SOURCE: Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Terms of Empowerment in Kamala Das's My Story.” In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, pp. 346-69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Lim discusses My Story as a provocative and transformative work of women's autobiography.]

A popular approach to Western women's writings is to categorize the best of them as the achievements of exceptional women, women who were able to move beyond the sociocultural confines that kept other women “domesticated” and invisible. Such exceptional women forced a reordering and re-visioning of seemingly stable social relations and roles for women; their works, therefore, have been privileged in the canon of Euro-American women's literature.¹ In Sappho, Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Western women persistently find models of exceptional women to study and emulate.

Recently, the privileging of exceptional Anglo-American women has become open to interrogation in critical exchanges about the intersections of race, class, and gender and the sociopolitical implications of “sisterhood.” Bonnie Thornton Dill, succinctly outlining the racist and classist biases that have historically accompanied white American middle-class women's liberation movements, tells us that “contemporary scholarship on women of color suggests that the barriers to an all-inclusive sisterhood are deeply rooted in the histories of oppression and exploitation that Blacks and other groups encountered upon incorporation into the American political economy.”² Dill calls, therefore, “for the abandonment of the concept of sisterhood as a global construct based on unexamined assumptions about our similarities” and urges us to “substitute a more pluralistic approach that recognizes and accepts the objective differences between women.”³

American readers, however, are generally ignorant of non-Western women writers whose literary production has set them apart in their traditional societies. In the Asian world, the works of such women writers as Ding Ling and Kamala Das possess a power to enable their readers to reread social relations and to participate in a revolution of consciousness.⁴ Such a revolution, Julia Kristeva rightly insists in Revolution in Poetic Language, must precede changes in the materialist/political horizon.⁵ The transforming power in Ding Ling's and Das's work and its impact upon readers precede and/or parallel the effects of works by Anglo-American and ethnic women writers and critics such as Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith. Ding Ling's and Das's writings contain the themes of women's revolt and the interrogations of the processes of women's subjectivity as it is situated in frankly portrayed male-female power relations that many Western readers associate chiefly with Anglo-American feminist literature.

Kamala Das is a prolific bilingual Indian woman poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is the author of numerous novels in Malayalam, collections of English-language fiction and poetry, and an autobiography, My Story, published in 1976.⁶ She is not entirely unknown to American readers; Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have included her as the only representative from Asia in their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.⁷ As none of her Malayalam novels has been translated into English, I will address only her English-language writing.

For the purposes of this essay, I am interested in Das's autobiography as a document expressing the writer's own ambiguity—what Bakhtin characterizes as “the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose”⁸—as a woman asserting subjective power in a traditional patriarchal society. Her materialist critiques propose precisely those themes that give her writing its vividness and compelling power to arouse and disturb. Her female subjects destabilize our notions of what is female or feminine and dislocate given Indian cultural and social relations; in short, they give her writing a transformatory dimension that accounts for both the repulsion and the fascination it has provoked.⁹

Das's autobiography is a strongly public work, exhibiting a deliberate consciousness of audience. The audience is both the reader of the autobiography and the readers of her poetry prior to the writing of the autobiography; that is, the poet's audience appears in her life story as an active catalyst and agent. Before turning to the autobiography, however, I would like to summarize her critical reception to date, as that reception helps explain the “double-voicedness” of her narrative.¹⁰

Das has had two audiences. Her own native Indian audience is mostly English-educated and middle-class. Its class mobility and its choice of the English language for expression are generally associated with a modern, Westernized mentality (that is, with an unstable indigenous cultural identity related to an assimilation of sociopolitical values influenced by Anglo-American norms and cultures).¹¹ Her other, more vocal and welcoming, audience is an international group of readers, chiefly from Australia. These non-Indian critics are interested in non-Western writing in English. They represent the old Commonwealth literature school of thought reincarnated as postcolonial, post-Orientalist sensitivities to new or national or world literatures in English.¹² While the emphases are different, both audiences share common assumptions and make similar conclusions in approaching Das's writing.

Das is acknowledged by both Indian and Anglo critics as working within a “strong tradition of female writing … with a venerable ancestry.”¹³ The consensus from both interpretive communities is that her achievement is limited to themes of female sexual and physical experience. Hostile readers, both Indian and international, debunk her subjects, describing them variously as “a poetry of thighs and sighs,” “salacious” fantasies of sexual neuroticism, and “flamboyant,” “weak,” “self-indulgent” obsessiveness.¹⁴ Friendly critics valorize her as “a poet of feminine longings.”¹⁵ She is praised (chiefly by male critics) for that “feminine sensibility [that is] manifested in her attitude to love, in the ecstasy she experiences in receiving love and the agony she feels when jilted in it.”¹⁶ According to her most fervent defenders, both Indian and Western, her feminine sensibility is expressed in her total involvement with the sexual male Other.

The recent publication of a selected collection of her work by the Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English in Adelaide, Australia, accompanied by critical essays, all by white Australian critics, would seem to confirm a hardening of these interpretive lines.¹⁷ Many of the essays in the volume argue that the theme of Das's heterosexuality receives its highest apotheosis, its Indian rationale, in Das's identity as a devotee of Krishna. As Dorothy Jones informs us, Krishna, eighth avatar of Vishnu, is traditionally represented in Indian culture as “an important focus in Hinduism of Bhakti, the experience of intense religious adoration in which the soul [the female representation] abandons itself in ecstasy to the divine [the male representation].”¹⁸ Jones is only repeating a paradigm, first articulated by Das herself, whereby the “vulgar” (and arguably Westernized “confessional”) topos of brutal or illicit sexuality becomes transformed into the “high” topos of licit Brahminic mysticism.

In approaching Das's evident concentration on sexual themes, however, the non-Indian reader would do well to keep in mind that erotic sexuality is strongly inscribed in Indian, specifically Hindu, culture. In using these materials, Das is able to appeal to both the Western tradition that emphasizes confessional writing and the Hindu tradition that places a high and visible valuation on male-female eroticism. By a shift in authorial (and critical) perception, the sensual complexities of a “sensational”—because exceptional—life are reduced to an abstract allegory of religious quest and devotion. (No American reader, however, would find Das's so-called confessions of extramarital affairs memorable if set among the Hollywood memoirs appearing today!)

