Movement from Innocence to Awareness:

Ganga Laxmi Patnaik
Movement from Innocence to Awareness:
Poetry of K. Das
Kamala Das who looms large over the poetic horizon of India, hails from the South, precisely from the southern Malabar in Kerala, where her grandmother, Nayar father and Nalapat mother used to live peacefully beside the fathomless sea. She was born (March 31, 1934) and bred here and received her education, for the most part, at home. As her autobiography tells us, Das, whose maiden name was Madhavikutty, first attended a European School in Calcutta, then the Elementary School at Punnayurkulam (which is her birth place), and then a boarding school run by the Roman Catholic nuns, but in each of them she stayed for a short while. Her father, who had married in 1928 belonged to a traditional family having an aristocratic atmosphere around it. Speaking of her parents' unsuited alliance, Das writes in her autobiographical novel : "My mother did not fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and horribly mismated." (My Story 40). Das's mother was a poet. Her poetry was exactly what society prescribed for a respectable woman-poet of her time. The women in her poetry called their husbands master. The male manufactured definitions of femininity nauseates Das. She detests, the male gaze because it reduces woman as an object, as a commodity. The sexual politics that prevailed in the relationship between her mother and father and several other couples around her also shaped her views on marriage. The power politics in sex relationships is repulsive to her. Her parents fixed her marriage. She is stunned after knowing this news. She tries to plea the postponement of her marriage. She wants to escape marriage-bondage. Marriage is a fate traditionally sanctioned to women by society.
It subjugates and enslaves women. It leads women to aimless days indefinitely repeated, life that slips away gently toward death without questioning its purpose. In our society, marriage is the privileged locus for the interaction of the two sexes. It is the agency that reflects and regulates our attitude towards life. One of the functions of marriage is to assure the future of our society through reproduction. Marriage produces a single social unit wherein differences among individuals are seemingly dissolved under one name, the name of the father. Thus, whether one views marriage as the blissful coming together of equal voices speaking in unison, or as the site of an ongoing dialogue between individuals continuously affirming their differences, we cannot escape the structure it imposes, the patriarchal society it sustains. Nelly Furman writes:
... marriage is a form of human communication. In an exogamous matrimonial system, potential wives are assets in the service of society. Through the exchange of daughters and sisters, families are forced into a system of reciprocity whereby they establish enduring ties with other families which assure the formation of social communities (60).
Das' My Story contains ample evidence of her awareness of the arrest of feminine development brought about by an economic system, a family structure which produced in women dependency, insecurity and lack of autonomy. The feminine mystique, she feels has always been exploited by man who treats woman as his slave. Das is terrified seeing the attitude of the oil-seller. She talks about an oil-seller in the ‘Lonely Goddess’ of My Story:
Beyond the northern rice-fields lived Lazar, the oil-seller who drove his white cow and the three women of his house round and round his old mill, to extract oil from the copra and the sesame -while he rested, leaning against a tree, abusing them in pornographic language which only amused his victims, for he was always a good provider and they were, by nature, masochistic…. (28)
Women, Das feels, have always belonged to the deprived categories of humans, while men believe that the privileges they enjoy are theirs by right. After her marriage Das undergoes the mental strain and very much aggrieved and agonized but any how she wants to adjust and reconcile with her husband's sentiments. After leaving the grandmother's house, she lives in her new home but she is never at peace. This is the experience of her irreparable loss and frustration, which makes her life more painful and irreconcilable. She feels that destiny makes her nostalgic, suffering more intense and more rigorous but she is a typical traditional woman so she wants to lean on the will and desire of her husband. She thinks to become the epitome of submission because to her, husband is the sheltering tree and one can't perceive or act beyond that. She might even accept the inevitable married life as a girl and its responsibilities, but not without lodging her forceful complaint against mankind as whole and hollow marital relationships. This is how we discover her saying in ‘A Relationship’:
Yes, / It was my desire that made him male
And beautiful, so that when at last we met,
To believe that once I knew not his
Form, his quiet touch, or the blind kindness
Of his lips was hard indeed. Betray me ? Yes, he can, But
never physically,
… … … … … …
My body's wisdom tells and tells again
That I shall find my rest, my sleep, my peace
And even death nowhere else but here in
My betrayer's arms ... (Descendants 18)
In "A Relationship" she is anti-feminist in her stance, admitting that her peace lay only in her "betrayer's arms". She needs the husband always. Her hunger for sex appears in the few opening lines of the poem ‘Forest Fire’: "Of late i have begun to feel a hunger / to take in with greed, like a forest fire that / consumes, with each killing gains a wilder, / brighter charm, all that comes my way" (10). This hunger is intemperate and terrible in nature as its smile with the wild forest-fire signifies. But she is courageous. She has courage. Her courage to stand against all odds shows her faith in life. She pleads to all women to kneel down before the male ego since it is implicit in the institution of marriage:
I have reached the age in which
one forgives all.
