QUEST FOR SELF IN KAMLA DAS`S POETRY VOLUME THE DESCENDANT
BY DR. RAM SHARMA, SENIOR LECTURER IN ENGLISH, J.V.P.G COLLEGE, BARAUT, BAGHPAT, U.P.
Kamla Das`s present volume contains 29 poems of \which 'The Looking Glass' and some other poems deal with the theme of love. The remaining ones deal with personal anguish and dilemma in love-business with the same degree of urgency found in her first poetic corpus. The most of her poems give ample evidence to her painstaking efforts with life to transcend the SELF.
Kamla Das`s poetic self rises above the mundane problems. She tries to seek a smooth way for her life-journey on an ideal path. She addresses the sea in 'The Suicide' to know the intuitive knowledge of life and death. She wants to ask from the sea-ho\v to get-rid of worries, to learn how to endure life and face death. For these answers she need not go to Ivory-tower'.
She hears the pricks of her soul within her body and believes that declining of her bodv has nothing to do with the dignity of soul. She concerns this problem, and states :
"Bereft of Soul
my body shall be bare
Bereft of body
my soul shall be bare ...
... I throw the bodies
out ... only the souls know
how to sing'1
She is concerned with external and internal aspects of her SELF. Kamla Das does not try to adopt the fictional world of others but she looks into her self, her body is her Malgudi. here.
Her poetic self neither wants to leave her body nor soul. Kamla Das once again goes to and fro within her inner self as the sea moves in vortex before her. As E.V. Rama Krishna opines:
"Since the poet cannot disinherit either the body or the soul and live with one of them, the whole climax of the poem saturates into the idea of suicide where the agency which can take away one of them is the sea, an old symbol of timelessness"2
But, her illusive freedom in the lap of the sea is over shadowed by the painful memory of her love-affairs within and without the orbit of marriage, Frustrated in married life and the breaking of the emotional ties from her husband are svmbolically present in The Bangles. The bangles in India are considered as a symbol of matrimonial relation. Kamla Das seems to present the discontentment and disharmony in the marital relationship through the following lines :
" ... At night
In sleep, the woman lashes
At pillows with bangled arms;
In
Vain she begs bad dreams
to fade
The man switches on the light
and
Looks into her face with his
Gray, pitiless eyes ..."3
This poem is Tree from personal malice' The concrete imagery 'at pillows with banglecl arms' has been artistically woven into the texture of her poetry. Other common details .like 'sleep', 'bad dreams', switches on' convey an impersonal message. As Arlene R.K. Zide opines :
"Kamla Das' themes transcend the 'personal' because what she attempts to poetise, is the 'Universal experience' of a woman"
Her feminine self finds the man emotionally deficient and incapable of possessing a passionate regard for concrete reality. Kamla Das' view of the world of reality is blurred by her own view that positive male indifference in attributing to women a capacity for individualism, is condemned in her poems of self-exploration.
Her feminine self is an example of the cruelty, tyranny and indifferent attitude of man. She is subjected to much humiliation by her own husband as well as by other men. The sex-based aspects of her observations about men are more-complexive where bed is no more a place that can offer a woman comfortable sleep. She loses her feminine identity when she is forced on to the bed against her desires. She mourns :
"They let her slide from
pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with
tears and
She lay there weeping
far sleep had lost its use ..."5
But her feminine self in order to escape from the suffering and humiliation, can only build a wall of tears :..
'...I shall build walls with tears
She said, walls to shu: me in ...'
The poem is a strong representation of the feminine self which is merely a puppet in the hands of the dominating men. They are like flies to wanton boys to be thrown away after the operation. She continues to be ill treated and humiliated by men till they are sure that she is no more of use to them and is mere a 'half-dead' creature.
Under the disguise of her pathetic character Nani in the poem of the Same title the feminine self of Kamla Das experiences the suffering and humiliation of the last degree. Driven by shame and moral austerity the pregnant housemaid hangs herself with a rope like Prophyria in Brewing's world who hangs with her long hair. But in Nani's case the situation is the more heart-rendering because she, besides herself, kills her pregnancy. And pregnancy, here, stands for Kamla Das' inner self. The poem raises unanswerable questions : "Nani, the pregnant maid, hanged herself
In the privy one day. For three long hours,
Until the police came, She was hanging there
A clumsy puppet, and when
the wind blew.
