The Body and Beyond – Quest for Love

The Body and Beyond – Quest for Love 

By Purnendu Chatterjee

Kamala Das’s poetic vision is essentially moored in a strong fund of love. Her feminist stances as well as her melioristic vision is rooted in her love for humanity. In fact, love is the dominant theme in the oeuvre of Das’s poetry. In an interview to the present writer, the poet acknowledged the importance of love in relation to her life and her poetry.

"I craved for love, not lust. Love gives a kind of protection. Love is the capital of poetry." 

In all her five anthologies — Summer in Calcutta [SC], The Descendants [DS], The Old Playhouse and Other Poems [OPP], Collected Poems [CP] and Only the Soul knows how to Sing [OSS] — Kamala Das used her personality as the raw material for her poetry. In her autobiography ‘My Story’, which in parts is like an expanded poetry, she points out:

"A poet’s raw material is not stone or clay, it is her personality."¹(italics mine). 

This statement implies that she does not accept Eliot’s distinction between the man who suffers and the mind that creates. Her poetic creations are rooted in her personality that becomes its "raw material". It must, however, be realized that the personality of the poet is a "raw material" and in no way a finished piece of poetry. The "raw materials" undergo aesthetic transmutations before they are presented as poetic wholes. Facts and fantasy, experience and imagination are inseparably mingled in her works, thereby creating a sort of Magic Realism. But, unfortunately, often her poetry has been interpreted as a true reflection of her personality and this has resulted in unleashing a battery of trenchant criticism against her self and her writings. 

The central position of love in her life meant that it was also the sine qua non of her poetry. Love, in Kamala Das’s poetry, is distinctly severed from lust. Love is seated in the soul and is an ennobling experience, while lust is associated with the body and is an abominable and obnoxious experience. However, thanks to her rich fund of honesty, Kamala Das never lends herself to the obscure regions of metaphysics. In her search for love, she does not deny the role of the body. She yearns for a love that at once satisfies the body and caters to the need of the soul. Her obsession with the body is functional in lending a feminine flavour to her style, consistent with the objectives of feminist poetics; her sustained endeavour is to transcend the body. Her poetry presents an oriental dialectics of the body and the soul. She aims at sexual-spiritual fulfillment in terms of love. Her quest for such a love is fostered by a sense of alienation that lies deep in her consciousness.

I

During her childhood days she seldom received parental love. Her father was the dominating male and her mother was an introvert, always busy with her poetic creations. The obvious result was that the child found herself hopelessly moored in the mire of a loveless family. She recollects the pain of living with her parents:

"Whenever I stayed with my parents in my Calcutta home I suffered from mysterious headaches that kept me awake at night."²

At school she was singled out by the teacher for her brown skin. Her own introvert character worsened matters. This pain of alienation is superbly brought out in the poem ‘Punishment in Kindergarten.’

"Today the world is a little more my own.

No need to remember the pain

A blue-frocked woman caused, throwing

Words at me like pots and pains, to drain

That honey-coloured day of peace.

Why don’t you join others, what

A peculiar child you are!" [SC]

The auditory image in "throwing / Words at me like pots and pans" reveals the mental pain that the poet received that day. In more discursive terms, Kamala Das describes the painful event in ‘My Story’. It was a picnic day at school and

"Oh I was so lonely that day. No one seemed to want my company, not even my brother who was playing a kind of football with his classmates. ……… I wondered why I was born to Indian parents instead of to a white couple…………. Then suddenly like the clatter of pots and pans, harsh words attacked my privacy. "What on earth are you doing here, Kamala?" shouted the teacher. "Why don’t you join the others? What a peculiar child you are?""³

 

Marriage brought lust but no love. Kamala Das was married at the tender age of 16 to an insensitive homosexual who was 14 years older to her. She entered the domain of marriage with high hopes of obtaining love, warmth and comfort. The poet candidly states her expectations from her husband:

"I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversation, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from thoughts."⁴

 

Reality, however, falsified her expectations. The homosexual advances of her husband rubbed salt on the soar. Her body was humiliated while her soul remained neglected. With life creeping on all fours and the last hope of receiving love proving to be illusive, it is very natural for a sensitive soul to look for love outside the orbit of marriage. But Das did not go out in search of love. Instead, she turned inwards.

"I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself where I wrote stories and poems and became safe and anonymous."⁵

Couched in this "cave", she went on creating the various personae who move over her poetic canvas, shocking some and titillating many. In the act of creation, as the poet says in ‘Loud Posters’,

"……….. I’ve put

My private voice away, adopted the

Typewriter’s click as my only speech".[SC]

So, any attempt to reconstruct her personal life from her loveless love poems is unwarranted. In fact, it would have been impossible for her to go outside her marriage for her husband and her children formed the axis around which her life revolved. After the death of her husband, in the poem ‘A Widow’s Lament’, she mourns:

"I walk the highway alone.

He was a sunshade, he was my home,

Now I walk naked as a babe." [OSS]

The "highway" is the path of life where the husband provided her protection (not love!). The image in "walk naked" refers to the poet’s sense of vulnerability that she feels without her husband.

Kamala Das’s love poems, like a seismograph, reflect the poet’s yearning for love and the consequent heart-break as she realizes that her cravings have only yielded lustful advances. As K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, commenting on Kamala Das’s treatment of love in her poetry, points out:

"Love is crucified in sex, and sex defiles itself again and again."⁶

In poem after poem, Das expressed her horror and disgust of lust. Lust is painful and its aim is to hurt as revealed in the poem ‘Glass’.

