SOURCE: Raveendran, P. P. “Text as History, History as Text: A Reading of Kamala Das's Anamalai Poems.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 1 (1994): 47-54.

[In the following essay, Raveendran examines how Das's later, more political poems, embody tension between the timelessness of the landscape and the minutiae of human history.]

Anamalai Poems are a series of short poems that Kamala Das wrote during her sojourn at the hills of Anamalai in Tamil Nadu following her defeat at the parliamentary elections of 1984.¹ Although she has reportedly written twenty-seven poems as part of the sequence,² only eleven have so far been published.³ Inhabiting a space “too near [the poet' s] nerve”,⁴ and expressing the pain and anguish of a lonesome soul, these poems provide a peephole into the troubled psyche of a writer, Third World and female, and quite unsure of her position in a world growing increasingly mercenary. They are different from her earlier work in that here one would not find narrated childhood memories, marital disharmony, anxieties regarding old age and other “ordinary / events of an / ordinary life”,⁵ which, in a sense, are the staple themes of her earlier poetry. The Anamalai Poems celebrate the self in the tradition of the classical Tamil akam (“interior”) poems.⁶ What is laid bare in each of the poems in the sequence is an interior landscape far removed from the world of mundane reality. Inasmuch as the seemingly unchanging hills of Anamalai constitute an escape from the ever-changing world of politics in the wake of her debâcle at the polls, these poems can be regarded as embodying the ahistorical other of what politics implies. However, aside from providing a quiet retreat for dejected electioneers, the visibly superb peaks of Anamalai can also stand as a sign for the invisibility of the life that they conceal within their foothills. This reading of the poems, then, is certain to reveal how they represent the historiography of their times, almost, in the words of T. W. Adorno, “unbeknown to themselves”.⁷

History, in other words, operates both on the visible and the invisible layers of Anamalai Poems. At the visible layer it reveals itself in terms of a movement from ignorance to recognition, from darkness to daylight, and from the self to the other. This is the syntagmatic aspect of the verse. Thus, in the first poem in the series, the lone poet—or the speaker—traverses the mountain paths of Anamalai only to be recognized by a bird who cries out her name in apparent wonder. This implies a movement in thought, accentuated by the ubiquity of verbs of motion in the poem. The second poem in the series is also marked by a similar movement, this time from darkness to daylight, from the world of dreams to that of “rude awakening”:

There were nights when I heard
my own voice call me out
of dreams, gifting such rude
awakenings, and then
expelling me from warm human
love, unaccustomed
fare for one such as I
a misfit when awake.

(p. 153)

The dialectic of the movement in this poem is such that even as the poet remains part of the dream world, her voice turns out to be its opposite, its other. A further irony here is that awakening into the world of reality becomes for the speaker a mark of expulsion from “warm human love”. If the speaker in the poem is to be believed, she who initiates the act of communication is, at the end of it, excluded from community and, by implication, from history.

The “I” here, as well as the reference to “voice”, suggest the theme of the self and the other. Kamala Das's obsession with the self, which has been described elsewhere as “the ideology of intimacy”, has grave historical and political implications.⁸ One of the recurring paradoxes of the Anamalai Poems, indeed of much of Kamala Das's poetry, is that each of its inward movements toward an isolated self covers an intricate path, ultimately becoming a movement in the direction of a larger reality. Northrop Frye might call this a centripetal movement of the poetic experience. This can also be read as an instance of a text's unconscious projection of itself into history, indeed the supreme moment of its historicity. The fifth poem in the series will illustrate this. This poem begins as the enactment of an interior drama with the speaker, in a vague identification with the mountain peaks, hiding beneath a mistry dream. However, as the poem progresses, we see the personal dreams of the speaker getting intermingled with the dreams of others, making them stir and sigh in their sleep. This seems to be a reference to the speaker's myth-making powers, a faculty that allows her to escape from the prison-house of the self:

… Yes, often, poets
gatecrash into the precincts of others' dreams
as Gods and Goddesses do many a time
in unsolicited magnanimity.

