KAMALA DAS AND THE MAKING OF THE INDIAN ENGLISH IDIOM

Mrs. Ritu Bajaj

Associate Professor

Department of English

Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya, Jalandhar

• Modern Indian English Poetry no longer suffers the fate of mythical Shakuntala. It has ceased to be “Matthew Arnold in a Saree” and our poets are not “dogs walking on their hind legs.” The Indian English poetic movement of the fifties and the sixties which did much to fix its image as deliberately deficient, moderate with a will has now acquired a distinct character and discovered its own voice.

• Recent Indian English Poetry has risen above decadent romanticism and in the hands of its luminaries like Nissim Ezekiet, Kamala Das, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Shiv K. Kumar, Jayanta Mahapatra, Keki N. Daruwalla and G.S. Saratchandra is acquiring new dimensions.

• Kamala Das, who won the Prestigious Central Sahitya Akademi Award for her book of Verse, Collected Poems (Vol.1) for 1985, is a well known name in Indian English Poetry. Infact, she is perhaps the best known poet after Exekiel and her name is almost synonymous with modern Indian English Poetry.

• What makes a poet belong to a particular country necessarily involves nationality and his identity is to be found in being rooted in the soil. W.B. Yeats expresses this position clearly in his poems “Under Ben Bulben”

Many times man lives and dies

Between his two eternities

That of race and that of soul

And ancient Ireland knew it all.

• A poet’s response to the landscape of his country, his sense of tradition and culture of the land of his birth and many other factors go together to make him assume an identity of his own. Nissim Ezekiel is right when he says that “ there is no single Indian flavour which alone can claim the designation (Indianness) and that its value, too, depends on a host of generative factors which should never be simplified for purposes of praise or blame.

• What Judith Wright observes in this context is also pertinent :

Before one’s country can become an accepted

Background against which the poet’s and

Novelist’s imagination can move unhindered

It must first be observed, understood, described

As it were, absorbed. The writer must be at

Peace with his landscape before he can

Confidently turn to its human figures

• Kamala Das is firmly rooted in the Indian soil. Born in Kerala and brought up in Calcutta, she has also lived in Delhi and Bombay, in a sense she has felt the pulse of the whole of India. In her poetry one detects a certainty of touch that seems to reflect a confidence in the direction and purpose of her writing as well as an integrity of images of India, style and subject matter.

• Kamala Das’s imaginative world derives its power to involve the reader from its rich mimetic content while its enduring quality comes from verbal imagery drawn from many sources. Thus, she grapples with ideas and abstractions, images of man and woman on several planes, the complex of emotions centering round human activities such as love, sex, companionship and problems relating to her own art.

• In Summer in Calcutta, Das describes a world which is harsh, sun-pierced tropical world full of smells of rotten garbage and death, where men have “limbs like carnivorous plants.” The lanes are fevered, the trees dustry and leafless, cheeks sun stained. Only the marigolds and bougainvillea survive and courtesans with tinsel and jasmine in their hair.

• The poet herself feels a hunger to take in with greed, like a forest fire that /consumes.” As a Eunice de Souza rightly suggeests that ‘against a background of this fraught landscape on to which the poet projects so much of her inner sense of dirt and sexual disgust, Kamala Das plays out her roles of unhappy women, unhappy wife, mistress to young men, mother, reluctant nymphomaniac pining for the lost joys of innocence and childhood.”

• In her most wellknown poem “ An Introduction” Das universalizes the neurosis

I am every

woman who seeks love

Her feminine sensibility finds its finest and fullest expression in her love poems. Her frankness in expressing love owes its origin to the tradition of her ancestral family connections. In keeping with the tradition and the practice of marumakkathayam (Matrilineal system of inheritance and succession) Nayar women were sexually uninhibited.

• Kamala Das’s bold and straight forward treatment of love and sex comes from such a background. She is in the main a poet of love, of love from the women’s point of view, to her the centre is not the blind worship of the husband but the consummation of love.

• Her poetry is intensely lyrical and could be classified into three main categories positive poems, negative poems and poems about her grandmother and ancestral house, leaving aside a few poems on some minor observations on several topics. The love poems where she expresses satisfaction and the love poems.

• Where she expresses her resentment against unrequited love may be termed as positive poems and negative poems respectively. It is in her love poems she creates a new Indian English idiom hitherto unknown in poetic diction.

• It is in her love poems she creates a new Indian English Idiom hitherto unknwon in poetic diction. It is this new idiom which gives a local habitation and a name to modern Indian English poetry. Sex and sensuality are a part of life. In order to accept art one has to affirm sensuality, Kamala Das seems to say. Hence, we find a lot of new and unconventional words in her poetry.

• Kamala Das’s poetry is lucid, scrupulously hones in its effort to be accurate, and sincero. There is no traditional love ritual, no hyparbole, and no hypocrisy in it. The tone is conversational, the attitude is defiant against deifying either the love or the belove and the voice that speaks through the poems is thoroughly honest.

• Courage, conviction and honesty are the hallmark of her poetry. She expresses a feminine sensibility that demands equality with man and examines love relationship from a women’s point of view. She does not imitate Anglo-Americans but uses words as naturally as they come to her.

• She does not experiment with English language but uses it in a typical Indian way with native accent and collocation. She is not obsessed with the use of English language either in the manner of the British or the Americans. She uses English as an Indian speaks, writes and perhaps understands it. It is in this sense that she is a modern Indian English Poet.

• THANKS