A Study of Kamala Das as a

Confessional Poet

A PROJECT REPORT
Submitted towards the partial fulfillment of the Degree of Bachelor of Arts (Pass
Course) as part of the curriculum of Semester VI.

2021-2022

ENGLISH

Submitted By: Diksha Verma

B.A.-B.Ed.

ICG/2018/26305
 INDEX
S.No. Chapters Page No.

1. Modern Indian English Poetry 1

2. About the Poet 6

3. Das as a Confessional Poet 9

4. Conclusion 16

5. Bibliography 18
 Chapter I

Modern Indian English Poetry

Indian English poetry is one of the many new literatures emerged in the early nineteenth century.
The earliest Indian English poet, who laid the foundation of present poetry, was Henry Derozio
(1809-1831) known as the “father of Indian English poetry”. Derozio’s literary works include:
‘The Fakeer of Jungheera’ (1827), A Metrical Tale and Other Poems (1827). Derozio’s verse is
full of “burning patriotic zeal” that confers on him the title of a “true son of the soil”. Poems like
‘My Native Land’, ‘To India’ and ‘To the Pupils of the Hindu College’, reveal the poet’s ardent
patriotism. He is mainly pre-occupied with Indian myths and legends and his authentic poetic
output shows the signs of true poetic talent.

With Toru Dutt Indian English Poetry began to appear real and genuine rather than imitative. She
is the first poet, who has written on the Indian myths and legends. Her first poem, ‘A Sheaf
Gleaned in French Fields’ is a translational work of seventy French poets. She was not confined
to Indian historical themes and legends extrinsically. These elements are integrated with her
consciousness. ‘Our Casuarina Tree’, one of the finest book by Toru Dutt, is an excellent
example of “romantic melancholy and nostalgia” written in that period.

Indian English poetry has been categorized into pre and post-independence poetry. Pre-
Independence era has witnessed two prominent poets, Aurobindo Ghose and Rabindra Nath
Tagore. Both are original and innovative in their literary craftsmanship. Literary bilingualism is
Tagore’s rare contribution to literary history. Tagore’s ‘Gitanjali’ (1912), a translational work
includes his Bengali devotional lyrics. Aurobindo Ghose proved a great benefactor to Indian
poetry in English. His entire poetic career was a preparation to create ‘Savitri’. Post-
Independence scenario was completely different from Pre-Independence. In the words of Lal and
Shah “The phase of Indo-Anglian romanticism ended with Sarojini Naidu” who had explored the
simple themes of nature and village life well in her poems.

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The first Indian English poet of Post-Independence era was Nissim Ezekiel (1924 - 2004). A. K.
Ramanujan and Shiv K. Kumar have introduced new innovations in Indian English Poetry.
Nineteen-sixties and seventies witnessed a period of development in the field of Indian poetry in
English language. The poets of this age were highly intellectual people who displayed their
creative expertise through their beautiful verse. Women writers like Kamala Das, Gauri
Despande, Monika Verma, Lila Ray, Margaret Chattejee, Tapti Mukherji, Tillotama Rajan,
Vimla Das, Malti Rao, Sunita Namjoshi, Gauri Pant, Rosen Alkazi, Mamta Kalia , Eunice de
Souza, Meena Alexander, Lakshmi Kanan, and Sunita Jain contributed much towards Indian
English Poetry by exploiting their miraculous inherent poetic talent.

The first poet, Nissim Ezekiel, is remembered as the chief pioneer of modernism in Indian
English poetry. Another gleaming star of immediate post-Independence phase is Dom Moraes.
His poetic works are: Poems (1960); John Nobody (1968); Poems (1955 to 1966) and Collected
Poems (1969). He was alienated from genuine Indianness and disowned his Indian heritage in
England. P. Lal launched his career as a poet during nineteen sixties. His poems unveil his
awareness of social realities and complexities. He used symbolism in his longer poems. Modern
Indian English poets constituted large group of poets who have different literary tastes,
aesthetics, styles and standards. This enhanced the rapidity with which the modern Indian
English Poetry was evolving towards international standards keeping in view the different
notions of creative art.

The next class of poets embodies: Gieve Patel, Pritish Nandy, Jayant Mahapatra, K. N.
Daruwalla. They employed diverse themes in their poetry and institute new features in the
domain of Indian Poetry in English language. Parthasarathy, Kolatkar and Ramanujan tried to
evoke a sense of their past and made a bid to inherit the native traditions. Kamala Das has
delineated her sexual and emotional traumas in highly sensuous manner. She highlighted her
sexual experiences and inhibition rooted in her native culture which, at last, forced her to convert
into Islam for the protection and security.