(p. 155)

In spite of this visible attempt on the part of the self to reach out to the other, the sense of Anamalai Poems as a record of the poet's obsessive celebration of the self prevails. As suggested earlier, there is a muted identification of the hills with the poet's subjective self in all the poems in the series. The identification is near complete in ‘The Anamalai Hills’, a poem which, though not included in the series, can be treated as a kind of prologue to the series.⁹ In this poem the hills are described as occupying a space outside time with neither “clocks” nor “cocks [to crow] the morning in” (p. 149). The whole area is enveloped in an all-embracing mist, which however seems to arise from somewhere within the speaker's own heart. There is a clear indication of the external landscape becoming an extension of the interior landscape, a conception that grows quite distinct towards the end of the poem and acts as a governing metaphor for the series named after it:

The mountain
seems deaf mute, but the flesh of her spirit
                                                                                                    is but its flesh,
and her silence, despite the tumult in her
                                                                                          blood, its destined
hush.

(p. 149)

Much, of course, can be said about this metaphor in ‘The Anamalai Hills’. At the centre of this poem is a feeling of sombre mistrust about the healing powers of verbal communication. Walking alone, “no longer seeking comfort in human speech” (p. 49), is preferable to all kinships, all blood-ties. This is different from the anxiety about failing poetic powers that marked Kamala Das's voice in some of her earlier poems like “The Cart Horse” and “Women's Shuttles”. There the anxiety, never resolved, was a direct outcome of the poet's growing fears about her deteriorating health, and about death. The Anamalai Poems are different from such earlier poems in that here the poet finally overcomes these several anxieties, and allows herself to luxuriate, almost erotically, in the crisis of the self.

The longest route home is perhaps
the most tortuous, the inward
path you take that carries you step
by weary step beyond the blood's
illogical arrogance, yes,
beyond the bone and the marrow
into that invisible abode of pain,
yes, that deathless
creation tethered to your self,
and constantly struggling to wrest
itself free, tethered to your soul
as your shadow is to your form,
your Siamese twin no surgeon
can cut away from you. Other
journeys are all so easy but
not the inward one, the longest
route home and the steepest
descent …

(p 156-57)

But while the movement of the lines reproduced above, and their images of loneliness and gloom, tend insistently towards absolute subjectivity, they are also symptomatic of a kind of tragic lyricism which, according to Georg Lukacs, is the mode appropriate to the soul “gripped by the torment … of solitude and devoured by a longing for community”.¹⁰

This “longing for community” is the invisible text of the Anamalai Poems, and is worked into the paradigmatic stratum of the poetic experience. That there is a definite correspondence between this and the syntax of interiority examined above is not surprising since even for Kant, as Adorno has pointed out, interiority was at least in part “a forum for protest against a heteronomous order imposed on people”.¹¹ What is being suggested is that interior journeys need not always signal the subject's flight from history. It can, on the contrary, signify a deeper involvement with history. While the more conspicuous flight from history, embodying the historicity of the text, manifests itself as a function of the syntagmatic axis of the poem, the deeper involvement with history is more a matter of the textuality of history rather than the historicity of the text.¹² This dialectic of textuality/historicity overlaps with the dialectic of visibility/invisibility noted earlier, and can be seen to operate at the levels of textual immanence and cultural critique.

An immanent analysis of the text of Anamalai Poems will reveal how, as against pure interiority, the sign “home” in the poem just quoted conjures up a whole semantic environment of comfort and conviviality domesticated by contemporary capitalism. “Home” here, as well as in the other poems in the sequence, is a metonymy for “the ordinary events of an ordinary life” that Das's early poetry celebrated. In the first poem in the sequence, “home” evokes the image of a person physically expelled from his/her territory; in the fifth poem it is, like dreams, an enclosed private residence. The description of the “longest route home” as “the most tortuous” in the eighth poem, while referring syntactically to an inward journey, cannot avoid suggesting metonymically the arduous task of making oneself “at home” wherever one is.

The above examples are only a brief illustration of what an immanent analysis can do to the text of a poem when read in its paradigmatic context. In fact each of the poems in the Anamalai sequence can be shown to have extensive textual ramifications when read in the context of other poems in the sequence as well as of the poems written earlier, for example, “Delhi 1984” or some of the “Colombo” poems, all set squarely in the politico-historical context. Written against the backdrop of the carnage against the members of the Sikh community in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, “Delhi 1984” also contains a reference to “home” in its fourth line:

The turbans were unwound, the long limbs
broken and bunched to seem like faggots
so that when such bundles were gifted
to their respective homes, women
swooned …

(p. 120)

But this is no interior journey. The lines evoke the ruthless manner in which Sikhs were massacred in the communal riots of 1984, the political turbulence shattering the presence of “home” as an example of domestic calm. The idea reappears in “Smoke in Colombo”, one of the several poems written while Das was in Sri Lanka, at the peak of the war between the Tamils and Sinhalese in that country.

