Kamala Das: The Voice of the Voiceless

Kamala Das: The Voice of the Voiceless

R.Annamalai

Research Scholar,

Department of English and Foreign Languages,

Alagappa University,

Karaikudi.

A dismal picture emerges from the prevalence of injustice to women, subjecting them to sexual violence and denying them the love she craves for-the love, not conditioned by sex and by adopting a double standard of conduct-one equipping the women with the privilege of unquestionable behaviour even if the male partner proves false and faithless to her and the other prohibiting any moral deviation on the part of women because of failure and frustration in love with her husband.  Writers do not turn a blind eye to these ugly cracks in society but turn their pens to write about these cracks in society in works of literature.  To this extent, society influences the writers to give a realistic portrayal of the plight and predicament of the women in the convention-bound society.  Writes like Kamala Markandaya, Kamala Das, Mamta Kalia and Sashi Desh pande cannot turn a blind eye to the ugly spots in the society.  In their writings, they give a realistic picture of the harassment and humiliation suffered by women in the hands of men, and awaken their dormant state of being passive sufferers accepting their lot as preordained by God, prepare them to shed off the blind acceptance of man-made laws suppressing women’s urges and raise their voice against the dominating male ego and the anti-women society.

            There is a popular tendency to consider Kamala Das as out and out a love poet who writes sensationally in the style of journalistic gimmicks about sex.  This means doing injustice to her poetic talent, capacity and achievements.  There are poems in her poetic corpus which opens the eyes of the world to the social evils to which women are subjected and the victimization of the poor girls to appease the sex hungry rich. She commits herself to write about religious bigotry in India, ethnic violence in Sri Lanka and the genocide of the Sikhs in India.  Kamala Das cannot close her eyes to the poor roofless people sleeping on pavements exposing themselves to the burning sun and the pouring rain and about the downtrodden bearing the burden of hunger and starvation and wandering about looking for edible left overs.

            There is truth in the statement that society influences the writer and the writer in his turn influences the society by his / her revolutionary writings.  In this paper, the paper presenter makes an analysis of Kamala Das’s rebellious attitude to the acts of injustice by the male chauvinistic society.

            Kamala Das comes down heavily upon man who hungers for the body while the woman hungers for love.  She through the protagonists of her poems tries to free women from being the victims of sex hungry men.

            The characters presented in her short stories are not the constituents of seamy side of life but as actual left overs of a male world that has sought its pleasures and left them dry and useless. 

According to Kamala Das as long as a woman loves her husband in the tradition of an Indian Pativrata with no skill or strength to strike him when subjected to brutality or bestiality, she will remain a lifelong passive sufferer with a tearful history (Thasan, Kalai 193).

           

In her essay on “Enough of Pativrata,”  Kamala Das is for putting an end to this type of life: “Honour is not merely connected within the body.  It is the raiment of the soul.  If a man does not allow his wife to practise it, she should leave him” (1).  Recalling her own life, Kamala Das says in “Suddenly As She Enters Middle Age”: “It was only when I stopped loving my husband that he began to love me” (16).  Her poem “Losing Battle” and “The Story of “A Little Kitten” are based on this aspect of the poet’s personality.  The heroine in “A Home near the Sea” has no reservation to strike her husband when she is insulted.

            Almost, all her poems bear the stamp of her liberated spirit.  She is a crusader fighting against bourgeois morality.   

In her revolt against convention, she is an equivalent of George Sand, who, as an ardent feminist, flouted social conventions.  In her vindication of the rights of women, she is an Indian Mary Woolstonecraft.   She is the counterpart of Amrita Pritam of the Punjab, in her impassioned plea for the liberation of women from the dominant male ego. (Thasan, Kalai 115).

           

As an iconoclast, Kamala Das is against the concept of love concerned with sheer bodily fulfillment.  “Can this skin-communicated thing be called love?” is the question the poet-persona poses to herself in “In love” (Summer in Calcutta 12). The indwelling sarcasm of the expression, “a skin-communicated thing,” brings out only her inwrought disillusionment with physical fulfillment but also her fiery outburst at equating love with sex.  The rhetorical question in “The Freaks” (Summer in Calcutta 8).

Can’t this man with / Nimble finger-tips unleash / Nothing more alive than the / Skin’s lazy hungers?” expresses the uselessness of her man who can be no match to her. 

“What is the bloody use of this kind of love, / This hacking at each other’s parts?” asks the poet in “Convicts” (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems 25) because of her painful awareness of the soul-killing act of sex, as suggested by “This hacking at each other’s parts.” In “Substitute,” the poet comes down heavily upon love that is based on sheer fulfillment—a love which is a “swivel-door” that lets out one in order to let in other (Thasan, Kalai 117-118).

           

In a number of poems, we find Kamala Das as a crusader fighting to liberate women from the clutches of male domination.  She cannot sit silent in the face of injustice, indignity and its treatment done to women. She protests against what is inhuman and unjust in the institution of marriage.  The hapless, the humiliated, and the frustrated speak through Kamala Das.  “The Sunshine Cat” (Tonight, This Savage Rite 22) is the poet’s silent registration of the hapless indignation at the humiliation of women by the male-dominated world where no one cares for her individuality, aspiration and need to have emotional fulfillment.

