SOURCE: Chavan, Sunanda P. “The Unity of Vision in the Poetry of Kamala Das.” In Perspectives on Kamala Das's Poetry, edited by Iqbal Kaur, pp. 142-49. New Delhi, India: Intellectual Publishing House, 1995.

[In the following essay, Chavan identifies the unifying aspect of Das's poetry, asserting that “the extraordinarily subjective nature of her vision establishes a vital link between her poems about private life, and about external life.”]

Due to its unusualness in the Indian context, Kamala Das's poetry has received a variety of interpretations from critics. But it is seen that the criticism has so far been primarily concerned with her poems about personal life, to the total or partial neglect of her poems about external life. For instance, Bijay Kumar Das seeks to divide her personal poems into three categories of positive poems, negative poems and poems about her grandmother and ancestral house, dismissing her poems about the external life as ‘a few poems on some minor observations’.¹ Dr Harish Raizada tends to regard them marginal in interpreting Kamala Das's poetry because they offer merely ‘impressionistic images of certain sad and beautiful sights of life around her which catch her attention and fire her imagination’ when occasionally, the poet ‘comes out of her cocoon’.² Anisur Rahman discusses them in a separate chapter, describing them as poems about ‘the world beyond the self’. But he finds them only as illustrations of how the poet ‘assimilates the fond details of life in myriad forms and projects an inclusive human consciousness’.³ In his rather isolated treatment of various important aspects of Kamala Das's poetry, Bruce King makes only a passing reference to her poems which ‘record a woman enjoying the newness of the world as she wanders the streets and pursues her own interests’.⁴

Unlike a large number of poets with their sense of commitment to society, Kamala Das turns to external life in her poems only as a part of her commitment to the self. The extraordinarily subjective nature of her vision establishes a vital link between her poems about private life, and about external life. In a sense, her poems about external life are as subjective in their approach as her poems about private life.

The extraordinary subjectivity of vision originates in the urgent need of Kamala Das to come to terms with her crisis of identity. The trauma of the annihilation of self yearning for fulfilment of its need of love compels the poetic psyche to struggle for survival through poetry. Poetry is, for her, the hectic struggle to understand the complex nature of crisis of the self, and to try to discover a means by which to transcend the annihilated self. Faced by the vital problem of survival, the psyche turns to external life as a means to an end—the end being the survival of the self. The poems about external life are neither marginal, nor occasional, nor expressive of her commitment to society. They echo the crisis of her personal life and are a vital means to get it resolved. They originate in Kamala Das's preoccupation with the self and are written for their therapeutic function like the poems about private life.

The poems about external life, which may be described as social poems, voice Kamala Das's obsession with death and rottenness. It is the result of her own traumatic state due to the persistent frustrations in her efforts to get love from the husband and other men. She believes love to be a fulfilment of soul realized through body—an experience of sex, beyond sex. Unfortunately, in each love-relationship, she finds her body accepted at the cost of her soul. As Kamala Das says herself, ‘My affairs have not been sexual. I am frigid by nature. Sex, I can get in abundance from my husband. It was something else that I hungered for.’⁵ In ‘The Swamp’, the consciousness explores her relationship with one of the lovers who takes her body but leaves her soul unfulfilled in the act of sex:

he undressing my soul effortlessly … but still—I leave unsatisfied for what does he bare for me on the bed, in his study except his well tanned body.

(The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, p. 52)

Hence, her sense of horror at the existence in terms of body and the resultant sense of annihilation of soul projects itself through the persistent tendency of the poetic consciousness to associate death and rottenness with the life of sex. For instance, she responds to the act of sex shared with the husband thus in ‘The Maggots’:

                                                                                                                        What is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

(The Descendants, p. 22)

In ‘Convicts’, it takes on the form of ‘hacking at each other's part’ (The Descendants, p. 26). The frustrating sex-experience is felt as an act of murder—herself being the victim. The lover smoothing out bed sheets after love appears to her to ‘Tidy up the scene conscientiously’ after a murder. (‘The Doubts’, The Descendants, p. 16).

