Radical Feminism in Kamala Das’s Poetry
- Javed Hussain Khan,
Sardar Patel University
Kamala Das has apparently received scant critical attention in this
country insofar as her poetic creations are concerned, and even such attention largely
borders on the judgmental. What has been highlighted in criticism of her poetry
is her obsession with sex and promiscuity. Having considered the entire gamut
of her poetic creation objectively, we find that her so-called obsession with
sex and the vehemence with it finds articulation in her poems is the product of
her deep concern against the issue of gender discrimination. It is in this
sense that there is evidence of radical feminism in Kamala Das’s poems in
English or English translation, no matter what her critics might have had said so
far.
Our aim in this paper is not only to show how her poems address a
range of issues like love, lovemaking, loneliness of women, and their physical,
psychological, and sexual exploitation, but also to explain how it cannot be merely
coincidental that there is almost total similarity between Das’s concerns and
those of other feminists during the second wave of feminism from mid-1960s to
1980s, which manifested as radical feminism some time towards the middle or end
of the 1970s. We hope to be able to argue that a good look into the poems that
form a part of collections of poetry like Summer
in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants
(1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems
(1973), culminating with Only the Soul
Knows How to Sing (1996) contain sufficient evidence of radical feminism.
Accordingly, we have divided this paper into six sections beginning
with a brief historical account of the developments in the feminist movement.
on feminism, We shall devote the sections that follow the first and preceding
the last to identify and elaborate on the significance of the titles of major
poetry collections and poems of Kamala Das respectively by examining closely sixteen
of her major poems and relevant portions of the other important poems, and then
draw upon the features identified in the first section to cite evidence of
their reflection in Kamala Das’s poems. We shall also make an attempt to explore
the appropriate texts to trace the development of the ‘myth and legend’ of
Krishna and the crucial strands of thought in Kamala Das’s poems to place the
man-woman relationship as she sees it in its proper perspective. We shall
conclude our discussion by making certain observations on the basis of the
major points made in the preceding sections.
1
History takes note of three waves of feminism. The first-wave of feminism
appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century in the USA
and Europe and lasted for a major part of the 20th century.
It came by way of a response to the liberal politics
and problems of the industrial society when the feminist movement began
to seek access
and equal opportunities for women. The second-wave
of feminism followed in the 1960s to 1970s in post-war western model of welfare societies in response to other ‘oppressed’ groups like the Afro-Asians, those practising other forms of sexuality,
and the rise of the New Left. Associated as it was with demands
for radical reforms and
differential rights, this wave continued all the way
through to the
1980s to 1990s. The third-wave that followed subsequently
from the mid-1990s
onward focussed on issues born out of the inevitable shift to a postcolonial
and post-socialist world order. An offshoot of this manifested itself in what
is called the ‘grrl’ rhetoric that seeks to address the problems of equity and differentiation
and the polemics of evolution vs revolution.
Feminist writers who lived and wrote during the second-wave
of feminism sought to raise their voice against all forms of oppression based on
gender, colour of the skin, and a different sexual orientation, seeing these as
a contradiction within the western model of the welfare
state. It took a radical turn in the wake of demands for drastic reforms and equal rights in the 1980s and 1990s when this wave reached a peak. The
latter part associated with radical turn is ordinarily referred to as radical feminism. Radical feminism thus marked the beginning of revolutionary political
views primary aimed at advocating, as a part of their demands, the restoration
of balance by seeking to eliminate the heavy bias in favour of men, and other
related issues. A close consideration of the key ideas that informed
and structured the discourse in radical feminism brings to light the use of the
following set of premises:
1
Patriarchy, prevalent
in all societies, leads to gender-specific claims to superiority on the ground
that the seed of man (the phallic principle) helps bring a new life into being
and ensures the continuity of the family.
2
Patriarchy ignores the fact that gender inequality has no legal basis
and women do not belong to a ‘sex class’, and this leads to oppression and exploitation
of women for non-/extra-scientific reasons like biology (anatomical structure),
the institution of marriage (making equals unequal), and heterosexuality
(disapproval of other forms of sexuality) as it does in case of social class and ethnicity.
3
Institutionalized relationships which show a complex of hierarchies
like father-son, husband-wife, superior-subordinate, male-female etc were used
to pave the way for the subsequent establishment of an investor-investment kind
of structure, leading to gender and economic exploitation.
4
Share in control over technology and development is necessary for
ensuring women’s liberation as it would free them from the processes of
conceiving, bearing babies, childbirth, and the subsequent responsibility for
their nurture.
5
All men are neither
‘the class enemy’ of women nor all male-female relationships are oppressive and
exploitative in nature, with the fight being restricted to the demand for a
fair share of control over development, which was an exclusively male preserve
thus far.
6
Women, unlike men, experience a dual form of exploitation because men exercise
some or the other form of unnatural authority to oppress women both at the
workplace and within the confines of their homes and this high-handedness essentially
symbolizes the treatment of women as a commodity.
Thus, radical feminist movement, it appears from
the discussion above, battled patriarchy on the ground of its (a) phallic-centred claims to superiority, (b) use of institutionalized
hierarchies and structures to perpetrate these claims, (c) sole control over development, (d) use of biology and heterosexuality to
create restrictions, (e) commodification of women at home and at work, and (f) insensitive
treatment of women for childbirth. This formed the basis for the ‘grrrl’
rhetoric in the mid-1990s.
The term ‘grrrl’ is a
reference to a young woman considered to be independent and strong or
aggressive, especially with regard to her attitude to men or her own sexuality.
It found its entry into the English lexicon sometime between the beginning and
middle of the 1990s.1 The
third-wave of feminism, believed to have been launched by an underground
feminist punk rock movement called the ‘Riot grrrl’ had its origins in the USA.
It sought to advocate female empowerment by addressing issues like rape,
domestic violence, sexuality, patriarchy etc considered to be forms of
discrimination and subordination by almost all versions of feminism. We cannot
help observing that the noun form ‘grrrl’, which resonates the ‘grrr’ sound
associated with both protest and warning made by certain categories of the wild
life, derives its name and legitimacy from that underground punk rock movement.
This is not to draw, in any way, a parallel between ‘grrrl’ as a word ‘grrr’ as
a sound but have taken liberty to mention it largely due to that resonance
there. Independent and strong women’s use of ‘girrl’ rhetoric came to
be recognized as an artful, aggressive and effective discourse pattern reflecting
their attitude to men and sexuality.
2
We seek to identify and elaborate on the significance of the titles
of major poetry collections of Kamala Das in this section by examining closely sixteen
of her major poems and relevant portions of the other important poems and
drawing upon the features identified in the first section to point out the
evidence of their reflection in Kamala Das’s poetry. We shall focus
attention on the indicative references contained in the self-explanatory titles of her major collections of poetry mentioned to begin with.
We find that the word ‘summer’ used in the title of the collection Summer in Calcutta, which is ordinarily
taken to mean the warmest season of the year, can also be used mean the mature
stage of one’s life, work etc. Kamala Das said she found her growth ‘gratifying’
due to the ‘many avatars, avatarams in one life’ in response to a question
on her evolution as a writer in her famous Warrier interview.2 She admitted to the
interviewer that she was eager and ‘in a hurry’ to go through all that ‘experience’,
‘see’ and ‘hear’ things; never realized when she had grown old; and does not
even at that given point in time, arguing that ‘one is ageless’ within one’s
own self. Kamala Das, who was born in 1934, was given away in marriage at 15
and mothered her first child Jaisurya at the age of 16. She admits in the Warrier
interview that she was not mature enough for childbirth at that time and
perhaps did not understand what conception and motherhood entailed, asserting
thereafter that ‘I was mature enough to be a mother only when my third son was
born.’ A person matures both in terms of chronology and experiences and becomes
more sensible and wiser over a period of time.
The term ‘descendant’ used in The
Descendants is also especially suggestive because it presupposes an ‘ancestor’,
‘ancestry’ and a genealogy. The descendants may be a part of a nucleus, or a
larger family consisting of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and so on, but
the fact remains that they derive their legitimacy and fortunes from their ancestors
within a feudal structure. Ancestry brings with it family tradition, or ‘a way
of life’ as our sages tells us, including customs, rites and rituals. Kamala
Das drew her ancestry from the aristocratic matriarchal Nair community of
Malabar on her maternal side and the peasant class with a strong influence of
the Gandhian principles of austerity on her paternal side. So she had in her a veritable
blend of the genes of the aristocracy and the commoner which seems to us to
have been reason for a confusion of identities in her. The tradition in the
aristocratic Nair community was to cremate their dead in the southern compound
of their traditional matriarchal home, Nalappat House. Paying his tribute to
her in The Hindu Vijay Nambisan
quotes her as having told her neighbours before leaving Kerala in 2006 that she
would ‘return here after death, in whatever form, as a bird or a deer’ and that
she would be a ‘part of this earth’.3
Max Muller traces the probable
ancestry of the Nairs to the union between the ‘Nagar’ community of ‘Naga’
farmers and sailors and ‘Aiyar’ community of cattle breeders and warriors,
which inhabited the area between Lothal and Sind where River Sindhu flowed into
the Arabian Sea. This union created a new community of ‘Nayars’ later named the
‘Nairs’. The Nairs were swordsmen from the west coast of India who subscribed
to a matriarchal (Marumakkathayam in
Malayalam) system of society. The Nair women enjoyed liberty, and commanded respect,
prestige, and power under the right to property through inheritance and
descent. This system was legalised through a royal decree during the second
Chera Empire after the Empire lost a majority of its Nair fighters in the Chera-Chola
wars.
