[In the following essay, Raveendran examines the role of history in the Anamalai Poems.]

The Anamalai Poems are a series of short poems that Kamala Das wrote during and after her sojourn at the hills of Anamudi in Tamil Nadu following her defeat at the parliamentary elections of 1984.¹ Along with “The Anamalai Hills” which closes the group of poems dating from 1981-90 in The Best of Kamala Das (1991), this cycle of poems provides 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. In as much as the seemingly unchanging Anamudi constitutes an escape from the ever-changing world of politics which Kamala Das wanted to get away from in the wake of her poll-debacle, these poems can be regarded as embodying a historical other of what politics implies. However, a close reading of the poems will reveal how they represent the historiography of their times, almost, in the words of T. W. Adorno, “unbeknownst to themselves.”² Indeed, aside from providing a quiet retreat for dejected electioneers, the visibly superb peaks of Anamalai can also stand as a metaphor for the invisibility of the life that they conceal within their foothills. History in the Anamalai Poems operates along this dialectic of the visible and the invisible.

History, in a sense, operates both at the visible and the invisible layers of Anamalai Poems. At the visible layer it appears as the syntactic shift within each poem realized semantically as 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 traverses the mountain paths of Anamalai only to be recognized by a bird who cries out her name in apparent wonder. This, obviously, implies a movement, one that is 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:

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.(3)

In some poems the movement is from the self to the other. Kamala Das's obsession with the self, which was described elsewhere as “the ideology of intimacy,” has grave historical and political implications.⁴ 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 misty 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.

(155)

In spite of this visible dialectic of the self attempting 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. In this poem the hills are described as occupying a space outside time with neither “clocks” nor “cock [to crow] the morning in” (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 becomes 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.

(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 distrust about the healing powers of verbal communication. Walking alone, “no longer seeking comfort in human speech” (149) is preferable to all kinships, all blood-ties. This is different from the anxiety of 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 was a direct outcome of the poet's growing fears about her deteriorating health. The anxiety is never resolved in these poems, which moreover, were characterized by a more pervasive anxiety about death. 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 crisis manifests in the text of the poems as images of loneliness and gloom. This is symptomatic of a kind of tragic lyricism, which, according to George Lukacs is the mode appropriate to the soul “gripped by the torment … of solitude and devoured by a longing for community.”⁵ This is a movement towards absolute subjectivity, pure interiority, illustrated by the following poem in the Anamalai sequence:

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 …

(156-157)

The “longing for community” that Lukacs speaks about is the invisible text of the Anamalai Poems, a layer that is worked into the paradigmatic stratum of the poetic experience. There is a definite correspondence between this and the syntax of interiority examined above. There is nothing surprising about this. 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.”⁶ This would suggest a further implication of history, and its paradigmatic participation would call attention to the textuality of history rather than to the historicity of the text. 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, for example, the sign “home” in the poem just quoted conjures up a whole semantic environment of comfort and conviviality domesticated by contemporary capitalism through its sophisticated advertising technology. This is a far cry from the world of pure interiority that an “innocent” reading of the poem is expected to unravel. This is only a minor 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 poems written earlier. This will become clear if these poems are read in conjunction with a poem like “Delhi 1984,” or some of the “Colombo” poems, all set squarely in the politico-historical context.

From the poetic context to the cultural context is but a few steps, as the above examples 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 is condemned to lead the life of a woman in a post-colonial society. That Kamala Das has chosen to write these poems in the language of the erstwhile coloniser complicates the matter. These are important questions, but the more important fact, which indeed is related to the questions raised, is that Anamalai Poems are read in a context in which these questions lie intertwined with other questions about literature and aesthetics. The fact is that Kamala Das's poetry cannot, in contemporary circumstances, escape a feminist reading and a post-colonial reading. This, to be sure, is yet another way of talking about the historicity of these texts.

The best way to tackle the gender issue in Kamala Das perhaps 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 earlier, in such essays written in English in the seventies 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 at a personal level Kamala Das has never tried to identify herself with any version of feminist activism. In fact she has been quite vociferous and consistent in her denouncement of 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 of being a lesbian utterly scandalized Kamala Das.⁷ Her smugly conventional admiration for the “masculinity” of such world leaders as Fidel Castro and Nasser⁸ is unlikely to render her popular with feminists. Her response to the gender question is not the studied, calculated analysis of a feminist. It is spontaneous, more of a gut response, and hence highly ideological. There is a great deal in her work to interest a cultural critic. Her involvement with the gender question, her answer to it and the way she answers it are all quite unique in many respects. Although her answer to the gender problem does not coincide with the standard answers of feminist activists, a feminist self-consciousness is quite strong in all her writings. While this self-consciousness may not be immediately present 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 our culture without at the same time making an overt comment on it.

Read against this background, the last poem in the Anamalai series might yield meanings unrecognized in an immanent analysis:

There is love greater than all you know
that awaits you where the red road finally ends
its patience proverbial; not for it
the random caress or the lust
that ends in langour.
Its embrace is truth and it erases
even the soul's ancient indentations so that
some unknown womb shall begin to convulse
to welcome your restructured perfection.

(158)

“Love,” “lust,” “womb”—these are some of the words that have acquired new associations in the feminist paradigm, in the wake of which it might no longer be possible to read Kamala Das's poetry as an expression of pure interiority. 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 confronting a social construct produced at a specific historical moment. The historical dimension of Kamala Das's poetry can ultimately be traced to this ideology.