CHAPTER I

Women Poets in Indian English Poetry: The Past and the Present

Indian English poetry is now more than one hundred and seventy-five years old if we recall the date of the publication of Derozio’s book of poems entitled Poems. The book Poems appeared from Indian famous city of Calcutta in 1827. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, born in 1809, was the son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother. He was a conscious and curious child who started writing in his early age. He worked for few days as a clerk in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and at Bhagalpur on an indigo plantation. He tried to search his fortune in journalism also but could not succeed. He became a lecturer at Hindu College, Calcutta. Here, his free, frank and fearless personality bloomed and curious nature came forward. His spirit of inquiry, his passion-for ideas, his reformistic idealism and his romantic enthusiasm and temperament fired the imagination of many a students to a great extent. 2

Derozio was revolutionary not only in his iconoclastic ideas but also in his effort to initiate a new form of literary composition. Indian English poetry, in fact, has offered over the period of one hundred and seventy-five years a chequered history of growth and development that continuously made, unmade and remade itself through constant experiments in matters of themes and styles. Indian English poetry has undergone several phases of experimentations resulting in varied phenomena a ceaseless poetic activities that vouch for the inner strength of the succeeding poets. The social reforms, the individual ecstasies^ the agonies of living personae as well as mythical characters, love and nature, rejuvenation of legends and metaphysical queries are some of the themes that have been treated and projected by Indian English poets during both the pre-Independence and post-Independence periods. A host of stylistic innovations have marked the growth of Indian English poetry from its inception during the cofinfoal days down to the post-Independence and post-modern periods. That Indian English poetry is not isolated from the global trends very much corroborated by the fact that it has incorporated in itself the manifestation of the feminist 3

movements that swept through Europe, America, Canada and Australia since 1960s. Since then there appeared the poetry of Kamala Das, Eunice de Souza, Mamta Kalia, Tara Patel, Imtiaz Dharker, Channayne D’Souza, Suzata Bhatt and a few other women poets who boldly upset the phallogocentric discourse of Indian English poetry by introducing in it a new array of thematic contents like woman’s protest against patriarchal mores and attitudes. For the first time in Indian English poetry, the women poets of post-Independence and post-modern period portrayed in a subversive idiom their desires, lust, sexuality and gestational experiences. They enriched Indian English poetry with a worth of new themes and experiences. They developed a new innovative iconoclastic discourse to portray their repressed desires. Thus a new form of feminist poetry emerged and grew to give Indian English poetry new strength, new diversity and new potent signs of maturity and newer forms of approximation to contemporary issues and reality of social and political changes • that have overtaken the course of human civilization during the period moving towards the new millennium. The pre-Independence period is also of more importance to understand the basic foundation of the 4

making of Indo-English poetry in general beginning from 1827 to 1947. Indian English poetry during its pre- Independence period produced a host of poets from Derozio to Harindranath Chattopadhyay but paradoxically enough only two women poets published their poems. Thus, the discourse that developed in Indian English poetry during the pre-Independence period was predominantly phallogocentric. Torn Datt died at the early age of twenty one and her poems were published posthumously. We can safely say that Indian English poetry really graduated from imitation to authenticity with Torn Dutt (1856-77). The third and youngest child of Govin Chunder Dutt, Torulata, born a Hindu was baptized along with the other members of the family in 1862. She learnt English at a very early age and reading and music were her chief hobbies. Sailing for Europe in 1869, she spent a year in France, studying French, and was thereafter in England for three years. Returning to India in 1873, she died of consumption four years later, at the age of twentyone. One of her father’s sonnets contains a remarkable pen-portrait of her: Puny and elf-like, with dishevelled treeses / Self-willed and shy... / Intent to pay her tenderest addresses / To bird or cat,—but most intelligent.” The fifty odd letters she wrote to her 5

