SOURCE: Raphael, R. “Kamala Das: The Pity of It.” Indian Literature 22, no. 3 (1979): 127-37.

[In the following essay, Raphael contends that Das's autobiography, My Story, is flawed but provides insight into the author's personality and work.]

David McCutchion says that Kamala Das, the Indo-English poet, uses the technique of free verse in her poems, the ‘originality’ and ‘freshness’ of which arise out of her personality. Roger Iredale says that “In many of the poems of Kamala Das there is an almost violent frankness that expresses itself through an outspoken use of languages as she explores the nuances of the personal relationship.” In a review article, K. Ayyappa Panicker says that Kamala Das's poetry deals with a distinctly feminine world, “the intensely domesticated but never tame or tepid world of man and woman.” He goes on to say: “In poem after poem there emerges the dark sinewy figure of femininity complaining of the failure of love: a wild shriek of despair fills every room until the walls visibly wobble.” Many critics have regarded Kamala Das as a confessional poet because she “has always dealt with private humiliations and sufferings which are the stock themes of confessional poetry.” E. V. Ramakrishnan says that the confessional poetry of Kamala Das not only avoids cliches of expression but also every trace of sentimentality and pathos even when dealing with the most intimate personal experiences. Her poetry is the outcome of a struggle to relate her private experiences with the larger world outside—it is a struggle to maintain her personal identity.

Kamala Das's poems deal with her own personality. “In her poems Kamala Das lays bare her hesitations, failures, ignorance, shame and feelings of guilt since all of them wear the stamp of her personality. There is no attempt to idealize or glorify any part of the self. One of her long poems, ‘Composition’, embraces such diverse moods as passionate attachment, agonizing guilt, nauseating disgust and inhuman bitterness. In ‘Blood’, self-questionings and self-assertions intermingle to form the dominant confessional tone. ‘The Old Playhouse’, ‘In Love’, and ‘Gino’ begin with images of deep involvement in the physical act of love. But, soon, these poems slip into images of physical rotting, disgust and sickness, suggested by the poet's awareness of the essential futility of her experience,” says E. V. Ramakrishnan.

That brings me directly to the problem of my enquiry, namely, the poetry of Kamala Das derives its value from her personality. The problem is vaguely stated by I. K. Sharma in his review of Devindra Kohli's Kamala Das (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1975) which appeared in The Journal of Indian Writing in English (Vol. I, No. 1, January 1977, pp. 69-70). Sharma complains that Kohli's book does not give us a sufficient picture of the life-story of Kamala Das. The charge is a serious one inasmuch as an understanding of the private life of Kamala Das is an absolute necessity for an understanding of her poetry. However, the task of understanding her life-story is made simple by Kamala Das herself in her autobiography.

II

Kamala Das's My Story seems to have created some sort of a sensation among the reading public and the controversy with the publisher seems to have contributed much to its publicity. However, anyone who wants to get at the personality of Kamala Das should read this little autobiography.

An author is a public possession, and his or her life-story, when written sincerely, does fill a social as well as aesthetic function. Besides, critics tell us that the first duty of a good student of literature is to establish a friendly and personal relationship with the author. I am, therefore, perfectly within the pale of aesthetic criticism, when I try to find out for myself if Kamala Das has a personality rich, experienced and mellowed enough to venture upon an autobiography.

It must be noted that not all can write autobiographies. Before writing his or her ‘story’, the autobiographer must have lived his or her life fully. Every human being leads a twofold existence: the inner or subjective world of meditation, introspection, beliefs and convictions, and the external or objective life of adventures structured in a chronological or historical order. A genuine autobiography should be much more than a book of deeds of externalized adventures; it must also explore the world of inner consciousness. Actions and events taking place within the phenomenal universe have their use, but an autobiographer should also concentrate upon the personal world, and recognize the phenomenological or external world as being important only insofar as it lends significance to the inner world of emotive or spiritual values.