Turning her gently on the rope ..."°.
She hangs from a rope as a helpless victim to the designs of an unknown citizen. The expression 'turning her gently on the rope' is a feminine verse in its denotative sense upon female self in its connotative sense. Another expression 'delight us', 'a comic dance' is a good example of mockery up on the shameful act.
Thus, the poetry of Kamla Das must be viewed in the light of her feminine consciousness. She acquired these circumstances dependent upon the society of her childhood days. As a poet, she is conscious of her creative faculties and tries to break chains and restraints. She indulges in self-awareness, self-exploration and self introspection in order to define herself poetically.
She finds herself condemned to play the part, apart from her feminine self. It is the male society, which compels her to choose her roles according to their convenience. She is forced to act either as a slave or an idol. Her personality reflects [he-worse condition of woman. She writes in My Story :
"Often I have toyed with the idea of drowning myself ;o get rid of my loneliness which is not unique in any way b-u: is natural to all. I have wanted to find rest in the sea and an escape from involvements"7.
Thus her feminine self is, traditionally, associated with the enclosed world of household under the disguise as a mother; a wife and a helpmate.
She wants to escape from her frustrated memory in 'Substitute' where the reaction of her body shocks her feminine self, she says :
"Our bodies after love making Turning away rejecting our
works began to sound like clatter of sounds in fight"8.
Such psychic-painful experience during her quest for emotional involvement with her husband compelled her to take freedom in suicide. Love for her has become a mechanical affair and lovers a series of substitutes : She says again :
"After that love become a
swivel-door,
When one went out, another
came in"9.
Poem is an attempt to explore into the psyche of the frustrated feminine self. Her poetic self wants freedom but her feminine self is always in the cage like a bird. Her desire to fly and her preoccupation with SELF is reduced slowly. She becomes the victim of male lust.
Karnla Das' painful-outcries come out from her inner self. What has disturbed her sensitive psyche is the dehumanization of her feminine self.
She says that she remained a virgin for a fortnight after marriage is an example of triumph won by her poetic-self or ego-self over her feminine self. It is but natural that all her softer emotions were completely switched off, towards her husband, what can be expected from her artistic self living in such a whirlpool? Her feminine self, growing in the form of a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother could not get male-love. In her, poem 'The female of the species', she says :
"Some times you want to talk
about love and despair,
and ungrate fullness of children,
A man is no use whatever than
you want then your mother,
or sister
or the girl with whom your
went through school ..."1.
She wants nothing but love in her life. Love and affection remained a craze and dream for her. Her feminine self got almost every thing in life, name; & fame a degree of wealth but her inner self is an 'empty cistern'. In the words of Manmohan K. Bhatnagar :
"Kamla's poetry embodies agonies of women emerging from that state of subjugation and bondage, and seeking to establish their identity and the self'11.
Sometimes her poetic self transcends from the subjective voice as seen in the following lines :
"I wore a shirt and my
Brother's trousers, cut my
hair short and ignored-my
womanliness"12.
These lines show that her feminine self feels satisfaction by opposing the fiction of idealism.
Her feminine self has made her bold enough with the male world on its on terms.
Kamla in her efforts discovers her selfhood as a feminine and artist. She, for this purpose, breaks away the norms of a male dominated society to the extreme limits. She skips over her subjectivism to get her artistic self experienced. She says :
"In darkness we grew, as
in silence
we sang, each note rising out of sea, out of wind, out of earth and
out of each sad night like and
ache ..."'3.