Naturally, the sights of death and rottenness loom large before the poetic consciousness facing external life. In ‘The Dance of the Eunuchs’, the rottenness and the smell of ‘dust in / Attics and the urine of lizards and mice’, remains the major impression in terms of which the poet's consciousness responds to the event. In her urgent plea to the flag to ‘lie’ beneath ‘this blood-drenched soil’ and ‘rot’, (‘The Flag’, Summer in Calcutta, p. 22) the psyche clutches on a sad and bitter parallel for the futility of her own state of ‘lying buried / Beneath a man’ (‘The Conflagration’, The Descendants, p. 20). The sight of the barges floating on the sea with ‘their undersides rotting and the garbage / Rot, and the dead, fish rot’ (‘The Wild Bougainvillaea’, Summer in Calcutta, p. 16) is an objectification of the rottenness and smell of the mere physicality of love as expressed, for instance, in ‘that leud, steamy smell of rot, rising out of earth’ (‘Gino’, The Old Play House and Other Poems, p. 13) that surrounds the lover walking ahead. ‘Sepia’ is an angry assault of a proud psyche humiliated time and again. It is willing to scorch and destroy the sterile world for its dreams ‘being flat / And sepia’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 24). The poet bursts forth,

It's time to hold anger
Like a living Sun
And scorch,
Scorch to the very marrow
This sad-mouthed human
race.

(p. 24)

Cursed to suffer mutely, Kamala Das sees the human race as descendants inheriting the curse of suffering without hope of redemption.

We are not going to be / Ever redeemed, or made new.

(‘The Descendants’, The Descendants, p. 8)

The unity of subjective vision is also evidenced by the recurrent image of dead bodies in both groups of poems about personal life and external life. For instance. ‘The Sea Shore’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 40) with the overwhelming regret and pity for the body burning with its' crunch of bones in those vulgar / Mouths of fire is expressive of pity for herself whose ‘all-enveloping gift’ of love cannot be accepted by the man ‘so ravaged, so spent.’ The burning dead body provides a valuable term of reference in defining the loss of courage of the present generation in ‘The Descendants’. She is certain that ‘We shall give ourselves to the fire’. Self-pity is predominantly active in responding to the dead body of the sweeper's wife ironically decked ‘with one rupee worth of / Yellow flowers’. (‘The Bangles’, Summer in Calcutta, p. 34).

The poems like ‘The Wild Bougainvillaea’ (Summer in Calcutta, pp. 16-17) and ‘The Joss-sticks at Cadell Road’ (The Descendants, p. 23) include extensive treatment of sights from external world. Yet they enter the arena of poetic consciousness only as a means to heal the wounds of the suffering self. In ‘The Joss-sticks’, for instance, the apparently objective vision of the cremation of a poor girl registers all the sad details of the scented body, the monotonous wailing of some crones, the snarling beast-like fire, and the garlands thrown by the corpse-bearers in the sea after the body is fed to the fire. But it emerges rather unexpectedly as the intensely subjective vision of her need for love in the concluding part of the poem.

‘Summer in Calcutta’ is probably the only poem where the poet enjoys a momentary release from the hold of the ruthless self. She then seems to exploit the opportunity for responding to the beauty in life for its own sake. The colourful drink before her becomes ‘The April Sun, squeezed / Like an orange’ in her glass (Summer in Calcutta, p. 48). But the release is so momentary that it can not forget its being ‘a moment's lull in / Wanting you, the blur / In memory’.

The images of street-girls, prostitutes and pregnant women in the poems about personal life as well as poems about the external life also underline the essential unity of the subjective vision in Kamala Das. The disgust at love limited to the physical level induces bitter response to the sight of street girls. ‘The Wild Bougainvillaea’ refers to ‘night-girls with sham / Obtrusive breasts’ (Ibid., p. 16), while, in ‘The Flag’, one of the realities within the country is the harlots who walk ‘swaying / Their waste hips’ (Ibid., p. 21). The disgust is, no doubt, neutralized by a feeling of nostalgia when in ‘Farewell to Bombay’, the ‘sad-eyed courtesans with tinsel / And jasmine in their hair’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 39) are affectionately accepted on behalf of the psyche.

The disgust is often substituted by a sense of guilt for violating social norms of morality. It then gets confessed through indirect reference to prostitutes in ‘Composition’. She admits that her ‘first school-house’ is now ‘a brothel’ (The Descendants, p. 33). It transforms itself into a sense of regret for humiliating the self in her confessional disclosure of having ‘Stretched my two dimensional / Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies / Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice.’ (‘Loud Posters’, Summer in Calcutta, p. 23). The cover page of The Old Playhouse and Other Poems with its pictorial outline of ‘two dimensional nudity’ illustrates what she means.

If the sights of death and rottenness as well as of street girls and prostitutes in both groups of poems are essentially a part of the psyche's struggle to understand the crisis of the self, the vehement self-assertion in both groups is a means by which the annihilated self accomplishes the miracle of rebirth. In a number of her poems about external life, the poetic psyche struggles to celebrate its role in assimilating external experience. Of course, every artist is a man with extraordinary sensibility which enables him to identify himself with the life outside and recreate it imaginatively. Art is life projected through the kaleidoscopic sensibility of the artist. It is hence significant that Kamala Das should assert her artistic self so vehemently and so persistently in the poems about external life. In her case, the claustrophobic experience of death and decay of the self necessitates the struggle for survival of the self. The vehement self-assertion is the exclusive means to survive for the poetic psyche. ‘Forest Fire’ is its most intense expression. Here, she confesses how she is hungry ‘To take in with greed’ ‘all that comes’ her way so that ‘in me / The sights and smiles and sounds shall thrive and go on’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 51). The ‘I’ pushes itself to the forefront of all experience from the external world also in ‘Someone Else's Song’ with its rhythmic chant of ‘I am a million, million people’, ‘I am a million, million deaths’, ‘I am a million, million births’ and ‘I am a million, million silences’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 3). The stranger in every walk of life is christened in the name of ‘I’ in ‘The Stranger and I’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 44).

‘An Introduction’ offers a valuable opportunity of witnessing the process by which the autobiographical, limited ‘I’ transforms itself into the impersonal, universal ‘I’. The poet explores this psychic phenomenon with extraordinary clarity and simplicity—‘I met a man, loved him. Call / Him not by any name, he is every man / Who wants a woman, just as I am every / Woman who seeks love.’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 60) Hence, the poem ends on a note of celebration: ‘I too call myself I’. Self-assertion thus involves self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the knowledge of one's human identity. In ‘Composition’, the personal self, transformed into the universal, human self through poetry, appears to arrive at the ultimate vision of the meaning of existence.

Kamala Das's journey from the state of unillumination to that of illumination is clearly concretized in the progressive recurrence of the image of sea in her poetry. As the poet moves from the stage of unillumination to the stage of partial illumination, the image of sea as a physical reality gains metaphorical dimension. The poet's progress from the stage of partial illumination to the final stage of illumination carries the image of sea from the level of metaphor to that of symbol.

In the preliminary stage of the poet's struggle to understand the complex nature of the crisis of self, sea enters the poetic consciousness only marginally as a physical reality. In ‘The Wild Bougainvillaea’, the sea is a part of the total scenic back-drop—she walks ‘beside the sea / where barges float’ (Ibid, p. 16) as it is in ‘Blood’ (The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, p. 18) and ‘The Stone Age’ (Ibid., p. 51).

The growing awareness of the imagistic value of sea encourages the poetic psyche to experiment with it as a metaphor. In ‘Sepia’ the sea stands for the romantic urge for the distant and the strange. It holds ‘the mermaid's eggs / That lie beneath the / Anemones’ (Summer in Calcutta, p. 24). In the agonizing confession in ‘Substitute’, its metaphorical potentialities are limitedly used to project the emotional storm within when memory is called as ‘Great moody sea’ (The Descendants, p. 6).

The poet's lack of stamina to transcend the sufferings of the self corresponds with the lack of stamina to delve deep into the symbolic value of the image of sea. Of course, sea now provides a satisfying objective correlative to concretize the psyche's sufferings. ‘The Invitation’ is the poet's struggle to keep up her faith in life in spite of the betrayal by a particular lover although there is irresistible temptation to end life in the sea. The image of sea provides a valuable means to project the inner conflict between faith and despair. Here is the sea a physical reality, inviting her, and here is the sea of mind trying to resist the fatal invitation. The outer sea with its plea to ‘end this whiplash of memories’ is balanced against the inner sea which, the poet fears, ‘shall take no more’ (The Descendants, pp. 14-15).

The image of sea shifts to the centre of poetic consciousness in ‘The Suicide’. The rather ambiguous metaphor of the sea of mind in ‘The Invitation’ now appears to hold solution for the crucial dilemma of the body and the soul. It has power to isolate the soul from the entanglements of body which she yearned for but could not get in every love relationship. Yet the sea still remains an important metaphor to communicate the ordeal of the self instead of providing a condition to transcend the self and reach the ultimate knowledge. The sea incorporates the soul's yearning for the impossible ideal of love. Hence, the consolatory note on which the poem ends,

Only the soul knows how to sing
At the vortex of the sea

(The Descendants, p. 4)

seems rather to echo the helplessness of despair in the recognition of impossibility to achieve fulfilment on the levels of body and soul simultaneously.

Kamala Das arrives, at last, at the ultimate vision of the meaning of existence in ‘Composition’ which also shows the emergence of sea as a symbol. It is surprising that Anne Brewster fails to locate the crucial significance of sea in the poem although Kamala Das's vision of existence is realized primarily through the symbol of sea. There is only a nominal reference to the presence of sea in the poem in Brewster's remark that Kamala Das ‘opens with a reference to the sea, whose melancholy movement rolls throughout the poem and sweeps it on to its conclusion.’⁶ She appears to evade the crucial problem of defining the symbolic significance of sea by identifying it vaguely with the image of water in ‘The Old Playhouse’.

The sea, for Kamala Das, stands for the human condition. It represents a stasis between uninvolvement and involvement. Her desire to lie ‘resting in the sea’, ‘completely uninvolved’ is itself a desire for involvement because ‘Greater hungers lurk / at the basement of the sea.’ Existence is hunger for life, for involvement. The self is compelled into involvements with others, each involvement being a potent fragment of oneself. We, being human, must ‘crumble’ and ‘dissolve.’ However, it is not an act of negating existence but that of celebrating its assertion in myriad forms which ‘retain in other things / the potent fragments / of oneself’. (The Descendants, p. 35). By ‘The freedom to discompose’, Kamala Das probably means the freedom to ‘decompose’ though both texts of the poem in The Descendants and The Old Play House and Other Poems spell the word as ‘discompose.’ The decomposing of the self into fragments is ironically described as the result of ‘freedom’ it signifies that decomposing is not an act of annihilation of the self but its renewal in different forms. Decomposition is, in fact, composition. It explains her hunger, to take in all that came her way in ‘Forest Fire’ and her hunger to assimilate experience through ‘I’ in the poems like ‘An Introduction’, ‘Some one Else's Song’ and ‘The Stranger and I’.

‘Composition’, thus, dissolves the border that divides the self from the world outside. The ultimate, mature vision unifies the two. In the light of the knowledge gained by the poet, external life becomes a macroscopic experience of the inner life and inner life becomes a microscopic vision of the external life. Hence, the essential unity of vision in the poems from the two fields stands validated by the poet's own recognition of the meaning of existence.

Notes

1. Bijay Kumar Das, Modern Indo-English Poetry, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1982, p. 44.

2. Dr. Harish Raizada, ‘The Confessional Note in the Poetry of Kamala Das’ in Indian Poetry in English ed. by Hari Mohan Prasad, Parimal Prakashan, Aurangabad, 1983, p. 115.

3. Anisur Rahman, Expressive Form in the Poetry of Kamala Das, Abhinav Publications, New Delhi, 1981, p. 78.

4. Bruce King, Modern Indian Poetry in English, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1987, Second impression 1989, p. 151.

5. Kamala Das in a personal letter to the author dated 26.1.79.

6. Anne Brewster, “The Freedom to Decompose: The Poetry of Kamala Das” in the Journal of Indian Writing in English ed. by G. S. Balarama Gupta, vol. 8, January-July 1980, p. 102.