Author: AUBBID HUSSAIN MALIK
Poetry literature brings together imaginative awareness of experiences as well as emotional experiences and one should thus always move very cautiously in the field of contemporary Indo-english verse. India itself has given birth to so many Indo-English poets with the number of series to their credits, however Kamala Das is par excellence.
A well known saying is “Surely one gram of gold is more valuable than one kilogram of copper” and it can be vividly experienced in the poetry of Kamala. The poetry of Das is glutted with images and symbols of love and lust and she is really a celebrant to the human body. Compared to today’s India, Das looms very high over the poetic horizon.
Kamala Surayya, popularly known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das, was born on 31 March 1934 at Malabar in South-Indian state Kerala. Born in a financially weak family, Kamala was married off in 1949.
Kamala Das in her poetry speaks about her parents unsuited alliance as she wrote “My mother didn’t fall in love with my father.” Her parents to her thinking ‘were dissimilar and horribly mismatched’.
Das describes that her mother’s timidity created an illusion of domestic harmony and produced some half a dozen children of olive skin with ordinary features.
There was an official in Reserve Bank of India Bombay Mr Madhava Das to whom Kamala married at the age of 15.The life became miserable for her in the circle of her unconcerned lustful husband. Behaviour of her husband was always cruel and brutal because he was an experienced man in a rumpy relationship with his maid servant as Kamala Das clearly expressed it in a poem “The Old Play-House”.
“… . You called me wife,
I was taught to break Saccarine into your tea and to offer at the right moment the vitamins.
Covering beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and became a dwarf. I lost my Will and reason to all your questions I mumbled incoherent replies ‘’
In these lines she expresses her sorrow over the illegal relationship of her husband with her servant as it was injustice to a wife that her husband had no love words for her, no time to spend with her and he was always busy sorting out his office files.
In India where marriage goes hand to hand however she describes herself as a very unfortunate woman for her husband was cruel to her and Das described the injustice of husbands with their wives as according to her experience, the man himself thinks dominant over a woman.
She strongly protested her marital bond for she was asked to perform home works and to care her husband but her husband never paid any heed to her which made her helpless and she described this helplessness in a poem “The Freaks” – which speaks of the glory belonging to a really exalting love experience that when man is passive and the woman is burning with desire but finds herself helpless. These inner feelings bring Kamala Das face to face to the question whether she could call her sexual experience love as it is a bereft of glow with no heat and passion.
Kamala Das’s poetry is concerned with both the external and internal world. Most of her poems are dominated by a tone of betrayal and she describes herself as a prisoner of her own loneliness and complex moods.
Das, as it seems, was actually overwhelmed by the feelings of loneliness. In her poem ‘A Request’ she describes herself as:
When I die, Don’t throw the meat and bones away
But pile them up
And what life was worth of the earth
What love was worth in the end.
Alas, how disappointed and helpless she seems to be, but she was courageous and bold enough as she describes the images of crows flying the sky over the market Square with hoarse cries breaks the distance from ground to space in order to target ground for the suggestion of the lack of mental contact between the man and woman.
Kamala Das says that the body of woman gets rejected after consummation because the ‘man is full of lust and greed’ of his chance that makes a woman always disappointed. There are many ways to love anyone and being loved by anyone but in her poetry she tells us that perhaps love no more than a way of learning about one’s self or the completion of one’s own personality but it is addressed in her poetry that husbands are largely personal in love that lodges a protest against the constraint of married life, hypocrisy of husband, routine of lust, artificial comfort and make domination as in her experience she says that ‘husband swallows the happiness of wife because of egotism’.
Kamala Das suggests that women should protest against male ego and assertion. Protest against the fantacism of religion is obvious but what is hatred and intolerance that goes in the name of religion whether it is Islam, Christianity or Hinduism as Kamala Das says that what man has inherited is not love but hatred not wisdom but babble this is the virus that is nurtured always in the souls of materialistic husbands.
By man of substance, shall perhaps wither, battling with
My darling’s impersonal lust. Or, it shall grow grads
And reach large proportion before it’s end.
In her poetry she raises the voice of women at her paternal home and in-laws that how women are being exploited either by their blood relatives or by in-laws and that they are treated like mere chattels.
Tailpiece: Recently a 23-year-old woman namely Ayesha of Allahabad India became the victim of dowry demanded by her husband after three years of marriage, and there are many others who are silently undergoing a gruesome experience and this is really what Kamala Das addresses in her poetry that ‘women are always being suppressed on the basis of of materialism, social inequality and cultural taboos.’
The sea is garrulous today. Come in,
Come in, what you loose are my gains.
- The author an English literature student resident of Sariwarpora pattan Baramulla and can be reached at aubbidmalik@gmail.com