"He drew me to him

Rudely

With a lover’s haste, an armful

Of splinters, designed to hurt, and

Pregnant with pain." [CP]

Lust is soul-killing and poisonous, as the persona is told in the poem ‘Gino’:

"You will perish from his kiss, he said, as one must

Surely die, when bitten by a Krait who fills

The bloodstream with its accursed essences". [CP] 

It is this "accursed essences" that filled every "nook and cranny" of her existence and wrecked her mentally. In ‘The Old Playhouse’, the persona reveals her derelict mental condition.

"…………………………….. There is

No more singing, no more a dance, my mind is an old

Playhouse with all its lights put out." [OPP]

It is a life-in-death state for the persona. Such a painful state is also revealed in the following lines from the poem ‘The Sunshine Cat’:

"Winter came and one day while locking her in, he

Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a

Line, a hair-thin line, and in the evening when

He returned to take her out, she was a cold and

Half-dead woman, now of no use at all to men." [SC]

The expression "Half-dead" signifies a condition in which the body is biologically alive but the mind is dead, giving rise to a terrible life-in-death state. Sometimes she tries to resurrect herself from such a pitiable existence by a willful attempt to obliterate the memory of her lover, as in ‘Summer in Calcutta’.

"……. 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." [SC]

The sun takes the shape of an orange but retains its characteristic quality of heat. The orange juice partakes the heat of the sun and as she drinks the juice her sadness is burnt away by its heat. The memory of her lover and the painful lust that he brought in his trail is forgotten. 

However, such benign oblivion is only temporary. The lover comes back and fills her heart "With coiling snakes of silence" (‘The Freaks’). Dissatisfied at heart, she strikes a posture in ‘The Freaks’:

"I am a freak. It’s only

To save my face, I flaunt, at

Times, a grand flamboyant lust." [SC]

Among the eighteen words used in the quoted passage, sixteen words are monosyllabic which the poet use to express the genuine feelings of the persona. When the persona strikes the poseur of a "freak", her artificial stance is revealed by the polysyllabic "flamboyant". Leaving in an abnormal world she has to behave abnormally in order to show that she is normal. Commenting on the poem T.N. Dhar rightly remarks:

"The fact that she is able to make this fine discrimination between love and lust in a culture which is male-dominated, reducing woman to the position of a passive being, and has the courage to give it an honest poetic utterance, and to break through the hypocritical veneer of man-woman relationship, makes her realize that "I am a freak.""⁷

This self-dramatization, however, does not give her solace. She is tired of vain sexual congress as the persona states in the poem ‘The Invitation’:

"All through that summer’s afternoons we lay

On beds, our limbs inert, cells expanding

Into throbbing suns." [DS]

The heat of the sun, like the body of the lover, saps the vitality of the persona. Anisur Rahaman aptly remarks:

"The male body and the burning sun are analogous in the poetic world of Kamala Das; both are imbued with the force of destruction. They annihilate the poet’s self and the necessary human sapling and freshness in her woman’s body."⁸

With lust becoming omnipotent and love vanishing out of sight, the persona tries another means to get a haven of peace. In the poem ‘Substitute’, she shows an attitude of passive detachment.

"After that 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.

Oh, what is the use, explaining —

It was a nameless, faceless crowd." [DS]

The identities of the lovers are deliberately blurred as she shows an insouciance to the relationships. But, in the face of ubiquitous operation of lust such stances are hardly tenable for long. The male’s preoccupation with the female body and the act of compromise forced upon her by patriarchy finds poetic expression in the poem ‘The Descendants’:

"We have lain in every weather, nailed, no, not

To crosses, but to soft beds and against

Softer forms, while the heaving, lurching,

Tender hours passed in a half-dusk, half- dawn and

Half-dream, half-real trance. We were the yielders,

Yielding ourselves to everything." [DS]

This is the pain of a loveless relationship. The pain is not physical for, the persona is on "soft beds" but mental as the compound epithets — "half-dusk", "half-dawn", "half-dream, "half-real" — reveal. Her mind is in such a derelict state that she cannot differentiate between dusk and dawn, dream and reality. Frustration is bound to burst out, as it does in the poem ‘The Bangles’:

"……….. At night,

In sleep, the woman lashes

At pillows with bangled arms; in

Vain, she begs bad dreams to fade.

The man switches on the light and

Looks into her face with his

Grey, pitiless eyes…" [SC]

The expression "bangled arms" is a metonymic representation of a married woman. Her action of striking the pillows is a gesture of immense frustration. The man’s reaction is one of cruel indifference. Subhas C. Saha brilliantly explains the action of the woman:

"Bangles symbolize the marriage of happiness and life; they indicate the acceptance of the charms of life. But when the beloved regards love as the purest source of highest happiness and finds herself deprived of that source, she strengthens her frustration by breaking into pieces the symbol of acceptance, the jingling colourful bangles. Life is no longer pillowed upon happiness; for it has lost the support on which it could sustain itself."⁹

However, this is an act of self-destruction. Indeed, in the poems of Kamala Das, frustration in love results in death-wish. But, to trace the death-wish to neurotic expressions of a personal psyche is to ignore, as Annette Kolodny points out,

"the possibility that the worlds they [victims of patriarchy] inhabit may in fact be real, or true, and for them the only worlds available, and further, to deny the possibility that their apparently ‘odd’ or unusual responses, may in fact be justifiable or even necessary."¹⁰

In the poem ‘The Suicide’, the persona expresses a willingness to die, if she cannot enjoy love.

