redefining the genre kamala das

Sahitya Akademi

Redefining the Genre: Kamala Das (1934-2009)Author(s): K. SATCHIDANANDANSource: Indian Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3 (251) (May/June 2009), pp. 49-55Published by: Sahitya AkademiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23340304 .

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Courtesy: Sajitha Gouwry



IN MEMORIAM

Redefining the Genre: Kamala Das (1934-2009)

K. SATC HI DAN AN DAN

amala Das (1934-2009) had many identities which were in a fruitful

J/Vdialogue with one another and coalesced into one at the point of

realization: Amy, the beloved of the aristocratic Nalappat family in South

Malabar where she was born and the dearest and the most generous of friends

to the small circle of intimate companions to whom she opened her heart

completely; Kamala Das, the radical Indian poet writing in English who did

not mind sacrificing the sterile aestheticism of older poetry for the freedom of

the body and the mind and managed to 'gatecrash into the precincts of others'

dreams' (Anam alai Poems); Madhavikkutty, the Malayalam fiction writer who

redefined the very genre of the novel and short story in the language and gave

it singing nerves and Kamala Surayya who sought refuge for her tired wings in

total surrender to Allah who was to her the very embodiment of the love she

had sought all her life. She was honest in the deepest sense of the word, but

was not naive and foolish as many seem to imagine: she was strong-willed and

could interrogate her community as few Indian women-writers before her had

done. She could be naughty and mischievous when she wanted and had a great sense of humour and irony evident in her memoirs as well as her poems. She

continued to laugh at religious superstitions even after her conversion to Islam

and was openly critical of the Indian inhibition and hypocrisy in man-woman

relationships. I had, as an adolescent school boy, first known her as Madhavikkutty,

a Malayalam writer of a novel kind of fiction that bordered on poetry that

kept appearing in the Matbrubhumi Weekly which in those glorious days of the

publication under the editorship of N. V. Krishna Warrier the scholar-poet and later of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, the fiction writer and film maker, used to

feature all our beloved poets and fiction writers. Her first story, Kushtarogi (The

Leper) had appeared in the Matbrubhumi Weekly in 1942 when she was a little

50 / Indian Literature: 251



girl and I was yet to be born; with the publication of Mathilukal (The Walls), her first collection in 1955, she had already established her place in Malayalam short story. She belonged to a generation that includes M.T. Vasudevan Nair, T. Patmanabhan and Kovilan who had all gone beyond the socialist realist

mode employed by their predecessors to explore the tormented psyche of the

solitary human beings haunted by guilt, pain and lovelessness. These writers—

Vaikom Mohammed Basheer for their forerunner—travelled from the outer

drama of social events to the inner drama of emotions; the states of mind

became more important to them than the states of the community to express which they developed a taut and cryptic lyrical idiom. The narrative content

became so thin in their stories and the form so much an organic part of it that

they could hardly be retold in another voice.

In Madhavikkutty this inward evolution touched its peak; her stories most

often evolved from a central image and expressed a mood or a vision. Even the

titles of her stories sounded like the titles of paintings or poems (remember she herself practiced painting for a while): The Red Skirt, The Red Mansion, The Child in the Naval Uniform, The Father and The Son, The Moon's Meat, Sandalwood Trees, The Secret of the Dawn, Boats, The Smell of the Bird, The King's Beloved, A Doll for Rukmini. Her vocabulary was limited as she

had little formal education and had mostly grown up outside Kerala; but she

turned this limitation to her advantage by her deft and economic employment of those few words in her stories that were always spare and crisp to the point of being fragile. Many of her stories were not longer than two or three book

pages, including the famous ones like "Padmavati, the Harlot." Here a harlot, like in the Arun Kolatkar poem where a prostitute longs to be photographed with Vithoba and Rukmai, goes to the temple, requests God to accept her

ragged body that was like a river that does not dry up even if thousands bathe

in it, meets her god who is growing old and gets dissolved in him for a while

to return purified. In her later stories like "Pakshiyude Manam" (The Smell of

a Bird), "Unni," "Kalyani," "Malancherivukalil" (On the Mountain Slopes), and "Karutta Patti" (The Black Dog) the element of fantasy grew stronger;

they became more and more compressed often taking the form of brief

monologues.