Then came the experimental poetry of A. K. Mehrotra, Arun Kolatkar, PritishNandy, Dilip
Chitre and Jayanta Mahapatra in early seventies. In addition to the immediacy, experimentation,

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frankness and revelation of Indian poetry in English, an increasing concern for long poems
evolved. A mention of Parthasarathy’s ‘Rough Passage’, Kolatkar’s ‘Jejuri’, and Mahapatra’s
‘Relationship’ is apt here. The period of 1950s and 1960s was a period of great upheaval in
Indian English Poetry. The major transition of perspective was to the poet himself, poet’s
awareness with surrounding, specific situation and relation with others.

Gieve Patel’s poems have also made an honest use of local or specific subjects. His personal
interest in peasantry is reflected ironically in the lines: “I have dealt with the peasantry / Over
three quarters of a century / and I fail to follow your thinking” (Grandfather). K. N. Daruwalla
presented his themes and characters in tangible situations. His poems are “striking, concrete, and
physical. Dreams, memories, and senses are there and no place for tragedy in his poetry. If it is,
it has been echoed in our personal feelings of angst and physical and social evils. It has an
immediacy and anger”. Older orders of view of tragedy in the modern world are denied.

Mobility and foreign travels was also a mark of Indian English poets during 1960s. For example,
Kumar has done his doctorate at Cambridge University. Ezekiel, during the struggle of his
career, stayed in England for three years. Dom Moraes, Jussawalla and Vikram Seth took their
university degrees in England. De Souza, Saleem Peeradina and Silgardo have studied abroad.
Rayaprol studied at Stanford University. All these poets brought new trends into Indian English
poetry. Kumar’s wit was the outcome of his high education which was reflected in his poetry.
For example, Kumar satirizes Indian hypocrisy and corruption in an amusing way in his poem,
‘Epitaph on an Indian Politician’.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (1947) began his career in writing verse and took ‘image’ as a pre-
dominant idea to explore in his poetry. Mehrotra uses figurative language brilliantly in his
poems. His poetry comprises images, symbols and fantasy which create a world of weird effects:
“a skull contains river”, “rose has bone” “pyramids come and knock at the door”. Saleem
Peeradina highlights social awareness consisting modern Indian urban life keeping in view the
fact that a poem arises out of the place where the poet dwells. He calls poem a “created artifice”
made from local material. It should have an immediacy and local relevance. He takes the
metaphor of Bombay suburb to characterize its history to identify the mixture of culture and sub-

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culture. He has also written on Indian situation. The poet introduces distinctive Indianization of
western forms of culture in later Indian English Poetry. The poet has incorporated tremendous
Indian realities: marriage, advertisements, negotiation for marriage, the cinema booking office,
wedding processions, the mixture of religious communities and their services in his poetry.
Manohar Shetty projects his introspections and emotions to the outer world. Memories of past
are incorporated into the present and become a subject for reflection in his poetry. ‘A Gaurded
Space’, the title of Manohar Shetty’s first book is impressive in its art.”

Jayanta Mahapatra started his literary career at the age of forty with his first book of poems
Close the Sky, Ten by Ten. He is called as post-colonial poet because of his themes, concern for
past, and his continuous attempts to represent the religion that point towards post-colonialism.
Mahapatra’s famous collections of poems are: A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False
Start (1980), Relationship (1980), Life Signs (1983), and Temple (1989). Jayanta Mahapatra
nourished Indian poetry with spontaneous fertility of his metaphors. Mahapatra’s Relationship
won him the Sahitya Akademi Award. It has twelve books and is a long poem written in an epic
style, telling historical and mythic origins of Orissa. The force that compelled him to write this
book is the poet’s interest and relation with his past that comes in the form of dream.

R. Parthasarathy is the author of single, slim, periodically revised work, Rough Passage (1977-
1980). The work shows resemblance with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Walt Whitman’s
Passage to India in quest for self. The three parts of Rough Passage are: “Exile”, “Trial” and
“Homecoming”. “Exile” describes the predominance of sense perceptions such as touch, smell
and sight. “Trial” ends on a note of mental suffering. After revisiting the past, the poet turns to
the present for sustenance in Homecoming. The three parts of Rough Passage are: innocence,
experience and knowledge.