"O Sea, I am fed up

I want to be simple

I want to loved

And

If love is not to be had,

I want to be dead…" [DS]

The word "simple" expresses the persona’s hatred of role-playing and the last four lines starkly set up a relationship between love and life. In the canon of Das’s poetry, lust is often equated with death. Concupiscence and sensuality brings death to the soul, while love rejuvenates it.

So the female persona in the poem ‘In Love’ feels the proximity of death, as she goes through the painful rounds of lust.

"…………………. Where

Is room excuse or even

Need for love, for, isn’t each

Embrace a complete thing, a

Finished jigsaw, when mouth on

Mouth, I lie, ignoring my poor

Moody mind, while pleasure

With deliberate gaiety

Trumpets harshly into the

Silence of the room… At noon

I watch sleek crows flying

Like poison on wings — and at

Night, from behind the Burdwan

Road, the corpse-bearers cry ‘Bol

Hari Bol’"¹¹

The "finished jigsaw" represents the mechanical act of bodily union in which the mind does not participate. The coarseness of sensual pleasure, in the auditory image "Trumpets harshly", prohibits the mind, with all its finer faculties, to take part in the act of lust. This mindless indulgence in sensuality that only gratifies the body is equivalent to death, as is reaffirmed in the cry of the "corpse-bearers". The fusion of lust with decay and death is fleshed out in the poem ‘The Wild Bougainvillea’:

"…… I walked through streets beside

The sea, where the barges float, their undersides rotting

and the garbage

Rot, and the dead fish rot,

And I smelt the smell of dying things and the

Heavy smell of rotting

Dead, I walked on streets where the night-girls with sham

Obtrusive breasts sauntered

And under yellow lamps, up-and-down wandered

Beaming their sickly smiles

At men." [SC]

The prostitutes, repeatedly going through the pains of bodily union, have lost the finer sensibilities of the mind as is revealed in their "sickly smiles". The image in "up-and-down wandered" signifies the mechanical action of these unfortunate and unprivileged women who, perhaps out of material need, have laid their body vulnerable to male lust, and have lost their souls in the bargain. The olfactory imagery in the first four lines — the word "rot" and "rotting" have been used four times — links sensuality with decay and death.

The persona attempts an escape from the trappings of lust. In the poem ‘The Prisoner’ she plans an escape:

"As the convict studies

His prisons geography

I study the trappings

Of your body, dear love,

For I must some day find

An escape from its snare." [OSS]

But, the rich endowment of veracity that lies at the root of Das’s poetic vision does not allow her to proclaim the validity of such an "escape".

II

Utterly disgusted with the mundane lust, she turns to the transcendental love of Radha and Krishna. The poet does not present Krishna as a God, he is rather her friend/lover/husband. She unequivocally clarifies her attitude to Krishna.

"But illogical that I am from birth onwards, I have always thought of Krishna as my mate. … And illogically again, I believe that in death I might come face to face with him. Then the shehnai can begin, the birds can sing, the river can start its lullaby, for another of his brides would have come home…"¹²

 

It cannot be doubtlessly asserted whether it is the "private voice" of the poet or one of her multiple public voices, but it can be safely asserted that, in the tradition of Jana Bai and Akka Mahadevi, Kamala Das also demystifies and demythicizes the Lord. Akka Mahadevi, the great Kannada poet, humanized Siva (Chennamallikarjuna) and Janabai, the varkari saint-poet of the low caste Sudra community of Maharashtra , in defence of her lower-caste status lowered the position of God to that of a fellow sweeper who aids her when she is tired and doesn’t mind shoveling dirt for her:

"Jani sweeps the floor,

The Lord collects the dirt,

Carries it upon his head,

Won over by devotion".¹³

 

Kamala Das imbues both Radha and Krishna with the qualities of common human beings, as in the poem ‘The Cobwebs’.

"Do not look into Radha’s eyes O friends

For her soul lies dead inside

As cobwebs block the doorways, unused,

Grief now mars her lonely eyes

He has been gone for years, that Krishna who

Once was hers alone. Perhaps

Another holds him now, a lovelier and

More fortunate one. And yet

Poor Radha must live on, for life is long." [OSS]

Radha is any woman, lovelorn and aggrieved, and yet she must go through the ordeal of a long life. Krishna is any man, charmed by another beautiful belle and in the intoxication of passion, cruelly forgetting his former fiancée. The mythical lovers are humanized and their relationship is often described in erotic terms. This brings into her poetic context the Abhisarika and Sahaja tradition of Sanskrit poetry. 

The gloss of divinity that enfolds the Radha-Krishna myth is shed in Das’s poetry. As Fritz Blackwell puts it:

"…… her (Kamala Das) concern is literary and existential, not religious; she is using a religious concept for a literary motif and metaphor."¹⁴

In fact, the bliss of the mythical relation is contrasted to the frustration of a mundane loveless relation and the eternal lover is contrasted to the earthly lover. In the poem ‘A Man is a Season’, the poet puts forward a contrast between the two lovers:

"A man is a season,

You are eternity,

To teach me this you let me toss my youth like coins

Into various hands, you let me mate with shadows,

You let me sing in empty shrines, you let your wife

Seek ecstasy in others’ arms." [CP]

The "You’ is the eternal, archetypal lover to whom the persona is married. But before she can dissolve into the eternal lover, she must shed her ego. So, it is the eternal lover who makes her "mate" with the earthly lovers. Once she is humbled, once the ego is squeezed out of the self, as it were, through a sieve, she can find eternal bliss in the arms of the archetypal lover. The fact that the several relationships of the poetic persona with earthly lovers are mere stepping-stones to the eternal union is made clear by Das in ‘My Story’.