English friend, Miss Martin, reveal an interesting personality. There is inevitably much in them of the usual school-girl gossip about the trivial minutiae of daily life— news of the calving of a cow and the killing of a large snake; and at one place one finds her demanding a mosquito curtain for her canaries; but there is something much more also: a sad awareness of the passing of time and strange intimations of maturity, as, for instance, when she declares ‘I am getting quite old, twenty and some odd months and with such an old-fashioned face that English ladies take me for thirty.’ For one living so sheltered a life she shows a surprisingly lively interest in the social and political scene. When a European who had killed his syu is reported to have been fined only two Pound, she comments indignantly: ‘You see how cheap the life of an Indian is in the eyes of an English judge’(Harihar Das 1921, p.5). Her comments on book she reads show a well-developed critical sense. She wonders why Hardy’s heroines ‘generally marry the men they loved the least’. An impish sense of humour too breaks out occasionally, as when, on being chided by an elderly relative for not getting married yet, she replies demurely, ‘I was only waiting for your permission.’ 6

Her study of Sanskrit during the closing years of her life brought her nearer to the springs of her own culture, she ceased to be a totally English woman. She now realizes how grand, how sublime, how pathetic our legends are; and during the last few months of her life, she writes, ‘strange to say I do not much relish the idea of leaving Calcutta. I am very fickle, for it was I who regretted the most leaving England. I wonder why this is so.’ As we know that a tender hearted girl that she was, her poetic output would have been rare had she only been allotted a little longer span of life. Like Ram Sharma’s hers also was a similar attitude of ambivalence towards Britain and loved the British ways yet she had a penchant for the Indian mythology. It is very curious fact that though she was a Christian convert, she had deep love for Indian legends and classics. She has extensively exploited some of the native myths and legends in her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan which were posthumously published in 1882. M.K Naik's evolution of her achievement is too pertinent to be overlooked: What is most impressive about Torn Dutt’s poetry is its virtually total freedom from imitation (in contrast with Kashi Prasad Ghose and M.M. Dutt) at an age when most writers are in their artistic swaddling 7

clothes... Her best work has the qualities of a quiet strength of deep emotion held under artistic restraint and an acute awareness of the abiding values of Indian life (Naik, pp 40-41)

The poetry she produced was mostly based on ancient Indian legends. Even then in one of her poems, entitled ‘Savitri’, Dutt recreates a bold woman who chooses her own bridegroom, and engages herself in a long pursuit to win back her husband’s soul from Yama, the supernatural king of death. She asserts the rights of her individual self: ‘He for his deeds shall get his due As I for mine: thus here each soul Is its own friend if it pursue The right;...’ Torn Dutt can be considered the first Indian English poet to make an extensive use of Indian myth and legend, though scattered references to these had been employed by her predecessors. Furthermore, her treatment of these legends reveals, on the whole, an instinctive understanding of the spirit underlying them, though as a recent Christian convert living in a half-anglicized environment at home, she occasionally betrays certain inadequacies. She sings of Savitri’s matchless wifely devotion, her faith in the

s . 8

omnipotence of fate and her belief in Maya. Her two ballads—Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan deal with the archetypes of Indian womanhood, Sita and Savitri’s four narrate the legends of youngsters. Dhruva, Buttoo, Sindliu and Prahlad, one recounts a legend about the goddess Uma; and Lakshman and King Bharata are the other characters that figure here. As this list indicates, Toru Dutt is the first Indian English poet to make an extensive use of Indian myth and legend. The other woman poet Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) was an equally talented poet whose artistic gifts clashed With her political involvement. She published several love lyrics in which, however, the patriarchal mode of the subordination of woman in the love relationship between man and woman is repeated. Politically, she was a freedom- fighter who fought for the sake of the country and the people of her own country. Before participating in social activities, she had brought out her first volume, The Golden Threshold which was followed by The Birth of Time, The Broken King and the collected poems, The Sceptered Flute. Her finest lyrics have a perfect structure and a rare craftsmanship. Besides being a freedom fighter, on rare occasions, she registered protest against the indifference of 9