Many critics have participated in this sanitization of the female subject Das constitutes in her autobiography and her poetry, and have acquiesced, even contributed, to obfuscating the notable “revolt” against male-dominant terms of sexuality in her themes. They have interpreted the persona in her poems and autobiography to be a “smoothly” acceptable, because traditional, worshiper of that most adulterous, most privileged male Indian god, Krishna. Mohan Lal Sharma, for example, argues that Das's career exhibits a “pilgrim's progress” toward Krishna-worship; thus, he congratulates her for her faults in poetic style, since, for him, they demonstrate her religious achievement. “‘He shining everything else shines’ is the ultimate Upanishadic dictum,” Sharma advises us, unself-consciously reflecting his patriarchal reconstruction of Das's work in his choice of dictums.¹⁹ Sharma's male-centered critical orientation, moreover, is itself a reflection of the patriarchal structure of communities dominated by Krishna-worship. Adopting a similar critical approach, non-Indian critics such as Syd Harrex, Vincent O'Sullivan, and Dorothy Jones similarly turn Das's very specifically located materialist critiques of class and gender into a phantasm of Krishna-worship.²⁰

I argue that Das's writing and life display the anger, rage, and rebellion of a woman struggling in a society of male prerogatives. Her best work cannot be read either as a celebration of love or as an allegorical abstraction of Radha, the Gopi cowmaid, worshiping Krishna in his many manifestations. I find that the informing energy in the autobiography springs, like the pulsating rhythm of a popular 1960s rock ‘n’ roll song, from its central poetics, “I Can't Get No Satisfaction.” Teresa de Lauretis, among other feminist commentators, has pointed out that “to feminism, the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics.”²¹ “Satisfaction,” therefore, while it encompasses the notion of sexual desire, emerges in the autobiography, as it does in Das's novel, Alphabet of Lust, as epistemologically the domain of female struggle in a patriarchal society.²² The inequalities and social oppressions suffered by Indian women are many and profound. As Marilyn French reports in a 1985 United Nations-sponsored publication, “Most Indian women are married young by their families to men they have not met before. … They then move to their husbands' parents' home, where they are, essentially, servants.”²³ French documents a series of social horrors: the dowry system, bride-burning, male abuse, the ban against divorce, women's isolation, job discrimination, female infanticide, poorly paid or unpaid female labor, high female illiteracy. Das's autobiography specifies the connections between personal/sexual and social/political struggles for a female protagonist in this traditional male-dominated society.

In her preface, Das locates the origin of her autobiography in the confessional impulse attending the deathbed. She indicates that the autobiography was written during her “first serious bout with heart disease,” and that she “wanted to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could depart when the time came with a scrubbed-out conscience.” This intention indicates a particular understanding of the autobiographical genre, one attuned to the confessional tradition of Christianity exemplified in Augustine's Confessions. The expressed wish for a “scrubbed-out conscience” itself prepares the reader for representations of “sinful” or immoral subjects, secrets that defile a conscience, and for some kind of remorse undertaken within a religious or spiritual frame of reference. Yet Das candidly reveals that she wrote her autobiography as a commercial publication, a series of articles for a popular magazine, because she needed money to pay off her medical bills. The spiritual impulse and the commercial intention are both evident in the dialogic, ambiguous, and contradictory features of the text.

The autobiography, republished in book form in 1976, possesses the characteristics that mark it as a book written hurriedly and structured to the formulaic requirements of serial publication. It has fifty chapters, each from two and a half to about four and a half pages in length. The organization of materials into so many short chapters is clearly governed by the necessity of chopping the life into as many marketable pieces as possible, thus revealing more about the magazine format and the attention span of its popular audience than about the writer's craft. Moreover, the serial form dictates the anecdotal, superficial essayistic structure, allowing little room for analysis of difficult issues or exploration of psychological experience.

The contradictions between the commercially dictated features of the text and the narrator's stated “spiritual” intention have led many critics to view Das as unreliable. “After reading such a confession,” Vimala Rao says astringently, “it is difficult to determine where the poseur ends and the artist begins.”²⁴ Dwivedi describes the work as “more baffling and dazing [sic] than her poetry,” and Jones admits that “it is hard to know how to respond to this book which, while adopting an openly confessional tone, conceals quite as much or more than it reveals.”²⁵ Because they cannot read her autobiography as a faithful account of her life, critics have generally preferred to treat it as an appendix to her poetry. Sharma claims that Das's autobiography “is the single best ‘Reader's Guide’ to the design and meaning of her work.”²⁶ Jones more cannily allows that “if considered as a literary rather than a factual recreation of the writer's life, it often serves as an illuminating comment on her poetry and fiction, exploring many of the same dilemmas and situations.”²⁷

In fact, the obvious unreliability of the author's intention foregrounds the postmodernist qualities of Das's “autobiography.” Thus, instead of approaching it as a text containing an authentic account of a life unmediated by literary conventions, I argue that our understanding of the constituted “autobiographical” female subject should be informed by features of the text. These features include ones that conform to a mass-market strategy (the simple anecdotal structure, unrelenting focus on sensational and popular themes, attention to domestic and marital relations as appealing to a female readership) and ones that derive from the self-reflexive nature of the prose. In “deconstructing” Das's autobiography, then, I want to elaborate how it achieves its impact less from its separate parts than from their sum. While each chapter offers a distinct picture or theme, together the chapters resonate in their emphasis on the domestic details of food, familial relations, marriage, childbirth, sexual liaisons, and the internal and external struggles of one woman in a sociopolitically repressive world.

The opening chapters, for example, depict a colonized childhood, resonant with the later theme of oppressed womanhood. The father, a Rolls Royce and Bentley salesman, stood as a middleman between the British corporation and the Indian upper class. Das similarly showed the characteristic alienation of being suspended between indigenous and colonized cultures. Unhappy as one of the few brown children in a white school, the young girl “wondered why I was born to Indian parents instead of to a white couple, who may have been proud of my verses” (p. 8). Significantly, the child's very mastery of the colonial language, English, provoked the psychic break between herself and her (native) parents. This separation between English-language child-poet and Indian parents, a consequence of colonialism, prefigures the later rupture between the English-language woman writer, engaged in the Westernized project of claiming her own subjective autonomy, and traditional patriarchal Indian society. Das's autobiography, therefore, in its very “doubleness” of commercial and spiritual intentions and of suspension between colonized or Westernized and indigenous cultures, provides a valuable recording of the hybridized, “impure” cultural conditions in which postcolonial English-language writers from non-Western societies often find themselves writing.²⁸

Setting the opening scene on the internal division in the colonized subject, Das prepares the reader for the move to the theme of an older division, the division between genders. By implication, the colonized child brings to her womanhood those perceptions of division arrived at when she learns to value her talent and simultaneously learns to reject her Indian parents, who do not value it. The longing for “white parents” is a powerful psychic aberration, expressing and demonstrating the embedded racism in the colonizing (and colonized) experience that the child has internalized. As the opening psychological drama, it contains those contradictions and ambivalences, between the privileging of “verse” and “self,” at times recognized as a specifically “white” or Western-based value, and the respect to be accorded to one's “parent” society. In her representations of gender divisions, Das similarly oscillates between two contradictory positions: one the exceptional woman in conflict with her traditional society, struggling for a subject status specifically endowed through her writing, and the other, that most unexceptional of Indian women, the Krishna devotee. Das's subsequent examinations of her woman's experiences are informed by these postcolonial ambivalences—the contradictions between Westernized and indigenous sociopolitical values—as well as by gender and feminist concerns.