"Physical integrity must carry with it a certain pride that is a burden to the soul. Perhaps it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many ways, so that the soul turned humble for a change."¹⁵

 

Humbling of the soul, which denotes a transcendence of the self, is a prerequisite for the congress with eternity. The ultra-physical nature of the Radha-Krishna relationship is brought out in the poem ‘Radha Krishna’.

"This becomes from this hour

our river and this old kadamba

tree, ours alone, for our homeless

souls to return someday,

to hang like bats

from its pure physicality." [OSS]

The poet’s soul is "homeless" because it has not yet reached the eternal abode. The soul is compared to the nocturnal "bats" because it can only hope to view the infinite after the darkness of death envelops her conscious vision. The reference to the "river" and the "Kadamba" tree help to localize, and hence, concretize the experience. 

The body is the source of all sins, and once the "physicality" is shed the soul is ready to merge with the infinite. The poem ‘Radha’ poignantly describes the union of the finite and the infinite:

"The long waiting

Had made their bond so chaste, and all the doubting

And the reasoning

So that in his first true embrace, she was girl

And virgin crying

Everything in me

Is melting, even the hardness at the core

Krishna, I am melting, melting, melting

Nothing remains but

You." [OSS]

The triple repetition of the word "melting" is no sentimental verbosity as Eunice de Souza opines; it rather suggests the gradual dissolving of the finite into the infinite, the Atma uniting with the Brahman. As a result of this merger, the finite "me" loses her individual existence and becomes a part of the infinite "You". 

The union of the finite with the infinite is the gamut of the Bhakti cult. One of the songs of Mira Bai expresses such an union.

"Mine is Gopal, the Mountain-Holder; there is no one else.

On his head he wears the peacock-crown: He alone is my husband.

Father, mother, brother, relative: I have none to call my own. I've forsaken both God, and the family's honour: what should I do?

I've sat near the holy ones, and I've lost shame before the people.

I've torn my scarf into shreds; I'm all wrapped up in a blanket.

I took off my finery of pearls and coral, and

strung a garland of wildwood flowers.

With my tears, I watered the creeper of love that I planted;

Now the creeper has grown spread all over, and borne the fruit of bliss. The churner of the milk churned with great love.

When I took out the butter, no need to drink any buttermilk.

I came for the sake of love-devotion; seeing the world, I wept.

Mira is the maidservant of the Mountain-Holder: now with love

He take me across to the further shore."¹⁶

The passage shows that renunciation of everything earthly, what Kamala Das terms "physicality", leads to union with the divine, archetypal lover. The "nudity" is symbolic of the pre-Lapsarian state of innocence that does not feel shame in shedding clothes. The "Mountain-Holder" is, of course, Krishna. A legend has it that once Krishna held up mount Govardhan to save the people of Braja from deluge. Thus, it would not be irrelevant to locate Das’s poetry in the tradition of the Bhakti cult.

Once the union with the eternal lover is effected there is no need to look beyond. Being a prisoner to the infinite is blissful and there is no need of escape. In the poem ‘Krishna’, the poetic persona describes the pleasure of such an imprisonment:

"Your body is my prison, Krishna,

I cannot see beyond it.

Your darkness blinds me,

Your love words shut out the wise world’s din." [OSS]

The adjective "wise" is packed with irony. With the soul-quenching "world’s din" shut out, the persona enjoys a blissful coexistence with the infinite. The joy of such a union cannot be hindered by the advances of the earthly lover who only touches the body, the soul of the persona being safely couched with the eternal lover. In the poem ‘The Maggots’, Radha feels:

"At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna

Loved her for the last time and left….

That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt

So dead that he asked, what is wrong,

Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,

No, not at all, but thought, what is

It to the corpse if the maggots nip?" [OSS]

The soul is united with Krishna and so the body is merely a corpse. The husband is only as insignificant as a maggot biting the soulless, dead body. His "kisses" do not arise any emotion, either of elation or of disgust, because the body, being dead, is insensitive and the soul is safely couched with the infinite.

Kamala Das glorifies a love that transcends the dimensions of the body and looks beyond the "chilling flesh". But the barriers of the body cannot be disregarded, it needs to be conquered with great pains. Once the obstacle of the flesh is conquered, one becomes sure of her destination and needs waver no more in life’s course. In ‘Lines Addressed to a Devdasi’, the poet drives home this notion:

"Ultimately there comes a time

When all faces look alike

All voices sound similar

And trees and lakes and mountains

Appear to bear a common signature.

It is then that you walk past your friends

And not recognize

And hear their questions but pick

No meaning out of words

It is then your desires cease

And a home sickness begins

And you sit down on the temple steps

A silent Devdasi, lovelorn

And aware of her destination…" [CP]

This is the state of utter resignation that dawns before the final union with the infinite. All nature — human beings are also part of nature — lose their external, individual identities and betray their common essences to the Devdasi’s vision. "Words" are finite and she does not understand them because with the widening of her "mental horizons" she only comprehends the infinite.