On that last ride home we had the smoke
Following us, along the silenced
Streets, lingering on, though the fire
was dead then in the rubble and the ruins.

(p. 132)

What is interesting to note here is that the phrase “that last ride home” can neatly substitute the phrase “The longest route home” (p. 156) with which the eighth poem in the Anamalai sequence begins, exemplifying the operation of the dialectic of interiority/exteriority at the immanent level of the poetic context.

From the poetic context to the cultural context is but a few steps, as the above examples again would indicate. The significance of a cultural critique of Anamalai Poems stems from the fact that the author of these poems is a woman who, as a member of a postcolonial society, is doubly alienated from mainstream literary culture, constituted as it is by patriarchal and colonial values. That Kamala Das has chosen to write these poems in the language of the erstwhile coloniser complicates the matter.¹³ The fact is that Kamala Das's poetry cannot, in contemporary circumstances, escape a feminist reading and a postcolonial reading, and this is yet another way of talking about the historicity of these texts.

A fundamental assumption of a feminist-postcolonial reading of artworks is that the mainstream culture—defined either as patriarchal or as colonial—subsumes “otherness” by means of various textual strategies. The question of otherness and, by implication, of the self, therefore, becomes a matter of paramount importance for the postcolonial woman writer. For example, Susan Willis has shown how black women writers use “I” in order to construct a site of ideological resistance for themselves, which in a sense is a historical project: “The ‘I’ proclaims voice, subject and the right to history and place”.¹⁴ In fact the prevalence of autobiography as a major form of creative expression among Afro-Americans can be related to the attempted retrieval of the voice by a repressed group in order to find a place for itself in space and time. Anamalai Poems dramatises one such attempt by a deterritorialized subject to relocate itself in a significant way:

Yes, from each city I lived in,
each dusty small town, I stole out often
to walk this winding road, laying aside
my poor body that had perhaps no home,
no territory to call its own.

(p. 153)

The theme of invisibility that recurs in poem after poem is a correlate of this sense of deterritorialization:

There was none to see me or recognize
but the bird hidden in the silver oaks …

(p. 153)

At times I feel that I hide behind my dreams
as the mountain does, behind the winter's mists

(p. 155)

No, not for me the beguiling promise of
domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly
letter that begins with the word dearest
not for me the hollowness of marital
vows and the loneliness of a double bed
where someone lies dreaming of another mate
a woman perhaps lustier than his own.

(p. 156)

Perhaps the best way to tackle the gender issue in Kamala Das is to read her poetry along with her several prose-narratives in Malayalam. Some of her recently published Malayalam short story collections like Palayanam (The Flight, 1990) and Neypayasam (Rice Pudding in Ghee, 1991) and the collection of journalistic jottings Dayarikkurippukal (Notes from a Diary, 1992) will be found useful for this purpose. Even in the essays written in English in the 1970s, such as “Only Those Above 55, Obsessed with Sex”, “Why Not More Than One Husband?” and “I Studied All Men”, she had explored the problem of her position as a woman and a writer in post-colonial India. But one has to remember that Kamala Das has never tried to identify herself with any particular version of feminist activism. In fact she has been quite vociferous and consistent in her denouncement of what she regards as some of the new-fangled ideas doing the rounds in Western feminism. One of her essays has a reference to an American poet she met during her trip to the U.S. whose frank admission to being a lesbian utterly scandalized Kamala Das.¹⁵ Her smugly conventional admiration for the “masculinity” of such world leaders as Fidel Castro and Nasser¹⁶ is unlikely to render her popular with feminists. Her response to the gender question is not the studied analysis of a feminist. It is spontaneous, more of a gut response, and hence highly ideological. But although her answers to gender problems do not coincide with the standard answers of feminist activists, a strong feminist self-consciousness runs through all her writings. While this self-consciousness may not always be obvious in the poetry, it is quite conspicuous in her prose-narratives. In fact an overriding feminist concern seems to be the unifying principle behind her recent collection of Malayalam short stories Palayanam. What captures the attention of the reader of these and other writings of Kamala Das is that she provides significant insights into the operation of sexual politics in her culture without at the same time making overt comments on it.