man towards woman, as in the following lines from a poem entitled ‘Caprice’: You held a wine cup in your finger tips, Lightly you raised it to indifferent lips, Lightly, you drank and flung away the bowl... Alas! It was my Soul. (The Sceptered Flute, p. 200) She was also a social reformer who began to work for the people of India. This social reform and the freedom struggle had begun increasingly claiming her energies and thereafter she wrote poetry only sporadically. She became one of the foremost political figures of her generation and won fame as a leading orator. She continued to be active in public life after Independence also. Her finest lyrics have a perfect structure and a rare craftsmanship. However, since her diction and imagery are derived from conventional romantic sources, her work appears to be irretrievably outdated by the parameters of modern poetics. Her contribution lies in giving an authentic native English utterance marvellously tuned to the composite Indian ethos marked by the splendours of native scenario. Naidu’s lyric art has been strongly influenced both by British romanticism and Persian Urdu poetic modes, 10

with their characteristic opulence. The century and a quarter of lyrics brought together in The Sceptured Flute are rather unsystematically grouped under eleven mutually overlapping sub-sections, the most significant of which are ‘Folk Songs’, ‘Songs of Love and Death’, ‘Songs of the Spring Time’ and a sequence of love-lyrics entitled The Temple. The folk songs mostly take the form of dramatic lyrics in which the speakers represent groups of Indian folk playing their traditional occupations—e.g. ‘Palanquin- Bearers’, ‘Wandering Singers’, ‘Indian Weavers’, etc. Some of the pieces in a latter section entitled Indian Folk Songs follow a similar strategy. Here are also songs celebrating traditional Indian mythology, legends and history which reveal the poet’s catholicity of sympathy and secular outlook. A Hindu Brahmin domiciled in Muslim Hyderabad, she sings of both Krishna and Allah and Radha and Gulnar, with equal zest. Love is naturally one of her favourite subjects and her handling of this age-old theme is marked by a variety of approach, mood and technique. While in A Rajput Love- Song she recreates a dramatic situation against a typical Rajasthani back-drop, in A Love Song from the North and A Persian Love Song, she employs the conventions of Hindi 11

and Persian love poetry, respectively. The Temple is easily one of the most remarkable sequence in Indian English poetry. Tracing the progress of love from The Gate of Delight through The Path of Tears, ultimately to The Sanctuaiy, where it culminates in mystical self-surrender, it treats its subject with sensitivity and charm. The true-blue romantic that she is, she also revels in the ‘pleasure of being sad’ and designates herself an ‘unwilling priestess’ to the God of Pain, performing his ‘inexorable rites’ : ‘How shall 1 cherish thee’, she asks, ‘0 precious pain? A mind like this needs must be ‘half in love with easeful death’. Hence, like Emily Dickinson, ‘the blind, ultimate silence of dead’ and ‘the mute and mystic terror of the tomb’ always fascinate her. In a weak moment, she pleads with Death: ‘Tarry a while, O Death, I cannot die / Till all my human hungers are fulfilled’, but being deeply grounded in Hindu.philosophy, she is reassured by the thought that ‘Life is a prism of God’s light and Death ‘the shadow of His face’. Her ‘Coromendel Fishers’ too refuse to panic when caught in a sea-storm, because they believe that ‘He who holds the storm by,the hair will hide in His breast our lives.’ The Songs of Springtime contains some of Sarojini Naidu’s most characteristic work. Here she finds ‘the clue / 12

To all the vernal joy’, which her response to the colourful Indian scene with its gulmohars and sirisas, champak and lotus buds, and koels and dhadikulas evokes. Her Hature poetry is lighted up by her zestful - and - uninhibited joy in beauty, especially of spring, her favourite season. She sings, ‘O'let us fling all care away and lie alone and dream / Neath tangled boughs of tamarind and molsari and neemJ And bind our brows with jasmine sprays arid play on carven flutes/ To make the slumbering serpent-kings among the banyan roots.’ Like the romantics, she regards Nature as a refuge from the cares of human life, though unlike Wordsworth she is hardly a Nature-mystic nor is a Keatsian, sensuous apprehension of Nature her strong suit, though she does evoke the tropical magnificence of the Indian landscape as in ‘The earth is a fire like a humming bird’s wing / And the sky like a king-fishers feather.’ She is at her weakest in her occasional and patriotic poems—all those songs, sonnets and odes addressed to India, Tilak and the rest These pieces seldom rise above the level of commonplace sentiment and conventional expression and on the whole offer flashy rhetoric rather than authentic poetry—a surprising feature of the art of one whose patriotism was beyond question. 13

It is said that literature mirrors its contemporary society. Let us see how far the saying goes true. In those days, women were kept behind the curtain, or in mantle- tradition, confined to the womanhood traditionally, and utilized as sex-dolls for the patriarchy in the Indian society. Hence their voices were suppressed. They were dominated, trivialized and made invisible. It is only in the seventh decade of twentieth century that we encounter women coming out, resisting male domination, registering their voices of protest and asserting their independence and freedom in the choice of the modes and the ways of life they prefer. Their voices of protest and the assertion of their independence developed a new discourse in the post­ modern stylistic spectrum of Indian English poetry. The demolished the imposition of purdah (curtain) and ladies came out into the open, externalizing their repressed desires, and claiming their social rights, thus creating a new subversive idiom for the articulation of womanhood and its parameters in the male-dominated society,' upsetting the formulae of the phallogocentric syntax of Indian English poetry. A new life-force emerged and energized the lyricism of Indian English poetry through the medium of 14

women’s poetry, verbalizing woman’s desire and protests in a new-fangled mode of feminist discourse. However, the feminist perspective and praxis in Indian English poetry did not either originate from or eventuate in feminist theories. But the discourse developed by the feminist poets of Indian English literature in their poetry invites consideration of their literary theories of the feminists of Europe. Hence, references to the feminist ideas and theories from the West would be incorporated in this explication and evaluation of the mode of discourse evolved and matured by the Indian English women poets of the post- Independence period. In a way, these women poets exemplify and testify to the post-modern variety in literary articulation. In their feminist poetry, the Indian English women poets ‘so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful that their styles resist classification according to traditional rubrics’ (M.H. Abrams, 1993, p. 12), The pre-Independence poets have dealt with a variety of themes and styles. While Derozio used a derivative and romantic style, Romesh Chander Dutt had a narrative style, Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s was an epical one, Toru Dutt’s simple and transparent while Tagore used prose-poem style, Man Mohan Ghose imitated the 15

style of the decadents of the naughty Nineties, Sri Aurobindo dealt with a somewhat obscure and Mantrik style, Naidu’s technique is sophisticated and figurative. The poetry of pre-Independence era basically has a social and political orientation. It is also to be noted that in the initial stage, the Indian poets in English were imitators of the British Romantics in their style but since 1857, nationalistic sentiments became part of their poetic design. The attainment of Independence in 1947 proved a turning point in the growth of Indian poetry in English. Bruce King has perceptively noted this phenomenon: Unlike the creative writing of Africa and the Caribbean, modern Indian poetry in English has been neglected by most critics, foreign readers and intellectuals for it has no obvious direct relationship to the cultural movements which led to natural independence; by 1947 the situation had changed and with it the concern of the new poets became their relationship to and alienation from the realities of their society (King: 1)

The Indians writing poetry in English accepted the challenge thrown up by some critics that English was simply inadequate to express the Indian situation in all its multiplicity. This modern poetry in English grew some more teeth and got poised to meet such demands with 16

practitioners like Kamala Das who asserted their freedom to choose a language for creative expression: The language I speak Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest It is as human as I am human.;.. (Das 1965:59) So the poets including Kamala Das appeared self- confident while accepting English as their medium of expression, They turned their backs on the existing Romantic tradition and wrote poetry suited to the general temper of the times. These poets also tried to naturalise the modernistic elements pronounced by Pound, Yeats and Eliot. P. Lai and his associates, in late 50s and in the beginning of ‘60s, founded the Writers Workshop in Calcutta to promote the poetic efforts of these poets. It soon proved to be an effective forum for modernist poetry though in miscellany, devoted to encouraging new and unpublished writers. In its seminal volume, Modern Indo-Anglicin Poetiy (1958), the editors vehemently attacked the poetry of Sri Aurobindo and others: 17

It has spoilt a good deal of the Indo-Anglian Past; it can without exaggeration spell ruin for the future. We claim that the phase of Indo-Anglian Romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu... We must more and more aim at realistic poetry, reflecting poetically and pleasingly the din and hubbub, the confusion and indecision, flashes of beauty and goodness of our age..,. We emphasise the need for the private voice especially because we live in an age that tends so easily to demonstrations of mass approval and suited for a capsule minded public.., (Lai 15)

Thus it can be said that the poets df beginning of the second half of the twentieth century started a search for an altogether new poetic idiom. The wild abstractions were replaced by concrete although somewhat complex images. Poetry, written in those days, is characterized by experimentation and innovation with new set up and new imagery, authentic creative urge and superb craftsmanship. Pritis Nandy, thus writes rightly: After years of hortation and fruitless dialogue with eternity, long loud wails at the human predicament and garrulous search for the spiritual dimension to man’s fate, the Indian poet in English decided to look into himself and search for his answers there. Not in terms of prophetic generalization about got and the devil and all but in terms of the voiceless vacant, in the still center of the heart. (6^7) 18

No doubt women poets form a healthy and gorgeous school in modern Indian English Literature and the most outstanding work is done by Kamala Das. She was born on 31st March, 1934 at Punnayurkulam, a village in South Malabar, Kerala to V.M. Nair and. Balamoni Amma after four years of their marriage. She received her education for the most part, at home. Why her parents who were poets themselves of a certain taste and stature, adopted this attitude towards her education is not known. As her autobiography tells us, Kamala Das whose maiden name was Madhavikutty first attended a European school in Calcutta, then the Elementary School at Punnayurkulam and then a boarding school run by the Roman Catholic nuns, but in each of them she stayed for a short while. At the Catholic boarding school, she got ill and was removed to Calcutta where private tutors were engaged to teach her fine arts. Her father worked with a British automobile firm. He belonged to a traditional family having an aristocratic atmosphere around it. Her mother was a well-known Malyali poet, with a literary aptitude. Kamala Das frequently refers to the incompatible of her parents as marriage partners (“dissimilar and horribly mismated”, My ■Story, 4). Speaking of her parents’ unsuited alliance, 19

Kamala writes: “My mother did not fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and possibly mismated” {My Story, 5). But her mother’s timidity created an illusion of domestic harmony, and produced some half a dozen children of swarthy skin and ordinary texture. Kamala’s maternal grandfather and great grandfather were Rajas and she refers to this house in “Blood”, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems: Our great grandmother said one day You see this house of ours Now three hundred years old... She told us • That we had the oldest blood My brother and she and I The oldest blood in the world... Her father was a confirmed follower of Gandhian principles. He always believed in austerity and had ever made his wife give up all her gold ornaments and forbidden her to wear anything but khaddar. Kamala Das has dedicated her third verse volume The Old Playhouse and Other Poems to “my fond parents”. Kamala Das had her early education in a European school at Calcutta when the coloured children were called 20

Blackie by their white companions. She immortalized her ancestral home in Malabar in several poems including “My Grandmother’s House” {Summer in Calcutta) and “Evening at the Old Nalapat House” {Collected Poems). Kamala seems here satisfied and was happy of her childhood. She narrates several of her experiences of the convent school hostel. Talking of her memories, she recalls that: . Nearly all the teachers were old maids, turned sour with rejection and so we were subjected to subtle sadism of several kinds. {My Story. 56)

Her stay in Calcutta coincided with the partition riots of 1947 which claimed her ocalist Dr. Ahmed. The poem ‘The Inheritance’ derives its emotive force from the poet’s memories of those days. It was around this time, or shortly thereafter that her parents separated, her mother living in Malabar while her father stayed; on in Calcutta. Unfortunately Kamala failed in Mathematics at the St. John’s Diocesan School in Calcutta to her father’s great annoyance. In her interview with Iqbal Kaur she seems to defend her failure by playing down the importance of mathematics: Probably mathematics is unnecessary. A little bit of arithmetic is good enough for anyone but the girds must be taught some kind of martial art... This is 21

definitely more important than algebra or geometry (Das 1995,163)

Kamala Das was married to Mr. Madhav Das, an official in the Reserve Bank of India, Bombay at the age of fifteen, where her life became miserable in the company of her non-chalant, lustful husband. The pbet has referred to this event in several poems. As he was experienced in sex with his maidservants his contact with his wife was usually cruel and brutal. With her husband’s posting at Bombay she was exposed to the ethos of another big city and these experiences have been recorded in poems like “The Millionaires at Marine Drive” and “Farewell to Bombay” among others. She has made no secret of the fact that she was frequently depressed and demoralized on this count. Her husband boasted to have known of ‘sluts and nymphomaniacs’ and this prompted Kamala Das to launch into ‘a hectic love life with small capital—-just a pair of beautiful beasts and a faint must-rat smell in my perspiration...’ She grew revengeful towards him, and reacted in a non-traditional fashion in love-making, offering herself to any handsome or resourceful man who came across her, and forgiving even her rapists. Her husband had 22

no soothing words for her, no time to spare for her and was ever busy sorting out his files and affixing his signature on them. And as a traditional wife, she was expected to discharge her domestic duties well and to look to the needs and comforts of her husband. This eroded her own distinct personality and belittled her for ever. She recorded every event of life in her poems. Her poem The Old Playhouse reads thus: ... 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. This is actually a strong protest against a hollow marital bond which she cannot untie. In a country like India, where marriage and love go hand in hand, it was very difficult for such a sensitive woman to go traditionally in life. She condemns such situations repeatedly in her poems. A different and difficult phase started in the life of Kamala Das when her husband was transferred to Calcutta for three years. Her relationship with this city had grown as she moved from childhood to adolescence. She had left 23

Calcutta as a teenager about to be married. She returned to it adult, married and a mother. Despite all difficulties she continues to live with her husband, look after her children, Her experiences of the city appear in poems like “The Dance of the Eunuchs”, “Of Calcutta” and “Summer in Calcutta” With her husband’s deputation to Planning Commission, she moved to Delhi where the cultural life was an altogether different kind. Unfortunately she was not keeping good health and with the expiry of liis term her Delhi sojourn ended and they came back once again to Bombay. Her deteriorating health has turned into a ---- insomnia and she spent the nights sitting at the dining table writing poetry. But when she speaks of love outside marriage, she does not really advocate for infidelity and adultery but merely searches for a kind of man-woman relationship which should guarantee both love and security to a woman. She gives a mythical framework to her search for genuine love and identifies it with the Radha-Krishna myth or with the Mira-Krishna relationship. There are several poems on Lord Krishna in her volumes, supported by references to this Lord in her prose writings. She writes in both Malayalam and English and has published eleven books in 24

her mother tongue and three books of poems in English. Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967) and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973) are her poetical collections in English. It is noteworthy that she has collaborated with Pritish Nandy in Tonight, This Savage Rite (1979), a collection of their love poems. Her autobiography, My Story which was first serialized in The Current Weekly of Bombay from January to December, 1974, has now come out as an independent work (1976). She has also published a novel in English under the title, Alphabet of Lust (1976). Kamala Das’s creative profile and accomplishments are singularly impressive and they entitle her to a position of eminence in the comity of men (including women) of letters. Her creative odyssey started way back in 1948 when one of her poems was published in Indian PEN (later on reproduced in An Anthology of Commomvealth Verse, edited by Margaret O’Donnell, Backie & Sons, 1963). She won the PEN’s Asian Poetry Prize by PEN Philippine Branch” “and had for the first time in my life bank account of. mine” {My Story, 155). Her first volume of poems Summer in Calcutta was published in 1965 followed by the second book of verse The Descendants (1967). She was 25