This is the ennobling quality of love. Das’s search for such a transcendental love has often been misread and misinterpreted. The glory of her quest lies in the fact that it is unfinished, and hence, eternal. In her search for a love that ushers a sexual-spiritual fulfillment, she breaks new grounds. She presents the Radha-Krishna myth in an innovative manner. But, her quest is by no means untraditional. It is rooted in the different traditions of Indian poetry. Her poetic expression of a pursuit for love is a rich blend of "tradition and the individual talent".¹⁷

 

References:

1. Kamala Das, My Story (Kottayam, 2004), p. 124.

2. Kamala Das, ‘A Writer’s Predicament: A Personal Statement’, dated, March

12, 1981. Presented to the writer as a manuscript, p. 2.

3. Kamala Das, My Story (Kottayam, 2004), p. 15.

4. Ibid., p. 69.

5. Ibid., p. 140.

6. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English (New Delhi, 2004), p. 677.

7. T.N. Dhar, ‘Eros Denied: Love in the Poetry of Kamala Das’, Atma Ram

(ed.), Contemporary Indian-English Poetry (Calcutta, 1988), p. 23.

8. Anisur Rahaman, Expressive Form in the Poetry of Kamala Das (New

Delhi, 1981), p. 49.

9. Subhas C. Saha, Modern Indo-Anglian Love Poetry (Calcutta, 1971), p. 20.

10. Quoted in Elaine Showalter, ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’ in Philip Rice &

Patricia Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory ( New York, 2001), p. 152.

11. V.K. Gokak, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry (Delhi, 2004), p.

271.

12. Kamala Das, ‘Sex: Mindless Surrender or Humming Fiesta?’, Femina,

dated. June 6, 1975, p. 19.

13. Susie Tharu & K. Lalita (eds.), Women Writing in India (Vol. I), (New Delhi,

1991), p. 83.

14. Fritz Blackwell, ‘ Krishna Motifs in the Poetry of Sarojini Naidu and Kamala

Das’, Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 13, No. 1— 4, 1978.

15. Kamala Das, My Story (Kottayam, 2004), p. 146.

16. From the internet, http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/mira.html .

17. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, D.J. Enright and Ernst De

Chickera (ed.) English Critical Texts (New Delhi, 1997), p. 293.

(Source: www.museindia.com; Muse India; Issue 30)

Image of Indian Woman in Woman’s Poetry

Image of Indian Woman in Woman’s Poetry

By Dr Kalpna Rajput

Woman’s voice was heard for long and from ages but only in the songs sung to highlight the spiritual yearning or in the lyrics and the passionate love songs. Indian woman for long had been encircled in the whirlpool of pain and suffering of orthodox society. Though much has been done to relieve them from the plight from the time of William Bentick to curtail the evil practices against woman and that social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy clamored for widow remarriages and for restoration of her rights. But the pace of reformation is still slow. The voice of the women is yet to be heard though women in India have been fortunate enough to occupy high and honourable places of power. But the fact remains that traditional bound society is yet to liberate the Indian women fully. It cannot be denied that there are clear differences between male and female temperaments and this difference would show in every thing to which both sexes turn their hand. In art apart from the necessary standards of technical efficiency, what matter the expression of the individual temperament is. I am not trying to prove that one (male or female) is superior to the other in the emotional vitality. I honestly feel that there are such features without denying the essential fact that any satisfactory work of is produced under conditions of total incandescence of the whole personality. It is also possible that what are known as female ingredients are features of poetic style of thematic choice not altogether absent in male writers but which occur in the female writers with great frequency. As a preliminary exercise in identifying the such features and the overall view of women poets about Indian women is intended to present the poetry of women poets in our country is Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpandey, Monika Verma, Lakshmi Kannan, Mamta Kalia, Lila Ray, Gauri Pant, Margaret Chatterjee, Chitra Prasad, Rohini Gupta and Anna Sujata Modayil. The emergence of a large number of women poets is significant features of Post-independence Poetry. These Indian English women poets communicate a powerful female sensibility which does not find expression in their male counterparts.

Women poets write consciously as women. What distinguishes their poetry is their confessional and autobiographical note, frank, candid, bold and realistic expressions of their attitude to woman. Commenting on the feminine sensibility in Indian English Poetry Murli Das Melwani says:
Their themes are few in number. Thwarted desires, the frustration of living in a male dominated world, Sex and of course Love are common ones. Contemporary situations are finding more frequent mention in their poems. The viewpoint is peculiarly feminine, a distinctive tone setting of their work from the rest of Indo English Poetry. Another distinguishing mark is the frequency with which imagery is used to suggest personal reactions. (Melwani: 35)

A vast impact of surrounding milieu can be glanced in the poetry of these Indian Women Poets. Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu are called the precursors of women poetry. In those olden times the condition of woman was not so crucial as is now but there was also rampant the slavery of orthodox beliefs, although a strong impression of righteousness, love and peace can be seen in the women of ancient times. In the past the image of woman was that of Kali, Uma, Lakshmi, Durga, Sita and Anusuya whom man also gave full reverence. The images of the woman are basically drawn from the Hindu religious texts i.e. the Ramayana, the Mahabharata Shrimad Bhagvada Gita and Vishnu Puran. A.N.Dwivedi aptly remarks:
Savitri ,Sita and Jagadhya Uma are the ideal representative of Indian womanhood and offer an opportunity to the poetess to reveal the mysterious feminine nature. Toru’s intimate feelings are expressed through them.

