What elements of modernity do you notice in Kamala Das's poetry?
Popularly known as "The Mother of Modern English Poetry" she was a popular Indian author who took the literary world by storm with her individualistic and unapologetic voice. She wrote freely about female sexuality, love, lust and loneliness in a realistic fashion. Her style of writing has often been compared to other great women writers like Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath.
Born on 31st March,1934, Kamala Surayya had a love for stories, poems and writing from an early age. She was married at the young age of 15 to a bank officer who supported her writing. She wrote under different pen names like Kamala Das and Madhavikutty. Being a confessional poet, many of Das' literary works were autobiographical but that didn't make them any less explicit. She talked about her desires, grief and depression in an honest way. Her poems were eloquent and often melancholic. She was different from her contemporary writers as she preferred writing personal stories and moreover did not romanticize love or any of its aspects. Her first book of poetry Summer in Calcutta contained many such poems - which spoke about love lost, betrayal and loneliness - such as The Dance of the Eunuchs. Her second book The Descendants was also centered around similar themes. She also wrote several short stories as well like A Doll for the Child Prostitute and Padmavati The Harlot and Other Stories. The general public of her time wasn't ready for a woman to lay bare such intimate and sensitive topics in public. Due to this reason Kamala Das became a highly controversial author with many critics not appreciating the brutal honesty and recurring themes of sexuality in her works. Her autobiography Ente Katha similarly depicted Das' views about many subjects like her feelings towards her children, her failed marriage, experimentation with her sexuality and her extramarital affairs. The book caused many problems within her family with many of her relatives opposing the release of the book. Despite facing so much backlash throughout her career, Kamala Das stood tall in the face of adversity and never backed down from telling her story. Das was a feminist ahead of her times. Her unwillingness to bow down to societal pressure and courage to speak about subjects considered taboo made her an iconoclast of her generation and an inspiration for women for many more generations.
Writing is a means of creating a place in the world: the use of the personal voice and self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Das opened areas in which previously forbidden or ignored emotions could be expressed in ways, which reflect the true voice of feeling: she showed how an Indian woman poet could create a space for herself in the public world. She brings a sense of locality to her poems. There are the rooms in which she lives, the homes she has left, the bedrooms, restaurants and streets in which she meets her lovers, the rides in cars, the people she visits or notices, the people who address in personal terms. Whereas Ezekiel consciously refers to his environment, Das's poems assume their location; create their space by being set in situations rather than by observing or alluding to their environment.
Kamala Das's most remarkable achievement, however, is writing in an Indian English. Often her vocabulary, idioms, choice of verbs and some syntactical constructions are part of what has been termed the Indianization of English. This is an accomplishment. It is important in the development of a national literature that writers free themselves from the linguistic standards of their colonizers and create a literature based on local speech; and this is especially important for women writers. Such a development is not a matter of national pride or a linguistic equivalent of local colour; rather it is a matter of voice, tone, idiom and rhythm, creating a style that accurately reflects what the writer feels or is trying to say instead of it being filtered through speech meant to reflect the assumptions and nuances of another society.
In the poetry of Kamala Das, the directness of speech rhythms and colloquial language is an expression of emotional involvement. Her language reveals feeling in all their quirkiness and unpredictability, whereas with previous women poets‟ language stands in the way of emotion, poeticizing and generalizing rather than reflecting it. Das offers a range of highly volatile emotions with poems unexpectedly, changing direction and gaining effect from their inner contrasts, conflicts, ironies and extremes. With its repetition of words, phrases and symbols, and its curious blend of Indian English usage, Das has created a climate for a more honest, revelatory, and confessional poetry for Indian women.