Both male and female writers equally contributed to Indian English Poetry. Women poets also
explored various aspects: subject matter, language used, and craftsmanship. The most influential
women poets are: Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Monika Verma, Lila Ray, Margaret
Chatterjee, Ira de, Tapti Mookerji, Tillotama Rajan, VimlaRao, MaltiRao, Sunita Namjoshi,
Gauri Pant, Rosen Alkazi, Mamta Kalia, Eunice de Souza, Meena Alexander, Lakshmi Kannan,

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Silgardo, and Sunita Jain. Women poetry, indeed, is a rebellion against the conventional role of
woman as a wife and mother. A striking wave of feminism evolved in Indian poetry in English
during the post-modern era. Significantly many of Das’s poems are based on the theme of love,
marriage, sex and her childhood memories. Das has created linguistic standards which are purely
Indianized and reflect what the poet feels or is trying to say.

Eunice de Souza and Silgardo are the younger women poets, who followed Kamala Das in the
employment of directness of speech rhythms and colloquial language. From Eunice de Souza,
Melanie Silgardo learnt to write about herself. She imitates De Souza thoroughly and elaborates
and introduces Goan culture furthermore in her poetry. These poets have contributed much
towards Indian poetry in English. They stretched and redefined the realms of realities in Indian
English poetry.

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 Chapter II
Kamala Das
(31st March 1934 – 31st May 2009)

Kamala Das was one of the most prominent feminist voices in the postcolonial era. The
renowned Indian author was bilingual and wrote in her mother tongue, Malayalam, as well as in
English. To her Malayalam readers she was “Madhavi Kutty” and to her English patrons she was
“Kamala Das”. Born in Punnayurkulam, Kerala as “Kamala Surayya”, she was better known in
her home state for her short stories and her autobiography, and in the rest of the country, for her
English poetry. Das’s childhood as described in her autobiography “My Story” was very
culturally enriched. She belonged to a family considered the literary royalty of Kerala. Her
mother Balamani Amma was a famous poet and her grand uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon a
respected writer.

Her fascination with writing began at a young age while watching her elders immersed in their
work. When she was as young as six, she started a manuscript magazine where she would write
‘sad poems about dolls who had lost their heads and had to remain headless for eternity’ while
her brother would illustrate the verses. As she grew older she put together a children’s theatre
with her brother, where they performed plays ranging from Victor Hugo’s  ‘Les Miserables’ to
Kalidas’ ‘Sakuntalam’. The poetess was married off to Madhava Das, a bank employee at the
age of 15 and moved to Bombay with him. At a very young age, she had to find a way to pursue
her passion for writing while being weighed down by the expectations of her husband, her family
and the society at large of her ‘duties’ as a wife and mother.
.
When her family landed in financial trouble, she had to switch to being a columnist because it
paid better and poetry took a backseat in her life. She wrote regularly for the popular weekly,
Malayalanadu expressing her views on women, children, and politics. She described her
experiences of womanhood, with a certain guiltless honesty that the people of Kerala had not
witnessed so far. Her father V M Nair, Managing Director of the Mathrubhumi group and a
powerful figure in the journalism industry tried to put pressure on her editor to stop publishing

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her work but she did not yield to his demands. Kamala lived by her own terms all of her life,
which is clearly visible in her writings.

In 1973, her autobiography ‘Ente Kadha’ (My Story) was released in Malayalam. It consisted of
a compilation of her weekly columns in Malayalanadu that had already become a sensation
across the state. Fifteen years later, it was translated into English with more text added, many
parts rewritten and published with the title ‘My Story’. K. Sachithananthan, in his foreword for
the book, concludes: “I cannot think of any other Indian autobiography that so honestly captures
a woman’s inner life in all its sad solitude, its desperate longing for real love and its desire for
transcendence, its tumult of colors and its turbulent poetry.”

The book is about her personal and professional experiences as a woman in a patriarchal society
and her quest for love in its truest form. Her writing consisted of vivid descriptions of
menstruation, puberty, love, lust, lesbian encounters, child marriage, infidelity and physical
intimacy. She introduced her readers to the concept of female sexuality, a notion that was
nonexistent until then. She talked of her ‘brush with love’ with an eighteen year old girl, right
before Das was about to be married off. She talked of having to look for love ‘outside its legal
orbit’ because she was unhappy in her loveless marriage. She talked with an audacity never seen
before as she wrote unapologetically about everything the conservative Kerala society had
managed to box in for very long. It managed to evoke such a widespread reaction which was
equal parts shock and equal parts adoration that it has become a cult classic in the genre of Indian
autobiographies ever since.