At times her stories became pure poetry, just emotional contexts with no

narrative content. Look at "Premattinte Vilapakavyam" (An Elegy for Love):

You are my beloved. You are the old sweet mango tree for my

jasmine creeper to wind round. You appear before me with the

sad halo of a banished king. I longed to have you in my lap, heal

your wounds and ease your weariness. You are fortunate and you are the fortune. You are pure, unmixed manliness. Woman's soul

K Satchidanandan / 51



is the garden where you roam. You are inside me and outside me.

You rest on the banks of the sanguine streams inside me like a

king tired of hunting. You trample my nerves with your boots,

thinking they are the roots of the wild trees long ago dead...

In some stories, especially those around the character Janu, a house

maid, Madhavikkutty employed the dialect of her Valluvanad to great effect.

Thus the stories collected in her seven volumes in Malayalam show great thematic and structural diversity while being linked together by their essential

femininity, their sisterhood with nature (her stories are full of birds and trees,

sand and fields and moonlight) and the presence of her rural locale, either as

real setting or as a nostalgic landscape. She is one with the Modernists like O. V.

Vijayan, Anand, M. Mukundan, Sethu, Kakkanadan and Punattil Kunhabdula

in urbanising fiction in Malayalam, but she had her own way of doing it: her

urban women are mostly schizophrenic, torn by conflicts and desperate for

real love while her rural women, mostly drawn from the lower classes, are less

inhibited and openly critical of the master-race and patriarchal interventions.

They also seem more at peace with themselves as they feel the presence of a

community and of comforting nature around them. Women and nature here

appear to fertilize each other. Even in the city the woman feels pacified by the soothing touch of the tender mango leaf on the terrace. Ammu who in

Sarkara Kondoru Tulabharam (An Offering with Jaggery) visits Guruvayur for

the offering with her husband Biju cured by her prayers and refuses to go back with him to the city, charmed by her farmer-cousin in the village living in

harmony with nature, sums up this attitude.

Probably her autobiographical writings grew out of her monologic tales.

Ente Katha (My Story) that was written during her treatment for lukemia

created a sensation. The readers were drawn into a charming and threatening

life of love and longing, of desire and disloyalty. She wrote other memoirs

too: Balyakalasmaranakal (The Memories of Childhood), Varshatigalkku Munpu

(Years Ago) and Neermatalam Poottappol (When the Pomegranates Bloomed).

It is safe to view all her works as part real and part fantasy as she was adept at genre-crossing. Her novels — there are seven of them if we follow the

publishers' categorization, including Chandanamarangal (Sandalwood Trees) -

that obliquely deals with same-sex love — are long stories, most of her stories

are like poems, the style of her poems is often not very different from that

of her stories and the one-act play, Memory, Great Moody Sea combines all these

genres!

I came to her poetry later, reading, in 1968 her Summer in Calcutta (1965)

and Descendants (1967) together, being charmed by her eloquent images and her




unconventional attitude to the art of poetry. I had already started corresponding with her by now and had received generous praise from her - she was the

poetry editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India then - for my early poems like

Anchusooryan (Five Suns), though we began meeting occasionally later, mostly in public functions. Now I began following her poetry closely and read her

later collections like Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1976), The Best of Kamala

Das (1991) and Anamalai Poems (1992). I knew how much she trusted me only when she insisted on my writing the introduction to her collected poems Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. I undertook the mission with genuine involvement,

finding in her poetry unnoticed nuances and muted voices that transcend the

narcissistic obsession with the body and with herself often attributed to her.

This transcendence comes partly from her political engagement and partly from her secular spiritual concerns.

I am a million, million people

talking all at once, with voices

raised in clamour...

I am a million, million silences strung like crystal beads

onto someone else's song...