honoured with the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for her collection of short stories entitled Thamippa (Cold) in 1969 and won the Chaman Lai Award for journalism in 1971. Her third book of poems The Old Playhouse and Other Poems appeared in 1973 and two collections of short stories Frigidity and Sepiatainted Photograph were also released the same year. My Story (first serialized in a Malayalam journal and later in The Current Weekly, Jan-December 1974) is considered to be her much acclaimed autobiography, was published by Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 1976 (later by Quartet Books, London, in 1978). Alphabet of Lust, a novel in • English also came out the same year. In 1979, she brought out Tonight, This Savage Rite (in collaboration with Pritish Nandy, an anthology of love poetry, besides her next collection of short stories, A Doll for the Child Prostitute. She visited Sri Lanka from 1982-84 and her experiences of this trip have resulted poems like “Smoke in Colombo” (“Only the Soul knows How to Sing”). Besides her poetical and prose works, Kamala Das contributed much for various popular magazines and periodicals, such as Opinion, The Illustrated Weekly, India, Poetry East and West, Debonair, Eye’s Weekly, Femina, 26

Imprint, Weekly Round Table, and Love and Friendship. In the early phase of her creative career, she used to write short stories in Malayalam for Mathradhumi., a magazine which paid her rupees 12 per story, and her poems for The Illustrated Weekly, whose editor, Mr. Mondy, was very considerate towards her and used to explain reasons for his inability to publish anything. All these accounts are given in detail in her well-known autobiography: I typed nearly a thousand words a week. I wrote about the subjects and editors asked me to write on, fully aware that I was educated by the usual standards and that I had no business meddling in grave matters. But how happily I meddled to satisfy that particular brand of readers who liked me and liked my honest approach. I was useless as a housewife anyway. I could not pick up a tea pot without gasping for breath. But writing was possible. And it certainly brought me happiness. {My Stoiy, p. 48)

It is very quite clear that she kept on writing all the time even during her illness. The year 1984 was very remarkable in the life of Kamala Das and she won many laurels in different fields. The most prestigious of all being her nomination for Nobel Prize in literature. Her fifth book of verse Collected Poems, Wol. I published the same year won for her Sahitya Akademi Award. As if all this was not 27

enough, the World Academy of Arts and Cuilture, Taiwan awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. Among other respectable positions, she simultaneously held include Chairman of the Kerala Forestry Board and of the Committee on Environmental Education, Vice-President of the State Council for Child Welfare and Member, Governing Council of the Indian National Trust for Art, Culture and Heritage. She also Contested though unsuccessfully, a parliamentary election for the Lok Sabha as an Independent candidate on the rising sun symbol and scored only 178. Ironically enough it proved her own assessment, “I don’t know poitics” (“An Introduction”, Summer in Calcutta). In 19.85, she won the Asian World Prize for literature and visited Singapore the following year which is the motive force behind the. poem “At Chiangi Airport”. She won the Indira Priyadarshini Vriksha Mitra Award in 1988. A selection of her major pieces under the title The Best of Kamala Das appeared in 1991 followed by another collection of short stories Padmavati the Harlot and other stories in 1992. Her last collection of poems Only the Soul Knows How to Sing was released in 1996. Her writings in Malayalam have appeared under the pen name 28

Madhavikutty which is the feminine version of her husband’s name. In the poem I Shall Some Day (,Summer in Calcutta:52) Kamala Das warned “I Shall some day leave, leave the cocoon” which referred to breaking her marital bond. After all, she did continue taking shelter “Here in your nest of familial scorn....” And served her husband until his death. But in the poem “Blood” (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, 16-19) she came to realize that the glory and greatness of Malapat House had suffered irrepairably owing to her non-conformist attitude, an open defiance of family customs and conventions. The following excerpt borders on a confessional note: I have let you down Old house. I seek forgiveness Mother’s mother, mother. On 16 December 1999, Kamala Das embraced Islam and changed her name to Suraiya Begum and started following Islamic tradition wearing burqa, disowning all signposts of inherited identity. Giving reasons for conversion, she writes: I like the purdah which Muslim women wore. I liked the orthodox lifestyle of Muslim women... I don’t freedom had become a burden for me. I want guidelines to regulate and discipline my life. I want a master to protect me. I wanted protection not freedom. I want to be subservient to Allah. (Das 1999: 4)