In the autobiography's dialogic representations, therefore, the interest does not lie in the frank revelations of illicit sexual encounters. In fact, the autobiography has so little of the pornographic in it as to make credible a critic's description of Das as “Matthew Arnold in a sari.”²⁹ Instead, it compels our reading because it offers, among other things, a critique of the victimization of women in a patriarchal society. The autobiography is itself a gesture enunciating the empowerment of the female when she speaks in protest, in rejection, in an infinitely recessive “desire” within a powerfully restrictive psychosocial matrix.

The dominant figure in her autobiography, also present in her fiction and poems, is the female as “desiring” subject. Female “desire” is figured in the psychological longing of a neglected daughter for a remote father, the physical drive of a virgin for sexual experience, the marital yearning of a young wife for emotional union with her husband, the ecstatic enjoyment of a mature woman with her lover, the depraved lust of a disillusioned older woman with a host of unloving and unlovely paramours, and finally as the ecstasy of the older devotee in the ancient worship of Krishna, a female soul seeking her divine bliss. “Desire,” as embodied in the autobiography, is multiply manifest, attending a range of female roles. The narrator presents herself in turn as a girl-child with a crush on a teacher, the naive object of lesbian exploration, an innocent child bride, the victimized wife, loyal and loving wife, adoring mother, sexual tease, easy lay, and spiritual goddess seeking union with the divine. The narrator lives out these stereotypic roles.

The central attribute of this “desiring” female is that, in order to maintain her subject condition and the economy of energy that constitutes her being, she cannot be satisfied. As “self” is constituted in desire, and desire is given shape by the energy of an absence of satisfaction (whether in innocent longing, brutalized sex, cynical promiscuity, the range of female sexual experiences), the story of “self” is constructed on a continual series of arousals and deferments of satisfaction. The life in the autobiography is continuously plotted as a drama of desire, and the female protagonist becomes the representation of female desire.

Significantly, the narrative first provides the reader with a series of empowered female subjects. Chapter 4 is a rewriting of Das's matriarchal past. The narrative is yet another version of the legends surrounding her grandmother's home, Nalapat House, which had been mythologized in earlier poems.³⁰ The poem, “My Grandmother's House,” for example, identifies the place with an idealized time in the poet's life, “where once / I received love” (KD [Kamala Das: A Selection with Essays on her Work], 14). In Das's automythology, the maternal home is also the trope for the condition of proud and loving freedom, a condition that the poem raises as absent in the degraded adult woman's life:

… you cannot believe, darling,
Can you, that I lived in such a house and
Was proud, and loved … I who have lost
My way and beg now at strangers' doors to
Receive love, at least in small change?

In the autobiography, Nalapat House becomes a symbol of the way in which the contradictions in traditional Indian women's roles can be resolved. Das traces her lineage to her ancestress, Kunji, a wealthy aristocrat who, at age fifteen, fleeing from the war between the English and Dutch, “was made to change her route by an amorous chieftain who brought her over to his village and married her” (p. 11). The delicate phrasing masks the more sensational possibilities of abduction, rape, and forced marriage; it suggests instead a romantically blurred portrayal of a male figure motivated by “amour,” a male figure moreover who “was well-versed in Astrology and Architecture” and who set his bride up in the magnificent Nalapat House. The maternal home was dominated by “the old ladies”—“my grandmother, my aunt Ammini, my great grandmother, her two sisters” (p. 12). Only two males intrude in this woman-universe, the remote and idealized political saint, Mahatmaji Gandhi, whom the uncomprehending girl saw as a brigand whose “diabolic aim was to strip the ladies of all their finery so that they became plain and dull”; and her grand uncle, the famous poet-philosopher Narayana Menon, who is seen as lonely and indigent. The girl-child falls under the influence of these women, especially her aunt Ammini, “an attractive woman who kept turning down all the marriage proposals that came her way.” Ironically, it was from this virginal literary woman that Das “sensed for the first time that love was a beautiful anguish and a thapasya” (p. 12). Deepening the theme, the following chapter is devoted to an even earlier ancestress, “my great grandmother's younger sister,” Ammalu, “a poetess.” Like Ammini, Ammalu “was a spinster who chose to remain unmarried although pretty and eligible” (pp. 14-15).

What kind of female models do these two relatives offer the girl-child? Both women were ascetics. Ammini “chose to lead the life of an ascetic” (p. 12), while Ammalu “was deeply devout and spent the grey hours of dusk in prayer” (p. 15). Both loved poetry. The former recited it and the latter “read profusely and scribbled in the afternoon while the others had their siesta” (p. 15). Das locates the existence of an ancient female ambition for writing, expressed, and perhaps only capable of being expressed, in the strict and narrow social structures of the time and place, as religious longing. This writing ambition, while associated with female spinsterhood or chastity, is made more complex by its juxtaposition with intimate symbols of female sensuality. As a middle-aged woman, Das returns to her maternal home and discovers books containing Ammalu's poems. Together with “the leaves of her books, yellowed like autumn-leaves,” Das finds “in the secret drawer of [Ammalu's] writing box, a brown bottle shaped like a pumpkin that smells faintly of Ambergris” (p. 16). The archetypal resonances in the symbols of “bottle” (container, receptacle, vagina, womb, female desire), pumpkin (roundness, swelling, female, fecundity), and ambergris (perfume, sensuality, arousal, sexuality) are meaningful cross-culturally, and the significance of their placement in “the secret drawer of her writing box” is deliberate and emphatic. If these ancestresses are literary spinsters, they also are familiar with female desire, with the knowledge “that love was a beautiful anguish.” For Das, their biographies offered a knowledge of the complex intersections of asceticism and sexuality that form major thematics in her autobiography.

What separates this knowledge, the surface thematics of Das's autobiography and much of her poetry, from the usual sentimental drift of popular women's romances is that it is inseparably, intricately woven and innately situated in the thematics of woman as writer and as speaking subject. The identity of her ancestresses, while associated with love or yearning, remains woman- or subject-centered; and this subject condition is integral to and invested in the literary enterprise. In these maternal figures, therefore, the protagonist is able to find an indigenous tradition that her English-educated childhood had denied her. Only in Nalapat House, in a matriarchal society, do the identities of Indian, woman, and writer coalesce. Only here, as the poem suggests, are love and pride coeval, in contrast to the patriarchal society, where love becomes coeval with degradation.

Nalapat House and the women in it, while representing ideologically one pole of female empowerment, are also perceived as limited in what they can offer the active child. In the poem “Blood,” for example, Das shows in painful detail the decline and fall of this matriarchal tradition. Its “chastity” and isolation from “the always poor” and “the new-rich men,” its venerable ancestry (“Now three hundred years old, / It's falling to bits / Before our very eyes”; OP [The Old Playhouse and Other Poems], 17) result in its destruction. The adult Das, while finding her source of identity in it, cannot resurrect this matriarchy:

O mother's mother's mother
I have plucked your soul
Like a pip from a fruit
And have flung it into your pyre.

(OP, 19)

Yet, even as the autobiography narrates the sordid “reality” of a bad marriage and unsuccessful affairs, the matriarch as native spinster and writer remains a powerful representation that resonates in the background.

Similarly, foregrounding the native sources of the narrator's feminism, the early chapters narrate an active engagement with those Indian cultural elements that valorize unchallenged female power. The strongest symbol of female empowerment in the protagonist's early ancestral memories is Kali. Kali is the most feared deity in the Indian pantheon, the goddess to whom powers of death and destruction are attributed. Significantly, the narrator devotes her longest description to her worship. Describing the annual ceremonies, she writes, “When Kali danced, we felt in the region of the heart an unease and a leap of recognition. Deep inside, we held the knowledge that Kali was older than the world and that having killed for others, she was now lonelier than all. All our primal instinct rose to sing in our blood the magical incantations” (p. 26).

What is constituted in this “recognition”? The shift from “I” to the communal “we” emphasizes Das's explicit recognition here of a collective female “primal instinct” associated with the repressed aspects of womanhood, the un-nurturing, destructive forces of female passion. Paradoxically, Kali represents a collective identity of powerful isolation. Thus she is called the “lonely goddess.” Her affection, we are told, is specially reserved for the aboriginal pariahs, people who are normally “regarded as outcasts and held at a distance” (p. 25). Only in the month of Makaram, between January and February, a time set aside for the worship of Kali, do the pariahs become important members of Indian society. Kali-worship, as a form of carnival, permits the reversal of social hierarchy and encourages the transgression of social rule. Kali's power in Indian society is such that it also permits a crossing of gender identity; in the Kali rituals, the oracle who takes on the role of Kali is a male: “He ran up and down through the crowd of people brandishing his scimitar before a trance thickened. … His voice changed into the guttural voice of the angry goddess” (p. 26). During the month of Makaram, young women perform a processional ritual in which they enter into a trance-like condition: “The drums throbbed against their ears, mesmerizing them so that their walk began to resemble the glide of a somnambulist and their eyes began to glow, nesting in their pupils the red flame of their lamps” (p. 26). The passage describes an ecstatic state at the level of sensuous experience that Kali-worship permits these young women, and stands in contrast to the later devotional passages on Krishna-worship, in which the god is described in abstract terms of nonphysicality, as “the bodyless one.”

The Kali figure returns in a later chapter, to represent again those forces of fearful female isolation that can protect the outsider, the pariah, against “feudal enemies” (p. 178). In response to the villagers' persecution, Das decided she “too should try some magic to scare my foes away. I hung a picture of Kali on the wall of my balcony and adorned it daily with long strings of red flowers, resembling the intestines of a disemboweled human being” (p. 178). The Kali figure therefore represents the usually repressed energies of the female psyche whose release transgresses and crosses social hierarchy and gender. This mythic female power is capable of both destruction and protection, and it therefore has to be pacified through intercession.

In the early chapters Das sets up female figures, each of which, like the iconic representation of Kali, provided her as a girl-child with a “leap of recognition.” In Ammina and Ammalu we recognize the woman writer influenced equally by sensual and ascetic passions, a woman recognizable in Amherst's Emily as well as in Nalapat House's Ammalu. In her grand-uncle's wife, we recognize yet another face of the empowered female. The wife is woman as voluptuary and seducer. She is “never seen even at night without her heavy jewellery, all gem-encrusted and radiant, and the traditional cosmetics of the Nair woman” (p. 19). And the object of her life is to “enslave” the man “with her voluptuous body” (p. 20; emphasis mine).

These early portrayals of female types make apparent, contrary to general critical consensus, that Das's focus is less on the male (or male-female relations) than it is on the female. The female types that fascinate the young girl range from those in the women-centered community in Nalapat House to the self-authored woman as subject (Ammalu) and the fearfully empowered Kali figure. Together they form an original patterning of proud and powerful womanhood against which the narrative of patriarchal marriage and abuse develops.

Despite the rhetoric of scandal Das employs to describe them, the male-female relations depicted in the autobiography, therefore, are significant more for their sociopolitical themes than for any scandal in them. For instance, in the narrative of her arranged marriage we see a critique of that institution beneath the apparently confessional surface. The fifteen-year-old Das, having experienced only schoolgirl crushes, the attentions of lesbians, and clumsy seduction attempts, is married to an older man because “I was a burden and a responsibility neither my parents nor my grandmother could put up with for long” (p. 73). Her marriage begins in sexual brutality. She calls the wedding-night encounter an unsuccessful rape (p. 79). She suffers through her husband's selfishness and neglect of her emotional and physical needs. The cook prepares only breakfast and dinner, and the young pregnant bride falls ill. After an early separation, she and her husband attempt a reconciliation when they move to Bombay, but she has a nervous breakdown at twenty, after the birth of her second son. Das's critique of Indian marriage as patriarchal oppression is more damning when the reader keeps in mind that middle-class and professional Indian women, a very small minority of Indian society, generally receive greater legal and social protection than the vast numbers of poor and peasant Indian women.