- these lines seemingly so uncharacteristic of a poet of solitude ever in search

of intimacy betray Kamala Das's intense desire to identify herself with the

silenced victims of oppression, patriarchal as well as political. Kamala Das's

very first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta, broke new ground in Indian

poetry in English dominated until her entry by men from Nissim Ezekiel and

Dom Moraes to Adil Jussawallah and A. K. Ramanujan who had already de

romanticized poetry and liberated it from its earlier flamboyance and verbosity. Here was a voice that was feminine to the core, often confessional in vein, that

spoke uninhibitedly about woman's desire and her unending search for true

love. She had little respect for tradition and yet many traditions went into the

making of her poetry: the rebellious spirituality of the women Bhakti poets, the sonorous sensuousness of the Tamil Sangam poets, the empathy with the

down-trodden and the hatred of violence central to the great poetry of her

mother, Balamani Amma, the melancholy tempered by a larger vision of life

characteristic of the poetry of her uncle Nalappatt Narayana Menon (who was

also the translator, of Victor Hugo; of Havelock Ellis too.) "An Introduction", her most discussed and paradigmatic poem with its defense of her trilingualism, her opposition to male power, her rejection of the traditional roles of the

house-wife and the cook, and her longing for love was a clear announcement

of her arrival on the scene.




I am every woman who seeks love...

I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover

and the beloved. I have no joys which are not yours, no aches which are not yours we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams...

The direct kinship with her reader that she establishes here, the

identification of female physicality with female textuality, similes drawn from

nature, the opposition to feudal norms and man-made hierarchies, the quest for intimacy and an almost clinical exploration of the landscape of the self

and the interrogation of the family as an oppressive institution became the

hallmarks of her writing in the years to come.

Kamala Das denounced the extreme forms of feminism as she could

not imagine a world without men or think that replacing male hegemony with female hegemony would create an egalitarian world; she never wanted

to master anyone including herself. She is deeply aware of her difference as

woman but would see it as natural rather than glorify it. Her Radha melts in

the first embrace of Krishna until only he remains (Radha). In the panic of

surrender, Radha tells Krishna:

Your body is my prison... I cannot see beyond it

Your darkness blinds me

Your love words shut out the wise world's din.

But she also wants to escape:

As the convict studies

his prison's geography I study the trappings of your body, dear love,

for, I must some day find an escape from its snare.

Poetry to her becomes an organic extension of the body as also a means to

ultimately transcend it.

Her poetry soon showed a widening of concerns and an extension of

empathy to embrace the victims of all forms of tyranny and discrimination. If

to begin with the personal was the political for her, later the political became

personal as in her poems like "Delhi 1984," a severe indictment of the genocide of Sikhs in Delhi and the new cult of hatred and senseless violence it implied,

turning "the scriptural chants into a lunatic's guffaw." She denounced terrorism

in no uncertain terms: "If death is your wish, killing becomes/an easy game." In "Toys" too her indictment is unambiguous: "Doomed is this new race of




men who arrive/ With patriotic slogans to sow dead seeds..." The genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka—whose climactic orgy we recently witnessed—grows into a metaphor of collective violence in her poems like "Smoke in Colombo", "After July" and "The Sea at Galle Face Green". She sees here the macabre re

enactment of the first holocaust:

Hitler rose from the dead, he demanded

Yet another round of applause; he hailed

The robust Aryan blood, the sinister

Brew that absolves man of his sins and

Gives him the right to kill his former friends...

(After July)

She bemoans the loss of innocence:

We mated like gods, but begot only our killers.

Each mother suckles her own enemy And hate is first nurtured at her gentle breast...

(Daughter of the Century)

In her last poems old age, death, nothingness and the desire for

transcendence become recurring presences. "At my age there are no longer any

home comings" (Woman's Shuttles). She sees death as "life's obscure parallel." The encounter with physical decay forces the poet to look beyond death into a

state of spirituality that has little to do with conventional religion.

Bereft of soul,

My body shall be bare;

Bereft of body,

My soul shall be bare

(Suicide)

The Annamalai Poems are full of references to this tortuous inward journey. "There is a love greater than all you know/ that awaits you where the road finally ends." Its embrace is truth and she seems to have found this great love in Allah as her poems in Ya Allah testify. She was working on two books in her last

days: From Malabar to Montreal, a collaborative work on women's empowerment and a book on Islam for Harper-Collins. They may still be incomplete, but the tasks she completed in her lifetime are enough to guarantee her a place among the most iconoclastic writers of our time, a beacon and a model especially for

every honest woman writer with a story to tell, a song to sing or a shackle to break.




redefining the genre kamala das

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