Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India
by Dr.Shikha Saxena

Kamla Das was born (March 31,1934) in a Nair family. She hails from the Southern Malabar in Kerala. 
She opened her eyes in the beautiful lap of nature and blossomed beside a fathomless sea. As her 
autobiography reveals her maiden name is Madhavikakutty. She attended a European school in 
Kolkata then the elementary school at Punnayurkulam (her birth place) and then a boarding school 
run by the Roman Catholic nuns. At the Catholic boarding school, she got ill and sent back to Kolkata where private tutors were engaged to teach her fine arts.  She was nurtured in an autocratic atmosphere in her home. About her parents’ and their relationship she reveals, “My mother did not fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and horribly mismatched”1.But her mother’s timidity created an illusion of  domestic harmony and produced some half a dozen children of swarthy skin and ordinary features. Her parental home was influenced by the movement of Gandhi and its members used to wear ‘Khadi’  clothes and even spin ‘khadi’ yarn. Gandhi’s photo was hung in every room. Her ancestral house was christened as ‘Nalapat House’. Her mother was a writer and grand- uncle was a poet.

Formation of a Poet
In her formative years she has undergone various negative experiences. At school level she was 
discriminated as a  dark girl from South India .She recalls, “My mother was worried about the 
duskiness of my skin and rubbed raw turmeric on Tuesdays and Fridays all over my body before the oil-bath.” 2 Her white classmates not only made the fun of her ‘dark skin’ but thrashed her brother also till he bled from his nose. In her childhood she also missed the caresses of her mother and showers of love from her father. She recalled, “My father was always busy with his work at the 
automobile firm where he was employed ,selling Rolls Royces,Humbers and Bentleys to the Italian 
princes and their relatives. Her mother, vague and indifferent, spent her time lying on her belly on a 
large four-poster bed, composing poems in Malyalam.”3When she was nine her father came home 
and found her  to be very rustic and immediately admitted her in a boarding school. In her school 
days she has undergone a series of negative experiences which she did not even share with her 
parents. Recalling a particular experience she shares, “When the visitors came,  the brown children 
were always discreetly hidden away …told to wait in the corridor behind the lavatories where the 
school ayahs kept them company.”4
At the tender age of 15, she was married to Mr.Das, an official in Reserve Bank of India posted in 
Mumbai.
Her first encounter with her fiancé was an emotional and physical shock for her. She had expected 
him to take her into his arms and stroke her face, her hair, her hands and whisper loving words. She has expected him to be as she wanted her father to be  and her mother to be. She wanted 
conversation, companionship and warmth. She expected that he would remove the ‘loneliness of her life.’5 She hoped for a more tranquil relationship with a hand on her hair and a voice in her ear 
assuring him that everything  is going to be right. She never expected ‘rough hands rising up her 
skirts and tearing up her brassiere’ and “Whenever he found me alone in a room, he began to plead 
with me to bare my breasts and if I did not he turned brutal and crude. His hands bruised  her body 
and left blue and red marks on the skin.”6 .Her life became miserable in the company of her 
nonchalant and lustful husband. As he was experienced in sex with his maid servants his contact with his wife was usually cruel and brutal. He boasted of  his knowledge about ‘sluts and nymphomaniacs’ and this prompted Kamla to launch into a ‘hectic love life’.7 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 no soothing words for her. He is busy in official files and Kamla always feel emotionally parched .In ‘The Old Playhouse’ she yelled,
You called me wife, 
I was taught to break saccharine 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.8

This is actually a strong protest against hollow marital bound which she poured in her writings. The hollow pretension of Marriage was exposed during the preparations of her marriage. She narrates, 
“Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. It was enough to proclaim to the friends that the father had spent half a  lakh  on its preparations. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue.”9
After her marriage she came to Kolkata with her husband .She lost weight rapidly. When her father 
came to meet her, he expressed that he was expecting that she will put on some weight after 
marriage and she thought, “I wished then to cry and to tell him that he had miscalculated and that I ought not to have married the one. I did but I could not bring myself to hurt him”.10 But the poetess continues to live with her husband and to look after her three sons. 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 .To quote her words, “I Thought then that love was flowers in the hair, it was the yellow moon lighting up a familiar face and soft words whispered in the ear…At the end of the month, experiencing rejection, jealousy and bitterness I grew old suddenly, my face changed from a child’s to a woman’s and my limbs were sore and fatigued.”11
In this pursuit of genuine love she identifies it with Radha-Krishna myth or with Mira-Krishna 
relationship. There are several poems on Lord Krishna in her volumes, supported by references to 
this Lord in her prose writings. The reference of Radha  –Krishna is witnessed in almost all the 
collections. The first one contains “Radha-Krishna”, the second one contains “Radha” and the third 
one mentions “prayers to unfamiliar gods”, and “Tonight,This Savage Rite” includes “Radha” and 
“Ghanshyam”. She expressed her spiritual salvation like, “Through the smoke of incense I saw the 
beauteous smile of my Krishna. ‘Always, always, I shall love  you’ ,I shall told him, not speaking aloud but willing him to hear me, ‘only you will be my husband,your horoscope will match with mine…”12
It is again a grave mistake to see her love affairs as the amorous adventures of a promiscuous wife; they are like  the screams of a wounded and solitary soul thirsty for love and understanding that she seldom found even in the hands of her lovers, to most of whom she was a passing episode in a masculine narrative of heroic romance. She gave a vivid account of the life  of ‘Nair’s woman in 
reputed families. They never mentioned sex .It was their principal phobia. They associated it with 
violence and blood-shed. They had been fed on the stories of Ravana who was punished due to the 
desire for Sita It was customary for a Nair girl to marry when she was hardly out of her childhood 
and it was also customary for the much older husband to give her a rude shock on the very first 
wedding night.13 