The 'ache' and sadness arising from her innerself is the symbol of general pain. The symbolic use of the 'sea' indicates her emotional restlessness and sad mood, reciting the self's confessional sense of the melting and disintegrating into nothingness. The 'sea' becomes a safe-guard for her time ridden existence and tormented psyche. The sea', throughout her second volume, functions as an objective correlative to her quest for peace. Here, Kamla Das faces two psychic traumas. One, her feminine self wants to be attached with 'body's wisdom' and the second, her poetic self wants to gain the total vision of life by being detached from the earlier. She is unable to make a reconciliation between the two because there remains always a gap between the two. The ironic fact is that these experiences give her the power neither to subdue her nor to forgive her. Both the conflicting selves do not reach the single conclusion. As Devendra Kohli opines :
"Despite the positivity of 'body's wisclon' the body itself is subject to decay"14.
A number of poems in 'The Descendants' deal with the theme of love-affairs resulting in uselessness. Most of her poems in the present volume are of tragic vision. But 'The Looking
Glass' functions as a comic-relief in the same intensity as it functions in a typical Shakespearian tragedy. In a male dominated world, it depends on her to satisfy the male ego by admiring his male prowess and her own feminine weakness. Her soft, lovely feminine self serves two duties, first to excite his passion and - second to gratify his vanity as a superior male. Her feminine self also learns how to get a man to satisfy her lust. She says :
"Getting a man to love you is easy
only be honest about your wants as
woman stand nude before
the glass with him
So that he sees that himself the
stronger one,
And believes it so, and you so much more
softer, younger, lovelier ...........
Admit your admiration. Notice
the perfection of his limbs,
his eyes reddening under the shower, the sky walk
across the bathroom floor"15.
The poem is a psychic striptease the woman poet who is denied the emotional involvement which she hungers after. Kamla Das the 'queen of erotica' admits herself softer and lovelier and see him as the 'stronger'. She let him feel that he is her 'only man' for sexual satisfaction. To satisfy her "endless female hungers', she offers her female anatomy including- ;musk of breasts' 'scent of long hair' and 'the warm shock of manustral blood'.
But, her thrust for emotional fulfilment remains starved. Her sexual self, which was once receiving warm erotic touch, now becomes 'drab' and 'destitute'. It is her inner self which is reflected in her poems. A keen feminine sensibility is at work here. As a hot blooded woman, Kamla Das makes an honest confessions of her wants for her sexual-starvation. For a woman, love is the slice and essence of life. Frustration and turbulence at the early young age, lust and sexual needs at the mature young age, tender affection towards children and flirting towards male are the psychological expressions of woman-love.
A woman always longs for love and this love can not be one sided. It should be reciprocal. But instead of the juice of love Kamla Das finds an 'empty cistern' in her life. As Saleem Peeradina has opined :
"She writes about love with the obsessiveness of a woman who can realize her being fully only through love. Not surprisingly, given the subject, the writing is some-times week and self-indulgent"16.
It is, therefore, obvious that she feels always hungry and unhappy in the absence of true love in her life. She remained all through her life searching for love of which she could not get a single stance. Her heart remains unfulfilled. She cries out :
Sometimes theatrical
when I die
Do not throw the meat and bones away
But pile them up
Let them tell
By their small
What life was worth
on this earth
What love was worth
In the end17.
Thus, one can say that frustration in love is responsible for her present condition. She is a woman who wishes to escape the trappings of lust in order to find his love. Often she is frightened to think about the loss of a man whom she loved. She accepts the fact that to love is easy but to live without lover with his memory is very hard for a woman. She says : "Oh, yes, getting A man to love is cosy, but living without him afterwards may have to be Faced. A living without life when you move Around, meeting strangers with your eyes that Gave up their search, with ears that hear only His last voice calling out your name and your Body which once under his touch had gleaned Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute"18. These rmes show that Kamla Das wants full satisfaction in love with its associations such as security, mutual understanding, shelter and a happy home. Love always meant something more than a physical-inter-course to her. What she actually wanted from her husband was sympathy, gentle dealing and companionship. She has lived her all life in search of illusive —. Jove and company.
Common man can not easily understand the complexity of her love seek-psyche and her ideas. The ups and downs of cultural restrictions, family background and the traditions of an orthodox family have often shaped her inner self. As Bruce king opines about her TOTAL SELF :
"If many poems speak of unhappiness and the desire for an all absorbing love, others are filled with Das" clisccvcrv of the life around her on the streets and in the bed rooms. While marriage has hurt her ego, leaving her unfulfilled, her poems also record a woman enjoying the new ness of the world as she wonders the streets and pursues her own interests"19.
