Writers Editors Critics (WEC): Vol. 7, No. 1 (March 2017)

RESEARCH ARTICLES

The Confessional Voice and Rebellious Cry of Kamala Das as Visualized in her Poetical Works: A Brief Analysis

S. Chelliah

Abstract: This paper, at the outset, does introduce the readers to the origin of Indian English poetry cherished in ancient Indian tradition as ‘Kavya’ that was hailed as the ‘fifth Veda’ attesting to the fact that poetry is the language of human feelings and emotions and then projects Kamala Das as a poetess of high repute in Indian English poetry, who wrote poems with the sole intention of not only inspiring and making one understand and enjoy poetry but also raising her voice against the persecution of women in a male-dominated society with the profound assertion of herself in a new and different way bringing home the point that Mrs. Das’s poetry is nothing but the confessional voice and rebellious cry raised against exploitation of women in the male-dominated world.

Keywords: Confessionalism, The Old Playhouse, unfulfilled love, disillusionment, feminine sensibility, rebellion against the male-dominated society

It is generally held that Indian poetry in English has had a rich harvest. Before Independence, Indian Writing in English could not get due recognition and attention from the reading public as it was so thought that only an Englishman, preferably born and bred in England, could write in English, for they thought that Indian Writing in English is deficient in both form and content. But after Independence, the bias thinned away. Those with literary taste subsequently began to notice the hitherto unnoticed shades of the form and feeling of Indian poetry in English. Generally speaking, Poetry is considered as the highest art; in ancient Indian tradition, ’Kavya’ is hailed as the ‘fifth Veda’. Poetry calls for a much higher order of creative faculty to organise its thoughts and feelings into an organic whole. That is why there are a handsome number of research works done on poets or poetry in comparison to fiction and other kind of writing. But it has been rightly said that poetry is the language of human feelings and emotions and it will be written till man does not become a robot. What Keats said of the nightingale is true of poetry as well: Though was not born for death, immortal Bird; / No hungry generations tread thee down. So what is wanted for a healthy growth of society is ‘poets to write good poems to make one understand and enjoy them and also to inspire critics and poets. Kamala Das is one such poet in Indian poetry in English, who writes poems with the sole intention of not only inspiring and making one understand and enjoy poetry but also raising her voice against the persecution of women in a male dominated society with the healthy assertion of her self in a new and different way. As M. K. Naik has put it, Das’s poetry produces one of a bold, ruthless honesty tearing passionately at conventional attitudes to reveal the quintessential women within (P 21).

Indian poetry in English is interesting not only in its theme but also in technique and style. In theme, it deals with the various aspects of human emotion and social behaviour. It beautifully delineates the patriotic zeal mysticism and a theme of underlying unity amidst diversities. It also dwells upon the theme of the spiritual bliss and harmony, a strong affinity to rootedness and nostalgic touch to tradition and motherland which always nurse and nourish the sentiments of the poets in particular and the common rank file in general. Kamala Das dives deep into the unfathomed land of the subdued psyche and churns out the real truth which comes in the form of confessionalism and revolutionary idealism. Born on 31 March 1934 at a small village Pannayurkulam in South Malabar in Kerala, Kamala Das spent the happiest days of her early life with her grandmother at her palatial house, Nalapat and received her early education first at Elementary School at Pannayarkulam and then at Catholic Board School, Calcutta. As she is the daughter of Balamani Amma, a famous Malayali poetess, poetry was in her blood and she began to write poems at a very tender age. Being a bilingual writer Kamala Das shot into fame with the publication of her first volume of her poems, Summer in Culcutta (1965) and her two other volumes of poems The Descendants (1967) and The Old Playhouse and Other poems (1973).

Having travelled widely to give poetry readings at various Universities by visiting Flinders, Melbourne and Monash in Australia and Essen, Bonn and Duisburg in Germany besides Singapore and Kingston, Kamala Das is said to have held coveted positions as Vice Chairperson in Kerala Forestry Board, President of Kerala Children Film Society and poetry Editor of Illustrated Weekly of India in 1984. She was short-listed for the Nobel Prize for Literature along with Marguerite Yourcenae, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer. She has also received many such prestigious awards for her literary contribution as Asian Poetry Prize for the work The Sirens, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries for Summer in Calcutta, Sahitya Akademy Award for best short story Thanuppu. No longer limiting herself to writing, her achievements extend well beyond her verses of poetry. Das says: 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 (P 32).