Feminism In Das’ Poetry
Enriched with this experience Kamla found art and literature as a mode and repose from all her 
sufferings. Like other poets of twentieth century she finds her own way to express it. Her voice is 
different, and sometime her voice takes feminine form as an articulation of person speaking. The 
growing consciousness among women against all the forms of oppression finds a full potential in 
artistic expression.
In this transition from ignorance to awareness one may possibly pass three different stages. The first stage of pre-awareness was that of silent submission when women quietly accepted their 
subservient role in society. The next stage came with the gradual building up of resentment when the female mind started questioning male supremacy and social custom that dic tate their duties towards their home and hearth. And the final phase was that of rebellion, when protested against all male oppressions .Elaine Showalter divides the struggle for female liberation in to corresponding stages -‘the feminine, the feminist, and  the female.’ 14.The twentieth century, thus has been a witness to the change in the social status of women and the recognition of their individual identity, capabilities and powers. At present female poet has to grapple with an age old male tradition, she   has to find her bearings despite all her oppressions and assert herself against all odds.
Her poetic journey started while expressing her wounded soul in the night on the vacant table of the kitchen when most of the family members are asleep. Her silent  submission continued till she fell parched for a genuine men-women relationship. To quote her words:
It was July, a July full of rain, and darkness
Trapped like smoke in the hollows of the sky, and
That lewd, steamy smell of rot rising out of earth.
He walked one step ahead of me,the west wind leafing
Through his hair,and I thought,if I could only want,
Really, really want his love,I shall ride happiness,
Great white seed, trampler of unsacred laws,
If I could only dislodge the inherited
Memory of a touch, I shall serve myself in
Bedroom mirrors, Dark fruit on silver platter,
While he lies watching, fair conqueror of another’s
Country.I shall polish the panes of his moody eyes,
And in jealous moods,after bitter words and rage 
I shall wail I his nerves,as homeless cats wail
From the rubble of a storm…15
After getting fed-up with the physical and the carnal the poet seeks solace in spiritual love of Radha -Krishna :
This becomes from this hour
Our river and this old Kadamba
Tree, ours alone ,for our homeless
Souls to return someday
To hang like bats from its 
Physically….16
In another poem she says,
The long waiting
Had made their bond so chaste
And virgin crying
Everything in me
In melting ,even the hardness at the core
O Krishna,I am melting,melting,melting
Nothing remains but
You…17

Confessional poetry by women is of absorbing interest to feminist readers. For confessional poetry 
renders personal experience or emotion as it actually is, regardless of social conventions .Moreover 
confessional poetry expresses truths and experience so painful that most people would suppress 
them. If a woman feels victimized by a patriarchal society or is revengeful towards it , the 
confessional mode helps her to express it directly. In ‘A Holiday at Panchgani’ she expresses her 
experience thus:
There was a time when our lusts were
Like multi coloured flags of no
Particular country. We lay
On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just
The toys dead children leave behind
And we asked each-other,what is
The use,what is the bloody use?
That was the only kind of love.18 
There is true confession in Kamla Das’ poetry. The adverse circumstances have left deep-delved 
marks on her poetic creation. She transformed her personal grief in poetic creation. Kamla’s poetry 
has a  strong note of subjectivism. She boldly uses personal pronouns ,Me ,My in her literary 
expressions. In The Descendents we have the following poetic passage wherein her subjective 
feelings are predominant:
But
I must pose
I must pretend
I must act the role
Of happy woman
Happy wife 19
Thus she is a typical confessional poet who pours her true feelings in her poems. Her poems give us an opportunity to peep her life that is full of emotional and physical torture; a life wanting in search of a companion in true sense. Her poems represent reliable poetic voice that emerged from her personal experiences in the life. Her voice gives representation to million women of India who 
humbly succumb to  life-long ordeal; who accepts this inhuman treatment mutely just to protect the family honor of their family and parents. They suffer like continuous burning candles who 
illuminates the world but by burning ceaselessly. Through her poems we come to know about our 
rotten social orders where a girl child is ideal only when she  is performing the role of obedient 
daughter, a warm wife, an affectionate mother and a caretaker but in such a chain where is the space for her intellectual craving? Kamla’s verse gives voice to these unheard cravings.Through her reliable poetic verse she created a distinguished place among Indo Anglian Women Poets.


Notes:
1. Relocating My story, p.xii.
2. Children’s Theatre, My Story p..35.
3.Rule Britannia My Story,p..2
4. My Story ,P.xiii.
5An Arranged Marriage,My Story,p.79. 
6.An Arranged Marriage,p.79.
7. An Arranged Marriage,p.80
8.The Long Summer of Love, My Story,p.176.
9. An Arranged Marriage,My Story,p.82.
10. My Story, p..86.
11. The Brutality of Sex, My Story,p.85 
12.The Brutality of Sex,My Story,p.87
13.  My story,p.xiii
14.Elaine Showalter,ed.The New Feminist Criticism:Essays on Women,Literature and Theory(New 
York:Pantheon Books,1988)
15.Woodhouse Road ,My Story,p.114
16. Radha Krishna ,Summer in Calcutta,p.37)
17.The Descendents,p.9
18A Holiday at Panchgni, My Story,p.123
19.The suicide p.2