The matriarchal system was
structured around a family ‘house’ (Tharavadu
in Malayalam) which was controlled by the mother, her brothers and younger
sisters, and her children. The oldest brother (Karanavar in Malayalam) acted both as the head of the
household and the manager of the family estate. Since children in the family
traced their descent from their mother, they were considered as belonging to
her family, and such family owned the property collectively. The law had a
provision to club the children’s share in the property with that of their
mother’s in any division of property if and when it took place in future.
An obligatory tradition in the
community necessitated a ritual when a Nair girl reached puberty. Her parents
invited a ‘bridegroom’ chosen from the Machcham-Pikkars as per the established
tradition fashioned through the ancient Royal writs, to ‘marry’ her in a formal
ceremony known as ‘Thaalikettu’. Formalities like comparing
horoscopes, setting the date, the auspicious hour (Mahurat) etc were followed. The
girl was taken in procession to a tank for a bath by one of the girl’s would-be
sisters-in-law, dressed thereafter in bridal attire, bedecked with jewellery, brought
back to her house, and was seated in a separate room. After a sumptuous feast,
the family Brahmin, or her brother, would tie a piece of string (Prathisara-bandham)
round her wrist amid singing of ‘Subhadra Veli’ (commemorating the Arjun-Subhadra
marriage) by the Ambalavaasi Brahmin women. These women then garlanded the
groom and invited him for marriage. The groom was given a traditional welcome,
and the girl’s brother or maternal uncle washed his feet. The groom then tied a
‘Thaali’ round her neck in a ceremony. The groom’s men, the Machchampi, escorted
the girl into the ‘Manavara’, a decorated apartment in the inner part of
the house, where both the couple were expected to ‘cohabitate’ for three days. On
the fourth morning, the family Brahmin removed the string tied round the
groom’s and bride’s wrists on the first day and performed purificatory rites. The
couple was once again taken to the neighbouring tank to bathe, after which the
bride’s father and uncle would bid farewell to the groom with gifts like rings,
ear-rings, money and clothes.4
Moving on to the next collection, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, we find that the word ‘playhouse’
could have at least two meanings: (a) a theatre, and (b) a small model of a
house wherein children store their toys and play with them. Although the word
here is not hyphenated, it could have been taken as the expression with origins
in 1870s ‘to play house’ which is suggestive of ‘having sex’. We use it in a
more innocent sense in which it is taken in the rural countryside in India.
Children enact the roles of elders in terms of traditions, customs, beliefs etc
while playing with their dolls. We have a fine example of this in Aa Mani (1984), a Kannada play by the
late Kirtinath Kurtkoti, translated into Hindi as Woh Ghar (That House),
and subsequently made into a television film by actor-director Girish Karnad.5 The play is about how a
children’s game in an old house loses innocence and turns serious when the
children begin to enact real-life situations like marriage and a death in the
family. It has a happy end, however, with the ‘mother ghost’ residing in that
house appearing before them to bless them, and to tell them in a typical fashion,
quite Eliotesque in nature, that the past does not impede the present but tends
to enhance it.
One is also reminded of Nora’s complaint to her husband Torvald in
Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House
that their home ‘has been nothing but a play-room’, she has been his ‘doll-wife’
and like her who was ‘just as at home Papa’s doll-child’, her children have
been her ‘dolls.’6 This
is not to suggest that Kamala Das had read Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House or Kurtkoti’s Aa
Mani. We use these two examples only to buttress the point we had made about
the word ‘playhouse’. For, the ‘playhouse’ appears to symbolize the girl-woman narrator’s
painful experiences as it does in Kamala Das’s “An Introduction”.
The title Only the Soul Knows
How to Sing is similarly quite enlightening. ‘Soul’ is a reference the spiritual
or immaterial part of a person, which is often regarded as immortal. However,
at the same time, it is marked by its use to refer to the moral, emotional, or
intellectual nature of a person. The ‘moral’ aspect of an individual’s
personality relates to goodness or badness of his/her character or behaviour, and
his/her ability to distinguish between right and wrong in life, and thus with
social conduct as per the norms prevalent in a given society. Some of it is
universal in nature and endorsed by communities as a whole. The emotional
aspect is related to strong instinctive feelings, such as love, fear etc prevalent
in a person’s mental make-up in varying degrees of intensity or sensibility.
Since ‘emotion’ is instinctive in nature, it is innate, native or inborn, and not
something that is learnt. What is learnt, however, is the way in which to manage
emotions by exercising emotional control within a family and a social set-up.
Obviously, this is associated with the process of nurture and maturing and is but
a part of it. The intellectual aspect relates to the use of the faculty of
reasoning, knowing, thinking, and understanding. One can achieve balance in
responding to a stimulus if one learns to keep emotions out of the process by
separating it from the intellectual aspect.
Kamala Das seems to have had in mind the basic meaning of ‘soul’ as
the spiritual or immaterial part of a person, often regarded as immortal, when
she settled on this title for her penultimate collection of poems. To ‘sing’ is
a verb that ordinarily means to use musical sounds set to a tune. It is quite
apparent that Kamala Das has used ‘sing’ not in its ‘literal’ but in a
‘literary’ sense, which serves to remind us of Bernard Shaw’s use of élan vital or life force7
in Act III of Man and Superman (1903)
through Anna; and Frederico Garcia Lorca’s use of duende through the youngest of Bernarda’s daughters, Adela, in The House of Bernarda Alba (1936).
Life force (originally élan vital), coined by Henri Bergson, is
a term most commonly used in biology to mean a hypothetical force which figures
in the theory of creative evolution as an extension of the development of
organisms to substitute Darwinian theory of evolution.8 He used it to mean ‘the urge or impulse’ which is not
only ‘an essential part of all human life’ and ‘the fundamental source of human
action’ which was for him ‘the source of efficient causation and evolution of
human life’ through successive generations. Bergson sought to promote the
concept of élan vital by extending
the Victorian notion of vitalism thus
appropriating the idea of ‘soul’ in the sciences. Arguing that development took
two routes, instinctual and intellectual evolution, he observed that the former
resulted in insects, and the latter variant in human beings. Shaw uses the
concept of life force to outline the Anna’s search for superman through Duan
Juan in Act III of Man and Superman.
Lorca refers to duende citing from Manuel Torre’s argument
that it is ‘a mysterious force that everyone feels’ which ‘no philosopher has
explained.’ The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as ‘the ability to
attract others, through personal magnetism and charm’. However, Spanish
scholars relate it to something that ‘surges up, inside, from the soles of the
feet,’ and this makes it something innate, leading a person to break into a
dance like a dancer as Adela does in The
House of Bernarda Alba.
On hindsight we feel that the twin concepts of élan vital/life force and duende draw their origin in the stirring
of the human soul for some reason or the other. Kamala Das uses the term soul to refer to the ātmãn which, according to the Indian
belief system, never dies. The body decays and perishes but the ātmãn remains intact, and reappears recurrently
in other bodies as manifested in the theory of rebirth until such time as it
attains moksha, i.e., it is freed
from the cycle of life and death. This bears semblance with Emerson’s argument
of the merging of the soul and the oversoul.
We consider the features identified in the first section and cite
evidence of their reflection in sixteen of Kamala Das’s poems chosen on the grounds
of: (a) their recurrence in her poetry collections, underscoring their
importance9 to her, and (b) our belief that
they are germane to any discussion on the poetry of Kamala Das. We use other important poems but only to
illustrate the points we make in the following sections.
A person’s introduction, whether by his/her own self or by others,
usually begins with the name of the one being introduced by himself/ herself or
others. Yet “An Introduction” begins with a negation, which has nothing to do
with the name, but with an assertion of fact in normal cases: ‘I don’t know
politics’. Disinterestedness in politics is made good by the narrator expressing
her satisfaction with her knowledge of the current political leaders in India. She
describes herself as a brown multilingual Indian, a native of Malabar, one who
dreamt in one language but wrote in two. Her use of the term ‘dream’ with ‘language’
as a complement is suggestive of her comfort level with it and creativity at
its best helping her convert to a verbal form her emotional experiences in the
language concerned, probably her native language. Her second language,
obviously English, met with social disapproval due probably to its non-native
nature as the language of the colonisers. She responds to this with the
observation a language belongs to one who uses it, irrespective of whether
he/she is native to it. A user naturally crafts the ‘other’ language to suit
his/her purpose and that is how individual styles of use in speech or writing
evolve.
Language is believed to be a vehicle of thought and it becomes so naturally
in due course as the user gets habituated to its use much in the same way as
he/she gets habituated to things he/she does regularly. The narrator calls this
her ‘speech of the mind’ which helps her give expression to her thoughts, and
quite unlike ‘the/Incoherent mutterings of the blazing/Funeral pyre.’ Conceding
the fact that her gradual transition from childhood to adolescence had caught
her unaware, she argues how she realised it only after she was told about it
and saw the signs of it setting in. She complains that she was pushed into a
bedroom with ‘a youth of sixteen’ and the doors were closed on them when she
asked for ‘love’, and how her ‘sad woman-body felt so beaten’ after that
experience.