That means that the autobiographer must have lived his life according to certain noble principles and ideals. The struggles and tribulations that such a person encounters in upholding these principles and the joy and satisfaction connected with their achievements alone can make the autobiographer's life worth reading. The autobiographer must, therefore, live not only his or her private life, but also that of his or her age. My Experiment with Truth is the autobiography of a man who lived ‘fully and entirely’ not only his private life but also the life of his age: Gandhiji's Experiment will live as long as humanity lives, because mankind has a great fascination for truth; Nirad C. Chaudhuri's Autobiography of an Unknown Indian tells less about himself than about the age in which he lives and the historical forces that made it to be what it is today. Chaudhuri is so alive to his social and cultural environments that his Autobiography remains “a refreshing and many-pronged attack on that nebulous phenomenon called the British Empire in India,” says K. Raghavendra Rao.

St. Augustine's Confessions is the first completely honest self-analysis in the history of literature. Book XI of the Confessions is pure philosophy. And Augustine was not always a philosopher: he was a pleasure-seeking profligate and a lascivious philanderer, sexually more deviated than Kamala Das. Yet his Confessions lives, not because he narrates his own vices and sins of the flesh but because his life was a quest after perfection. For instance, he sought his salvation in Manichaeism and then wanted to establish himself as a rhetorician. Both these he gave up. Finally, he discovered his real self in Christianity. I am not insinuating that one can discover one's true self only in Christianity: one could equally discover one's self in any religion or in any ideology. The important point is to discover one's self—which is neither pure flesh nor pure spirit—because as long as one does not know one's real self, one wallows in ignorance.

Thus, Cardinal Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua is a passionate defence, by the leader of the Oxford Movement, of the roads he took in his chequered march towards Truth. It is the story, once again, of his intellectual development and conversion to Catholicism. The Apologia pro Vita Sua “is among the greatest autobiographies of the world,” says George Sampson. W. B. Yeats's autobiography is called A Vision, “and that book is an attempt to let Western civilization, or the mind of the race itself, write its own autobiography; at that period in his life Yeats tried to find in the structure of history the structure of his own personality,” says Daniel Albright in the Preface to his book The Myth against Myth.

None of these elements find any place in Kamala Das's Story. It is not the story of the unfolding of a great personality. There is no element of quest, spiritual or otherwise, no ideological confrontation. The structure of her Story may be analogically spoken of as a passage from ignorance of her flesh to a knowledge of it: at the beginning of her story she felt that she was incapable of enjoying sex and looks suspiciously at her husband who enjoys it. But there soon came a stage when she did learn to enjoy orgasmic pleasure. And once she learnt that, she went after quite a number of strong men to satisfy the demand of her flesh.

Apart from her ‘sex-story’ there is nothing enduring and endearing about Kamala Das's Story. Kamala belongs to the Nair caste, of which she makes a few pejorative remarks, such as ‘the Nair males are violent in temper’ and that they are crude when sexually aroused. She seems to have not loved any one, including her parents. She is the type of unhappy soul who wants the whole world to turn on the axis of her personality, and when it refuses, she condemns it. In fact, My Story is an emotional outburst of someone disgruntled, someone afraid. “My story is my autobiography which I began writing during my first serious bout with heart disease. The doctor thought that writing would detract my mind from the fear of a sudden death and, besides, there were all the hospital bills to be taken care of,” says Kamala Das in the Preface to her Story. Once the understanding was reached with the editor of a journal, she wrote her Story rapidly. “I wrote continually, not merely to honour my commitment but because I wanted to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could depart when the time came, with a scrubbed-out conscience.”

And what does she empty herself of so that she could depart with a scrubbed-out conscience? Surely not her spiritual anxieties, not her religious quest and not her ideological confrontations. Instead, she pours out from the cauldron of her personality her sensual longings and frustrations, humiliations and triumphs. It is not in her to sublimate any of her instinctive reactions for any nobler cause. Never does she seem to sit down for a moment to find out the real cause of her misery. As a result there is no structural growth in her Story. If at all we find a sense of growth in her Story, it takes the form of her desire to experiment with sex under the pretext of a liberated woman.

The editor who published her Story was quick to perceive the predominance of sexual motive in it. He, therefore, calls it a sizzling, spicy and lovable autobiography, the most sensuous life story ever written. The word ‘sensuous’ is ill-chosen: ‘sensual’ and ‘erotic’ would describe the book more appropriately. The dominant note of My Story is one of erotic self-pity. And if her apparently stormy life lacks conviction, the book as a whole lacks art and proportion.