Kamla Das has faced frustration, disillusionment and drabness that she has expressed through every verse-line of her poetry in a bold and confessional manner.
A close study of her longer poems like 'Composition' reveal* that she is a deeply distressed woman. As she remembers the frustrated bygone days of her married life; her feminine self, like a psychiatrist, begins to study the diseased-inner-self. Her feminine consciousness sinks, bit by bit, into the sea of sorrow. And it seems that her feminine self would not come out from the last layer of the sorrowful sea. She remembers the cold and dry days of married life; she complains of her man and the tragic situation. As, she has stated in pessimistic poem Composition :
"The tragedy of life
in not death but growing.
The child growth into adult
and. growing out of needs ..."20.
As far death is concerned she is not afraid of it. Her poetic self reveals the pessimism throughout the poem. This poem shows that in her life 'happiness is an occasional episode in the general drama of pain'. She follows throughout her life this Thomas Hardian pessemism.
While taking some more lines from the same poem; it becomes clear that her feminine self has become drab' and destitute'. It has become a suffering-moving-soul. Her feminine self now a detached pessimistic entity does not involve with the Vaster world of varied colours. Her poetic self with all absorbing sensibility could not escape from the painful involvement. The line 'no p^wer to escape from cages of involvement' from the same poem shows that her situation in life is as painful as that ..... of Tess in the hands of her husband-D'urburvilles.
Throughout a long span of her life Kami a Das had been playing with trivialities and frivolities of a self-centered mind. It becomes clear from the lines of the same poem, '1 asked my husband, am I hetro, Am I Lesbian' Here, her feminine self is going through a peculiar problem of 'to be or not to be'. Her poetic self wants to rise above the trivialities but, her ego-self does not want to give them up. As Devendra Kohli opines :
"Clearly a sensibility which elegantly refuses to either touch the clouds or 'go clown the sea' - to shun the plunge which the mysterious ambiguity of life demands - is ill constituted to breathe in the region of vaster identities"21.
Disgusted by the loveless and mechanical sex her feminine self wants to die in the lap of sea instead of her husband's hands. The self expects that the death offered by the sea is less painful than the death offers by her husband. Her feminine self is torn between the two modes of death, the one cool and the other warm. Here her feminine self is rendered lovely, empty, lifeless and sterile by the love-less sex.
There is no solution to this personal dilemma which
arouses suicidal thoughts in her.
KamUi Das in her poem 'The Invitation' has artistically used the 'sea' as an escape for her present dilemma. The symbol of 'sea' gives her solace, comfort, and redemption against the force of oppression and exploitation of the domineering male tyranny. Here, the poet looks to the sea as eventually and accepts its invitation of self-drowning. She says :
"What do you lose by dying .... Darling, Forgive, how long one can resist'.
She does not romanticize death by comparing it to an ecstasy of love. As her autobiography clears the point.
"I have toyed the idea of drawing myself to be rid of my
loneliness which is not unique in any way but is natural to all.
I have wanted to find rest in the sea and an escape from involvement"23.
Her feminine self never gets supposed freedom. The private security of her feminine self is threatened by horror and violence around her. This danger of insecurity brings her face to face with the sea. As her poem 'Substitute' clears the idea. She says :
"It will be all right if I join clubs
And flirt a little over telephone.
It will be all right, it will be all right
I arn the type that endures.
It will be all right, it will be ail right.
It will be all right between the world and the me"--4.
Karnla Das has used the expression 'It will be all right' for several times to assert her feminine self. This expression shows her intention. She has used it as a poetic tool to fortify the tension and restlessness of life. Viewed in the light of this peculiar dilemma, the self's ultimate craving for the 'escape from ^ the cage of involvement', is rather spontaneous. This is the effort of her feminine self to assert the feminine identity.
The above mentioned poems like 'Suicide', 'Substitute', 'The Invitation' and 'Composition', reveal the death burdened psyche of the self. They project, by and large, the self's confrontation with the complex emotional restlessness caused by the new recognition that despite the positivity of 'body's wisdom' the body itself is the subject to decay.