We find oblique reference here to the ‘Thaalikettu’ in the
Nair tradition. Young as she was, this strange experience changed her and made
her non-conventional both in appearance and attire. The traditional-minded in
the family asked her there onward to behave like a normal girl/woman, to adopt
a name, to ‘fit in’, ‘belong’, and to stop playing ‘pretending games’ or behaving
like a nymphomaniac ‘jilted in love’. This experience of the first ‘man’ in her
life, who could have been anyone and be called by any name, led her to believe
that ‘he is every man/Who wants a woman, just as I am every/Woman who seeks
love’. Drawing a line of distinction between a man and a woman, she observes
that while the man’s passion equals a ‘hungry’ river eager to merge into the
sea, the woman’s desire approximates the ‘the oceans’ waiting tirelessly. The subsequent
feeling of shame after love-making confuses her, making her feel both the ‘sinner’
and the ‘saint’, and the ‘beloved’ and the ‘betrayed’, though both experience the
same joys and aches.
Kamala Das’s poem “My Grandmother’s House” brings back to our mind
as readers the fact that children are very fond of their grandparents,
especially their grandmothers. Children in the Nair families, following the
tradition, lived with their parents in their maternal grandmother’s house. The narrator’s
longing to return to revisit her childhood is what makes this special as a
poem, for it reflects the sense of belongingness, and satisfaction of having
been treated as special and loved in it. This nostalgia is negated immediately
with the impersonal reference used in the phrase ‘that woman died’ to refer to
her grandmother, which is disturbing. It is disquieting because one never ever
refers to a loved one in third person terms. It is true that nostalgia grips us
because there is no going back to the relations and times which caused it in
the first place. The yearning remains, even increases, and can be stifling as
is the case here. The frequent use of oxymoron as in ‘blind eyes’, ‘the frozen
air’, the synecdoche in ‘an armful of/darkness’ and the transferred epithet in ‘a
brooding/dog’ tend to buttress the point that the narrator is apprehensive
about her proud feeling of having ‘lived in such a house’ and of being ‘loved’
in it. She confesses to having gone astray, seeks to trudge a lonely path in
life, and seems doubtful whether seeking and receiving some love from others
was really worth the effort made. However, we do not know whether her
claim is real or imaginary. It could be only a way of protesting the hurt.
From the narrative about the grandmother’s house, we move to another
narrative of an experience camouflaged as one in the kindergarten. A
‘kindergarten’ is a class or school for very young children but its usage in
the poem “Punishment in Kindergarten” appears to be that of inexperienced youth
rather than very young children. We do still recall instances when we caused
offence to our teachers by breaking the rules in our kindergarten class and the
consequential punishment we were handed down. This poem seems to be a recollection
of the verbal reprimand: ‘Why don’t you join the others, what/A peculiar child
you are!’, reminding us of the categorizers’ demand that the child-woman in the
family ‘fit in’, ‘belong’ and desist acting like a nymphomaniac. The poet
camouflages her narrator’s experience by introducing along with her narrator,
‘a blue-frocked woman’ as her kindergarten teacher. The teacher, trying hard to
spend some time with her boyfriend who had joined them on a class picnic,
reprimands her student who had tagged along. She refuses to relive the pain it
had caused and is content in the fact that her ‘mind has found/An adult peace’
leaving behind it all the agonies it had been through. Interestingly, her reaction
to her classmates laughing at her is adult-like because she found it strange
that they made light of the pain in her tears even as she expected them to
empathize with her and console her.
Kamala Das uses the ‘looking glass’, a mirror, as an image in her
poem “The Looking Glass” to protest against male arrogance even in matters of
love and love-making. This protest is directed against men who expect women in their
lives to be ‘honest’ about their ‘wants’. The narrator’s use of words like want
and seek (“An Introduction”, lines 44-46) requires a closer scrutiny. Want
is a strong word involving authority, power and a strong desire or need
bordering on almost being an exclusive right.10 Seek
is a meeker option meaning a search or an effort to find or obtain, involving humility and submission.
The act of seeking is what Kamala Das calls a thapasya. Indian
philosophy treats a seeker as a sādhaka,
or a spiritually
disciplined person aiming to attain the highest degree of realisation. Love is
sought not demanded, for it takes the lovers by surprise. Philosophers and
seers use several epithets for love like caring for the other, sharing with
the other, sacrificing for the other, and the feeling of oneness and equality
that knows no subjugation. It is the sheer joy of the moment when all fuses
into one, into a cosmic unity, which Osho Rajneesh calls sādhana,11 but becomes a source of pain when substituted by
lust. Lovemaking, without the feeling of oneness and equality or of love, is an
example of lust in action. Satiation of lust can only yield some sort of
physical release, but fails to help restore emotional equilibrium. Kamala Das
may not have stated this very explicitly, but has implied it in several poems
in lines like the one in which she says, ‘Love is not important, that
makes the blood/Carouse, nor the man who brands you with
his/Lust’ (“Jaisurya”, lines 21-23; added emphases).
Words that deserve careful examination
in this case are the verbs ‘carouse’ and ‘brand’, for to carouse is to
make merry, especially by drinking large amounts of alcoholic drinks, and to brand is to mark something by
burning or as if by burning, especially by way of establishing ownership. Love neither
knows ownership, nor possession, nor does it cause the carousal of blood that
is symptomatic of a state wherein pleasure takes precedence over fulfilment. This
kind of lovemaking is mechanical, and hardly leads to fulfilment. The narrator
in the poems finds it trifling, and is forced to
generalize about men: ‘Men are worthless, to trap them/Use the
cheapest bait of all, but never/Love’ (“A Losing Battle”, lines 3-5; added
italics), with the ‘cheapest bait’ turning out elsewhere to be ‘the wrappings
of hairless skins’, a crude depiction of the female genitalia, and worthless
is a complement there expressing contempt.
Moreover, the noun ‘want’ refers to a strong ‘need’ and the verb ‘need’
expresses a ‘lack’ and, notwithstanding Kamala Das’s use of it as a noun, it
still seems to imply a ‘lack’. The pronoun ‘her’ in place of ‘their’ adds to
this negativity, for love is a mutual need and love-making involves mutual
consent and acceptance. Therefore, that ‘her’ in the poem is suggestive of
arrogance. Her man needs her to accept him as the stronger one, a paragon of
perfection worth admiration, ‘graceful’ and more passionate than she is, and
her ‘only man’. There is vainglory in the male ‘belief’ that the woman is the
one ‘seeks’ and he is the one ‘sought’; and she the one who ‘wants’ and he the one
who ‘fulfils’ those wants. The narrator uses this sarcastically to remind men
that love and fulfilment in love being mutual ‘needs’, they are not
gender-specific. She is disgusted that her gift of her ‘endless female hungers’
do not find reciprocation in the form of his own ‘endless male hungers’ as his
arrogance makes him believe that he exists to satiate female ‘hungers’. The narrator
protests vehemently against this preposterous claim, when she says: ‘getting/A
man to love is easy, but living/Without him afterwards may have to be/Faced’
(lines 16-19).
Interestingly, ‘get’ is a causative verb which in this context means
to ‘attract’, ‘entice’, or ‘entrap’ (the last two being negative) and ‘love’
here means ‘to make love’. Therefore, it may be easy for a woman to ‘entrap’
man to ‘seek’ satisfaction of her ‘endless female hungers’, but the difficulty
lies in taming and holding him for long, for he gives her to understand that he
not only knows ‘what’ a woman ‘wants’ (ridiculous!) but also knows how to
satisfy those wants. His vanity leads him to believe that he neither ‘seeks’
love nor knows how to ‘seek’ it, but only knows the ‘gift’ she desires and
‘gives’ her ‘love’ as a gift, expecting nothing in return, not even allegiance
and attachment. The narrator in the poem is apparently justified in ridiculing
such a claim.
We move to the next important poem, “The Old Playhouse”, which appears
to be woven around a ‘pun’, a figure of speech involving humorous use of a word
or words with two or more meanings. The ‘playhouse’ is both a reference to a
theatre where plays are presented, and a toy house in which children play and
wed off their toys in imitating the tradition of marriage. It begins with the narrator
making a sarcastic remark about her lover who had planned to ‘tame’ a ‘swallow’12. Such antithetical usages
connote aiming at achieving the impossible by seeking to change the nature of
what one wishes to tame because that would require a superhuman feat.
The narrator tells her oppressor that her intention in coming to him
was not to experience what it was to be in another man’s arms ‘but to
learn/What I was’ and, by doing so, she wished ‘to learn to grow’. She does not
want to know ‘who’ she was but ‘what’ she was much as the narrator in yet
another poem asks herself, ‘am I hetero/am I lesbian/or am I just
plain frigid?’ (“Composition”, lines 65-66; added italics). Hetero- (sexual
attraction to the opposite sex), homo- (sexual attraction to the same sex), and
bi- (sexual attraction to both sexes) are forms of sexuality, and frigidity a
psycho-physical condition of being cold and unresponsive sexually. The first is
acceptable, the second considered deviant, and the third is frowned upon
socially. The study of psychology tells us that a substantial number of
adolescents have confusion about their sexuality when they feel attraction to
the members of their own sex or both the sexes at the same time, or have fears
about their cold and indifferent response to sex stimuli and are confronted
with the need to make choices. The feeling could have a devastating effect.
The words ‘what I was’ seem to be, in many ways, a reference to such
a situation in life. It is not as if the narrator wants ‘to gather knowledge’,
for that is something she had already. She seemed to be interested in trying to
understand her response patterns to different stimuli. Her complaint is that
his ‘monstrous ego’ turned her into ‘a dwarf’, which is yet another
antithetical pair, and made her lose her ‘will’ (the faculty which helps a
person decide what to do) and ‘reason’ (motive, cause, or justification). Consequently,
her ‘mind’ seems to have turned into ‘an old/Playhouse with its lights out’
with the song and dance giving way to a sinister silence. She complains that
his ‘love is Narcissus at the water’s edge, haunted/By its own lonely face’ and
the nightfall alone would help erase the reflection and restore normalcy.