Kamala Das went on to produce what is considered some of the best work in modern Indian
literature. Some of her notable works in English are the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), the
collection of short stories Padmavati the Harlot and other stories (1992) and a compilation of her
poetry Summer in Calcutta (1973). In Malayalam, they include Balyakalasmaranakal (The
Memories of Childhood), Chandanamarangal (Sandalwood Trees) and many more. On account
of her extensive contribution to the poetry in India, she earned the label ‘The Mother of Modern
Indian English Poetry’ by Times in 2009. She has also been likened to literary greats like Sylvia
Plath because of the confessional style of her writing.

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She introduced her readers to the concept of female sexuality, nonexistent until then. Her literary
work earned her a lot of recognition and won her numerous accolades. She won the P.E.N.’s
Asian Poetry Prize in 1963, the Kerala Sahitya Academy Award in 1969 for the short story
Thanuppu (Cold) and the National Sahitya Academy Award in 1985. She was also shortlisted for
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. Much of her work has been translated into numerous
foreign languages including French and German due to popular demand.

Whatever Kamala Das decided to do in her life stirred a controversy in her home state including
her nude paintings, her decision to convert to Islam and to be called Kamala Surayya in the late
1990s. Her critics would often speculate that most of her actions were to seek attention. Though
she never formally associated herself with the feminist movement or described herself as one,
she was a feminist in many ways. She never let anyone deter her from doing what she wanted to
do by constantly rebelling against the system with her work. She created for herself a space to
have the freedom of choice. She dared to find her voice in a society that actively tried to shut it
down and she used that voice to express her experiences of the feminine sensibility that were
universal in many ways. Kamala Das died in Pune, on 31st May 2009, at the age of 75.

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 Chapter III
Kamala Das as a Confessional Poet

Confessional poetry is preoccupied with the personal lives of the poets. It discovers the inner
feelings, psyche of the poet. In the confessional poems the private life of the poet himself,
especially under stress of psychological crisis, becomes a major theme .The confessional poetry
is the poetry of introspection, self-analysis, self-expression and self-revelation. A confessional
poet more often takes the reader into confidence about his personal and private life, and unravels
those facets of life which an ordinary man, though that person is a poet, would keep strictly to
himself because of the intricate nature of those facets. Kamala Das is primarily a confessional
poet, and in this context, she may be regarded as a remarkable poet comparable to the American
poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

Kamala Das is well known for her bold and forthright expression. Kamala’s poetry is
confessional and autobiographical. With her poems she tried to give voice to a generation of
women who were confined to their households, and considered a commodity to be exchanged
through marriage. She portrayed the women in her poems as human; with desires, pain and
emotions just like men. Her writing consisted of vivid descriptions of menstruation, puberty,
love, lust, lesbian encounters, child marriage, infidelity and physical intimacy. She shows in her
poetry about her own frustrations and failures in a male dominated world, how she tried to
maintain her individuality and feminine identity, a rebellion that issued all her troubles,
frustrations and psychological traumas.

On being a female writer in that day and age, she said: “A woman had to prove herself to be a
good wife, a good mother, before she could become anything else. And that meant years and
years of waiting. That meant waiting till the greying years. I didn’t have the time to wait. I was
impatient. So I started writing quite early in my life. And perhaps I was lucky. My husband
appreciated the fact that I was trying to supplement the family income. So, he allowed me to
write at night. After all the chores were done, after I had fed the children, fed him, cleaned up the
kitchen, I was allowed to sit awake and write till morning. And that affected my health”.

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The poem ‘An Introduction’ is an autobiographical verse of Kamala Das that throws light on the
life of a woman in the patriarchal society. The poet says that she doesn’t know politics well yet
she is aware that the politics of India has always remained in the hands of males, therefore she
has memorized their names like the days of the week or month. The lines depict how men have
been ruling the country without giving this right to the womenfolk. In the poem she expresses
her resentment in being confined to gender roles that she did not choose for herself and her
desire to break out of them: “Then I wore a shirt and a black sarong, cut my hair short and
ignored all of this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife, they cried. Be embroiderer,
cook or a quarreler with servants.”