Her next effort to assert her feminine self can be seen in her important poem 'The Invitation'. Her husband could not provide her a paradise of love she had dreamed of. But her feminine self never forgets its cry-for-love. She finds it difficult to adjust the barrenness of her married life. Her feminine self goes deep into her own self-revealing mysteries. She says :
"... A long
As I remember I want to other
on the bed with him, the boundaries
of had shrunk to a mere
six by two and afterwards, when
we walked out together, they
widened to hold the unknown
city ...
End me, cries the sea. Think of
yourself lying on a funeral pyre
with a burning head ..."25.
It becomes clear that her husband has shattered all her romantic ideas about love and home. Her husband hurt her feelings and evoked a sense of despair in her.
REFERENCES
1. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writers Workshop, 1967), p. 1.
2. Rama Krishna E.V., 'Kamla Das as a Confessional Poet', Contemporary Indian English Verse, ed.
Chirantra Kulshreshtha (New Delhi : Arnold Heinemann, 1980), p. 204.
3. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Palo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Spectrum (Atlantic Pub. And Dis. 2001), p. 21.
4. R.K. Zide Arlene, Rev. of The Old Play House And % Other Poems (Journal of South Asian Ltd. 1981), p. 239.
5. Rajeshwar Mittapalli, and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Spectrum (Atlantic Pub. And dis. 2001), p. 137.
6. Ibid. p. 131.
7. Kamla Das, My Story (New Delhi : Sterling Pub. Pvt. Ltd. 1988), p. 215.
8. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta writers work shop), 1967.
p. 7.
9. Ibid. p. 7.
10. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Specturm (ed.) Atlantic Pub. And Dis. 2001), P. 46.
11. Bhatnagar K. Manmohan, Feminist English Literature (New Delhi : Atlantic Pub. and dis. 2002), p. 7.
12. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Specturm (Atlantic pub. And dis. 2001), p. 164.
13. Kamla Das, The Descendant (Calcutta writer's workshop, 1967), p. 26
14. Devendra Kohli, Virgin Whiteness : The Poetry of Kamla Das (Calcutta : Writer's Workshop, 1967), p. 24.
15. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writer's workshop, 1967), p. 25.
16. Peeradina Saleem, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Madras : Macmillian, 1972), p. 86.
17. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writer's Workshop, 1967), p. 3.
18. Ibid.
A. King Bruce, Modern Poetry in English (OUP, Bombay, 1987), p. 151.
9. Ibid. p. 7.
10. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Specturm (ed.) Atlantic Pub. And Dis. 2001), P. 46.
11. Bhatnagar K. Manmohan, Feminist English Literature (New Delhi : Atlantic Pub. and dis. 2002), p. 7.
12. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Specturm (Atlantic pub. And dis. 2001), p. 164.
13. Kamla Das, The Descendant (Calcutta writer's workshop, 1967),
p. 26
14. Devendra Kohli, Virgin Whiteness : The Poetry of Kamla Das (Calcutta : Writer's Workshop, 1967), p. 24.
15. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writer's workshop, 1967), p. 25.
16. Peeradina Saleem, Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Madras : Macmillian, 1972), p. 86.
17. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writer's Workshop, 1967), p. 3.
18. Ibid.
King Bruce, Modern Poetry in English (OUP, Bombay, 1987), p. 151.
20. Kamla Das, The Desendants (Calcutta Writer's Workshop, 1967),
p. 29.
21. Devendra Kohli, Virgin Whiteness : The Poetry of Kamla Das (Calcutta : Writers Workshop, 1968), p. 20.
22. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : Writers workshop, 1967),
p. 15.
23. Kamla Das, My Story (New Delhi, Sterling Pub. Pvt. Ltd; 1976), p. 287.
24. Kamla Das, The Descendants (Calcutta : writers workshop), 1967,
p. 6.
25. Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco, Kamla Das : A Critical Spectrum (New Delhi : Atlantic Pub. And Dis. 2001), p. 43.