Nymphomania and satyriasis are
instances of hypersexuality in women and men respectively. Rao (1977) defines hypersexuality
as a ‘morbidly exaggerated desire to have coitus with members of the opposite
sex.’ It is seen as ‘a disease of sexual expression coupled with the
pathological concern to satisfy one’s ego by gloating over one’s sexual
conquests.’ A hypersexual is a person who has sex with multiple partners in an
experimental way. When a person learns to identify himself/herself, he is
either potent or impotent, and heterosexual or homosexual/lesbian in his/her
sexual orientation. A male who lacks the sexual drive is usually considered to
be impotent because the natural instinct is dead in him for whatever reasons.
The narrator in Kamala Das’s poem, “Composition”, asks herself whether she is a
normal human being, ie a heterosexual.
If she were not to be so, then she can only be a lesbian (supposedly
deviant in sexual behaviour) or else just plain frigid.
Frigidity, which is also referred to an orgastic ineptitude, is a
medical term used for ‘sexual unresponsiveness in women’ who are either unable
to reach an orgasm despite experiencing pleasure in coitus, or are unable to
derive pleasure from coitus without having any dislike for sex, or are even
resentful or have an aversion to sexual intercourse. Scientific research
conducted in the subject and reported by Rao (1977) shows that frigidity is the
result of one or more of the following reasons: (a) negative influences in upbringing making sex appear bad; (b) past tragic (sexual, romantic etc) episodes;
(c) doubts about physiological/ psychological
adequacy; (d) personality/character
discrepancies due to religious indoctrination; (e) fears, anxieties and worries; (f) male ignorance/selfishness; (g) hatred for husband/lover; (h) orgastic ineptitude owing to inferior status/lack
of understanding of sex before marriage; and (i) orgastic ineptitude as a symptom of organic
disease/s.
3
Kamala Das’s poems deal with issues
that are of common concern although the finer sensibility they bring with them
may not be a part of our regular experience. The charge of exhibitionism hurled
against her seems appealing but we need not allow ourselves to be carried away
by it, for one would readily grant that her poems open newer vistas of
awareness. We need to remind ourselves of the fact that all art conceals as
much as it reveals and it is this inherent dichotomy that perhaps leads
us to appreciate it. The artist has to fight a running battle with
himself/herself to give an adequate expression to ‘self’ in
his/her artistic creation. It is a battle between the two selves: (a) that of
the artist who desires to say it all, and (b) that of the private person in
him/her who shies away from any real revelation.
Overtly, Kamala Das stands exposed
to the charge of being obscene but a foray into the inner recesses of the
artist’s mind through her poems is a revealing experience. Therein lies the
saga of anguish and agony a woman, which may not necessarily be of her own
making. The façade easily shatters and the
tautness of a carefree attitude gives way to a despair that “few of her poems
have, in fact, escaped”, says Parthasarathy cautiously. The frank
liberal-mindedness undoubtedly looks unusual in the Indian context. More so,
as the private person, the other self of the creative
artist, seems to hold most of the traditions of the Indian society close to her
heart. The tone of desperation in ‘I shall build walls with tears,/She
said, walls to shut me in’ (“The Sunshine Cat”, lines 13-14; added
italics) is the proverbial last straw to have broken the camel’s back. The
woman in the poem would build ‘walls with tears’ not only to shut herself in
but also to shut out the reality, making the phrase an explosive symbol.
Another image that emerges is that
of the woman clinging to the chests of the ‘band of cynics’ despite their
inexperience, unmindful of their ‘new hair’, ‘their smells’ or ‘their young lust’
only ‘to forget’ the sheer selfishness and cowardice on the part of all the men
who ‘knew’ her and the husband ‘who loved her not enough’. The image here is
one of a man who had abdicated his responsibilities. The woman in the poems
complains in a fit of rage that all she got when she asked for love was either
‘that kind of love’ or ‘tears and a silence in the blood’, horrible extremes to
say the least!
The resultant resentment makes the
woman generalise about men. She implies that they are beasts, lustful,
licentious and heartless brutes! Lust can never be accepted as love,
for it means a strong sexual desire, especially when uncontrolled or considered wrong.
Love, on the other hand, is a strong
feeling of fondness for another person, especially between
members of a family or between people of the opposite sex. To have a
feeling of fondness is to love and be loving in a kind, gentle, or tender way.
Love loses its sheen when the moment of intimacy lacks kind, gentle, or even
tender handling of the loved one. Only strong and uncontrolled sexual desire
is then left and this, in turn, becomes the motive of action. Certainly, this
is an abomination for those who consider love as the greatest gift of God to
humankind.
The subject of attack in that
symbolism in ‘kindergarten’ apparently seems to be on the lack of understanding
and inexperience that informs the behaviour of the kids in the age group of two
to five years. Kamala Das obviously suggests that the irresponsible and
indifferent behaviour of adult males is akin to the world of the kindergarten
with all its disorderliness. The world we live in is full of categorizers, the
tradition-bound conservatives, who want and expect
everyone to fall into the slots meant for him or her. For example, they would
like a girl to ‘Be wife.... Be embroiderer, be cook,/Be a quarreller with
servants. Fit in. Oh,/Belong’ (“An Introduction”, lines 34-36; added
italics). Their demand that a girl must ‘fit in’, ‘belong’, and thus be
a part of the system evolved by the categorizers is not acceptable to the woman
in the poem. The word belong means to be suitable or advantageous
or to be in the right place. The
right place for a female, according to the conservatives, is the hearth and
home because they feel that woman was created to be so. She is required to keep
her man happy and to be able to do that successfully she must satisfy his two
hungers: one for food and the other for cohabitation. Clearly, this is
abhorrent to the feminists of the radical kind and their sympathisers who
believe in the equality of the sexes.
Categorizers
are the main cause of this system of inequity that they perpetuate through
their support. The flirting kindergarten teacher ‘wanted’ the girl-child to
‘join the others’ and, because she failed to do that, says angrily, ‘Why don’t
you join the others, what/A peculiar child you are!’ (“Punishment in
Kindergarten”, lines 6-7; added italics). Quite obviously, that little girl was
trying to seek shelter in the arms of the cruel teacher who was so busy
romancing with her boy-friend, whom she had brought along with her on picnic,
that she had no time for her. The phrase, ‘join the others’, means doing what
is thought to be normal, usual, as the conservatives would have us believe. One
who fails to fall in line, fit in, and join the others is dubbed as queer,
not in the derogatory sense, but in the sense of strange. The use of the
word peculiar as an adjective relates the child to what is
strange or unusual, especially in a troubling or displeasing way. It would
indeed be very unpleasant if people were to seek to perform the roles not assigned
to them and insist on taking on other roles. That seems to explain the aversion
of an average male to women taking on a militancy though to be unusual in them
and, hence also his reaction to their demands for the restoration of equality.
Love is
a human need and, whether male or female, partners in life are both the givers
and recipients at the same time. A corpse is a corpse and not a male or a
female, for it ceases to have a sexual identity, a mark of the living beings.
The use of the impersonal pronoun ‘it’ for a corpse in Kamala Das’s
poem, “The Doubt”, is significant. Among the non-native users of English, a
baby is also referred to as ‘it’, probably because the helpless baby is not
aware of his/her sex at birth. The identity, which it subsequently acquires,
ceases with death. If death were to shatter the barriers of this kind, it only
goes to prove that all these barriers and differences are man-made.
Indian
philosophy holds that the soul or the ātmān mingles with the jīva
to make the jīvātmān, which binds the five elements called the panchmahābǖt:
ether, fire, air, earth and water. The body disintegrates, when the corpse is
cremated, and the elements so released merge into their respective sources. A
fact of this kind also supports the idea of equality. Identity of some kind is
necessary for a being (jīva) and seems to be important in this world of mithya
and maya.
4
We shall explore appropriate texts to trace the development of the
‘myth and legend’ of Krishna and the crucial strands of thought in Kamala Das’s
poems in order to place the man-woman relationship in its proper perspective in
this section.
The narrator in Kamala Das’ poems rejects the male notion that his
relationship with woman is limited merely to the duration of coitus because for
a woman, it is the beginning of a series of emotional upheavals. Implied in her
complaints is the inequity of this relationship, which firmly repudiates the
idea of unity and equality inherent in the motif of Radha-Krishna in the Indian
tradition.
Love and lovemaking as represented in that motif are acts of
continual surrender and fusion into a single entity to form a wholesome unity.
It is symbolic of unity and devotion and that is how it is seen as a part of līlā.
For Kamala Das, it forms the basis of what she chooses to call thapasya,
a phonetic corruption of tapasya13, which is a feminine
form of the word tap. Tap in Hindi is possibly derived from tapas
meaning variously as austerity, self-mortification, or self-restraint. Tap,
i.e., penance or self-mortification, is undertaken with a view to attaining
spiritual knowledge (jnāna) or salvation (moksha). It makes sense
to remember that sex is not a taboo in the Indian context, especially in view
of the vital role it plays in creation. The worship of shivling, like
the worship of the phallic symbol as a part of the Dionysian ritual at
the time of harvest season in Greek city-states mentioned in the Greek
classics, provides us with sufficient evidence of how sex is not a taboo in any
ancient tradition. Shivling is worshipped in this country not only as a
symbol of cosmogenic but also of progenitorial creation.
