Feminism In Kamala Das's poem

 

Title :- Feminism In Kamala Das's poem

Abstract 

Kamala Das is regarded as a one of the remarkable Indo-Anglian women. She established herself as the forerunners of the feminist writers in India.  Her feminine sensibility is the motivating and governing force behind her poems. The idea of Feminism in her writing is derived from the Indian patriarchal society.  We can say that she is very frank and talks about her woman's body and female body. She talks about womanliness and how females are subjugated in society. The paper focuses on Das's complex emotion regarding the system controlling her life and the lives of countless suffering women. The paper  about the women who have pased through a period of frustration, depression, pain and torture. Her poetry strongly expresses feminine sensitivity. 

Keywords:-

Feminism, Gender Issues, Identity, Woomanhood, Women  and Man.

Introduction:-

Kamala Das was a major Indian English poet and literature and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India.  She is known as a Kamala Madhavikutty.Her open and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, infused her writing with power, but also marked her as an iconoclast in her generation. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune, but has earned considerable respect in recent years. 

Feminism is belief in and advocacy of the  political, economic, and social equality of the sexes expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests. Mostly people thinks that the Feminism against man but feminism is not agaist man or but Feminism is about that man and women should have equal rights and opportunities. 

Feminism in Kamala Das's poem 

In the conversation between P.P.Raveendran and Kamala Das we can find some interesting questions asked by Raveendran and good answers given by Kamala Das.

P.P. Raveendran : In spite of the feminist concerns that can be read off or read into your stories and poems many of your statements are quite critical of feminism.

Kamala  Das : I'll tell you something, Feminism as the westerns see it is different from the feminism I sense within myself. Western feminism is an anti-male stance. I can never hate the male because I have loved my husband and I still love my children, who are sons. And I think from masculine company I have derived a lot of happiness. So I will never be able to hate them. Most of the feminists I met outside the country were lesbians-out and out lesbians. I do not think I'm lesbian. I tried to find out.  I experiment with everything.  I tried to find out our if I were a lesbian, if I could respond to a woman. I failed.  I must speak the truth. I believe that we must abandon a thing if it has no moral foundation whether it be a belief, a political system or a religious system. 

Feminism in poem 'An  Introduction'

Kamala Das's poetry, like the poetry of Shiv K. Kumar, begins in pain and anguish caused by her loss of freedom to live her life, the way she liked. Her best known poem, "An Introduction" sets the tone of her poetry and reveals her mind.

I was a child, and later they Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me

But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.

The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.

I shrank Pitifully.

The above quoted lines suggest the pain and anguish that crushed the poet. This line of An Introduction is interesting as she is placing her own body in one of the categories she rebelled against in the first stanza. It is due to this simplification of a woman as nothing more than a body that led her to marriage at sixteen. She also places blame on her own body for leading her to this place. Her distinctly female parts, “breasts and womb” are a crushing weight on her life. The pressure placed on her by her husband and by her family led to an emotional and mental shrinking. It was a “Pitiful” process. But it ended.

 In our society we can see that man wants the wife who is under him, who blindly follows him and whatever happens she doesn't speak against him, whatever happens she accepts it and doesn't raise her voice to fight against wrong things. Man thinks that they are superior. In married life men have the right to hit women but women speak against wrong things. Then she was hit by her husband and other women also told that She is not a good wife and many things they told her. So in our patriarchal society women were suffering a lot. 

Women Identity 

Kamala Das hates traditional sex roles assigned to women by the patriarchy. In the poem “Introduction” 

Then I wore a shirt and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of this womanliness.

Dress in sarees, be girl

Be a wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,

Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,

Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit

On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.

Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better

Still, be Madhavikutty.

In the poem 'An Introduction' it becomes clear that the speaker is truly meant to be the poet herself. She wonders at her own identity.  Here in this line the speaker talked about women's identity, that women have to wear a saree and behave like a girl or a wife. They don't sit on the walls and they have to cook in the kitchen. But they don't be  like men. 

In the words of K. Satchidanandan, “The woman can not change her body; so the poet changes her dress and tries to imitate men. But the voices of the tradition would force her back into sarees, the saree becoming here a sign of convention. She is pushed back into her expected gender roles: wife, cook, embroiderer, quarreling with servants: the gender role also becomes a class role” (13).

Conversation between P.P.Raveendran and Kamala Das Raveendran asked interesting questions related to her identity. 

P.P.Raveendran : Let me relate this interesting discovery to another question concerning identity. This is about the two names "Kamala Das" and "Madhavikutty" that you used for your English and Malayalam writings respectively. Again there are fellow-bilingual writers like Isak Dinesen and Fernando Pessoa who adopt similar ploys to keep their language identities separate. How would you respond to this?

Kamala Das : I think I was compelled to choose a name because I didn't want to embarrass my conservative family. I knew that I was a misfit within my family. I think I practised writing as people practice a secret vice. Like boys going to the bathroom to smoke. Especially, I didn't want to hurt my grandmother who was my favourite human being. And I don't think she knew that I was Madhavikutty till she died.

Patriarchal Society 

'An Introduction' by Kamala Das womanthe poet's own mental and emotional state as she aged and pushed back against patriarchal society.Kamala Das's love poems are rooted in her defiance of the patriarchal tradition of our country and especially against male dominance. Her frankness in expressing the desire of a woman to fulfill her love makes her a feminist in the western sense of the word. 

The influence of patriarchy is found in all 

Shiv K. Kumar, the well known poet and critic, makes an apt observation in the following lines:

It seems that the past two decades or so have witnessed an unprecedented upsurge of longing for freedom in our women's outlook. They have not only claimed parity with men but have vehemently questioned certain age old social practises and prejudices. This is the predominant theme in Kamala Das's poetry which exposes male chauvinism, its persistent endeavour to play the role of the 'stronger' sex. No wonder, the contemporary woman writer is never tired of articulating her disgust for the insensitive, aggressive male. If there is, therefore, a recurring element of sex in her work, it is more to expose it as form I male dominance than to glorify it. All that Kamala Das is trying to do is to salvage the Indian woman from the sexual exploitation of man, her husband or lover. In one of her early poems, titled "The Freaks'', she portrays her lover as only someone who arouses 'the skin's lazy hungers'.

Conclusion 

Kamladas remarkable feminist poet. Her poems are most readable because she reveals her feelings of anxiety, alienation, meaninglessness, futility, acute sense of isolation, fragmentation and loss of identity. Women live in male dominated society where their individuality, identity and freedom are in question. We can see that women are constantly denied love and passionate satisfaction in their married life. It just fills a woman's life with dissatisfaction and embarrassments. Kamala Das's poetry is about women. She reflects on how women are suffering in male dominance society. 

Reference 

“An Introduction by Kamala Das - An Introduction Poem.” PoemHunter.com, 28 Mar. 2012.

Dr. K. V. Dominic. (2016, January 19). Kamala Das (madhavikutty) kamala suraiyya. Kamala Das (Madhavikkutty) Kamala Suraiyya. Retrieved December 24, 2021.

Kumar, N. Prasantha. Writing the Female: A Study of Kamala Das. Kochi: Bharatiya Sahitya Pratishthan,2018. Print.

Raveendran, P. P., and Kamala Das. “P.P. Raveendran in Conversation with Kamala Das.” Indian Literature, vol. 53, no. 3 (251), Sahitya Akademi, 2009, pp. 64–75.