Kamala Das, who looms large over the poetic horizon of today’s India, is essentially a poet of the modern Indian woman’s ambivalence portraying nakedly the Indian life and culture. Married at the age of fifteen and finding herself bound to a hollow relationship which she could not untie, she started writing poetry as an escape from the reality of her frustrating relationship. Her poetry originates from ‘Self’ which functions like a poetic nucleus. As she says:

If I had been a loved person, I wouldn’t become a writer, I would have been a happy human being . . . I suppose I started writing because I had certain weaknesses in my system. I thought I was weak and vulnerable. That’s why we attempt poetry. Poets are like snails without the shells, terribly, so easy to crush. Of course it has given me a lot of pain, each poem is really born out of pain which I would like to share. But then you live for that person, the sharer of your pain, and you don’t find him anywhere. It is the looking that makes the poet go on writing, search. If you find someone, the search is over, poetry is over. (Interview)

An analysis of her poems reveals the fact that the women persona of her poems represents her own mutilated self tormented by both past and present resulting in deep sense of crisis and revolt. Her poetry is a sort of psychic striptease. She explores her psychic geography with an exceptional female energy and the capability to express her inimitable vision through the technique of sincerity. It is with extreme sincerity that she pictures her quest for identity. The quest for emotional liaison and her failure to establish a meaningful relationship with others, whether it is her husband or other family members is the central burden of her poetry. Her poetry reflects her restlessness as a sensitive poet moving in the male dominated society and she projects herself as a champion of women cause. She is an investigator of impulse. A product of intensely personal experiences, Das’s poetry has a strong note of subjectivism. Harimohan Prasad writes: her poetry is an autobiography, and articulated voice of her ethnic identity (P 8).

Almost all the poems of Kamala Das have been appreciated in the realm of Indian writings and also in the World Literature. In the words of Dominic:

Kamala Das wrote chiefly of love, its betrayal and the consequent anguish, and Indian readers responded sympathetically to her guileless, guiltless frankness with regard to sexual matters. Mrs. Das abandoned the certainties offered by an archaic, and somewhat sterile, aestheticism for an Independence of mind and body at a time when Indian women poets were still expected to write about teenage girl fantasies of eternal, bloodless unrequited love. (Dominic 16)

She attracted the attention of her readers with her love-sex theme which was never before so openly expressed. Her book Summer in Culcutta arrested the attention of many by its frank confession in the dissatisfaction of arranged marriage and the intensity of sexual desires. Devindra Kohli observes: "She wrote the poems in the book Summer in Culcutta to make a man love me, to break down his resistance" (P 29).

All her poems deal with love, sex, faliures, frustrations, marital relations, and exploitation of women in the male dominated world with few expectations. Gour remarks about her poetry which is written large with anger, frankness and willingness to confront unpleasantness in social as well as personal relationships (P58). In fact, her own life was the central theme of her poetry. The poem ‘The Dance of the Eunuchs’ is a bold poem written against the background of the poet’s sudden contact with a man who had hurt her when she was just fourteen or fifteen. She openly wrote all about it through apt and suggestive images. It is a highly symbolic poem in which the poetess finds a close parallel to her own loveless life of emotional vacuity. She herself suffered from such an emotional vacuity. In the poem The Freaks, she expresses the intensity of woman’s longing for sexual gratifications. In another poem, In Love, sex or the hollowness of sexual love which is only about the skin communicated thing (In Love 26). An Introduction is a fine lyric, being confessional as well as autobiographical dealing with the poetess assertion to establish her feminine identity in a male-dominated social set-up. She openly reveals how a woman is exploited in the name of marriage. In Luminol, she expresses the agony of a woman who never finds love and shows the vacant ecstasy in her. The Wild Bouganvilla is a poem in which Das expresses the sadness of a woman persona moaning for want of love, whereas in The Testing of Sirens she describes adultery and her own failure in love through love-lorn woman persona. ‘The End of Spring’, ‘Too-Early the Autumn Sights’. ‘Visitors to the Sea’,’ Punishment in Kindergarden ‘and ‘My Morning Tongue’ are the poems in which she gives vent to her own personal frustrations and disillusionments in love and life. The poetess describes the pain of a woman who forgers even the sufferings of her sexual exploitation in the child birth:

Love is not important that makes the blood

Carouse nor the men who brands you with his

Lust, but is shed at the end of each

Embrace only that matters which forms as

Toadstool under lightning and rain, the soft

(‘Jaisurya’ 21-22)

Her anthology of poems namely The Old Playhouse and Other Poems has entirely a new dimension and artistic maturity. She reveals a mode of protest against male domination in her little poem ‘The Old Playhouse’. Her protest is nothing but the protest of the entire womanhood against male domination. In another poem, ‘Gino’, she does express the terror of sex by realistically depicting the burdens of domestic life, sickness, her aging and decaying of body and death. In The Stone Age, she expresses the spirit of rebellion against male domination. The husband is here described as an Old fat Spider weaves webs of bewilderment (The Stone Age 2), around his wife and confines her within the four walls of domesticity. Mrs. Das speaks in her poems about intensely felt personal experiences including her womanhood and her unsuccessful quest for love in and outside marriage. In the words of R. S. Pathak, He who touches Das’s poem, touches a woman (P 44).