The upshot of the above analysis is that, notwithstanding the apparent posture of self-absorption in the text of Anamalai Poems, there is a historical subtext at work in the series that resists its assimilation to a voice of pure interiority. Instead interiority has broadened out to embrace and confront a world of ideological values. The ideology in question might be that of patriarchy or of colonialism. In either case we are, as readers, confronting a social construct produced at a specific historical moment. The impact of Kamala Das's poetry must ultimately be traced to its historical dimension as well as subjectivity.

Notes

1. Kamala Das contested and lost the general elections to the Parliament of the Union of India from a constituency in her home state, Kerala, in 1984. After living almost all her life in cities outside Kerala, she had on her return thought of making a mark on the people by her idealism. She contested as an independent candidate and hoped to get a few lakh votes and, in the process, opportunities to meet the poor and the depressed of the land. But when the results came, she was surprised to find only 1780 votes in her favour. That upset her a great deal coming after a month's tireless campaigning. Severely depressed, she was advised to rest and was taken to her sister's home in the Anamalai hills. The Anamalai Poems were written while Kamala Das was recuperating there. In a recent interview with the present writer, Kamala Das has talked in detail about the generative context of these poems. See P. P. Raveendran, “Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das”, Indian Literature 155, 1993, pp. 150-51. For a personal account of her experiences as a candidate in the parliamentary elections, see Kamala Das, “A Poet at the Hustings”, The Best of Kamala Das, Kozhikode: Bodhi, 1991, pp. 165-70.

2. P. P. Raveendran, op. cit., p. 151.

3. Her statement in the interview that about fifteen or twenty of these poems appeared in Indian Literature seems to be the result of some mix-up. In fact only eight of the Anamalai Poems appeared in Indian Literature (1985). Seven of these were later reproduced along with three new poems belonging to the series in The Best of Kamala Das. The ordering of these poems in The Best of Kamala Das is slightly different from the order in Indian Literature. As the selection and arrangement of the poems included in The Best of Kamala Das were suggested by the poet herself, it is reasonable to assume that the ten poems printed in this volume are the sequence Kamala Das would wish to be preserved as Anamalai Poems. There is another poem—“The Anamalai Hills”—closely related to the sequence but which the poet has placed at the end of the section preceding Anamalai Poems in The Best of Kamala Das.

4. P. P. Raveendran, op. cit., p. 151.

5. Kamala Das, The Best of Kamala Das, Kozhikode: Bodhi, 1991, p. 81. All quotations from Kamala Das's poetry are from this edition. Further references will be made in the text.

6. Tamil akam poems are mainly love poems, whereas the Anamalai Poems are not immediately about love. Edward Thomas's poems of the self come closer in spirit to Anamalai Poems. For a selection of classical Tamil poetry see A. K. Ramanujan, Poems of Love and War: From the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

7. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, London: Routledge, 1984, p. 262.

8. See P. P. Raveendran, “Introduction: The Ideology of Intimacy”, The Best of Kamala Das, op. cit., pp. ix-xvii, for a development of this argument.

9. See above, note 3.

10. Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Merlin, 1971, p. 45.

11. T. W. Adorno, op. cit., p. 169.

12. The theoretical position I take here can in certain ways be related to the views that Adorno gives in parts of Aesthetic Theory. My analysis can partly be seen as an elaboration of Adorno's observation that “in relation to one another, art works are hermetically closed off and blind, yet able in their isolation to represent the outside world” (p. 257). For Adorno's views on the merits and deficiencies of the immanent analysis of artworks, see Aesthetic Theory, pp. 257-60.

13. See Vilas Sarang, “Introduction”, Indian English Poetry since 1950: An Anthology, Bombay: Disha Books, 1990, pp. 1-38, for a comprehensive discussion of the language question in Indian English poetry.

14. Susan Willis, “Black Women Writers: Taking a Critical Perspective”, Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Green and Coppelia Kahn, London: Routledge, 1985, p. 213.

15. Madhavikkutty [Kamala Das], Dayarikkurippukal, journalistic writings in Malayalam, Kottayam: Current Books, 1992, p. 116. In the interview, she makes a similar point. See P. P. Raveendran, “Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das”, op. cit., p. 159.

16. Madhavikkutty, Dayarikkurippukal, op. cit., p. 146.