I am ready to forgive friends
their loving,
forgive those who ruined friendships.1
Das tries to reveal herself in performance as an artist encountering life with its many-sidedness. Even though men are selfish, supercilious, inconsiderate, egoist, narcissist, love has a liberating influence. So she thinks to love her husband more and more because the solution in the problems of marriage lies in love only. Like a bitter satirist she advises in the poem "Composition":
Husbands and wives / here is my advice to you
Obey each other's crazy commands, / ignore the sane.
Turn your home into a merry / dog-house,
marriage is meant to be all this / anyway; / being arranged in
most humorous heaven. (The Descendants 34)
Das, true to her feminine virtues, plays the role of an ideal housewife but the role of an ideal housewife restricts, rather circumscribes her self-development, firstly by taking away her freedom of thought and expression and secondly by denying her the scope of giving free play to her artistic potentiality. She is discontented with this pre-ordained role of a woman. She explores and exposes the long-smothered wail of the incarcerated psyche, imprisoned within the four walls of domesticity. She is sandwiched between the mask and the face. She has dealt graphically with the problems that confront a middle-class educated woman in the patriarchal Hindu society. Her poetry deals with the psychic turmoil of woman with the limiting and restricting confines of domesticity. Marriage mutilates Das, it dooms her to repetition and routine, the monotony of meet, mate and reproduce. Almost always it annihilates her but a man is not to blame for it. It is the masculine code. Further, a woman accepts the role of an ideal mother very gladly. A woman's sense of loneliness gets inflated, her frustrations get multiplied when she fails to actualise her maternal dreams. Upbringing of children is always considered to be mother's job in an Indian society. Even a workingwoman is expected to fulfill her duties towards home and her children. The image of a man is always of the breadwinner of the family. It is the woman who has been performing the duties towards home efficiently. This traditional outlook is carried up to this date hinders the emancipation of women as it weakens the roots of a woman's progress and fades her identity. But in the scenario of the conservative Indian society child is must for a woman. Creation is the birth right of a woman. Das acquires it after her marriage. She expresses her gratitude towards the husband. All her sufferings pacified with the thought of the incoming child. Her poem, ‘Jaisurya,’ deals with the joys of creativity and filial love. Though she is an iconoclast, she does not attempt to demolish institutions like family. Unlike Doris Lessing or Erica Jong, (female writers of the west) she is proud to be a biological mother. It is more realistic and far-sighted. It is not shrouded in any philosophy or motivated by any other political reasons. The poem, ‘Jaisurya’ (Descendants), signifies the redeeming feature of sexual love as the agent of fulfilment ( 44). She is convinced that her man can only know her with his lust and that she cannot look at him as a source of redemption or regeneration. But this single feature of sexual love arouses in her gratitude to him in ‘Jaisurya’:
Love is not important, that makes the blood
Carouse, nor the man who brands you with his
Lust, but is shed as slough, at end of each
Embrace. Only that matters which forms as
Toadstool under lightning and rain, the soft
Stir in womb, the foetus growing, for,
Only the treasures matter that were washed
Ashore, not the long blue tides that washed them in. (27)
She rejoices her existence as the agent of creation, forgetting her own pain of bearing the child and her emptiness within the feminine self feels the resourcefulness: "For a while I too was earth. / In me the seed was silent, waiting as /A baby does, for the womb's quiet /Expulsion" (27).