The Indian ideal of unity of the sexes is the ideal of the divine
love of Radha-Krishna and this stands negated when the two bodies of the lovers
united in coitus cease to experience the unity of souls. The rationale for such
a point of view lies in the ancient Indian Scriptures, which reveal that every
form on earth has its prototype in heaven, and everything flows from the unique
act of creation reflected in the infinite I AM that has been celebrated in
numerous literary creations in various Indian languages. Love and lovemaking,
in a context of this kind, can only be seen as an act of complete surrender and
devotion. The Radha-Krishna motif is an affirmation of this truth.
The Radha-Krishna legend is a complex one. Lord Krishna, ‘who had
formerly been an ecstatic god of Dionysian character’,14 has earned the dubious distinction of being the most
notorious of the gods in the Indian pantheon simply because līlā, which
is the most misrepresented and misunderstood part of the legend. The so-called
liaison of Krishna with his beloved Radha is believed to be the extension of
their lives in Golaka, cast in the image of its prototype Vaikuntha
which was the abode of the God of gods, Lord Vishnu. Lord Krishna, who is
believed to be an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, had taken birth in human form to
rid the earth of all evil, with the promise of an eternal return on every
occasion when evil surpasses good on mother earth.
It is indeed interesting to note how the Brahmavaivarta Puranam,
which is a sacred text of a very late compilation of an uncertain date believed
to be the sixteenth century, notes how Radha and Krishna
are one and the same. Radha finds a mention in the Bhakti texts as Krishna ’s divine equivalent. She is a distinct character
only in the Brahmavaivarta Puranam, wherein she is reported to be
identical to Krishna right from the beginning.
So identical is Radha to Krishna that Lord Brahma proclaims to her in the Brahmavaivarta
Puranam that she was the outcome of the body of Krishna and indeed equal to
him in every respect. Confessing how it was very difficult to say which one of
them was Radha and which Krishna, Lord Brahma observes that if Krishna
represented the soul, Radha was the body containing it, i.e., its recipient.15
This way, creation would become impossible in the absence of either
of them and, more so, because if Krishna were
the informing spirit, Radha was the eternal productive goddess. The
relationship gets a new meaning whose effect on this world of mithya and
maya is astounding when it is juxtaposed with Lord Krishna’s remark that
‘as the potter cannot make a jar without clay, so I cannot create without you…
Oh Goddess, you are always my container’.16
What this obviously suggests is that man and woman were created to be
complementary to each other and, thus, each is incomplete without the other.
Herein lies the basis of unity.
The ideal of love, it will bear repetition, is for us the image of
Radha-Krishna who are prototypes of men and women like us. The divine Krishna is the same as his consort, the celestial Radha.
The appearance of their unity as two separate entities is the immediate
consequence of the desire of god. The “Prakkriti Khanda” of the Brahmavaivarta
Puranam takes note of this process of separation in what is termed as the
“desire of the wilful” Lord Krishna, who was all volition, desire as he divided
himself into two parts. The right side of Krishna’s body became Krishna and the left side Radha. Here lies the secret:
the heart is situated on the left in the rib cage.
However, that is not all. This cosmogenic creation necessitated the
birth of playmates and Krishna not only caused
the birth gopas similar to himself out of the pores of his skin but also
cows and bulls in recreating Vaikuntha in Golaka. Similarly,
Krishna’s consort, Radha, created gopis identical to her from the pores
of her own skin.17 Thus
came into existence the new world of Radha-Krishna. The act is one of līlā
and so was the sporting of Radha-Krishna.
Dallapiccola (1982: 206) explains in the glossary section of her
book Krishna, The Divine Lover
that the word līlā is often translated as a ‘sport’ or ‘whim’ and
applied to “the spontaneous, unpremeditated act of creation or destruction”.
Our present context would make it an act of creation, not destruction. Since
the gopas and the gopis were the creations of Krishna and Radha
respectively and also since Radha was but a part of Krishna, Lord Krishna’s ras
līlā with the gopis in Vraja was but only Krishna’s sporting
with Radha much in the same way as the gopis’ sporting with the gopas
was only Radha’s sporting with Krishna.
The carefree attitude of Radha can be attributed to her knowledge of
this reality, which is her insulation from all manner of social criticism. It
is in this sense, then, that the sex act becomes a continual renewal of the
unity seen in the Radha-Krishna legend. This is also the reason why the woman
in Kamala Das’s poems regrets the loss of this unity and equality so very vital
for the man-woman relationship to blossom into a healthy state of existence.
The Christian philosophy explains that Eve, the first woman, was
created out of a rib taken from the left side of Adam’s body. This is also where
the Indian philosophy related to the Radha-Krishna legend shares similarities
because the divine Krishna caused Radha to be created by splitting his own body
into two and Radha took shape out of the left side, giving rise to the concept
of ardha nāreshwar. The left portion of a human body contains the heart
and thus a woman is ruled by her heart, and that is why she is very loving and
caring in nature, implying thereby that man is left with all the cunning,
scheming, selfishness etc, as an affront to those among the male species who
cherish love and care.
Kamal Das’s poetry has been
categorized as ‘confessional’. A confessional mode of writing poetry does not
necessarily make the poetry ‘confessional’ in nature. Although the word ‘confession’
means an acknowledgement of a fact, sin, guilt etc, it also can be used to mean
a statement of one’s principles. Perhaps, such an understanding made Jussawalla
(1973) opine that Kamala Das’s writing of love, sex and loneliness in the tone
of an insistent confession ‘may be meant to touch some of the deepest points in
the reader’s subconscious’ or be a ‘part of an elaborate private therapy’ she
used.18 If we take this
not just as an assumption but a statement of fact based on a close study of her
poems, then the narrator in these poems is only acknowledging facts and stating
principles in life. However, we do feel tempted to examine the part such
confessions play in ‘touching the deepest points’ in the reader’s subconscious,
and how these may be a part of ‘a private therapy’.
The term confession is a ‘sacrament’ for orthodox Christians, and means a sacred symbolic ceremony. However, this term is defined in the Prayer Book Catechism used in orthodox Christian Churches as ‘an
outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’.19 Orthodox Christian faith recognizes seven sacraments:
baptism, the sacrament of water; reconciliation; Eucharist or the Holy
Communion; the Holy Spirit, or confirmation,
i.e., baptism by fire; matrimony or marriage; holy orders; and the anointing of
the sick. These are a part of the articles of Faith for them. Anticipating a
moot question on the reason for Kamala Das, who subscribed to a religion other
than Christianity, taking resort to a Christian sacrament, we feel the need to
respond by stating that there is adequate evidence which leads us to believe
that the poet was making a clean breast of things for the entire womanhood, and
the aim is to seek reconciliation with the self and the world around. One of
the meanings of the verb ‘reconcile’ is to demonstrate compatibility with what
exists both in one’s argument and practice. We need not mistake the narrator’s
tone of reconciliation in the poems as an act of surrender but a demonstration
of her new-found ability to live on her own terms and yet retain her right to
protest against, accept or reject what does not fit into her own ideology. We
submit that confessions have a proven therapeutic value
since they touch ‘the deepest points’ in the reader’s subconscious, and force
them to think, reflect and revise their own reactions, thus making it ‘a private
therapy’ for a person making a confession.
The narrator
in the poems discards all masks and presents before the readers a picture of
the suffering womanhood and cries a halt to it. She demands equality in
everything including love. Basically an Indian in terms of her sensibilities,
she is a modern-day Radha seeking to resurrect her Shyam by whatever means she
can. Frustrated by the fact that it is not in man’s nature to love, she reminds
us of how love for a woman is an act of giving, or surrender to the man in her
life, and a tapasya, which gets her love as an act of kindness. She
probably thought that she would find love in the younger males but even with
this crowd that she dubs as the ‘band of cynics’, she meets with failure. That
failure was only to be expected and the narrator confesses that she found in
them only a lustful longing for experience. Psychologists tell us that a male
stepping into adolescence usually takes a sexual encounter as an opportunity to
prove his manliness to the rest of his gang, and that is as far as it
goes.
The narrator
recounts similar experience when she observes that after the event, each one of
them parroted similar lines to what were obviously her cries for love: ‘I do
not love, I cannot love, it is not/In my nature to love, but I can
be kind to you.’ (“The Sunshine Cat”, lines 9-10; added italics). The use of
the negation (not) with
the affirmative
forms of auxiliaries, especially in do not and is not is
quite revealing. If we take, for example, the first utterance: I do not love,
and examine the implications flowing out of it, then we find that it can mean
(a) I do not love you, or (b) I do not love you but I am only being friendly if
we assume that do not is used for emphasis, or
(c) I am simply doing what I am expected to do, or (4) Love means nothing to
me. The last one is obviously the meaning we are looking for because it fits in
well with the following utterance: It is not in my nature to love. The
revelation becomes more pronounced in the use of the contrasting subordinate
clause: but I can be kind to you.
