Kamala Das A Retrospective

Kamala Das (1934-2009): A Retrospective By Pariksith Singh, MD Of all the poets in the last 50 years in the Indian landscape, I find Kamala Das the most refreshing. She is the disruptor, iconoclast, gadfly, enfant terrible of Indian English poetry. It is true that she rattled many cages, and these were the cages in which she and countless other women and even men in the Indian society have been imprisoned for years. She tried to break the exo-skeleton in which we all must fit in, suffocated in our own falsehoods and inability to look at things as they are. Because the exo-skeleton, while it gives security for a while, also stunts growth. One needs to shed it when one is ready and find a bigger, roomier space. Until one grows further and finds its expanded space too a limit. This is how she blazed across the sky of Indian kavya like a meteor with this Introduction: “I don't know politics but I know the names Of those in power, and can repeat them like I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. … The language I speak, Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest… Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and Is aware.… I was child, and later they Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair. …it is time to Choose a name, a role. Don't play pretending games. Don't play at schizophrenia or be a Nympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when Jilted in love … the hungry haste Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans' tireless Waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone, The answer is, it is I…. I have no joys that are not yours, no Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.” Such poetry by a woman (or even a man) had not been seen before in the Indian subcontinent. Perhaps Sylvia Plath had done similar things. But Kamala Das was no follower. She charted her own course and continued to pique, perplex, embarrass, shock, and scare the reader and critic alike. But she had a sense of identity and empathy for the weak, the oppressed, the relegated, as she portrays in The Dance of the Eunuchs: “It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals Richly clashing, and anklets jingling, jingling Jingling... Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy…. All were watching these poor creatures' convulsions The sky crackled then, thunder came, and lightning And rain, a meagre rain that smelt of dust in Attics and the urine of lizards and mice....” Das is unusually sensitive to the physical senses, as we can see in the last line above. Her powers of close observation of things animal and human have an immediacy of perception. That is what makes her poetry not only overtly but also subtly feminine, in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Rita Dove. There is a deep longing in her poetry, manifest as physical and vital desire, but secretly something far more primal, something she was willing to accept in herself and articulate. Some quiet sense of betrayal and disappointment why things are not the way they should be and should have always been. She holds this ache in her Relationship: This love older than I by myriad Saddened centuries was once a prayer In his bones … Betray me? Yes, he can, but never physically Only with words that curl their limbs at Touch of air and die with metallic sighs…. And even death nowhere else but here in My betrayer's arms... As a poet, she is overflowing with words but also seems to recognize somewhere a deep silence within. And these words grow on her and do not stop. Perhaps Words is one of her finer poems for she is aware of a space where there is stillness inside: All round me are words, and words and words, They grow on me like leaves, they never Seem to stop their slow growing From within... a Chasm where running feet must pause, to Look, a sea with paralyzing waves, A blast of burning air or, A knife most willing to cut your best Friend's throat... They never seem to stop their coming, From a silence, somewhere deep within... And then, she rebels. In her own way. Against the tyranny of male oppression. With a sheer physicality that was shocking and scandalizing, but intensely raw and sensory. Only she could have said in The Old Playhouse, that … I came to you but to learn What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every Lesson you gave was about yourself. You were pleased With my body's response, its weather, its usual shallow Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices.… … I remember the rudder breezes Of the fall and the smoke from the burning leaves. … All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat… An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors To shatter and the kind night to erase the water. Indian literature had not seen such overt sexuality perhaps since the days of the Kamasutra. The society had become hypocritical and prurient. In the face of such fossilization, perhaps an aggressive sexuality needed to be expressed, but something that still retained dignity and strength. Not as a purveyor of body for the body’s sake but someone standing up to the suppression practiced by the hegemons of the society and demanding the affirmation of one’s own self-worth. As In Love: O what does the burning mouth Of sun, burning in today's, Sky, remind me…for, isn't each Embrace a complete thing a finished Jigsaw, when mouth on mouth, i lie,… This skin-communicated Thing that I dare not yet in His presence call our love. All masculine symbols are rejected. The Sun appears as a motif of maleness, bright, harsh, sometimes cruel, and she wishes to devour it and absorb all its energy in herself. Summer in Calcutta is a poem filled with hidden violence and usurpation of tradition, ritual, and hierarchy, an explosive rebellion: What is this drink but The April sun, squeezed Like an orange in My glass? I sip the Fire, I drink and drink … on the gold of suns, … How brief the term of my devotion, how brief your reign when i …drink, drink, and drink again this Juice of April suns. But all this hides an emptiness within, that resurfaces in the poet’s consciousness. Something primordial at play that is not satisfied with sensory fulfilment alone. Something that seeks to fulfill the void in The Freaks. Between the cavern of the lover’s mouth and the cistern of the heart, filled with snakes of silence, there is charade, that of the body’s crude seeking: He talks, … his mouth, a dark Cavern, where stalactites of Uneven teeth gleam, … …The heart, An empty cistern, waiting Through long hours, fills itself With coiling snakes of silence. ..... I am a freak. It's only To save my face, I flaunt, at Times, a grand, flamboyant lust. Sometimes she breaks through. In her poem Ghanshyam, she seems to find new ways of expressing herself. This is why I have always felt that hidden behind all ‘the vaunt and the war-cry’, was a profound spiritual search: I gaze into the red eye of death The hot stare of truth unveiled…. 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 if he is you and I am you Who is loving you Who is the husk who the kernel Where is the body where is the soul… The cell of the eternal sun The blood of the eternal fire… 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… Some ancient loneliness peeks through. Some sense of union that she searched for. Even as she remembered her childhood and the cruelty of the teacher and other children. Punishment in Kindergarten seems to evoke the child in her that is there even though ‘her mind has found an adult peace’: Today the world is a little more my own. No need to remember the pain… ‘Why don't you join the others, what A peculiar child you are! ' … I buried My face in the sun-warmed hedge And smelt the flowers and the pain…. That picnic day when I lay hidden By a hedge, watching the steel-white sun Standing lonely in the sky. Born in 1934 to a conservative and literary family in Kerala, Kamala Das defined Indian poetry in the 1960s. Her voice was direct and clear. No ellipses like Ramanujan and complex constructions like Mahapatra. The Times called her ‘the mother of modern English Indian poetry’ and this may not be a hyperbole. She broke the rules and restriction imposed on a generation of women, at least in literature if not in real life. There is a strong awareness of the body but also of the silence and the void within. And between the two a woman’s need for oneness and love. And that is what makes her unique in the post-colonial world of Indian English poetry. She passed away in 2009 but left an indelible print on Indian poetry in all languages. In my opinion her influence will last longer than Nissim Ezekiel, AK Mehrotra and R Parthasarathy, who are singularly passionless, dry and without vitality. Strangely she reminds one of DH Lawrence with his emphasis on blood-consciousness and what Harold Bloom described as healing the malady of ‘sex in the head’ in his book Genius. Strangely she reminds one also of the powerful romanticism seen in the early Sri Aurobindo of Urvasie and Love and Death. The best way to describe Kamala Das perhaps is that she was honest, even while she was creating the fiction of her own autobiography. This is the fundamental integrity that should have earned her the Nobel Prize for which she was nominated once. And will give her relevance for generations to come.