The theme of sexual love receives greater relevance from the glory of creation of childbirth. This expression, we find in ‘Jaisurya,’ combines the narrative and the meditateive and which details the whole gamut of feelings preceding and following the birth of a son. It brings together light and darkness, fire and water to weave a pattern of feeling which holds itself with the joy of creation. It is significant that meaningful things happen to the poet around noontime under the virgin whiteness of the sun. The child is a day that is: "Separated from darkness that was mine / And in me" (27). She feels now that some purpose in life is there in our submission to our problems. There alone we find a meaning in life: "Out of the wrong is born the right and / Out of right, The Sun-drenched golden day..." (27).
The simple prayer wishing her son a long life in the face of the outer threat of violence and death is strengthened by the contrast between the white flowers (standing for peace, long life) and the red (standing for blood, mortality, anarchy) of the cherry wine, the rose. She values very much her family and the domestic life. She brings forth and brings up children with care and affection for the better of children she encourages the mother for breast feeding. This attitude of Das can be studied bearing in mind that for the mother, breast feeding becomes a complement to the act of creation. It gives her a heightened sense of fulfillment and allows her to participate in a relationship as close to perfection as any that a woman can hope to achieve. The simple fact of giving birth, however, doesn't of itself fulfill this need and longing. Motherliness is a way of life. It enables a woman to express her total self with the tender feelings, the protective attitudes, the encompassing love of the mother. Das identifies herself with her children's well being. She suffers with them during their illness. She shares their joys, their aspirations and becomes their playmate. She values the part that she played in her family and the domestic life. The liberal feminists, consider woman's role in the social construction through her contribution to family and domestic life is as important and as valuable. From Marry Wollstonecraft to Betty Friedan and Simon de Beauvoir, an argument has been made that motherhood for women will free them from constraint and coercion. This exposure to motherhood helps her to exercise her options to achieve happiness and harmony in her otherwise empty life. In her autobiography, My Story, Das describes how, on her wedding night, ignorant and frightened by her husband's sexual advances, she urged, much to his astonishment, that hey both pray to Krishna first. She also describes how in her initial disappointment in marriage, she cherished the hope of having a son who would resemble Krishna :
Through the smoke of the incense I
saw the beauteous smile of my Krishna.
Always, always I shall love you I told
him, not speaking a loud but willing
Him to hear me, only you will be husband,
only your horoscope will match with mine. (My Story 92)
One of the strong male supporters of women's cause was John Stuart Mill who considers marriage as an institution. Marriage, he states is a necessary social institution for no man is complete without a woman. However he advocates choice in marriage. Because in this rotton set-up, marriages are made without taking into account the suitability of the partners from various angles—heir family background, age, education, financial status and social connections. Mill raised his voice of resentment against this hollow set-up. Society has appointed marriage to be the destination of all women. So he gives constructive suggestion for from page 45
the division of rights and duties in a marriage based on individual abilities and mutual consent. He describes the ideal relationship in a marriage in his book, The Subjection of Women, Essays on Sexuality:
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinion and purposes, between whom exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority over them - so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking upto the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development …. I maintain with the profoundest conviction that this, and this only, is the ideal marriage. (Mill 235)
Notes & References
1. Dr. Raghukul Tilak. New Indian English Poets and Poetry. New Delhi, Rama Brothers, 1997, P. 11.
Work Cited
Das, Kamala. The Descendants. Calcutta : Writers' workshop,1967.
---. My Story. New Delhi : Sterling Publishers, 1978.
Furman, Nelly. "The Politics of Language : Beyond the Gender Principle ?" Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. London : Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1985.
Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography. London : Oxford University Press,1944.