Exactly in the middle of the autobiography, in chapter 25, the narrator locates an instance of insight, an epiphany that permits the protagonist to move beyond the passivity of her female bondage to a more integrated existence. Faced with the failure of her marriage and the impossibility of leaving it, her son's illness, and her husband's rejection of her in favor of a homosexual attachment, the protagonist finds herself poised on a balcony in a moment of suicidal temptation: “I felt a revulsion for my womanliness. The weight of my breasts seemed to be crushing me. My private parts was only a wound, the soul's wound showing through” (p. 94). In this moment of recognition, the young wife acknowledges the imposed powerlessness of the female body, that understanding that woman's fate as suffering victim is tied to her physical body. The narrator expresses for us the knowledge that, for the victimized woman in a patriarchal society, sexuality not only makes her vulnerable physically, a prey to rapacious men; it is inherently bound up with her emotional and spiritual vulnerability. This moment of insight reinterprets the Freudian maxim that anatomy is destiny. It is a powerful, because profoundly ironic, reconceptualizing of woman's fate as victim; her victimization, we cannot be reminded too often, goes beyond the plane of material pain to encompass mental and spiritual conditions in which her very identity as woman and her own body become the instruments of her torment.

But the woman does not throw herself off the balcony. Instead, she “lit the reading lamp … and began to write about a new life, an unstained future” (p. 94). Again, as in the early chapters, the autobiography shows a female subject coming to her own ministry, becoming herself a mistress/ancestress of “an unstained future.” Centrally located in the text, the passage repeats the central theme, of woman writing her self, not only as one act of identity among other acts, but as the primary act. She saves her life by telling her life. It is perhaps an example of cross-cultural concerns that this passage foreshadows a later passage by French feminist Hélène Cixous, who asserts that a woman must write her self to mark “her shattering entry into history which has always been based on her suppression. … To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political system.”³¹ The protagonist chooses writing against suicide, self-inscription against self-destruction, and so takes the first steps of revolt against a symbolic/political system that has oppressed her.

The passage therefore also marks the convergence of the thematics of female psychic emergence with a continued critique of female sexuality in a patriarchal society. It is in the light of this thematic of emergence that we should read the rest of the book, which is heavily interlaced with accounts of extramarital affairs, sexual flings, cynical portrayals of deceit and betrayal, and yearnings for spiritual consolation. After her breakdown and her grandmother's death, the protagonist who emerges is a different sexual person. No longer a naif or passive “object” of her husband's actions and victim of the rapes of various strangers, she is now able to take her pleasure, to reappropriate her sexual self, “with my pride intact and blazing” (p. 100). Her sexual adventures, however, have less to do with actual male others than with her own internal identity needs. As Das aptly points out, “Like alms looking for a begging bowl was my love which sought for it a receptacle” (p. 105). Here the conventional association of woman with receptacle, of woman as passive receiver of male desire and sperm, is inverted. In this passage, woman's desire is dominant, aggressively seeking “a [male] begging bowl.” In the bold reversal, the male is passive, the female active and full, signifying plenitude and wealth.

But My Story does not conclude with this seeming female victory. Although it continues with the narrative of extramarital affairs (Das apparently had an open marriage; according to her poems and the autobiography, her husband accepted her love affairs rather than encourage the prospect of a divorce), it becomes clear that sexual empowerment in no way satisfies the protagonist's internal identity needs. Thus, even as the narrative dwells on lovers and husband, it incorporates a poem that resists an equation of “liberated” sexuality with satisfaction of female desire:

We lay
On bed, glassy-eyed, fatigued, just
The toys dead children leave behind,
And we asked each other, what is
The use, what is the bloody use? That was the only kind of love,
This hacking at each other's parts
Like convicts hacking, breaking clods
At noon.

(115)

The poet rejects the sexual act as a brutal and futile action committed by “toys dead children leave behind,” or by “convicts.” Rather than representing or enacting desire, male-female sexual interactions are anemic, penitential, dead.

Curiously, then, what we can read in Das's autobiography is a revisioning of female desire. Contrary to the Lacanian thesis of female desire as “lack,” a wanting, which is itself an extension of the Freudian view of female as that which is deficient in or missing the potency of the penis, the protagonist of the autobiography emerges from passive victim to active agent possessing fullness and plentitude, needing only a proper recipient. But this female desire, assertive, aggressive, and confident, must still await satisfaction in a sociopolitical context that denies it any expression except in the area of sexuality. The area of sexuality that the adult Das explores, however, is defined in a patriarchal society to the advantage of men, and the narrative's tales of extramarital affairs are also tales of male abuse. Thus, in the narrative of her most intense affair, she interrogates the sadomasochistic nature of her relationship: “Years after all of it had ended, I asked myself why I took him on as my lover, fully aware of his incapacity to love. … I needed security. … Perhaps it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many ways, so that the soul turned humble for a change” (p. 163). Here is yet another recognition of the mental and spiritual damage women suffer on account of their sex; the masochistic rationalization of drives, while more conventionally expressed as religious growth, is itself a chilling example of psychic damage in the female protagonist.

The struggle for sexual and other forms of autonomy in the female protagonist in Das's autobiography is “exceptional” in the tradition of Indian writing in English, whether by men or women. In the Indian context, female desire, because it breaks social conventions of marital and sexual property and propriety, is inherently illegitimate and therefore doubly exceptional. As French reports it:

[Indian women's] primary duty, a duty so emphatic as to override their children's well-being and certainly their own, is to “make the marriage work.” This means that a woman must adjust to her husband. Whatever he is or does—if he is cold or cruel, if he is never home, or does not give her money, if he drinks or gambles or has other women, if he beats her—is her lot. She is expected to submit, serve, and produce a son.³²

The myth of her origin in the woman-centered matriarchy of Nalapat House enables the protagonist to stand outside and to interrogate the abusive patriarchal world in which she (or her sexuality) functions only as an economic object with market value. When her husband complains that she has not read “the prestigious report of the Rural Credit Survey Committee”—that is, not given him due respect—she answers, “But I let you make love to me every night … isn't that good enough?” (p. 114). The protagonist has learned to balance what is “due” to her husband in terms of her sexual availability, and understands that the exchange of her sexual self in the economy of the marriage is a kind of market exchange, “a good” sufficient for the shelter and material security he provides. In this passage, Das makes explicit what is more often concealed or silenced in both Indian and Western literature, that the relationship between male and female is often baldly an economic exchange. This relocation of male-female relationship in an economic world makes it evident that the protagonist's claim to female subject autonomy in matters of sexual relations outside of marriage is even more illegal, for it breaks both the cultural and economic codes.

Das goes beyond the economic/sexual bond to examine the place of class in her society. Observing the lives of the working-class and poor who surround the protagonist and commenting specifically on the protagonist's fascination with the poor, the narrator offers these lives in moral contrast to the protagonist's own middle-class ennui. In one striking passage, the poet is in her “drawing room” while “cultured voices discussed poetry” (p. 190). She hears the song that the poor who live in the builders' colony behind the “large new structures” are singing. “Finally,” she writes, “unable to control myself any longer, I dragged my husband to the colony one evening” (p. 190). In the squatters' welcome for her, she is able to revise her subjective perspective:

I was pining for yet another settee for the drawing-room while these grand men and women were working from morning till dusk carrying cement and climbing the scaffoldings. And yet they had more vitality than I had of optimism. … My gloom lay in its littlest corner like a black dog. I had had the idiocy to think of myself as Kamala, a being separate from all the rest and with a destiny entirely different from those of others.

(p. 191)

This incident, isolated as it is from any larger examination of the issues of class and caste in Indian society, may be read as a shallow idealization of the working class. To my mind, however, its inclusion in a subjectivist genre such as autobiography indicates the writer's unease with her own subjective project, the project of constituting “Kamala, a being separate from all the rest and with a destiny all her own.” The passage contains less a materialist critique of class inequalities than an interrogation of the Westernized, middle-class privileging of the individual, which forms the autobiography's subtext. In its valuation and equation of vitality and “singing,” a communal activity, with the working class (in contrast to “poetry,” a private affair, equated with middle-class ennui), the passage offers another example of narrative “double-voicedness.” The incident represents another instance of the protagonist attempting to break the psychic isolation of a middle-class marriage; but the attempt on this occasion, dragging “my husband with me,” is licit and legal and serves to underline her identification with, rather than separation from, the larger Indian society.

In the autobiography, Das comes to a point in her life when she questions her own sense of being exceptional. The same kind of necessity to open consciousness to the dialogic presence of others, whether of a different race (as in the case of the young girl yearning for white parents), class, or gender, also admits into the autobiography the other aspect of self, of tradition. Yet it is this aspect of woman as patriarchal mate, that most unexceptional of women in Indian society, that the autobiographical discourse has been most energetically displacing.

As befitting the story of a woman mediating among and mediated by multiple and contradictory cultures, My Story in its Krishna-consciousness shows the ideological interpenetrations of the Hindu worldview with a feminist, although not necessarily wholly Westernized, text. For example, in locating the woman as autonomous sexual subject in her familiar world, the narrator moves from the image of plenty looking for a begging bowl to that of devotee: “I was perhaps seeking a familiar face that blossomed like a blue lotus in the water of my dreams. It was to get closer to that bodyless [sic] one that I approached other forms and lost my way. I may have gone astray, but not once did I forget my destination” (p. 105). The immediate contradictions between this passage and the bulk of the book are so large as to suggest the complicated indeterminacy of identity that forms the site of conflict for Westernized Asian women in strongly regulated, traditionally patriarchal societies. Marginalized by their gender, their colonial English education and language, their rejection of patriarchy and its given social and familial norms, and their bourgeois interests in a chiefly peasant society, women writers such as Das negotiate their identity needs among contradictory dominant discourses, each of which offers more grounds for tension than for resolution. As a work by a major English-language Indian woman writer, Das's “story” is less a seamless product of hybridity than it first appears, although the cultural differences between Indian and Western values and ideas are obviously present and affect her work. Her autobiography, in fact, shuttles between the gaps, articulating the space between cultures, displaying rather than resolving these differences in the narrative. The conclusion of the autobiography moves out of the discourse of feminism that occupies the foreground of the first two-thirds of the text to the more conventional discourse of the confessional autobiography.

Arguably, therefore, it is possible to read the major locus of meaning in Das's autobiography in the slippage between the two tropes, that of alms looking for a begging bowl (that is, female subject desiring/enacting its terms of empowerment/identity) and that of devotee worshipping the blue Krishna (female desire as passively situated in the hierarchical construction of patriarchal stasis or tradition). For in the shift of tropes, Das places a Hindu screen before her feminist project, which is up to this point to treat the domain of the sexual as also the field of political struggle. In shifting from the psychosexual and socio-political to the Hindu view of woman as Krishna-worshiper, Das attempts to move from the position of the exceptional (and illegitimate) woman to that of the legal, central, and iconic Indian female figure.

The presence of Krishna-consciousness (that is, of acceptance of female submission to male godhood) in Das's autobiography, I would argue, is evidence of the process of creative play that Bakhtin describes in The Dialogic Imagination, the “struggle and dialogic interrelationship of [the categories of authoritative discourse and an internally persuasive discourse that] usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness.”³³ Krishna-consciousness in Das's work makes evident the presence of the “authoritative word” of patriarchal Indian culture. The “authoritative word,” as Bakhtin defines it, is the word of the fathers, a prior discourse, located in a distanced zone, with a hieratic language akin to taboo.³⁴ Das's slippages between straightforward feminist discourse, the subjective writing of the body—her internally persuasive discourse—and this “authoritative word” of Krishna-consciousness, testify to the gaps that result from the simultaneous existence of plural, dominant, yet contradictory discourses in the same consciousness. The “intense struggle within … for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values”³⁵ defines her inscribed ideological development.

In this regard, Das's inscriptions of the struggles for autonomy of the female are themselves placed in jeopardy, under interrogation. Aspects of female identity are polarized. The autonomous subject actively creating her destiny in an unstained new world stands in contrast to the iconic figure of the female as passive, culturally fixed in an object relationship in which she is always the inferior in search of the Divine Krishna. The weight of these polarities indicates the enormous contradictions that beset a woman living in a strongly male-dominant society. As an Indian woman, she participates in and endures simultaneously those constructed systems of Hindu rationalization that have existed in India for centuries.

To privilege one polarity over the other, however, is to reduce falsely the dialogic complexities of Das's themes and the totality of her achievement. It is to silence the libido that speaks in and through relations with others. Her autobiography reshapes both our consciousness and our unconscious, by means of its raw, experimental edges. The internally persuasive dialogue of her autobiography shares characteristics with the kind of writing described as “écriture féminine” in Western literature. The enabling myth of matriarchal origin; the genealogical constructions of chaste spinster-writers; the sociopolitical critiques of arranged marriages, child brides, and loveless middle-class marriages; the portrayals of male abuse of women as sexual objects and prey; the narrative of emergence of woman as subject and writer—all these form a counterdiscourse to the later confessional closure. This counterdiscourse, contradicting and attacking patriarchal constructions of male superiority and female passivity, appears forcefully in the early reconstructions of empowered female figures. The Kali figure, for example, sets up a clear female antithesis to Krishna-consciousness that forms part of the authoritative word of the father in the second half of the autobiography; this “savage” goddess reminds us especially of “the forceful return of a libido, which is not so easily controlled, and by the singular, by the noncultural, by a language which is savage and which can certainly be heard.”³⁶

Despite the later development of the Krishna theme, Das's autobiography springs from the same impulses of revolt as the rest of her oeuvre. Indigenous cultural elements, such as the Kali figure and the matriarchal structure of Nalapat House, provide sources for her critiques of patriarchally constructed heterosexuality. These critiques form major themes in her autobiography and poetry, contributing to a self-reflexivity that provides an intertextual web in which whole plots, incidents, acts, characters, concerns, even sentences and phrases from her other works appear. For example, about halfway through the autobiography, at the point where the protagonist arrives at full, although emotionally unsatisfying, sexuality (in a chapter titled “For the First Time in My Life I Learned to Surrender Totally”), the chapters are prefaced by her poems (e.g., pp. 99, 107, 115, 124, 127). Many of these poems had been published previously and were already notorious.³⁷ Their appearance in the autobiography suggests that coming to adult sexuality for the protagonist is also a coming to speaking subjectivity for the poet.

Das's critique of patriarchally constructed heterosexuality and her struggle to construct her own terms of sexual empowerment, while sharing similar concerns with Western feminists such as de Beauvoir, Kate Millett, and Hélène Cixous, remain one exceptional Indian woman's life story. The concluding chapters suggest not so much a retreat as a reconfiguration of her feminist project. A bad heart condition and her aging body lead the protagonist to turn away from male-female sexual relations as the site of conflict: “I had shed carnal desire as a snake sheds its skin” (p. 170). Her sexual desires are imaged, ironically, in the stereotypical figure of the spiritual lotus, as “now totally dead, rotted and dissolved, and for them there was no more to be a resprouting” (p. 186). She returns to Nalapat House “like a lost woman” (p. 175), in a gesture of retreat into female chastity: “I should never have taken to wearing the coloured clothes of the city. I should have dressed only in white. … I belonged to the serenity of Nalapat House” (p. 176). But the retreat is not a defeat; instead, the protagonist's libido becomes invested in the writing project, which is described in suggestively erotic terms: “I learnt for the first time to be miserly with my energy, spending it only on my writing which I enjoyed more than anything else in the world. I typed sitting propped against pillows on my wide bed” (p. 183).

Yet this emergence of the woman as empowered writer, recalling the return of the ancestral figures of Ammini and Ammalu, is still patriarchally restricted. The narrator represents her readers as lovers: “I had realized by then that the writer had none to love her but the readers” (p. 183). The desire to write, therefore, signifies the desire for a collective libidinous intercourse, a female exposure fantasy: “I have often wished to take myself apart and stick all the bits, the heart, the intestines, the liver, the reproductive organs, the skin, the hair and all the rest on a large canvas to form a collage which could then be donated to my readers” (p. 183). Although a different subject from the woman as sexual being, the woman as writer is again presented as consciousness constructed under the gaze of a patriarchal other, in this case a voyeuristic male deity: “Each time I walked into my lover's houses dressed like a bride, my readers have walked with me. … Like the eyes of an all-seeing God they follow me through the years” (p. 183). It is in her intercourse with her readers that the narrative finally arrives at anything like a recognition of satisfaction: “But how happily I meddled to satisfy that particular brand of readers who liked me. … And it certainly brought me happiness” (p. 184). This satisfaction, however, while it is a sign of empowerment (privileging) of the woman writer, continues to be expressed in the terms of patriarchal (inter)discourse, demonstrating the continued submission of Das's feminist project to patriarchy.

The social restrictions on women writers against expressing the kind of sexual and professional autonomy that we find in My Story are as strongly embedded in many Asian cultures today as they were in 1976, when Das's book appeared, and will probably prevent any imitators soon. The negative responses of Indian women critics such as Monika Varna, Vimala Rao, and Eunice de Souza to Das's work and to the work of other candid Indian women writers such as Gauri Deshpande and Mamta Kalia demonstrate that perceived transgressions of social decorum and traditional behavior still affect literary evaluation.³⁸ Moreover, Asian women generally might not find Das's exploration of female subjectivity as chiefly desire-centered or her portrayal of sexual relations as politically engaged congenial or helpful. After all, Das's writing can be said to have little material transformatory effect in Indian society. Some 80 percent of India's 700 million people live in the countryside. The status of Indian women, moreover, is woefully precarious, reflecting profound gender inequality and urgent material deprivations. The age for sacramental marriage, for example, is fourteen years for girls; the 1987 birthrate was 32 percent per one thousand population. More than 75 percent of Indian women are illiterate.³⁹ Moreover, Das's English-language Indian audience is extremely limited; India has fifteen languages included in its Constitution, and it has been reported that only about 3 percent of the Indian population, a Westernized and class-differentiated elite, uses English with any regularity. Her engaged and disruptive work, however, serves to remind Western readers to avoid any stereotyping of women from postcolonial developing nations. Even in the oppressive sociocultural conditions the autobiography delineates—conditions too often elided and stereotyped as Third World backwardness—Das's My Story, proving the exception in her revolt against patriarchal oppression, helps to write the terms of empowerment for Indian women.

Notes

1. Adrienne Rich notes that for centuries Western women have been “mothered” by the “unchilded”—that is, exceptional—woman: “Throughout recorded history the ‘childless’ woman has been regarded … as a failed woman. … seen as embodiments of the great threat to male hegemony; the woman who is not tied to the family, who is disloyal to the law of heterosexual pairing and bearing. … Without the unacclaimed research and scholarship of ‘childless’ women, without Charlotte Bronte (who died in her first pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major work was done before her child was born), without George Eliot, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir—we would all today be suffering from spiritual malnutrition as women.” Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 251-52.

2. That we can and should find parallels between Asian and Western women's texts does not imply that we must accept “the concept of sisterhood as a global construct.” See Bonnie Thornton Dill, “Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 9 (Spring 1983): 145.

3. Ibid, 146.

4. See Ding Ling, Miss Sophie's Diary, trans. W. J. F. Jenner (Beijing: Panda, 1985); idem, I Myself Am a Woman Selected Writings of Ding Ling, ed. Tani F. Barlow with Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon, 1989).

5. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 17.

6. Kamala Das, Alphabet of Lust (New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1972); A Doll for the Child Prostitute (New Delhi: India Paperbacks, 1977); Summer in Calcutta (Calcutta: Rajinder Paul & Everest, 1965); The Descendants (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1967); The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (OP in the essay) (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973); Tonight, This Savage Rite: The Love Poems of Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1979); Collected Poems, vol. 1 (Kerala State: Trivandrum, 1984); My Story (New Delhi: Sterling Paperbacks, 1976) (all page references to this text will be given in the body of the essay); Syd C. Harrex and Vincent O'Sullivan, eds., Kamala Das: A Selection with Essays on her Work (KD in the essay) (Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1986). Page references to poems in KD will be given in the essay.

7. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, eds., The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English (New York: W. W. Norton), 1985, 2247-49. Das, the only Asian writer in the anthology, is represented by one poem, “An Introduction,” which encapsulates some of the material worked in her autobiography.

8. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 326-34. Bakhtin's notion of “the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose” that “draws its energy, its dialogized ambiguity, not from individual dissonances, misunderstandings or contradictions … but sinks its roots deep into a fundamental, socio-linguistic speech diversity and multi-languagedness [heteroglossia]” (325-26) applies to Das's multilanguage background and specifically to what Harrex has termed “cultural dissonances” in the postcolonial Indian world.

9. Das has attracted an enormous critical response, resisting and laudatory, in her relatively brief writing career. There are more bibliographical items on her work than on any other Indian writer in English, living or dead. It is curious that the majority of Indian women critics persist in reading Das's subjects as strongly physical, a “profanity” of love, in contrast to the male and Anglo tendency to sacralize her subjects, to read them counter to the body as manifesting transcendent and Hindu mentality.

10. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 324.

11. The phenomenon of erosion or changes within native cultures in response to aggressive colonial education and colonial language imposition has been the focus of numerous studies. See, for example, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike's classical polemical study of this phenomenon in African states, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1983).

12. See Bruce King's introduction in Literatures of the World in English (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1974), 1-21, for a discussion of the evolution of these literatures from their colonial sources to their complex contemporary national identities.

13. Harrex and O'Sullivan, “Introduction,” in KD, 2.

14. See Vimala Rao, “Kamala Das: The Limits of Over-exposure,” in Studies in Contemporary Indo-English Verse, vol. 1, A Collection of Critical Essays on Female Poets, ed. A. N. Dwivedi (Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1984), for one of the sharpest attacks on the sexual themes and craft of Das's work. See also Eunice de Souza, “Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Mamta Kalia,” in Contemporary Indian Poetry, ed. Saleem Peerandina (Bombay: Macmillan India, 1972), 85.

15. A. N. Dwivedi, Kamala Das and Her Poetry (Delhi: Doaba House, 1983), 20-21.

16. Anisur Rahmin, Expressive Form in the Poetry of Kamala Das (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1981), 7.

17. Harrex and O'Sullivan, Kamala Das. The essays in the volume are by S. C. Harrex, Vincent O'Sullivan, Dorothy Jones, and Curtis Wallace-Crabbe.

18. Dorothy Jones, “‘Freedom Became My Dancing Shoes’: Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Work of Kamala Das,” in KD, 203.

19. Mohan Lal Sharma, “The Road to Brindavan: The Theme of Love in Kamala Das's Poetry,” in Studies in Contemporary Indo English Verse, 100.

20. See Harrex and O'Sullivan, “Introduction,” 1-3; and Vincent O'Sullivan, “Whose Voice Is Where? On Listening to Kamala Das,” in KD, 179-94. O'Sullivan asserts that, with Das, “We are reading religious poems of a kind that it would be impossible to find in any other woman now writing in English” (190).

21. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 235.

22. For a discussion of Das's novel, Alphabet of Lust, see Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into the Subject of the Contemporary Woman Writer,” Women's Studies, 18 (Summer 1990): 153-75.

23. Marilyn French, “Women and Work: India,” in Women, a World Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 174-201.

24. Rao, “The Limits of Over-exposure,” 88.

25. Dwivedi, Kamala Das and Her Poetry, 42; Jones, “‘Freedom Became My Dancing Shoes,’” 192.

26. Sharma, “The Road to Brindavan,” 108.

27. Jones, “‘Freedom Became My Dancing Shoes,’” 197.

28. See Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Europe and Its Others, ed. F. Barker et al. (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 89-105, for an insightful discussion of the dynamics of hybridity in colonialist and postcolonialist cultures. In Das's case, her texts are further complicated by the intersections of gender conflict with postcolonial cultural ambiguity, multiplicity, and indeterminacy.

29. Syd. C. Harrex, “The Strange Case of Matthew Arnold in a Sari: An Introduction to Kamala Das,” in KD, 155-75.

30. See, for example, “My Grandmother's House,” in KD, 14; and “Blood,” in OP, 16-19.

31. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 (Summer 1976): 880.

32. French, “Women and Work,” 170.

33. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 342.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 346.

36. Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 880.

37. For example, untitled poems beginning chapters 37 (p. 137) and 41 (p. 154) are “The Freaks” and “The Sunshine Cat,” both published in her 1965 collection, Summer in Calcutta.

38. See Monika Varna, “Gauri Deshpande,” in Studies in Contemporary Indo-English Verse, vol. 1, A Collection of Critical Essays on Female Poets, ed. A. N. Dwivedi Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1984), 65-75; Eunice de Souza, “Kamala Das, Gauri Deshpande, Mamta Kalia,” in Contemporary Indian Poetry, ed. Saleem Peeradina (Bombay: Macmillan India, 1972), 84-87; Gauri Deshpande, Between Births (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968); idem, Lost Love (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1970); Mamta Kalia, Tribute to Papa and Other Poems (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1970).

39. These statistics are taken from Women: A World Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

I wish to thank Nancy Miller, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Larry Lipking, Northwestern University, for their support; Wimal Dassanayake and the East-West Center, Hawaii, for the time and resources that led to this paper; Julia Watson, who gave me the occasion for the paper; Sidonie Smith, whose critical eye sharpened my argument; and the many critics, both East and West, who have provided me with their readings.