The narrator’s
experiences in these poems evoke nearly the same kind of fear that an animal trapped by carnivores has. This fear elicits sympathy
and she reacts to it, the mention of the physical aspect of love, and a
situation that reeks of thraldom: ‘It is a physical thing, he suddenly/End it,
I cried, end it and let us be free’ (“Substitute”, lines 35-36). She finds it
difficult after the event to accept the fact that her man should give her a
false feeling of being much in love during their love-making, and should
shatter her pleasurable illusion by turning away thereafter. This is to her a
complete rejection of the divine union. Juxtaposed with the contempt of the
mere physicality of the act, or what the woman in the poems derisively calls that
kind of love in: ‘When/I asked for love, not knowing what else to
ask/For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the/Bedroom and closed the
door’ (“An Introduction”, lines 25-20; added italics), we arrive at the
meaning: ‘That was the only kind of love,/This hacking at each
other’s parts/Like convicts hacking’ (“Convicts”, lines 8-10; added
italics).
To
hack at is a terrible phrase, for it refers to the
use of an axe for ‘a rough cutting movement or blow’. People may hack at wood but
those who hack at the living things can only be called assassins, murderers
facing a possible conviction under the law if proved guilty. The implication is
that violent lovemaking, devoid of the feelings of love, leads to the death of
that fine feeling of fulfilment: ‘We lay/On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued,
just/The toys dead children leave behind’ (“Convicts”, lines 3-5; added
italics). The spark of recognition, of fulfilment, of joy, when absent from the
eyes of the so-called lovebirds after the event, makes them look like ‘the
lifeless toys left behind’ by dead children, and the only natural reaction is
‘loving him,/I found no courage then even to be kind’ (“The Proud One”, lines
9-10).
Sin is
born out of man’s disobedience of God according to the philosophy of religions,
and saintliness an attribute of a person with a holy or completely unselfish
way of life. No human being, is cent per cent a saint or a sinner, or else
he/she would have attained moksha (salvation) from the eternal cycle of
life and death. Alexis Zorba explains succinctly in Kazatzakis’ novel Zorba the Greek that a man is both
God and Devil at the same time.19
This represents the duality of human nature. God created man in after Himself
but man’s (Adam and Eve’s) thirst for knowledge propelled him to seek the
freedom to chart the course of his own life, causing him to defy the Lord.
Satan had appeared before Eve in the form of the serpent in the Garden of Eden
and asked her to taste the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge that God
had forewarned them against, and this is how man became both the betrayer (of
God) and the betrayed (by Satan). Adam’s succumbing to the temptation led to
the couple’s fall from grace, and expulsion from Paradise to eternal suffering
in the world.
The narrator
observes that love is life-giving and reinvigorating and acts as a restorative.
Sex, she argues in “The Doubt” is not only the union of bodies but also of
souls. Men and women’s souls yearn for their partners and not bodies that are
subject to afflictions. The myth of ‘sexual’ behaviour does not hold because
sex is not always the focal point of human relations. The narrator confronts
the question of morality head on, chides the categorizers that like everything
else in life including truth, morality is relative in nature, and each epoch in
the seeks to redefine it in keeping with the changing needs of the times.
Kamala
Das observes that relationships need to be put on an even keel in tune with the
rights of the individual in the drama of life. The looking-glass presents us
with the picture of ruined relationships and the series of events contributing
to this sorry state of affairs and helps restore a semblance of sanity by
jolting us out of our slumber. She confirms the view that the institution of
marriage had been created for subjugation of the fairer sex. The experiences that find mention in “The
Sunshine Cat” and “Composition” lead her to state that the assignment of roles
in marriage was ‘arranged in (the) most humorous heaven’.
We do
not subscribe to the idea that either Adam or Eve was to blame for their fall
because it was the handiwork of Satan. The woman in Kamala Das’s poetry
alternates between the images of Eve and Radha. Bernard Shaw seems to use
Anna’s effort to create a superman in Act III of his Man and Superman as a hint that women have taken a lead to avenge
this slight. If that were to be true, then they would be taken as the leaders
and no leader can be led. That would then explain their abhorrence of the very
idea of subjugation as it negates not only the idea of leading but also of
equality. The narrator musing about love and the root of the process of
subjugation in one of the poems argues: ‘Perhaps it had begun as a young man’s
most/Normal desire to subjugate a girl’ (“The Proud One”, lines 1-2;
added italics). Subjugation is not a very happy usage because it suffers
the handicap of being a word from political lexicon, and is reference to a process
within the world of power-games where mighty people, groups, countries etc
conquer or seize power from their weaker counterparts. Neither the Western
concept of lovemaking nor the Indian concept of ratikrida involves any power-game. Coercive sex with a woman
amounts to a ‘rape’ in the eyes of the law, for a rapist is seen as violating
twin fundamental rights to equality and informed consent in satiating his lust.
Psychologists confirm that rape is as perverted a form of sexual behaviour as
are the other deviant forms of sexual behaviour.
Unlike
animals, according to the Thomistic view of the universe are gifted only senses
by nature but human beings have both intellect and senses. Civilised behaviour
differs from the unrestrained animal behaviour. It is true that the sensual
aspect of human behaviour may defy logic and reason. However, there is also an
unwritten code of conduct that prevents human beings from displaying lack of
concern for others or for that matter restraint in behaviour though the fact
that the animal in us is hardly under control in private is an acknowledged
fact. The militant denunciation of a woman’s meek surrender to the brutal
assertion of man’s rights comes through quite clearly in a poem wherein the
narrator asks: ‘Woman, is this happiness, this lying buried/Beneath
a man?’ (“The Conflagration”, lines 1-2; added italics). The phrase ‘lying buried beneath’ bothers the
readers in us, for ‘bury’ seems to have multiple layers of meaning there. To
‘bury’ someone is to consign his/her dead body to the bowels of mother earth, to
a tomb, or to the waters of the sea; or to put or hide someone/something underground;
or even to conceal or relegate someone/something to obscurity. Lovemaking
presuppose mutual consent and equality and this entails to active rather than
passive participation but the Indian concept of pati parmeshwar in case
of a married woman is a belief firmly embedded in the female psyche through
indoctrination right from childhood. None can be equated with God, not even a married
woman’s husband for her. For, this violates the principle of equality reflected
in the legend of Radha-Krishna. What place, then, can one accord to shame in
this scheme of things with the primordial līla
being replicated by a couple after having sworn allegiance to each other in
this world and hereafter?
Shame is not the same as shyness demonstrated in man-woman relationship.
Shyness is lack of boldness or nervousness in a person when he/she is in the
company of others. This is a quality that has somehow come to be associated
with women. Shame is a painful feeling of guilt, wrongdoing, inability
or failure experienced. Guilt is experienced when a person realises that
he/she has broken a moral code. It involves the knowledge or belief of
wrongdoing, or what is called moral wickedness. The narrator in one of
her poems, for instance, complains: ‘it is I who make love/And then, feel
shame’ (“An Introduction”, lines 55-56; added italics), but at the end of
the same poem, we get to learn that the narrator calls herself ‘I’ because
every man in her life calls himself ‘I’, a personal pronoun used impersonally.
The ‘I’ there represents ‘each and everyone’ in his/her assertion of individuality.
If lovemaking were to evoke a sense of shame in the partners in love after the
event, then there is adequate reason to abstain from it but this is not the
case in that poem. The sense of shame
experienced there is due to the realisation of the inequity because the process
reported reveals that there was ‘the hungry haste of the rivers in him’, which
perhaps made him insensitive to his woman’s needs, and ‘in her the oceans’
tireless waiting’ which might have made her appear to be insatiable.
5
We would like to use in this section the features of radical
feminism that we had discussed and summarised in the first section. Since we
found that there are three pairs of features which are interrelated, we decided
to put them together and this gave us a total of three larger features: (A) phallic-centred claims to
superiority and the use of institutionalized hierarchies and structures to perpetrate
phallic-centred claims; (B) use of biology and heterosexuality to create
restrictions and sole control over development this way; and (C) commodification
of women both at home and at work and thus the insensitive treatment of women
for childbirth.
Phallic-centred claims to
superiority and the use of institutionalized hierarchies and structures
to perpetrate phallic-centred claims.
Kamala Das launches the strongest protest possible against
phallic-centred claims to superiority by the male section of the society in her
poems like “An Introduction”, “A Losing Battle”, “Composition”, “Convicts”,
“The Doubt”, and “The Freaks”. Since we have already discussed “An
Introduction” in detail in section 2 of this paper, it will suffice our purpose
if we cite the relevant lines from the poem to illustrate the point here.
Following her narration of an experience matching in description with the ‘Thaalikettu’ ceremony in the ancient Nair tradition, the narrator speaks about
the attitudinal change that it about in her: ‘Then … I wore a shirt and my/Brother’s
trousers, cut my hair short and ignored/My womanliness’ (lines 31-33).
A superficial reading of those lines may make them seem ordinary, but
a closer scrutiny reveals a sense of devastation leading to an emboldened
spirit that makes her throw her coyness to the winds. Those lines typify the
blurring of the lines between feminine and masculine grace, and yielding place
to the abandonment of tradition for the espousal of modernity through
appearance that defies gender patterning. The protest grows the loudest when
the narrator says in a matter-of-fact manner, ‘I met a man, loved him.’ The
categorizers turn against her for like: ‘Call/Him not by any name, he is every
man/Who wants a woman, just as I am every/Woman who seeks love’ (lines 44-47).
While a surface reading of the lines tells us of the stoic nature of that
statement implying that names do not matter in love-making as far as it is
good, the deep structure embedded in them gives them a different meaning.
Obviously, ‘want’ and ‘seek’ are in a tussle there, highlighting a deep divide
between a ‘demand’ that ‘expects compliance’ and ‘a supplication’ that needs
‘acceptance’.
The idea of avenging a wrong would take any of its male readers by
surprise: ‘Men are worthless, to trap them/Use the cheapest bait of all, but never/Love...’ (“A Losing Battle”, lines
3-5; added italics), or doubts the narrator has about her own sexual
orientation, ‘Am I hetero,/Am I lesbian,/Or am I just plain frigid?’ (“Composition”, ll. 65-67;
added italics) would force the reader’s to harbour similar doubts if the
feeling is of the same kind as the narrator experiences in poem after poem in
Kamala Das’s poetic creation. Similarly, in the aftermath of a sexual
encounter, the question that the tired lovers (the convicts in “Convicts”) ask
each other, ‘...we asked each other, what is/The use, what is the bloody use?/That was the only kind of love,/This hacking at each other’s parts/Like convicts hacking...’ (ll. 6-10; added
italics). Surprisingly, the word used to stir the readers is ‘convicts’. A convict,
if we were to draw its meaning chiefly from history, is a person who is serving
a prison sentence handed down through a legal process after being proved guilty
of having committed a crime etc. One wonders whether the reference there is yet
again to the history of human kind which was responsible for creating
categories like husband-wife, lover-beloved, fiancé-fiancée etc. Humankind
committed the crime of eating the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge
quite against the wishes of God, their creator. Using the analogy of how after
death, we identify the dead body not as male or female, but give it a
gender-free reference ‘it’, the narrator in “The Doubt” asks, ‘...Does it/Not mean, that we believe/That only the souls have sex and that/Sex is invisible?’ (ll. 3-6; added italics). Or, the confession
that the narrator has to make in “The
Freaks” but which she does quite sarcastically, ‘I am a
freak. It’s only/To save my face, I flaunt,
at/Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.’ (ll.
18-20; added italics). A freak is a monstrosity, an abnormal person. In
colloquial usage this means an unconventional person, and this unconventional
make-up may owe itself to the fact that the person under consideration is a fanatic
of a specified kind or an addict, especially a drug addict. This tends to give
the so-called nymphomaniac tendencies the shape of an abnormality.
Use of biology
and heterosexuality to create restrictions and sole control over development.
“An Introduction” offers several instances wherein the narrator in
the poem scoffs at the use of institutionalized hierarchies and structures to perpetrate
phallic-centred claims. For instance, this is evident in the lines, ‘When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask/For, he drew a
youth of sixteen into the/Bedroom and closed the door...’ (“An Introduction”, ll.
27-29; added italics). What followed was that kind of love which left her ‘sad woman-body’ feel ‘so beaten’. The social categorizers told the
narrator, ‘...Dress in sarees, be girl/Be
wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,/Be a quarreller with
servants. Fit in. Oh,/Belong...’ (ll. 35-38; added italics) and gave her an admonishment, ‘...Don’t sit/On
walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.’ (ll.38-39), but instead to ‘Choose a name, a role’, stop
playing ‘pretending games’, stop
resorting to schizophrenic behaviour or ‘be a/Nympho’ and to give up crying ‘embarrassingly
loud when/Jilted in love…’ (ll. 41-45)
The use
of the impersonal pronoun ‘it’ for a corpse in Kamala Das’s poem,
“The Doubt”, is significant. Among the non-native users of English, a baby is
also referred to as ‘it’, probably because the helpless baby is not aware of
his/her sex at birth. The identity, which it subsequently acquires, ceases with
death. If death were to shatter the barriers of this kind, it only goes to
prove that all these barriers and differences are man-made.
Commodification
of women both at home and at work and insensitive treatment of women for
childbirth.
For example, in “The Looking Glass”, the woman narrator bemoans the
fact that ‘Getting a man to love you is easy/Only be honest about your wants as/Woman.’
(ll. 1-3) ‘Oh yes, getting/A man to love is easy, but living/Without him
afterwards may have to be/Faced.’ (ll. 16-19)
Or, in “The Old Playhouse”, ‘It was not to gather
knowledge/Of yet another man 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.’ (ll.
5-8) The complaint about roles they were forced to play: ‘You called me wife,/I
was taught to break saccharine into your tea and/To offer at the right moment
the vitamins. Cowering/Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and/Became
a dwarf.’ (ll. 12-16) That ‘dwarf’ there symbolizes the diminishing of the
stature. A vehement attack follows thereafter: ‘The strong man’s technique is/Always
the same, he serves his love in lethal doses...’ (ll. 25-26). Or the beauty of
the analogies drawn in a play with philosophy as in “The Suicide”:
‘Bereft of soul/My body shall be bare./Bereft of body/My soul shall be bare.’
(ll.1-4) ‘Only the souls know how to sing/At the vortex of the sea.’ (ll.
13-14) and the punch in ‘Bereft of body/My soul shall be free./Take in my naked
soul/That he knew how to hurt./Only the soul knows how to sing/At the vortex of
the sea’ (ll. 134-139) in the same poem. Then the sad realisation: ‘But,/I must
pose./I must pretend,/I must act the role/Of happy woman,/Happy wife.’ (ll.
40-45)
In “The Sunshine Cat”, the narrator complains bitterly, ‘They did
this to her, the men who know her, the man/She loved, who loved her not enough,
being selfish/And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor/Used her, but was
a ruthless watcher...’ (ll.1-4) and even more vehement complaints about how ‘...the
band/Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where/New hair sprouted
like great-winged moths, burrowing her/Face into their smells and their young
lusts to forget/To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of/Them, I do
not love, I cannot love, it is not/In my nature to love, but I can be kind to
you’ (ll. 4-10), coupled with the reaction: ‘...I shall build walls with tears,/She
said, walls to shut me in.’ (ll. 13-14)
6
Kamala Das faced charges of nymphomania
and a show of obscenity by her critics until her death on 31 May 2009. The
narrator in her poems comes through clearly and sharply to any unbiased reader
as a rebel, a staunch feminist, rising in revolt against a phallocentric world.
These poems reveal a
radical feminist ideology which moved the poet to talk of sex and the
meaninglessness of both marital and adulterous adventures quite fearlessly. We
believe that she had done this in an attempt to wake the society up to the need
for gender equality in terms of space and rights. The descriptions, narrations,
rhetoric etc indicate, implicitly or explicitly, the existence of the features
of radical feminism in them. It is surprising,
therefore, when we find Raveendran (1994) arguing that Kamala Das, often
labelled as ‘a feminist’, was never known ‘to identify herself with any
particular version of feminist activism’.20
This appears to be far from the truth, for quite to the contrary, a close
reading of some of the poems we discuss draw attention to the fact that the
‘evidence’ of ‘nymphomania’ and ‘obscenity’ is essentially a corroboration of
the existence of radical feminism in her poems.
Her poems
can be taken easily as the product of an exercise of both ‘self-expression’ and
‘self-realisation’. The spontaneity of expression may make them appear obscene
because the narrator in her poems does not mince her words. The simultaneity of
the attempts to cling to the tradition and the yearning to help affect a
change gives the poems a sharper edge. The ambivalence reflected in them,
although at a superficial level, makes them more attractive. The poem read as a
whole implies that the ‘I’ in “An Introduction” represents both men and women.
Sex is accepted as a categorial relationship which has social sanction
according to the Indian belief system. The prohibition imposed by social
custom on a free public debate on sex still holds. Even if we appreciate the
fact that this is sheer hypocrisy, we accept sex not only as the means of
progenitorial creation but also a source of spiritual fulfilment bordering
divinity. We do not need corroboration beyond the fact that the erotic art in
the Ajanta and Ellora caves and the scientific handling of eros in Kamasutra adequately testifies the
celebration of love as an art and an important part of our lives in ancient
India.
Love for Kamala Das is tapasaya and not a paradigm of the lustful longings of
the lovers whose minds ‘are willed to race towards love’ with the race
degenerating into an ‘idle tripping … over puddles of desire’ (“The Freaks”,
lines 6-9). It is not surprising that
the so-called race only unleashes ‘skin’s lazy hungers’. Another ugly truth brought
home is the never-ending trauma of a woman doing everything possible to keep
hold of her man. The animal in him threatens to stray away the moment the
eternal ‘other woman’ flaunts ‘a gaudy lust’ and is a ‘lioness to his beast’
(“A Losing Battle”, lines 2-3). Juxtaposing this with the complaints of the
narrator who is left with little option to flaunt ‘a grand flamboyant lust’ as
a ‘face-saving’ device to keep her man from straying (“The Freaks”, lines 19-20), we discover how the age-old
institution called marriage tames a woman to ‘fit in’ and ‘belong’ as per the
dictates of the categorizers and their world, the metaphoric kindergarten! This
is what creates the crises of identity of all kinds, even the sexual identity.
Kamala
Das’s agitation on behalf of women unfortunately makes her forget that this
defence mechanism works both ways. Men must also flaunt their flamboyant lust
and boast about their so-called sexual conquests using fictional accounts to
keep themselves in the reckoning, or else they would face ignominy of dubbed mamma’s boys and be reduced to
nonentities. The poet contests the charge of being a nymphomaniac by
vehement defending herself, citing ‘the sad
lie/Of my unending lust’ (“In Love”, lines 6-7). The lethal combination of
‘sad’ and ‘lie’ makes the phrase a double negative, with ‘sad’ meaning shameful
and/or deplorable and ‘lie’ a false statement with the intent of a deception.
We find her accepting the fact that she had resorted constantly to using a
deplorable feint as a spokesperson for women, using ‘my’, a personal pronoun
impersonally, as a qualifier for the phrase ‘unending lust’. Here, then, is a
reliable piece of evidence in support of our contention about her being a
radical feminist.