During her intense search for love, she becomes more aware of the pathos in the life of a common woman playing a very passive role in a tradition-bound Indian Society. Devendra Kohli rightly says in this regard as: Kamala Das has more to say about the pathos of a woman emerging from a passive role to the point of discovering and asserting her individual freedom and identity (P 222).

In The Sunshine Cat, Kamala Das speaks of the injustice meted out to women. She believes that the society is hostile to women and that they are humiliated in all possible ways. Sexual humiliation is the central expression in her autobiography ‘My Story’. The image of the Sunshine Cat, thin like a streak of light, is the imaginative equivalent to all her pains and sufferings in this man-dominated world. The act of living has been a penance of her and domestic life as a prison to her. The poem metaphorically recalls the plight of Kamala Das who feels half-head while living with her husband. She had dreams of a loving husband who could provide her the bliss of paradise. Instead, she feels the heat of a funeral pyre with her head constantly burning. As Kamala Das deals with personal emotional experiences in her poetry, she is called as a poet in confessional mode. She has been ranked with such writers in the confessional mode as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethike, Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is often compared with Kamala Das because she shares some of the qualities of Sylvia Plath, her suicidal tendencies.

Kamala Das stood as the first Hindu woman from Nair family who never hesitated to state what she felt. She confessed everything in her verse with honesty and made her own life, her personal emotional experience with frustrations and despair as the central point in her poetical creations. Shibu Simon is of the opinion that Kamala Das recognized herself as one of the victims of the prevalent orthodox attitude towards the Indian women and of the male domination (P182). This point is important because her poetry was most unorthodox and also revolutionary as compared to the environment and atmosphere. Kamala Das once said; each poem is born out of pain, which I would like to share (Santhosh 11). She shares her experience frankly and she has ability to develop the images of women in her own style. She does not express an individual’s experience. But she uses her personal voice to speak on behalf of others. It results with the persona in her writings. S. D. Sharma rightly says: The literal self becomes the nucleus. Kamala Das is also a confessional poet (P 3).

She confesses a number of things exclusively related to her own self as a woman with her strong feminine sensibilities. Kamala Das, as pointed out by Santhosh, is an iconoclast of her generation who unabashedly spoke about Indian woman’s sexual desires and a maverick who coveted controversies (P11). She is no doubt, a pioneer who gives clear, frank and straightforward expressions to feminine sensibility in all its varied manifestations. In the words of P. K. J. Kurup, She concerns her poetry mostly with herself as a victim of circumstances and sexual humiliations (P 114).

Kamala Das projects herself as a frustrated woman in love and in her marital and extramarital sex. She condemns male egoisms and superiority and depicts her husband as well as lovers as equally selfish, fleshy and above all ‘betrayers’. They are projected as cruel and pitiless in depriving her of pure love which she aspires for. Mishra points out that her accusation is justified in as much as male poet like Pritish Nandy viewed woman as a source of temporary pleasure. As a true confessional poetess, Kamala Das expresses with frankness the wrongs, injustice and humiliation that she suffered in the male oriented world. Her life is a painful journey and she wants to escape to the external world. This difficult journey she realizes is the inward one. She says:

…other

Journey are all so easy but

Not the inward one (Anamalai Poems 104-106)

But this difficult journey is full of the poetess’ crisis. Her poetry recorded her experiences and she struggled that she had to undergo in order to maintain her identity. Her identity as an Indian, as a woman, as a wife, as a poet shows her primary attack against male domination. She rebels impulsively and defies the gender code bluntly. As Muktha Manoj Jacob has put it, She refuses to fit in the constructed role of a girl and a wife. She wishes to become a woman by wearing sarees. Like her own language, she chooses her own man (Jacob 96). She revolts against the rules meant for women and also breaks the traditional image of woman. She bitterly describes:

… I wore a shirt and my

Borther’s trousers, cut my hair short and

Ignored my womanliness (‘An Introduction’ 31-33)

This poem An Introduction is out and out confessional and in fact aggressive voice of the feminine sensibility. Mrs. Das had a rebellious thought even in childhood. M. M. Jacob is of the opinion about Kamala Das that as a feminine writer, Das is riddled with emotions at the plight of the woman in a patriarchal society (P 88). In India ,even the birth of a girl is unwelcome because rape, dowry deaths, female infanticide ,male domination and other various forms of exploitation are the everyday happenings. In fact, Kamala Das raises her voice in favour of women by bringing out the discrimination made in the society about a girl. In the words of Poonam Srivastava, Kamala Das showed the complaining attitude towards her parentage and atmosphere (P 140). She did not get any affection and emotional fulfilment from her parents. She herself stated, We grew up more or less neglected" (My Story 2). As she was neglected a rebellious attitude towards family started in her even as a child. She got a wrong picture of family and tradition. All these situations made her revolt and lose in tradition. She became rebellious in attitude and approach for when she was denied love when she had craved love from her husband. She felt almost her loneliness after the death of her grandfather and she had to suffer a lot. She said in her autobiography My Story about her husband’s daily activities: Her husband was neatly all the time away touring in the outer districts. Even while he was with me, we had no mental contact with each other. If at all, I began to talk of my happiness, he changed the topic immediately and walked away (P45).