One reason for Kamala Das's tendency to take shelter in sex seems to be her unhappy childhood. She ‘grew up more or less neglected’; her mother did not love her father. To her mother, her father was a “dark stranger who had come forward to take her out of the village and its security. She was afraid of her father and afraid of her uncle, the two men who plotted and conspired to bring for the first time into the family a bridegroom who neither belonged to any royal family nor was a Brahmin,” says Kamala Das.

Kamala Das is quite unhappy that, though her mother belonged to the royal family, her father was neither a Brahmin nor a member of the royal family. She, therefore, says that out of such an ‘arid union’ were born her brother and she. Even as a child, she was acutely conscious of her swarthy skin and lack of strikingly charming features. From these, she makes the most unjust generalization regarding her parents: “We must have disappointed our parents a great deal. They did not tell us so, but in every gesture and in every word it was evident. It was evident on the days when my father roared at us and struggled to make us drink the monthly purgative of pure castor oil.”

Kamala Das is full of complaints against every body. Chapter XIX of her Story makes it clear that she not only misunderstood her parents' motives but also positively disliked them. Here is an admirable example of how she could make unconsidered judgments regarding her parents. Usually, children complain of too much interference from their parents. Once Kamala Das came home with a heavy heart after a visit to her teacher's house. Her parents asked nothing about her visit. Perhaps they wanted not to interfere with her activities. But Kamala says: “They took us for granted and considered us mere puppets, moving our limbs according to tugs they gave us. They did not stop for a moment to think that we had personalities that were developing independently.” I should think that her parents did not ask her questions about her visit, because they respected her personality developing independently.

My Story then, is an autobiography, written as if it were a novel. The book reads like some of the ‘real life confessions’. A cloud of confessions hangs over us these days. Most often, these feminine confessors burst into a storm of erotic self-pity. Every woman seems to think that she is a potential Rousseau—innocent but wronged by a male. But to have Rousseau's impulse without his genius is not an enviable position. It was once considered desirable to learn how to live and how to write before attempting an autobiography. But now every school girl seems to have her confessions ready in her pillow case. And most often these feminine confessors do not confess, but only narrate certain tragic incidents in a raw manner designed rather to shock the reader and bring some sort of sympathy for their wronged selves than to ennoble and fortify the reader's soul.

An autobiography is an attempt at self-analysis. It is a very difficult thing to do objectively and honestly, because the narrator and the object narrated are one and the same. Honest self-analysis is difficult, because man lives a threefold life, the conscious, the unconscious and the subconscious. These three layers of the mind are so interdependent that even a normal person is not sure of the motive of a particular action. Even Rousseau's Confession is not accepted by psychologists as a genuine self-analysis, for although he wants to give us an honest picture of himself, “throughout the book he retains blind spots concerning his vanity and his ability to love,” says Karen Horney.

Rousseau is very frank in sexual matters, and so is Kamala Das. But their frankness in sexual matters only shows how ignorant they were of the other problems that afflict man. Of course, I do accept that sex is a very important factor in the development of our personalities, and that one must be absolutely honest towards it as towards everything else. But I do not believe that sex is the only important element in human life.

I said that the dominant notes in My Story are sex and erotic self-pity. This is also true of her short stories. Under the pretext of giving expression to her intimate experiences, Kamala Das indulges in pathetic exhibitionism and subtle eroticism. On account of her sexual frankness, some people have thought her a liberated woman. The truth, however, is that she appears to be a prisoner to her own passions and prejudices, and a single impulse reigns supreme, suppressing right reason, good sense and delicacy.

I feel that the theme of her autobiography and most of her poems is the failure to get satisfaction in physical union. Eunice De Souza says that the theme of her two collections of poems entitled Summer in Calcutta (1965) and The Descendants (1967) is “love, or rather, the failure of love or the absence of love.” She feels that Kamala Das treats her theme “with the obsessiveness of a woman who can realize her being fully only through love.”

For Kamala Das the word ‘love’ is an euphemism for sex. In her interview with Atma Ram (New Quest, No. 2, August 1977, p. 42), Kamala Das says that she regards ‘The Old Playhouse’ as her best poem. An Analysis of this poem will show how sex-charged her imagery is:

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge
Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn
What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every
Lesson you gave was about yourself. You were pleased
With my body's response, its weather, its usual shallow
Convulsions. You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My poor lust With your bitter-Sweet juices. You called me wife.