In the poem ‘Savitri’, Savitri the ideal of Indian womanhood follows Yama boldly and when she is asked to retrace her steps home and perform the duties of a widow, she strictly denies:
If fate so rules, that I should feel
The miseries of a widow’s life
Can man’s device the doom repeal? (118)

In ‘Lakshman’ and ‘Savitri’ both Sita and Savitri speak in alike tone in relation to love and attachment to their lords. Savitri says:
No weariness, O death, I feel
And how should I by the side
Of Satyavan ? in Woe and  weal
To be a help mate swears the bride
This is my place. (131)

When Sita feels that Ram’s life is in peril, she also says:
Learn this – whatever comes may come,
But I shall not survive my love
Of all my thoughts here is the sum!
Witness it God’s in heaven above
If fire can burn or water drown
I follow him.” (141)

In the poem ‘Sita’ she has she has beautifully portrayed the plight of a rejected wife and her children. K.R.S.Iyanger comments:
This almost perfect poem is attribute to Toru’s mother’s genius for story telling, never Toru had written more feelingly or evoked a scene or an emotion as unforgettable. (65) 

Sarojini Naidu or the Bharat Kokila is the most lyrical woman poet of India. She made more definite contribution to Indian English Poetry. Her poetry reflects her involvement with Indian life. She is an epitome of Indian womanhood and commands respect from the younger generation as an intrepid freedom fighter. She said about herself:

The lyric child had grown into the lyric woman. All the instincts of her awakening womanhood for the intoxication of love and the joy of life were deeply interfused with the more urgent need of the poet’s soul. For a perfect sympathy with its incommunicable vision its subtle and inexpressible thoughts.

In her poems like “Indian Love Song”, ‘Village Song’, ‘Pardanashin’ and ‘Indian Dancers’, she has portrayed the life of Indian Woman of different sects where women are seen dancing enjoying and involved in the thoughts of their lovers. A beautiful talk is worth noting here:
“Mother mine, to the wild forest I am going,
where upon the Champs boughs the Champa buds are blowing:
To the koil- haunted river- isles where lotus lilies glisten
The voices of fairy- folk are calling me, O listen!” (48)

Love is the prominent theme of her poetry where woman are shown as a sacred beloved who are ready to surrender before their lovers. ‘If You Call Me’, ‘The Path of Tears’, ‘The sanctuary’ and ‘The Worship of Love’ mirror the role of woman as a beloved in the diverse moods. In ‘If You Call Me’ the beloved is longing to move swiftly on the call of her lover. Here the lovers are lord Krishna and Radha:
If You call me I will come
Swifter O my love,
Than a trembling forest deer
Or a panting dove,
Swifter than a snake that flies
To the charmer’s thrall
If You call me I will come
Fearless what befall. (33)

In her poems we find woman complaining of her negligence but at the same time she shows her preparedness to accept all humiliation and suffering at his hands as sweet token of love. ‘Love Guerdon’ gives an example of the same:
Fires were the wounds You struck me O my love
And bitter were the blows!
Sweeter from dear hands all suffering
That rich love tokens other comrades bring
Of crimson Oleander and of rose(33)

Here we can mark out her sensuous ardour of passion:
Crush me o love, betwixt thy radiant fingers
Like a frail lemon leaf or basil bloom,
Till aught to me that lives for thee or ligers
Be but the wraith of memories perfume,
And every sunset wind that wadereth
Grow sweeter for my death. (33)

Sarojini’s poems breathe an Indian air with particular light on women and their glory. They are mellifluous and catching and disclose an image of ideal woman of Ancient times. Dr. S.Z.H.Abidi remarks:
A study of Sarojini Naidu’s poetry is a delightful affair. She is a poet of colour and melody and beauty while her poems, one is bound to be deeply involved in her aesthetic response to things.

Kamala Das is one of those luminary poets whose name is synonymous with Modern Indian English Poetry and who has opened new dimensions in the field of Recent Indian English Poetry. Her feminine sensibility finds its finest and fullest expression in her love poems. Her bold and straight forward treatment of love and sex and her emphasis that is not to the blind worship of the husband but the consummation of love make her peculiar and precursor of woman’s poetry in modern Era. Kamla Das is a skilled painter of images and her poetry is a finely woven piece of imagery where she mingles the tinge of memory and her observing expressions into one. Looking at her mother at sixty six, she portrays:
………I saw my mother, beside me,
Doze, open mouthed, her face ashen like that
Of a corpse and realized with pain
That she was as old as she looked, but soon
Put that thought away………………
……………I looked again at her, wan, pale
As a late winter moon and felt that old
Familiar ache, my childhood fear
But all I said was, see you soon Amma
All I did was smile and smile and smile. (Hers 29)

Kamla Das in her poetry carries the theme of independence in her poetry when she writes:
Women, is this happiness, this lying buried
Beneath a man? It is time again to come alive,
The world extends a lot beyond his six foot frame.”(72)

And again she says:
“On the bed with him, the boundaries of
Paradise had shrunk to a more
Six by two and afterwards, when we walked
Out together, they
Widened to hold the unknowing city.(SIP 72)

In the poem after poem, she is interested only in talking about her sexual exploit, her physical life and moods of her body. This is a valid theme for any particular poet. Kamla Das plays out her rules of unhappy woman, unhappy wife, and mistress to Youngman, mother, reluctant nymphomaniac pining for the lost joys of innocent and childhood.