In further lines she compares herself to the menfolk trying to show that she is no lesser than
them. She can speak three languages, write in two and dreams in a universal language that is
common to all alike. The poet perhaps tries to show her ability in the educational sphere which is
inaccessible to most women. She feels no lesser than a man in terms of capacity, passion, and
creativity. She condemns those who criticize her, putting restrictions on her writing in English,
believing it is the language of the Colonists and thus she should avoid using it. She scoffs at
them and questions how a language can be owned by a particular community. In her opinion it
belongs to every person who uses it .The language in which she writes is her own along with all
its imperfections and strangeness. She draws a parallel between herself and her language as both
are honest and imperfect and this makes her human. She wonders why society ignores the
blunders of men and questions the mistakes of women when the fact is that every person in the
world is imperfect.

She moves towards her married life saying she was still a child at core although her body
matured owing to puberty. As a child she desired love however, her husband quenched his own
lust on the bed. The poet here not only describes her married life but tries to narrate the story of
every woman in her country. The young girls are forced to marry older men without having their
consent. They desire that their husband should show compassion and love them. But instead,
they are drawn to the bed and made to endure the brutal pains of loveless sex. The lines, “He did
not beat me/But my sad woman-body felt so beaten. /The weight of my breasts and womb
crushed me. /I shrank Pitifully” depict the crushed soul of these young women. In the end

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Kamala Das says just like men, she is also a sinner and saint, beloved and betrayed. Her joys and
pains are no different than those of men. Hence she emancipates herself to the level of ‘I’. She
highlights her identity as an individual, as a human breaking all social or ethical codes.

Das’s ‘Summer in Calcutta’, the title piece of the anthology of poems which was published in
1965, projects through action and gesture, and a self-contained mood of sensuous luxury. The
poem celebrates the mood of temporary conquest over the defeat of love. It is the poet’s creative
reaction to the torture of the Indian summer. The poetess comparing the April sun with a ripe
orange seems to enjoy even the harshness of the heat. Under the influence of the drink she
forgets her worries and indulges herself in fantasizing about her beloved. Yet she is impulsive by
nature and thus cannot concentrate on her beloved for too long as she is too engulfed in the
enjoyment of the hot but beautiful summer in Calcutta.

Kamala Das confesses her impulsiveness and alcohol abusive attributes through very carefully
selected words but as usual straight forward enough to make us smile just like the ‘nervous
bride’ in the poem. The tone of the poem is half satirical and half confessional. At the same time
the lines display a sense of confidence, of a person who has nothing much to lose and thus enjoys
the life on a hedonistic basis. The wonderful simile of the bubbles being compared with the
nervous smile of the new bride is both naive and sexually charged. Sex being a large part of
Das’s forte is often invoked consciously and unconsciously. She surprises the readers with her
erratic and erotic linguistic turns of phrases, her unconventional images and symbols and her
frank acceptance of the bitter truths of life. .Thus the poem which appears to be a descriptive
one actually results to be a reminiscence of guilt.

The poem, ‘My Grandmother’s House’, first appeared in Kamala Das’s first anthology of verse
titled Summer Time in Calcutta (1965). It is also an autobiographical poem in which the poet’s
yearning for her parental house in Malabar is movingly described. She is reminded of the
ancestral house where she had received immense love and affection from her grandmother. She
suffers from an acute sense of alienation after having left this place after her marriage. It was her
disenchantment with her loveless marriage that reminded her of her grandmother’s pure and
selfless love. Her heart is itself like a dark window where the fresh air does not blow. The image
of the house has stuck to her mind. The poet has also used the similes of a brooding dog to show

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her inability to pay a visit to her grandmother’s house. She has also used suggestive visual
imagery of ‘blind eyes of the windows’ and ‘the frozen air’ to convey the idea of death and
desperation.

The tone of nostalgia and pessimism is prevalent throughout the poem. It reveals the poet’s
aching unfulfilled desire to visit her grandmother’s house to which she is deeply and emotionally
attached. The poet is shocked to learn that the house is all in ruin after the death of her
grandmother. She suffers in silence due to the wear and tear it has undergone in her absence. A
death-like silence reigns in her grandmother’s house. The poet often longs to visit her
grandmother’s house to which she was emotionally attached since her childhood. It has been a
place of security and protection which is sadly missing in her new house in the city. It is this
longing to revisit her grandmother’s house that adds to her sense of frustration and hopelessness.
The darkness of her grandmother’s house doesn’t terrify her. She wants to gather some darkness,
some memories of the grandmother’s house and bring them to her present residence hoping they
will have a soothing impact on her loveless and hopeless married life.

‘My Mother at Sixty-Six’ is a confessional poem that describes a daughter’s feelings towards her
mother. Through the poem, Das has poured her fear of losing her mother to death and aging. The
poet notices the old appearance of the mother during her car journey from her place to the airport
at Cochin. The mother is sleeping with her mouth open. The mother’s face appears ashen. The
pale complexion of the old woman is similar to that of a corpse. The thought of the corpse forces
the poet to think of her mother’s death. The sleeping form of her mother allows the poet to
observe her uninhibitedly making her emotional.

Further lines allude to the disturbed state of the poet’s mind when she thinks of her mother’s
death. She puts the thoughts away. Then, she looks out through the window at the passing green
trees and young children coming out of their homes to play. The world around the poet appears
young and energetic. It forms a contrast to the state of her mother. The poet describes the
youthful scenery of the world to underscore the mature years of her mother. The poet tries to
distract herself from her surroundings. But her mother’s appearance pulls her back again during
the airport security check. Once again the poet compares her mother to a winter moon depicting
that her mother is in the last stage of her life. The poet is reminded of the mother’s imminent

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demise bringing back her childhood fears. As a child, the poet was so afraid of her mother’s
death however now as a grown-up woman she hides her fears and simply smiles at her mother
and bids farewell as she moves towards her flight. The poem concludes by emphasizing the
optimistic behavior people display towards their loved ones.

The poem, ‘The Freaks’, dramatizes an abnormal situation in love-making which exposes the
futility of loveless relationships. It also brings to light the agony of the female persona who
remains a non-participant in the act of love-making because it denies her the emotional and
intellectual thrills of life. The female-persona in the poem, presents the male-partner in love in a
very dark light. His way of talking is highly selfish has no fascinating for her. She knows that he
cannot go beyond the satisfaction of his lustful desires. She finds him not only ugly looking but
also extremely repulsive. His cheeks are sun-burnt and brownish in appearance, his mouth looks
very horrible like a dark cavern and his shining teeth are uneven and calciferous. The man places
his right hand on the knee of the female in a gesture of love-making. They are intending to make
love, their minds-particularly of woman-keep wandering to avoid any sign of emotional
involvement in it.

The lovers are filled with ‘puddles of desire’ or lust without love. It is a purely sensual
relationship full of dirt and filth. The poetess finds this relationship lifeless and devoid of any
meaningful spiritual or emotional involvement. The poet here dramatizes the pangs of sorrows of
a woman involved in a lifeless and loveless relationship. She is all disenchanted with the purely
sensual relationship which deprives her of the intellectual and emotional thrills of life. She feels
almost suffocated but has to bear this torture because of social compulsions. She is not against
physical love but it must pave the way for spiritual love.

The poet says that the woman finds herself totally isolated and ignored in the sexual act. She is
all fed up with the lustful desires of her partner in love. She feels emotionally and spiritually
starved and is totally disgusted with the unending sexual demands of the male persona. She is
critical of his purely lifeless and uninspiring love. She is treated like a playful object only. The
fingers of the man move very swiftly over her body for the gratification of his lustful desires. He
cannot think beyond ‘skin’s lazy hungers’, the physical passion in which there is no place for the
realization of spiritual or emotional satisfaction.

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In the concluding part of the poem, the female persona finally realizes that she too is a freak like
the male-persona. But she does not want to give the impression that she is sterile and incapable
of responding to the calls of love. Though fed up with a lustful relationship, she feigns the
masculine role and flaunts “a grand, flamboyant lust” at times to save her feminine integrity and
strength. She wants to portray that she is not frigid in any way, but is sufficiently fit for
participating in the sexual act. But this pretended show of lust cannot be called genuine and real.
It is undoubtedly an abnormal behavior to counteract the passivity and laziness of the male
partner. This shows that she is also a freak who poses to be an equal and willing partner in the
sexual act. This stanza shows the futility of sensual relationship which is devoid of spiritual and
emotional fulfillment as they are uninspiring and lifeless.