She ironically comments, “I found Hinduism too lenient for me” and one may consider her early vociferous offensives against orthodoxy in Hindu traditions as simple overtures lacking insincerity and conviction. Havovi Ankles aria’s following observation seems correct: Kamala Das’s conversion to Islam on December 16, 1999 and the advertising of it, is not, as some have suggested, empathizing with a minority, nor championing the cause of the underdog, but simply the most recent in a series of flamboyant gestures that have characterized her life and writing (Anklesaria: XIII)

Kamala Das was not satisfied with her own and began to trade freedom for the security of a more ascetic lifestyle. We are never astonished to see her love for Lord Krishna even after being an Islamic woman: But I must tell you that Lord Krishna had exerted a profound influence on me. My grandmother had told me as a child that I was married to Krishna. That had remained with me all along. I had seen Krishna, played with him (sic) and eaten with him (sic). I just 30

cannot pack him off. I love Krishna that love will • never die. The essence of Krishna is within me only the name has changed. (Das 1999: 4)

‘Yah Allah’, was the first poem of Kamala Das after she became a Muslim, appeared in The Poetry -Chain (Jan- March, 2000). It is dedicated to Prophet Mohammad and can be considered as a hymn. She prayed Mohammad for His mercy and forgiveness. The Path of the Columnist. appeared in 2000. In 2001 she launched a political party Lok Sabha to help the down-trodden and the needy. She intends to be a woman for the people of the world in need. Other names in the circle of women poets are more than 30 modern women poets with more than one collection each to their credit, the work of few of them possesses the individuality and ower of Kamala Das’s verse are: Monika Verma, Dragon Flies Draw Flame (1962), Past Imperative (1972) and Alaknanda (1976) often reveal acute responsiveness to nature, but she succumbs too easily to poetizing, and her sense of diction is sometimes so unsure that she writes a line like ‘bivuac of bulrushes bordering the brackish poof. Gaufi Deshpande’s (1942) three collections—Between Births 91968), Lost Love (1970) and Beyond the. Slaughter House (1972) shown similar 31

sensitiveness to the changing moods of nature, while some of her poems recreate the drama of man-woman relationship as evocatively as Kamala Das though on a much more limited scale and in a less challenging manner. Mamta Kalia’s (1942) works has a refreshingly astringent quality. In them she talks of love, marriage, family life and society with irony and wit, but she could not be able to sustain this mood effectively enough. Her works are: Tribute to Papa (1970), Poems (1978). Next comes Suniti Namjoshi’s (1941) is of the same and similar mould as we saw in Mamta Kalia. Her books are Poems (1967), Cyclone in Pakistan. (1971) and The Jackals and the Lady (1980). Tilottama Raj an comes next and before Meena Alexander— The Bird’s Bright Wing, Without Place ' Roshen Alkazi’s Seventeen Poems; Seventeen More Poems, Margaret Chatterjee’s, The Sandalwood Tree, Toward the Sun, Mary Ann Dasgupta’s, The Peacock Smiles, The Circus of Love, Leela Dharamraj’s , Selected Poems, Slum Silhouette, Ketaki Kushari Dyson’s, Sap- Wood Hibiscus in the North, Lakshmi Kannan’s, The Glow and the Grey, Impressions, Anna Sujatha Modayil’s, 32

Crucifixions, We the Unreconciled, Gauri Pant, Weeping Season, Staircase 17, Lila Ray’s, Entrance, The Flowering Heart, Lalitha Venkateswaran’s, Declaration, Tree-Bird, Indira Devi, Dhanrajgir’s, The Yearning and Other Poems, Partings in Mimosa, Sunita Jain’s, Man of My Desires, Beneath the Frost, Mary Erulkar, Mandala. 25, Ira De’s, the Hunt and Other Poems, Tapati Mookerji’s, The Golden Road to Samarkand, Malathi Rao’s, Khajuraho and Other Poems, Bhanumathi Srinivasan’s, C-Flat and Eunice De Souza (Fix) are to be noted as their works. 33

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