There was a time when our lusts were
Lying multicoloured flags of no
Particular country. We lay
On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just
The toys that children leave behind,
And we asked each other, what is
The use, what is the bloody use?
That was the only kind of love,
This hacking at each others’ parts
Light convicts hacking breaking clods
At noon.(IEP 96)

She presents a feminist movement through her poetry. She discovers male hegemony from the inner care of her feminine consciousness. She has delineated her feminist voice through sex imagery. It is the woman who offers to man the sensual pleasure of her body:
Gift him what makes you woman, be sent of
Long here, the musk of sweat between the breasts
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
And lap female hungers.(page 131)

The growth he generally hints at in her poetry is not of virgin into woman but of a girl into wife and mother. She feels raped in life by all- husband, lover, society and also the humorous heaven. On the contrary, the awareness of that peace which come with the soul’s union with the divine as in the Radha Krishna poem remains a far off vision that she is trying to reach, through the throes of physical frustration. Sri Raghunandan remarks,

Kamala Das in her search for freedom from bond imposed on women by society, explore the matriarchal status of women that once existed in Kerala, and tried to delve into Krishna Radha stories of ideal love to search for a meaning in human relationship.

Among the numberless voices surging and floating on the surface of Indian English writing, “S. Radhamani”, says S.L. Peeran, “is a frail woman who has all the chappings of an Indian woman, tradition bound, deeply spiritual, a loving devoted wife, a duty-conscious mother, a conscious citizen, a humble teacher in male dominated society and voice of suffering woman in all corners of the society.” With her published volumes of poetry ‘The Times Ahead are Propitious’ (1996), ‘Thistle and Transformation’ (1998), ‘Tirings of Transition’ (2000) and ‘Obsessions and Transitional Exuberance’(2001), she has given bent to the rampant pain, suffering and the depravation of the basic rights to the woman, making her go round the tread mill of all social evils and tortures heaped on her.

Her poem ‘My Luxary’ expresses the agony of the loneliness of women:
How often loneliness has served me
Soothing as soothsayer.
More often than not, my aloneness
Has assured me with
Assurance of unconditional prayer.          

Almost all the collection of her poetry speak aloud for the cause of woman but she is not only the champion of the rights of woman but she also torch bears the path of modern woman, who has been blind folded by the extreme light of westernization and modernization. In the poem ‘A Soliloquy’, the poet advices wives to be true and loyal alike Savitri:
Whether you get married to man young
You must be true to your beloved or old partner.

Some other poems like ‘Publish or Perish’, ‘Grief is but Brief’, ‘Before and Behind Ph.D.’, ‘A Drive on the Night Street’, ‘Tender to be Tethered or Withered’, ‘Penury Bounteous’ and ‘suffering to What Extent’ are the woeful tales of the exploitation, depravation, sufferings, frustrations and turmoil of woman in the present time.

Another luminary poetess Gauri Deshpande shows different feminine sensitivity; full of events, baffling, sensuous and captivating. Love for her is not of consummation and fulfillment but a torment of flesh as well as spirit. In ‘The Guest’, Gauri Desh Pande recalls the unwelcome lover, who lived with her and enjoyed her, has gone now living her empty. The depth of feeling of the loss is unequivocally expressed in the following lines:
You are gone now
The perfect mouth that kissed my words no
Longer by,
And as the clouds heap and heap upon the west
I lie empty barren and bereft. (56)          

In some of her poems she complains of her lover’s relationship with other woman and at the same time states:
You choose well, my love
For before you they have been all
Taught me carefully to read contempt
In other faces, making me adept
At acceptance and regret.(59)          

True in the spirit of Indian girl, she pines for lover imagining him as Lord Shiva- the unattainable but much sought after the lover. According to her, when women talk among themselves, they become warm, intimate and personal. She says:
Sometimes you want to talk
About love and despair
And the unforgetfulness of children
A man is no use whatever then.(61)

‘A Lunch on The train’ reflects her views on the strange condition of middle class women when they are married at too young age:
The woman in front of me, a mere girl,
Too young to have been a mother of three
Is struggling vainly to feed one, control
The other, and the third is abandoned
From a weary care.

Lakshmi Kannan, a bilingual writer in Tamil and English is a well known signature of Indian English Poetry. She has remarkable capacity for wielding English language to express Indian feminine sensibility and to alter it in order to suit her own feelings. She is woman first well aware of her emotions, psyche and place in male dominated society. ‘I’ in her poetry stands for woman. Lakshmi Kannan writes about her education, her adolescence and the warning voice of elders:
No, no, don’t run,
Don’t take long strides, Don’t raise your voice,
Be a everyman, be moderate in everything
Be a model of mediocrity.(113)

Various stages of woman’s life are vividly described. The desire of son is an important factor in woman’s life:
There aren’t enough brakes
To the money
War- horse-powered conjunctures
About
The thirst for a son.”(116)

Here, she writes about womanhood:
“Woman,
Tugged by occult pulls
The female cycle secret
Throbs with the star.(116)

Lila Ray comments:
Lakshmi Kannan’s task has been the task of every woman, the task of discovering herself, for the ‘I’ is confused even with an appendix of a name, an age and a sex.

