal parts adoration that it has become a cult classic in the

genre of Indian autobiographies ever since. On being asked why her book shocked

the Malayali audience, she felt that it never actually did, that they were pretending to

be shocked to prove their ‘innocence’. She believed she was merely being vocal about
 23

things that had been happening for years. Kamala Das went on to produce what is

considered some of the best work in modern Indian literature. Some of her notable

works in English are the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), the collection of short stories

Padmavati the Harlot and other stories (1992) and a compilation of her poetry

Summer in Calcutta (1973). In Malayalam, they include Balyakalasmaranakal (The

Memories of Childhood), Chandanamarangal (Sandalwood Trees) and many

more.Kamala Das is a forceful and vehement feminist.

She is a spokesman of the rights of woman. At the time, Kamala wrote her poetry,

the Indian woman was subservient to her parents or her husband; and at that time,

the question of having extra-marital relationship did not arise at all she was among

the foremost woman to claim such freedom. She was one of the very few who

attained this freedom and exercised it to the fullest possible extent. Her feminism is

of new kind. She refers her theory of Oedipus complex and Psychoanalytical History
 24

of Freud. She confesses that she was deprived of paternal love. In her poem “Next to

Indian Gandhi”, She says to her father.

“I ask you without fear

Did you want me

Did you ever want a daughter?

Therefore, Kamala Das is the real voice of true feminism and a real feminist of Indian

sense. So she is undoubtedly a feminist voice articulating the hopes and oppressions,

the concerns and tensions of womankind. Her poetic voice imbued with a feminine

cum feminist sensibility is typically her own and it can’t be confused with that of

anyone else.
 25

Feminism has been a noticeable influence in the writings of Kamala Das which is hard

to miss the eyes of a regular reader. This influence becomes all the more pronounced

when the writer delineates her male female characters and the relationship between

them. Before we embark upon the task of evaluating the strains of feminism in the

writings of Kamala Das, we need to understand what feminism is and how it

originated. Attempt has also been made to analyze the trends of feminism in Kerala

and how they helped Kamala Das in forming an image about man-woman

relationship during her young and impressionable age. This imprint which stirred her

sensitive and receptive mind during her childhood got recurrently reflected in

portrayal of her characters in her works. The word feminism has aroused great

interest in the various spheres of the world. People have interpreted this term with

different annotations and connotations in their own way. In political world, feminism

implies the political movement of the women across various countries to secure

equal political and voting rights which have considerable historical significance.
 26

In literary circles, the term denotes the consistent and continuous evolution of

literature from the ideas of male chauvinism towards the equitable share of women

and women centric literature. It is considered as a response from the women against

various form of injustice meted out to them in general. In the mid nineteenth

century, the term feminism was used to refer to the ‘qualities of women’. It was only

after the International Women’s Conference in Paris in 1892, the word following

French word ‘Feminist’, came into vogue into English to mean the belief which

advocated strongly for the women empowerment and protested against the bias and

exploitation of women by the male dominated society. But she did not identify with

the feminists of today. She said, 'I think a woman is not complete without a man

Feminism has been a noticeable influence in the writings of Kamala Das which is hard

to miss the eyes of a regular reader. This influence becomes all the more pronounced

when the writer delineates her male female characters and the relationship between

them.
 27

Before we embark upon the task of evaluating the strains of feminism in the writings

of Kamala Das, we need to understand what feminism is and how it originated.

Attempt has also been made to analyze the trends of feminism in Kerala and how

they helped Kamala Das in forming an image about man-woman relationship during

her young and impressionable age. This imprint which stirred her sensitive and

receptive mind during her childhood got recurrently reflected in portrayal of her

characters in her works. The word feminism has aroused great interest in the various

spheres of the world. People have interpreted this term with different annotations

and connotations in their own way. Feminism as it is understood in the West is quite

different from the feminism as it is preached and practiced in India. In West, the

women attempt to shatter all manmade restrictions imposed upon them. They wish
 28

to stand on the equal platform with the men and even in certain areas want to

surpass them. They yearn to liberate themselves completely and stand against the

patriarchal society which dictates terms to them

In India, what the feminists want is only some space and a respectable position in the

v society. They do not want to grab the scepter of power from the men and wield the

authority.

“The Old Play House and Other Poems”:Your room isAlways lit by artificial lights,

your windows always Shut. Even the air-conditioner helps so little All pervasive is the

male scent of your breath. Kamala Das, through her writings, attempts to break this

age old tradition of silent sufferings. The female characters delineated by her in her

works are strong and courageous and they boldly take up cudgels against the male

superiority and his falsely inflated ego and refuse to bow down to the system. She
 29

also draws our attention to those outworn ideas and social norms which hinder our

emotional and intellectual growth. They also act as great obstacles in the cordial and

equitable man–woman relationship. Kamala Das is always aware about her female

identity and whether it is dealing with men in her life or shaking up the society out of

its slumber and hypocrisy, Kamala Das is vocal about her need and rights. In an

interview given to Iqbal Kaur, Kamala Das talks about the purpose of her

autobiography “My Story”:

CHAPTER 3
CONCLUSION

The conclusion of feminism is when women are valued for themselves as men are.

When women can walk down a street without being harassed, when their interview

for jobs are considered with the exact same criteria as men interviewing are. It's

when good husbands and fathers are the norm, couples split up housework fairly and
 30

stay at home dads have the same support stay at home moms do. It’s when transmen

and transwomen get the healthcare, they need that is appropriate for their bodies,

and what it says on their driver’s license isn't considered relevant. The conclusion of

feminism is when girl children are not sold into marriage or any children into the sex

trade.

The conclusion of feminism is not world peace or love and harmony, but the removal

of the systemic, universal devaluing of women and women's work by society. That

will mean more competition, but also much more sharing and cooperation. It's a

different dynamic, and one I look forward to experiencing.

When women will feel safe to go out anywhere irrespective of time, place,

irrespective of being alone or with someone, irrespective of cloths they are wearing.

When they won’t be stared or harassed by men and seen as a normal human being
 31

instead of an object of lust. When women won’t be seen by default as a home-maker

and instead be encouraged by society to earn her own bread. When a birth of girl

child be celebrated and she would be given equal opportunities as a male child in all

aspects - education, healthcare, etc. When women will feel safe to go out anywhere

irrespective of time, place, irrespective of being alone or with someone, irrespective

of cloths they are wearing. When they won’t be stared or harassed by men and seen

as a normal human being instead of an object of lust. When women won’t be seen by

default as a home-maker and instead be encouraged by society to earn her own

bread. When a birth of girl child be celebrated and she would be given equal

opportunities as a male child in all aspects - education, healthcare, etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY