Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 1, Number 1. May 2018. ISSN: 2581-7094
Indian Women at Crossroads: Postcolonial
and Feminist Concerns in Kamala Das’ Poetry
Abstract:
Kamala
Das is one of the first and most outspoken female voices in the Indian English
literary scene of the1960s. Unlike her contemporaries, poets like Arun
Kolatkar, K.N. Daruwalla, Nissim
Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Jayanta Mahapatra etc. who focused
more on the male-female relationship than on the marginalization of women and
the female experience in post-independence India, Das took up the challenge as
well as political necessity of representing the postcolonial female experience
in literature. Das as a female poet with a colonial past appears to defy not
only such negative forms of identification as ‘silence’ and ‘indeterminacy’
with which the figure of woman is often associated but also challenges the very
idea of phallocentric tradition and clearly demonstrates that a female
subaltern can speak. Not only does she raise the right questions concerning her
gender identity and discrimination based on it, but she raises these issues in
a language not only appropriated from the colonizer but also subverted to suit
her purpose. This paper concentrates on the intersectionality of the
postcolonial and feminist positions from which Das articulates her experience
of double marginalization from which generates her politics of double
subversion.
Keywords:
Postcoloniality, identity, gender, politics, subversion
Simon de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex meted out the first and
greatest challenge to biologically essentialist assumptions about woman and
womanhood with its declaration “one is not born but becomes a woman”, which, by
polarising gender and sex, set social
constructivist theories of feminism apace. Woman in a male dominated society is
always a construction more of patriarchal ideology, a product more of culture
than of Nature. Following generations of feminists have developed the debates
around whether or not there is a connection between biological sex and its
correspondent gender expectation until the 1990s when Judith Butler’s seminal
text Gender Trouble comes to lambast
gender (hetero)normativity by declaring all gender to be performative and
identity/ subjectivity as but an effect of those stylized repeated gender acts
which do not presuppose a ‘doer’ behind the ‘deeds’. Butler revolutionizes
feminist studies by putting gender before sex, as she declacres that sex was
always, already gender.
Patriarchal ideology
constructing man as the dominant “self”, has relegated woman to the position of
his inferior “other” and through several such institutions as politics,
culture, law, religion, medical science etc. has tried to consolidate this
binary down the ages. Literature is yet another potent tool in the hands of
patriarchy through which man represents woman either as the object of his
fantasies and desires or the repository of his fears. In man’s world, woman is
always struggling against such representations in order to establish her
identity. But while the western educated heterosexual woman, a privileged
minority is to struggle only against patriarchy, the situation is even worse
for the women of colour and the lesbians who also have such weightier issues as
racism and sexuality to deal with. The challenges faced by the women of the
Third world go beyond the challenge of gender inequality and discrimination as
they are doubly colonised by patriarchal as well as colonial ideology. They
have to fight not only against the aforementioned misogynistic representations
in literature by men, but also the racial stereotypes into which they are cast
by their more privileged western counterpart. Postcolonial feminist critics
like Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have addressed the
question of (mis)representation of the Thirdworld woman by the western feminist
discourse which looks at the Thirdworld woman as a submissive, silent,
uneducated lot, steeped in superstition and tradition, forever victimised and
abused by her men folk. In “Under Western Eyes” (1984) Mohanty questions such
absolutist, essentialist assumptions of western feminism and looks at these
attempts of western feminism to homogenize the Thirdworld female experience,
with total disregard for how gender arrangements and relations complicate and
problematize this category of ‘Thirdworld woman’, as another act of orientalist
appropriation of the East by the West. Spivak questions the homogenizing
tendencies of western feminist thought in essays like “French Feminism in an
International Frame” (1981) and “Feminism and Critical Theory” (1986). By
stressing the importance of including material histories and lives of third
world women in contemporary feminist discourse’s account of women’s struggle
Spivak introduces the vectors of race, class, caste, religion and culture into
contemporary feminist thought. She raises the issue of representation,
appropriation and silencing in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” as she questions the altruism of western
intellectuals in speaking for and representing the disenfranchised Indian
Hindoo widow who is meant to embrace the fire of her husband’s funeral pyre in
the ‘righteous’ act of self-immolation. Through her intervention with the
colonial archives as well as that of subaltern historiography Spivak
establishes the point that if the subaltern male subject is a shadowy figure in
both colonial as well as elite nationalist historiography, the female subaltern
is more so.