The poetry of Mamta Kalia amalgamates the themes of love, marriage, family life and society where she impresses us for her sharp intellectual quality and autobiographical flavor. The poem ‘Tribute to Papa and Other Poems’ brings forth the contrast between her father’s idealism which could not endow prosperity on him and her fascination for modern life which is without idealism and values:
Who cares for you Papa?
Who cares for your clean thoughts, clean words, clean teeth?
Who wants to be an angel like you?
Who wants it?
You are an unsuccessful man, Papa.
Couldn’t wangle a cosy place in the world.
You have always lived a life of limited dreams.”(306)

She discards the sanctities of life and believes in free sex:
Everything about you clashes with nearly everything about me
You suspected I am having a love affair these days
But You are too shy to have it confirmed
What if my tummy starts showing gradually
And I refuse it curetted
But I’ll be careful, Papa,
Or I know you’ll at once think of suicide. (S.I.E.P., 306)

The poetry of Anna Sujata Modayil is poetry of experience and an insight into life, nature and human nature of modern India. In ‘Crucifixions’ she begins with her realization of the unbearable waiting. The unbearable pain of which is known only to the woman who ‘have waited’ and ‘who wait.’ The exoteric joy of waiting and longing creates a common bond among them:
Of our common womanhood
And the secret knowledge of suffering
Something shared, not spoken of. (S.C.I.E.V., 33)

Her poem ‘Women’s loneliness’ mirrors the feminine longing for perfection, her ever-eluding of true love, her actual drudgery labor and search for joys of tomorrow that will ultimately end in loneliness:
Woman’s loneliness is a special thing incommunicable
She longs for perfection
But finds pain.
True love eludes her
Like dreams lost in the night.
At the special, still point of her being,
She weeps for what can never be
But no one knows about this
She bears children,
She cooks and cleans,
And her body grows old.
The man she loved
Search for younger lovers
But beneath the every day,
Below the surface
Lies a woman’s loneliness.

The poems by Indian women today constitutes a distinct phenomenon and what has made the contemporary English verse by Indian Women a phenomenon is the fact that they are not lagging for behind  their male counterparts in the point of creativity. They have hardly written any light-hearted verse. They have carved out a distinct image of woman and taken them out of their cozy power of old world tradition and express their feelings and thoughts without any inhibitions. The woman presented by Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu as an ideal one that love and is loved by all but we find a sea change in the image of woman created by contemporary female poets. Kamla Das is the pioneer in this category of poetesses who wrote for the art for art’s sake without dwindling their minds in the ideals and doctrines of ancient Hindu life. In this regard their literature can be influenced much with the literature of the west and can be listed in the school of Freud, Jung, Marx, Simon De Beouviour and Kierkegard. Now in the literature of such women poets are no more considered as commodity, a plaything, a maid or a sex toy but they have their own identity and they have their own platform where they can speak out loud boldly about their rights on love, sex and dignity. Mostly the definitions about woman’s conduct, behaviour and existence were given by men and the old conventional notions of male dominated society so rude, unbearable and depressive that a long depression gave birth to the movement of reform and restoration of women’s state and rights which at first was germinated in the poems of these poetesses. The several references from the eminent poetesses clearly show that the concept of new woman will be justified only by bringing a radical change in public attitude towards man-woman relationships. The general perspective about woman as a shadow figures to a male care taker, be he a father, a husband or a son, continue to persist. Man’s affinity to woman is most often the bond that exists between the master and the slave. This state is called for a concerted effort by the women poets to demolish such notions and to assert the dignity and equality of woman in the family as well as in the wider social life.

References:
  Melwani, Murli Das ‘Indo Anglian Women Poets’, Themes in Indo Anglian Literature.1977. Bareilly; P.B. D.

  A.N.Dwivedi, ‘Toru Dutt as a Poetess’,Toru Dutt’s Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot. 1989.

  K. R. S. Iyenger, ‘Sarojini Naidu’, Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling Pub. 1984.

  P.C. Kotoky, ‘Sarojini Naidu’, Indo English Poetry. Guwahati: University Pub., 1969.

  S.Z.H. Abidi, ‘Sarojini Naidu’, Studies in Indo Anglian Poetry. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot. 1987.

  B.K.Das, ‘Kamala Das & Making of Indian English Idiom’, Critical Essays on Poetry. New Delhi: Bahri Pub. 1987.

  ‘A Study of Kamla Das’s Poems’, Critical Studies in Indian Writing in English. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot. 2005.

  Hers (An Anthology of Women Poets), Kolkata: Writers Workshop. 2002.

  O. P. Bhatnagar(ed.), ‘Mary and Mira – A Study of Kamla Das ,’ Studies In Indian Poetry in English, 1985.

  Luxmi Raghunanandan, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English. (Blurb), 1990.

   B.K. Das, ‘Poetry of Gauri Deshpandey’ Modern Indo English Poetry’. Bareilly: Preakash Book Depot. 1990.

  Satish Kumar, ‘Women Poets’, A Survey of Indian English Poetry. Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot. 2001.

A.N.Dwivedi (ed.), ‘Anna Sujata Modiyal’, Studies in Contemporary Indo English Verse. Bareilly: Preakash Book Depot. 1989.


* Dr Kalpna Rajput is a poet, critic and translator who has edited two books entitled Pearls of Wisdom Part One and Two.