Kamal Das: As a Poet of Love and Sex

Mrs. Ritu Bajaj

Associate Professor

Department of English

Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya, Jalandhar

• Kamala Das, who received no formal education, no pompous university degree, is a conscientious artist who is mainly guided by her impulse and instinct for precise and harmonious words. She is fully aware of the value of words and their finer shades of meaning. She can make subtle distinctions in picking up or turning down her words and phrases.

• Like W.B. Yeats, she knows that words alone are certain good and like Nissim Ezekiel she believes that the best poets wait for words. The choice words, phrases and expressions render her poetry beautiful and precise. Poets, held yeats, are like women who must labour to be beautiful and here is a woman poet who has known through the years how to labour and how to be beautiful.

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• But being a poet of love essentially, Kamala Das sometimes feels that words are a nuisance in love-making. In her poem, Words, she acknowledges their natural growth on her like leaves, but she also says.

But I tell myself, words

Are a nuisance, beware of them, they

Can be so many things

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• Although she does not know the precise source of these words – and I this quite unlike T.S. Eliot- she speculates that they possibly spring from a silence, somewhere deep within.

In her well known poem, An introduction, Kamala speaks out her mind with regard to the question of the use of language. Herein she writes about herself.

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I am Indian very brown, born in

Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

Two dream in one, Don’t write in English, they said,

English is not your mother-tongue, why not leave

Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,

Every one of you? Why not let me speak in

Any language I like? The language I speak

Becomes mine, mine alone. It is half

English, half Indian, funny perhaps, But it is honest.

It is as human as I am human, don’t

You see?

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• This is a powerful plea for her use of the English language. Whether she dreams in it or in Malayalam is shrouded in mystery, as Rahman also suggests, she writes in English with an easy command and awful skill. An Introduction is more concerned with her use of English and others protest over it than with that of any other language.

• She has written a number of collections of short stories in her mother tongue undoubtedly, but her claim to English is no less. In a pert reply to the questionnaire of P, Lal in The Miscellany about the validity of English as a medium of poetic communication, she rightly states. Why in English is a silly question. It is like asking us why we do not write in Swahili or Serbocroate. English being the most familiar we use it. That is all.

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• The diction of Kamala Das is broadly speaking, lyrical and natural. Simplicity and lucidity are its hallmarks. It is hardly ever wrapped up in philosophical broodings or mystical abstractions. Mark her lyricism in the following passage.

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It is I who laugh, It is I who make love

And then, feel shame, It is I who lie dying

With a rattle in my throat, I am sinner,

I am saint. I am the beloved and the Betrayed.

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• The last three lines become incantatory and speak in the voice of an enraptured sage of the Upanishads. Here language has been put to an excellent use, and it does not fail the emotions of the poetess.

The repetitive application of words, phrases and expressions makes Kamala’s poetry truly musical and rhythmical.

• It was Hopkins, one of the greatest innovations in English prosody, who had states that Rhyme removed, much ethereal music leaps in the air. Kamala Das who does not practice rhyme in her verse, is a living example of much ethereal music. Keeping apart such poems as “A Hot Noon in Malabar”

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• “Radha and Summer in Calcutta” where we witness a cadence boom of repetition of words and phrases, her poetical pieces like “The Testing of the Sirens.” “The Doubt” “Blood” and “Glass” offer us a feast of musical delight and harmony.

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• The diction of Kamal Das is rarely suggestive. Since it is mostly expressive in character. An expressive language spares nothing for the fancy of the reader and speaks aloud all sentiments and thoughts in a hurried pace.

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• The abundant use of imagery renders Kamala’s verse pictorial and sensuous. It produces auditory, tactile and sensory effects on the reader, and sometimes he wonders whether he is not in the midst of Keats’s poetry.

• Kamala Das whose diction is essentially modern and surcharged with emotion, adopts a matching poetic technique to suit her purposes and the demands of our age. For the vigorous and sweepy expression of her verse, she did not need the artificial and gaudy technique of the school of Pope nor did she require the languid air and the love-born language of the Romantics, she rather needed the immense liberty and flexibility of the modern like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, the Sitwells, E.E. Cummings.

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• Evidently, Kamala Das is not as great an innovator in English as G.M. Hopkins or E.E. Cummings was but she has emotions arrested in glowing words and hrases and expressions and she has skill to turn out brilliant images and similes and these are enough to qualify her as a genuine poet in English.

• She is more interested in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings than in introducing new things in the art of verification. The distinguished English poet, Geoffrey Hill, was right to remark that “the one poet who stood out in P.Lal’s Modern Indian Poetry in English. An Anthology and a Credo (1969) was Kamala Das as Devinder Kohli informs us.

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• One critic who has severly lashed at Kamala Das, the poet is Linga Hess.

But even, Hess was also quick to perceive “the original poetic voice” in Mrs. Das, saying –

But all these deficiencies cannot finally cloud the fact that a genuine poetic talent is at work here. It lives on every page, is woven even through the most distressingly flawed poems. And in a few superb pieces it stands forth unchallenged and unmistakable.

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• In the end, Prof. K.R.S. lyengar rightly recognizes Kamala Das as “one of the most aggressively individualistic of the new poets whose fiercely feminine sensibility enables her to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world. Prof. lyengar maintains that Mrs. Das gives “the impressions of writing in haste” but that she reveals a mastery of phrase and a control lover rhythm – the words often pointed and envenomed too, and the rhythm so nervously, almost feverishly alive.

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