The poem, The Sunshine Cat, also taken from the collection of poems titled ‘Summer in
Calcutta’ (1965) shows the difference between lust and love in a very convincing manner. It is a
personal poem having universal implications. The poet has approached the tragic consequences
of the life of lust wherein there is no space for emotional and spiritual satisfaction. She has
adopted the female perspective for highlighting the predicament of a helpless and frustrated
woman in the modern male-dominated society. The poem realistically deals with the pathos of a
forlorn woman who failed to get real love in life. She was sexually ill-treated and exploited by
those whom she loved and were known to her. They indulged in lust but denied her the
emotional and spiritual thrills of love. She particularly referred to one person among them whom
she really loved but got nothing in return.

Unfortunately her lustful husband overlooked her emotional needs and limited himself to the
gratification of his lust only. Ironically, he was not only selfish but also a cowardly person. He
never bothered to have an emotional rapport with her. He neither loved her nor used her but
remained a ruthless watcher only who kept a close watch over her relations with other men. It is
a confessional poem in which the poet highlights the tragic consequences of forced arranged
loveless marriages. It is full of pathos in which the poet’s sufferings seem to have no end. She
loved him but her love was not reciprocated. She was suspected of having affairs with other men
by her selfish and cowardly husband.

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The men she approached for genuine love turned out to be cynics. She submitted herself to their
young greed to forget the longing for real love. But they too proved selfish and cruel like her
husband, for they could offer her nothing but lust. The poet becomes totally fed up with her
marital as well as extra-marital relationships in life. She was shocked to learn that all her lovers
had neither love nor lust but only lip sympathy for her. After being released from their clutches,
she left for room to relax on her soft bed, and started shedding copious tears due to the cynical
and hostile attitude of her lustful lovers.

Das feared that she would go mad in this tensed state of mind. She had built walls of tears around
her, and enclosed herself within their boundaries. Being self-lost and dejected, she had
consciously alienated herself from the main stream of life. Life of isolation and humiliation
always ends in premature destruction and death. The poet felt suffocated in the life of
confinement and lost her balance of mind. It compelled her to snap all her ties with the external
world. She was totally dehumanized and lost her relevance as a woman, unfit for sexual
purposes. All types of lustful relationships, marital or extra-marital, share a common tragic fate.

‘Words’ by Kamala Das is a short poem describing the power of words and the poet’s fear of
them as they keep growing in her. According to the poet, the words or the poetry originate from
within the hearts which like the leaves keep growing and never stop. The poet refers to some
hidden instinct which causes the words to come out like photosynthesis in the leaves. Neither this
instinct stops nor the growth of the words. According to her the words can be deep holes where
the running feet must pause as there is a sea with paralyzing waves. Here running feet symbolize
the confessions which are filled in the words. Sea with paralyzing waves refers to the society
which doesn’t allow the woman to write, to imagine, to confess and to be free. Hence the words
are problem for her in particular and all the women in general.

Next she calls the words a blast of burning air which means that the poetry which she writes can
be explosive and can be used against her. Finally she calls the words a knife which can cut your
best friend’s thoughts, implying that they can hurt the ego of friends or the males who won’t
accept the woman as a poet or writer. According to her, the words are annoying as they keep
growing in her causing her great suffering. Hence the poem ends in grief describing the problems
that a woman writer has to face in a male-dominated society.

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 CONCLUSION

Kamala Das is considered one of the first Indo-English poets who adopted the method of
confessionalism in her poetry. Confessional poetry is written by a poet under an internal pressure
in order to give vent to his or her grievances or feeling of resentment or a sense of the injustice
experienced by him or her. Like other confessional poets, such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton,
Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Hilda Doolittle, and Maya Angelou, Kamala Das makes her
own life, her personal emotional experiences, cynicism and frustrations the center of her poetry.

As a confessional poet she depicts with phenomenal bluntness the wrongs, exploitation,
oppression and humiliation that she endured in the male dominated society. It is the brutal
frankness of her verse that shocked and attracted readers. Her open and honest treatment of
female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked
her as a rebel in her generation. Kamala Das, truthfully and courageously, articulates prejudice
and embarrassment sourced to her. She endeavors to seek the unconventional women from the
restraints of patriarchal culture as well as find her own identity through her writings. Her poems
beautifully describe how she fails to blend the inner and the outer, the body and the soul.

Kamala Das has a lot to confess in her poetry, and she does so in the most candid manner
conceivable. Indeed, her poetry has no precedent so far as her frankness and candor in revealing
herself to the readers are concerned. She has expressed her intense desire to confess in a very
graphic manner by saying that the she must ‘striptease’ her mind and that she must exude
autobiography. Her confessions pertain to her role as a wife, as a mistress to relationship with her
husband, and of her extra-marital sexual relationships. She lucidly writes about sexual frustration
, love and desire, of the suffocation of an arranged love-less marriage, of numerous affairs, of the
futility of lust, of the shame and sorrow of not finding love after repeated attempts, of the
loneliness and neurosis that stalks women especially and emotional sterility etc.