            As a moth piece of her sisterhood, Kamala Das reveals in the poem “The Doubt” (The Descendants 16) her desire to liberate women from the self-centered interest man.  She breaks the bubble of the male ego by driving home the blatant truth that after death everybody is called “it.”   There is no differentiation between a man and woman.

            According to Kamala Das, “women are not as strong as men physically.  So if we do not let them know of our superiority, they are apt to take advantage of our frailty” (“Suddenly” 16).  “To be loved, stop loving him” is the easiest way to entrap the husband in the endearment of a wife.  Love, deprived of its honoured place in man’s heart and subjected to insult and ill-treatment, affords the occasion for versified tears of the female.

            Kamala Das takes cudgels against the injury, pain and humiliation inflicted upon the weaker sections of the society.  In an impassioned tone, she portrays in the poem “Nani” (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems 40) the tragic death of hapless woman who was victim of the carnal hungers of a “rich man.  It is indeed an irony that while alive, these unfortunate women were playthings in the hands of the feudal lords to appease their physical hungers:  Even death, they were “puppets” turning gently on the rope to delight children with a comic dance.

            In another poems, titled “Honour,” (Collected Poems 47) she expresses how the poor and the innocent women are simply toys in the hands of the bawdy rich Nairs.  Once the game in over, they are thrown into the wells and ponds.  The sex hungry Nairs suffer little censure or arrest or prosecution.  The voices of the drowned women and strangled babies “talk” though the poet.  Through these poems, Kamala Das calls up on the reading public to raise against the sex hungry monsters.

            In a militant tone, Kamala Das registers the protest in the poem “The Flag” (Summer in Calcutta 21-22) against the senseless pride of the Indian tri-colour Flag.  What need is there for a flag, when tens of thousands of people lie dead on wet pavements without even a rag or a vestige of clothing to cover their nude corpses? asks the poet.  She questions its right to fly in the sky.  Rather than being unfurled and allowed to flutter, it should be given a burial.  To her, the display of national pride lies neither in flying the national flag nor in singing the national anthem.  Rather it does in the promotion of people’s health and happiness.  She breaks the bubble of natural pride and raises the voice of protest against the preservation of national honour at the cost of the sweat, blood and tears of the people.  The poet’s large and selfless poetic vision cannot be cowed by cant and hypocrisy.

            In the poem, “Delhi 1984,” (Only the Soul Knows How to Sing 44) Kamala Das highly critical of the false patriotic fervour of the politicians whose blood stained hands that let loose the Reign of Terror and committed cold blooded murder of the members of the Sikh community in India following the assassination of Indra Gandhi.  In “Sri Lanka Poems,” she voices her resentment against the ethnic violence that swept the Island county of Sri Lanka in July 1983, and took a terrible toll of lives of the innocent men, women and children of Tamil population.

            In the poem “The Sea at Gale Face Green,” (Collected Poems  12-13) Kamala Das lodges her outright condemnation of the killings in the name of race.  Herself is an eye witness and a silent spectator to the scenes of murder and massacre enacted by the Sinhalese fenatics, Kamala Das reveals her silent remorse at the death and devastation caused to the lives and property of the Tamils during the outbreak of the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka.

            In a string of rhetorical questions, the poet portrays the predicament of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.  There is no biological difference in the physique of the Tamils and Sinhalese:

Did the Tamils smell so / Different, what secret / Chemistry let them down? /  Was there a faint scent of / Jasmine in their women’s / Hair?” (“The Sea at Galle Face Green” Collected Poems vol.I 12).

            She flies into a fit of fury at the rape committed on the Tamil girls. It is a pity that even the children, though innocent, were not spared. The motherly feeling of the poet which cannot bear to see the children slaughtered, raises unanswered questions:

But how did they track / Down the little ones whose / Voices rose each morning / With the National Flag / . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . / . . . How did they / Track down the little ones / Who knew not their ethnic  / Inferiority?  (“The Sea at Galle Face Green” Collected Poems vol.1 12-13)

           

The “little ones” who sang the National Anthem at the hoisting of the National Flag had their voices muffled by the gunshots.  The poet wonder if this is the price paid for their patriotism.  The Sinhalese gunmen ceased to be human beings, but turned out to be blood-thirsty hounds and wolves.

            The poems of Kamala Das are not meant for enjoyment; they are meant for the scholar’s desk.  The poems discussed in this paper serve as the battle field training the reading public to awake, arise and express their indignation and empower them to revolt against all types of injustice done to people.

Works Cited

1.      Das, Kamala. “Enough of a Pativrata.” Blitz 9 Apr. 1977: 1-2.

2.      . . . . Summer in Calcutta. Delhi: Everest, 1965.

3.      . . . . “Suddenly As she Enters Middle Age.” Sunday 4.41 (1977): 16-17.

4.      . . . . The Old Playhouse and Other Poems. Madras: Orient Longman, 1973.

5.      . . . .  Collected Poems. Trivandrum: Nava Kerala, 1984.

6.      . . . . Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: DC Books, 2007.

7.      . . . . “A Home near the Sea.” Illustrated Weekly of Inda. 10 Aug. 1975: 43-45.

8.      Kalaithasan, N. “Kamala Das: A Critical Study.” Diss. Madurai Kamaraj University, 1988.