Critics agree that in the creation of a work of art, the element of the unconscious plays a decisive role. It often determines the symbolic thought-structure of the work of art. And Freud tells us that there are certain stock symbols commonly associated with the genitals. Anything that has the property of enclosing a space or is capable of acting as a receptacle, such as pits, hollows, caves, jars, bottles, boxes, chests, coffers and pockets, is used as a symbol of the female sex organ. Thus, in the poem cited above, expressions like ‘body’s response', ‘shallow convulsions’, ‘dribble spittle into my mouth', ‘poured yourself into every nook and cranny’, and ‘bitter-sweet juices’, all create an atmosphere of abnormal sex.

The poem says that she went from man to man in order to discover herself, hoping that these men would talk only of her. It is a selfish desire on her part, because the way to self-knowledge is self-surrender. Ironically enough, she accuses every one of them of having talked only about themselves.

It is my firm belief that Kamala narrates her Story with a view to capture the young. In no other way can I understand why she narrates so minutely the physical changes of puberty. It may have been an important stage in the biological development of her personality, but it contributes nothing to her literary self nor to our understanding of her: “My frock had large spots of blood on it …” I am of the opinion that the passage which starts with this sentence is in poor taste.

Kamala Das's poems and short stories are part of her own story. She could never go beyond herself and view things objectively. She was not able to distinguish between the normal self and the creative self. Most of her stories, as a result, are nothing more than a reworking of her autobiography. This is very much true of her ‘The Young Man with the Pitted Face’.

A careful study of her autobiography and short stories reveals that her life is motivated not by love, not by sacrifice, not by sympathy, but by a hunger for power.

Kamala Das is a passionate but careless writer. She wrote her Story in haste and did not give her imagination sufficient time to crystallize her themes. True, she observed other people's lives: but she could write only on those aspects which she lived and suffered. The world does not matter much, but the world of her mind does. It is a limited world, a sadly diseased world, the disease being physical, mental and spiritual. Most of her short stories, which invariably suffer from stylistic and structural flaws, deal with some sick women. Sita in ‘A Doll for the Child Prostitute’ dies of haemorrage; the heroine of ‘The Young Man with the Pitted Face’ has undergone two operations and suffers from cardiac condition when the story opens; the heroine of ‘December’ collapses with a sudden heart attack. With Kamala Das love is a disease, being mixed with an overdose of sex. There is no rationality in the sex-tangles of Alphabet of Lust; the sexual atmosphere of ‘Kalyani’ is too fantastic to be true. We never meet with genuine love anywhere in her writing. The reason may be that Kamala Das never loved anyone in her life genuinely. There is no tenderness in her, little sympathy but only an unhealthy pity. She is not able to present true marital relationship: either the husband or the wife or both are disloyal to each other. This is true of the heroine of ‘A Little Kitten’ and Alphabet of Lust. Kamala Das could never unravel the mind of a man or a woman. Her men are contemptible and morally weak; sexually they are always above average like the hero of ‘The Sign of the Lion’. Truth, beauty, goodness, justice, love, charity, death, compassion—these eternal themes have no hold on her. She is a subjective writer not a romantic transcendentalist. There is no element of the sublime in her writing but only the ordinary and the contemptuous.

Kamala Das's writings lack intellectual content and even intellectual justification. They are the products of uncontrollable emotions, though she says: “Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shopmen and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them they feel the pressures and the torments. A poet's raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality.”

Clearly, with Kamala Das, writing is a way of easing herself of her pent up emotions, a sort of mental purgative. ‘Each time I have wept, the readers have wept with me. Each time I walked to my lover's house dressed like a bride, my readers have walked with me.’

Kamala Das's stories and poems are disguised autobiographies. I am certainly not against a writer's making a creative use of his personal experiences. But one's marriage is not the same as one's experience of marriage. The one is a temporal event while the other is an eternal aspect of human situation. Thus, one's sufferings are not the same as one's experience of them. An experience can be an experience only when there is detachment. Kamala Das's failure to make this distinction has proved to be disastrous to her poetic art.