Much before the
emergence of the voice of the Third world (Indian) woman in the critical
debates of contemporary feminist thought, we have in Indian English literature
the most eminent voice of feminist protest in Kamala Das, who in her poetry, has
challenged the ideas of ‘silence’ and ‘indeterminacy’ often associated with
women and established the fact that the female subaltern can speak. The time of
Das’s literary activity begins from the 1960s, when the second wave of feminism
was flourishing in the west and India, a newly independent nation, had the
spirit of nationalism expressed in adopted established poetic/ literary forms
for its earliest representative literary endeavours in English. The poets of
the 60’s breathed a new life into the existing body of Indian English poetry by
articulating a new postcolonial reality. While all her contemporaries like
Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujam, Arun Kolatkar, K.N. Daruwalla, R. Parthasarathy
etc. focused more on the man-woman relationship at a personal level, with a
complete disregard for situating these relations within the intricate web of
social relations and gender politics in order to address the marginalization of
women in post-independence Indian societies, Das, emerged as the most outspoken
and prominent feminist voice in Indian English poetry of that time. Her
articulation of female experience in patriarchal society through her own personal
experience of growing up as a woman in a newly independent nation struggling to
find its place in the world, situates her at a precarious position in which she
is to struggle with establishing her identity as a woman her postcoloniality as
a woman poet aiming to write in English. Despite the lack of intellectual
furniture back then in sixties and seventies, her poetical collections in
English The Summer in Calcutta (1965),
The Descendants (1967),
The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), Tonight this Savage Rite (1979) in collaboration with Pritish Nandy
and the latter Only the Soul Knows How to
Sing (1996) are all outspokenly feminist in tone and highly postcolonial in
technique and context.
Das comes from an
aristocratic Nair family which had a vigorous socio-cultural interaction with
the British which accounts for her hybridity. The poet had an early taste of
globalization through the discussions of her father who worked in an automobile
firm but paradoxically descended from a peasant stock. The combination of royal
and peasant identities, along with the atmosphere of colonialism and racism
initially produced feelings of inadequacy and alienation in the young poet
which were further aggravated by her post marital experience. Das recollects in
her autobiography My Story that her
interactions with her father and husband were preparing her for comprehending
the dangers of colonialism, the sorry state of India as a newly independent
nation and the wretchedness of Indian woman, when early motherhood interfered with
her writings. Her poetry is at the same time, a celebration of her Indianness,
her brown skin and dark hair and eyes and a statement of rebellious femininity
in her unabashed articulation of the bodily experiences and mental agonies
associated with her female-ness.
Das’s conscious
postcoloniality can be clearly seen in her most anthologized poem “An Introduction”
in which she takes pride in her dark complexion and asserts her admirable
linguistic quality as she writes:
I
am Indian,
very
brown, born in
Malabar,
I speak in three languages, write in
Two, dream
in one. Don’t write in English, they said,
English
is not your mother-tongue. (qtd. in Sarkar, 42)
By appropriating the coloniser’s
tongue and using it in her own way, interspersed with several Indian words she
challenges the coloniser’s attempts to retain linguistic purity:
The language I speak,
Becomes
mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All
mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian,
funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as
human as I am human… (qtd. in Sarkar 42)
Language is a male domain and
sexual difference, according to Lacan, is founded in language. In the
pre-linguistic state mother and child are inseparable and the consciousness of
self-identity comes only with the acquisition of language. It is through
language that the world is known, categorized and expressed and the patriarchal
authority is maintained. Discarding linguistic purity, pidginizing it with her
own “distortions” and “queerness” is a subversion, not only of phallogocentrism,
but also of linguistic hegemony of the colonizer as language along with culture
and economy is yet another potent tool to further imperialist ideology.
Challenging normative language is equivalent to challenging sexual difference
and assigned gender roles and identity corresponding to each sex which is
normalized through language. Again this linguistic subversion or queering of
language in Das’s poetry can be looked at as an Indianization of what the
French Feminists would call “womanspeak” – an exclusively female language which
emphasizes the semiotic rather than the symbolic aspect of language for the
articulation of female experience.
Das’s postcoloniality is further revealed in the
choice of her subject matter. Poems like “Smoke in Colombo”, “Delhi 1984” and
“The Inheritance” deal with such South Asian and subcontinental concerns as the
ethnic clashes in Sri Lanka and the Sikh riots in 1980s and religious
intolerance in India respectively. “Summer in Calcutta”, the title poem of the
eponymous collection celebrates the unconventional beauty of the infamous
Indian summer, a season much loathed in Euro-American literature about India.
When in spite of his attempted objective take on the Indo-English relationship
in colonial India in A Passage to India,
E.M. Forster could not refrain from relating the scorching heat of the hostile
Indian summer with the rising tensions between the Indians and the British, Das
in her poem writes that she wants to squeeze the April sun like an orange in a
glass and drink its juice:
I sip the
Fire,
I drink and drink
Again,
I am drunk,
Yes,
but on the gold
Of
Suns. . .
. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My
worries doze. Wee bubbles ring
My
glass, like a bride’s
Nervous
smile, and meet
My
lips. (qtd. in Sarkar 40)
The April sun has the same
effect on the poet’s worries as the Nightingale’s song has on Keats’s aching
heart in “Ode to a Nightingale”, however, Das’s choice of the April sun of
Indian/ Calcuttan summer as a tranquilizer and soother is something that may
baffle the English mind. She is as much in love with the summer sun as she is
with her brownness and this treatment of the Indian summer is a
counter-representation of the descriptions of the Indian climate in colonial archives,
fictions and other colonialist narratives.
There
is an artistic juxtaposition of male chauvinism and colonial domination in
Das’s poetry as can be seen in her poem “The Old Playhouse” where she deals
with the idea of loss of freedom. Das revisits the colonial experience in this
poem through an exploration of the inequality in man-woman relationship in
heterosexual marriage system. Das’s unabashed description of marital sex as
compulsive, ritualistic, devoid of any mental or physical compatibility or
attraction between the partners draws attention to her own unhappy marriage
with Madhava Das:
You
were pleased
With
my body’s response, its weather, its usual shallow
Convulsions.
You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself
in every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My
poor lust with our bitter-sweet juices. (qtd. in Sarkar 49)
The line that immediately
follows – “You called me wife” – expresses the poet’s anguish at the reduction
of the wife, the female into just a body, into the genitalia, with complete
disregard for her pleasure, or even consent. By juxtaposing the experience of
marital sex with the mundane activities of day to day life through which the
wife is trained into becoming the caregiver for the husband, and initiated into
the realm of domesticity by accepting total submission Das not only divests
marital love/ sex of any romantic glory but also highlights the
‘domination-submission’ aspect of heterosexual marriage.
To
woman writers, writing has always been a medium of self-expression, a tool of
subversion with which they can disrupt the existing power structures and carve
out a place for themselves in the masculine hierarchies and thereby re-evaluate
and reconfigure their existing marginalized position. Thus, Das chooses to
versify her own experiences as a doubly colonized woman and tries to subvert
the accepted notions of womanhood by presenting the feminine sensibility as it is.
Her poetry tells of her intensely personal experiences including her growth
into womanhood, her unsuccessful quest for love both in and outside marriage
and her life in matriarchal south India after inheriting her ancestral home.
The futility of marriage, as it fails to satisfy her early craving and quest
for love, is clearly expressed in “An Introduction” as she writes:
When
I
asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For,
he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom
and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my
sad woman-body felt so beaten. (qtd. In Sarkar 43)
As recorded in her autobiography My Story, Das was married to a man who
was much older than her in years; he was a philanderer with homosexual
inclinations. Conjugal disharmony and dissatisfaction
led her on a quest for love outside marriage. However, Devinder Kohli has
rightly pointed out, when Das pronounces of love outside marriage she is not
recommending adultery. She barely searches for a relationship that gives both
love and security and preserves her individuality. Her longing for love is only
to end up in a sense of anguish, frustration and a sad realization that love is
an impossible ideal.
Das
has equated love with the sexual act in such poems as “Relationship” where she
declares that “It was my desire that made him male/ And beautiful…” (Das,
poemhunter.com 16). With this outspoken expression of female sexual desire, the
female body ceases to be the object of male gaze and desire and becomes the
desiring subject. While in “The Testing of Sirens” she admits the futility of
the sexual act and the essential loneliness which it leads to. “The Freaks” is
about the uneasy coexistence of a married couple. Here by portraying the
helplessness of the sub-continental women who are forced to cohabit with
censurable personalities Das refutes the Euro-American concept of romantic love.
However, she has also attempted a celebration of romantic love and the
happiness and contentment associated with it in such poems as “Love” where she
tells her man:
Now that I love you
Curled like an old
mongrel
My life lies, content,
In you…. (Das, Poemhunter.com
13)
But with the feminine self of Das such moments
of bliss are short-lived and the longing for love always ends up in
disillusionment or in the vacant ecstasy of “The Dance of Eunuchs”.
Everywhere in her
poetry Das’s poetic self is inseparable from her feminine self, the latter
expressing itself through the former. To Das her poetry became a medium through
which she could vent out her inner thoughts, perplexities, emotional states and
feelings and hence she chose the confessional mode for her verses to relate her
private experiences to the world. But there is a kind of universal appeal in
her works as her private self transcends the personal and becomes the
representative voice of millions of women in newly independent India as she
declares at the end of “An Introduction”:
I am sinner,
I am
saint. I am the beloved and the
Betrayed.
I have no joys that are not yours, no
Aches
which are not yours. I too call myself I. (qtd. in Sarkar 44)
Das speaks for herself in
particular and for Indian women in general, who, at some point of their lives,
have come across similar experiences in a male dominated society. Her
unorthodox portrayal of womanhood, uninhibited presentation of the feminine
sensibility and totally unconventional attitude to love have earned her the
name of the femme fatale of Indian-English poetry.
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---.
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---.
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Chakravorty, Kaustav. “The feminist Protest in the Poetry of
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