In dealing with these themes, she hides nothing, and in dealing with this subject-matter, she
makes use of language freely, without any scruples, and even unabashedly. The orthodox reader

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would even accuse her of being immodest, shameless, or brazen in her use of the language
through which she lays bare the secrets of her private life. Professor Santanu Saha of Saltora
Netaji Centenary College, West Bengal, summarizes the poetic work of Kamala Das as follows:

“Kamala Das has neither written innumerable numbers of poems nor are these poems varied in
themes. She has not applied any complex poetic technique and the mode of expression is very
colloquial in manner. Her English is the ultimate form of ‘Indianization of English Language.’
And consciously she is never worried for experimentation in the poems. In spite of these
limitations she is very much popular in the Indian subcontinent as well as in abroad. And this is
due to her ‘honest’ declaration of self which establishes her as a ‘confessional’ poet. Among her
contemporaries she is much debated, disputed and criticized poet. But undoubtedly Kamala Das
is accepted as a universal poet whose lived experiences are beautifully portrayed in her poems.”

Her poetry is the poetry of introspection, of self-analysis, of self-explanation, and of self-

revelation. She created a world which is emotionally sterile and unproductive, a world where
only lustfulness and bodily pleasures prevail. Poem after poem she hammers hard at the
husband-lover and articulates her intense desire of escaping from his clutches and attaining
freedom. Kamala’s poems show us that she is every woman, who seeks love. She is the beloved
and the betrayed, expressing her endless female hunger. She is frank, honest and forthright in
describing different kinds of experiences in her poetry.

Kamala Das’s poetry is replete with a powerful force of catharsis and protest. This is so because
of Kamala Das’s intensely confessional quality and her ultra-subjective treatment. The struggle
of her ‘self’ ultimately becomes the struggle of all mankind, and herein lies her forte because the
best confessional poetry is that which rises above the subject-matter to achieve some sort of
victory over pain and defeat. Kamala Das as a confessional poet has rendered some valuable
service to the female sex by making them conscious of their dormant sexual desires and their
suppressed discontent with their husbands from the sexual point of view. She has thus given a
sort of incentive to women to assert themselves or at least not to suppress themselves. In these
confessional poems Kamala Das appears as a feminist, indirectly advocating the liberation of
women from the conventional social restraints and taboos.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source:

Das, Kamala. (1996). My Story. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.

Dwivedi, A.N. (2006). Kamala Das and Her Poetry. New Delhi: Atlantic Publisher &
Distributor.

Manohar, D. Murali. (1999). Kamala Das: Treatment of Love in Her Poetry. Gulbarga: JIWE.

Naik, M.K. (2002). A History of Indian English Literature. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi

Secondary Source:

Nagpal, Bharti, And Jyoti Sharma. “Kamala Das’s Life & Works: Progression From Physicality
to Spirituality.” International Journal Of English And Literature (Ijel), Vol. 4, No. 4, Aug. 2014,
Pp. 1–8.

Poonam, and Neha. “Expression of Kamala Das as a Confessional Poet.” Journal of Advances
and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education (JASRAE), vol. 14, no. 2, Jan. 2018, pp. 780–
783 ., doi:10.29070/jasrae.

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Deepak, Kashyap, and Bijay Kant Dubey. “Modern Indian English Poetry And Its Exponents.”
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poetry-and-its.html. Retrieved on 05.06.2021

Kumar, Melanie P. “Kamala Das - Indian Poet and a Woman Ahead of Her Time.” Literary
Ladies Guide, 29 May 2021, www.literaryladiesguide.com/author-biography/kamala-das-indian-
poet/. Retrieved on 07.06.2021

“Modern English Poetry in India.” IndiaNetzone.com, 7 Aug. 2014,

www.indianetzone.com/43/modern_english_poetry_india.htm. Retrieved on 05.06.2021

“Modern Indian Poetry.” The (Great) Indian Poetry Project, 4 May

2013,projectindianpoetry.wordpress.com/mip/. Retrieved on 05.06.2021

Sebastian, Sheryl. “Kamala Das – The Mother of Modern Indian English Poetry | Feminism In
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