Kamala
Das must be credited with the fact that she accepts sex as ordinary a need for
a human being as are food, shelter, security etc, not for women alone. Hence,
it is unfair to single out women as nymphomaniacs and/or as passive recipients.
The narrator in her poems does not want women to remain silent sufferers of all
humiliations but to be bold enough to demand fairplay and equality in status
because the soul knows no difference between sexes. Biological make-up
accounting for the difference needs to be kept out of bounds in this great
debate. Nature did not make man superior, and the creation of man-before-women
argument is as much a subject of dispute as is the egg-first-or-chicken
argument. There is neither any ambiguity in the fact that woman is the creative
principle as all religions recognise this truth nor in the fact that men are also
required to prove their masculinity and have the necessary ability to stand by
their women in the times of crises.
It seems to us that the narrator in Kamala Das’s poems is troubled
by the question of the growing chasm between the ideal and reality. The ideal
of equality in man-woman relationship is far from attained in real life, the
unity of man and woman in coitus is only a mirage and the woman in the poems is
determined not to rest until such time as it is restored. That explains why the
radical feminist in the poet is up in arms.
Kamala Das confesses of women’s failure in bringing about a change
in the male psyche. Yet there is room to believe that changes are bound to come
with the passage of time. Women’s refusal to follow the dictates of the
tradition will ensure that.
These poems seem to questions
why women must adopt certain roles based on their biology, just as it questions
why men adopt certain other roles based on theirs. They appear to be seeking to
draw lines between biologically determined behavior and culturally determined
behavior in order to free both men and women as much as possible from their
previous narrow gender roles. They appear to initiate a movement intent on
social change of revolutionary proportions.
Finally, to conclude our discussion, we shall make some important
observations in this section.
It seems to me that the woman in Kamala Das’s poems is troubled by
the question of the growing chasm between the ideal and reality.
We
expect intellectual honesty from an artist. True, the artist must work within
the bounds of decency to define and redefine reality as well as human
sensibilities. Honest expressions of truth are seldom obscene if they were to
be seen entirely as fair. Or else, the cave paintings, the sculpture on the
pillars and domes in our temples and palaces – the symbols of our national
heritage and pride – would also fall in the category of the obscene.
Open
expressions of love, of what love stands for, and of how love is different from
lust are issues that make Kamala Das’s poems what they are. Interestingly, this
is where we locate her radical feminism.
The ideal of equality in man-woman relationship is far from attained
in real life, the unity of man and woman in coitus is only a mirage and the
woman in the poems is determined not to rest until such time as it is restored.
That explains why the radical feminist in the poet is up in arms.
We are, therefore, persuaded to believe that Kamala Das and other
radical feminists like her have been subjected to unfair criticism.
Notes
1
Grrl, accessed from www.definition-of.net/grrrl,
is reported to have been derived from en.wikipedia.org, en.wiktionary.org,
oxforddictionaries.com etc in a footnote in the entry.
2
See the Shobha Warrier’s Interview with Kamala Das. Details in the Works
Cited section.
3
Vijay
Nambisan, “Caged bird who knew no
cages” (A Tribute), archives of The
Hindu; accessed from:
http://www.hindu.com/lr/2009/06/07/stories/2009060750010100.htm.
4
F Fawcett,
Nairs of Malabar (Asian Educational
Services, New Delhi, 1990). Also see the relevant information which was
accessed, collected and collated from a website:
http://www.malayalamresourcecentre.org/Mrc/culture/cultureofkerala/nairs.html.
5
Woh Ghar (Hindi), television film
directed by Girish Karnad in 1984 is based on Kirtinath Kurtakoti’s
Kannada play Aa Mani.
6
Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
(Project Gutenberg e-book), Act III, before she leaves him forever. Accessed from:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15492/15492-h/15492-h.htm.
7
Henri Bergson coined this term in his
philosophy to refer to the creative force within an
organism that is responsible for
growth, change, and necessary/desirable adaptations.
8
“Life
force”, accessed from <wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn> on 1
January 2012; for explanation on ‘creative evolution’, please refer to Henri
Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907)
translated into English in 1911.
9
“The Freaks” figures in all the four collections.
“An Introduction”, “Composition”,
“Convicts”, “Luminol”, “My Grand
Mother’s House”, “Summer in Calcutta”, “The Descendants”, “The Suicide”, “The
Sunshine Cat”, “The Inheritance”, “The Looking Glass”, “The Maggots”, and “The
Old Playhouse” appear in three of these collections. Poems like “Punishment in
Kindergarten” and “The Doubt” appear
only in one collection, but these have been included because these are germane
to her creative output. Some of these are yet to receive critical attention.
10 The expression ‘want’ is also used in line
2 in Kamala Das’s poem “The Looking Glass”. Want and desire are
words that are important in the language of desire and power. An example of
this is found in D H Lawrence’s short story “The Prussian Officer” wherein the
apparently queer Army Captain tells his young orderly on whom he has a crush, ‘I
want you this evening… I want you tomorrow evening also…’ in
response to the young man’s request to be allowed that evening off for a date
with his girl friend. It is obvious that what looks like an innocent statement
gathers a different connotation in the context of this discourse pattern in
that short story in D H Lawrence, The Complete Short Stories, Volume I
(William Heinemann, London, 1955; 1960 reprint), p.101.
11 Tapas is the root word of tapasya as explained in
the glossary section in Anna L Dallapiccolo (ed), Krishna, The Divine Lover:
Myth and Legend through Indian Art (New Delhi: B I Publications, 1982),
p.210.
12 Acharya Rajneesh, Sambhog se Sadhana Tak (Osho Commune, Pune). This author
has read the Hindi version of the work and has chosen to make a free
translation of it in English as From Coitus to Meditation.
13
W M Spink, “The Elaboration of
the Myth” of Krishna and Radha in Anna L Dallapiccolo (ed) (1982).
14 The act of taming is one of domesticating
by accustoming an ‘animal’ or someone wild and animal-like, given to moving
around freely, through the imposition of restrictions. A ‘swallow’ is a
swift-flying ‘migratory’ bird with a forked tail. The term ‘migratory’ is used
to refer to change of habitation seasonally.
15
W M Spink in Anna L
Dallapiccolo (ed) (1982).
16
Ibid.
17 Adil Jussawalla, “The New
Poetry” in Walsh, William
(ed), Readings in Commonwealth Literature (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1973), p.83
18 P P Raveendran, “Text as History, History
as Text: A Reading of Kamala Das’ Annamalai
Poems” in Journal of Commonwealth
Literature, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1994, p.52.
19
Beth Guide, “A Review of Sacraments of the
Catholic Church”,
http://www.articlesbase.com/religion-articles/a-review-of-sacraments-of-the-catholic-church-413034.html;
and Canon Denis Moss and Dr Simon Harding, “The Sacraments”,
http://www.articlesbase.com/christianity-articles/the-sacraments-1961690.html,
accessed on 21 January 2012.
20
C S White, “Krishna as a Divine
Child” in History of Religions, Vol. 10, No.1.
21 See Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba
the Greek (Tr Carl Wildman, Faber & Faber, London, 1961), p.239.
Works
Cited
Primary
Das, Kamala, Summer in
Calcutta, D C Books, New Delhi, 1965, 2004.
Das, Kamala, The Descendants,
Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1965, 2nd edition, 1991.
Das, Kamala, The Old Playhouse
and Other Poems, Orient Blackswan, 2004, reprint.
Das, Kamala and K Satchinandan, Only
the Soul Knows How to Sing, D C Books, New Delhi, 1996, 2009.
Secondary
1
“Radical Feminism”
(http://www.amazoncastle.com/feminism/ecocult.shtml) and Jan Creaser and Ben Li
(2000), “Radical Feminism” compilers for Gauntlet Publications Society
(http://www.ucalgary.ca/~gauntlet/eg/features/stories/20010315/supp17.html).
2
Bhanot, Preeti (1998), Kamala
Das: “Biography”, Spring 1998 (available on:
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Das.html).
3
Dallapiccolo, Anna L (ed)
(1982), Krishna , The Divine Lover:
Myth and Legend through Indian Art. New
Delhi
4
History of Religions, Vol. 10, No.1, August 1970/71, p.159.
5
Jones, Ernest (ed) (1953), Collected
Papers of Sigmund Freud. London : The Hogarth
Press and the Institute
of Psychoanalysis
6
Kazantzakis, Nikos (1961), Zorba
the Greek Tr. Carl Wildman. London
7
Lawrence, D H (1955), The
Complete Short Stories, Volume I.
London
8
Myers, Jack and Michael Simms
(eds) (1989), The Longman Dictionary of Poetic Terms, New
York and London
9
Rao, B Sridhar (1977), Sex
Problems and Their Management. Bombay
10
Sen, R N (Tr) (1920), The
Brahmavaivarta Puranam. Allahabad
11
Spink, W M, “The Elaboration of
the Myth” of Krishna and Radha in Anna L
Dallapiccolo (ed) (1982).
12
Walsh, William (ed) (1973), Readings
in Commonwealth Literature. Oxford : Oxford University
13
White, C S, “Krishna
as a Divine Child” in History of Religions, Vol. 10, No.1.
(Source: Radical Feminism in Kamala Das’s Poetry, The Commonwealth Review, Special Number on Diversity in
Commonwealth Literature, Vol.XXI, 1, 2012 (ISSN: 0974-0473), pp.96-134.)
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