Kamala Das’s complete alienation from her husband shows her bold attitude against her husband. The love or affection she expects from her husband is not given to her. He has only felt pleased with her response to his fondling and caressing of her in bed. She got married to know herself and to learn to grow (The Old Playhouse 7). But her hope was belied as her husband was interested only in her body. In the course of the sexual act, he used to press his whole body against hers with great effort. In the physical sense, he succeeded fully in penetrating every part of her body and making his bodily fluids mingle with hers. But he did not realize that a wife needed true love and affection in addition to sexual pleasure. Issac Sheeba says:

Kamala Das openly revolts against the traditionally accepted strange, queer womanhood concepts in the Indian society, which is so awkwardly full of abominable shams and cants. Rigid trammels of tyranny, she does not like at all. In a bitter, piercing cathartic tone, Kamala Das ridicules imposters show of masculine strength and also man’s lust. (P 34)

In love-making, Kamala Das is against traditional restraint. K. R. S. Iyengar affirms that Kamala Das’s was a fiercely feminine sensibility that dared without inhibitions to articulate the hurts. It had received in an insensitive largely man-made world (P 680). She has been forced to turn into social rebel because of frustration and sexual exploitation. In her own life, she has seen the reflection of the entire suffering womanhood. The poetess expects that the miserable condition of the women will arouse sympathy among the women folk and the women folk will rise in revolt against the lewd and selfish menfolk. When in An Introduction the poetess is almost raped by her husband on the honeymoon night, she rebels. She wears a shirt, her brothers trousers ,gets her hair cut short and ignores her womanliness. When the man in Old Playhouse clips the wings of his swallow wife and uses her sexually for the long summer, the woman rebels and decides to break the Narcissistic image of man.

To conclude, it may be seen that almost every poem of Kamala Das expresses one or the other aspect of Das’s life, her feelings, her unfulfilled love; her exploitation, her disillusionment, her feminine sensibility and her rebellion against the male-dominated society.

Works Cited

Dominic, K. V. A Feminist Reading of Kamala Das’s Poetry. Kamala Das—The Great Indian Trend-Setter. Edited by Dr. Jaydeep Sarangi. Authorspress, 2010, pp. 16-25.

Gour, U. S. B. Existential Elements in Kamala Das. Indian English Poetr—New Perspectives. Edited by K. V. Surendran, Sarup & Sons, 2002, pp. 61-69.

Kohli, Devindra. Kamala Das. Arnold-Heinemann, 1975.

Kurup, P. K. J. Revolt—The Self in the Poetry of Kamala Das. Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. Atlantic Publishers, 1991, pp. 114-123.

Naik, M. K. A History of Indian English Literature. Sahitya Akademi, 1992.

Pathak, R. S. Indian Women Poets: Mapping out New Terrains. Indian English Poetry: New Perspectives. Edited by K. V. Surendran. Sarup & Sons, 2002. pp. 111-117.

Raveendran, N. V. The Poems of Kamala Das: An Assessment. Indian Writing in English. Atlantic Publishers, 2000. pp. 19-27.

Sharma, S. D. Perspective on Kamala Das’s Poetry: Confessionalism and Scientific Positivism. Indian Writing in English. Edited by K. Agarwal. Atlantic, 2003. pp. 189-195.

Simon, Shibhu. Reading Kamala Das in the light of Lakoff’s Feminist Theory. Critical Response to Indian Poetry in English. Edited by Amar Nath Prasad. Sarup & Sons, 2008, pp. 180-189.

The Philosopher-Scientist A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and his World View: A Study

J. Pamela

Abstract: The essay is a study of the role of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam as a Philosopher-Scientist. It traces his life from his childhood days as a middle-class, religious and cloistered student to his life as a studious young scientist holding many a prestigious chair. The essay focuses on how Dr. Kalam amalgamates the two contrasting factors—science and spirituality—and evolves a cult of his own. It also discusses how he lived by this promising code of conduct and inspires the younger generation to follow suit.

Keywords: Philosopher-Scientist, scientific technology, spirituality, dreams, world view

In answer to a student’s question about the difference between a scientist and a philosopher, former President of India, the rocket scientist, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam replied thus:

A scientist deals with theory which has to be validated. A philosopher postulates theological, philosophical and spiritual thoughts, the validation of which are the societal dynamics. Science ultimately results in technology and benefits the society. Philosophy leads the way to the dynamics of society