Love Poetry of Kamala Das

Kamala Das lends a new dimension to her love poetry by revealing her kinship with an anterior Indian tradition which has its roots in Indian epics. Apart from this, her Nayar ground not only provides a suitable ground but also strengthens the confessional streak of her poetry. Thus the significant aspect of her love poetry is the merger of two traditions – the Indian and the western. It is in this light that an attempt is made here to examine Kamala Das’ love poetry.

Search for love is the principal preccupation of Kamala Das’ poetry. She confesses with utmost candour that she “began to write poetry with the ignoble aim of wooing a man”.¹ As a result love becomes the pervasive theme and it is through love that she endeavours to discover herself. As she concerns herself with various facets of love, her love poetry can be divided into two phases. While in the first phase her obsessive concern with physical love is quite prominent, in the second; her drift towards ideal love can be discerned. By ideal love, she means the kind or relation that exists between the legendary Radha and Krishna. She yearns for such a love which does not impede her impulse to freedom. Her concept of ideal love is embedded, in the poem “The Old Playhouse”,

... Love is Narcissus at the waters’ edge, haunted
By its own lovely face, and yet it must seek at last
An end, a pure, total freedom, it must will the mirrors
To shatter and the kind night to erase the water.

In the narcissistic phase, the lovers do not outgrow their egos which stand as hurdles preventing their merger. They are chained mutations seeking “total freedom”. It is in the second phase of ideal love that the lovers transgress the boundaries of their egos or narrow selves to merge with each other, as such merger ensures total freedom. The poet beholds such an exemplary relation in the love between Radha and Krishna. She surmises herself as Radha who goes in search of Krishna, the ideal lover, in spite of her marriage. This brings into her poetic context the Abhisarika tradition of Sanskrit poetry.² Besides this her uninhibited treatment of love and sex reminds one of Sahaja tradition.³

But in Kamala Das the element of bhakti is absent. Her relation with Krishna is purely human. She confesses, “I was looking an ideal lover. I was looking for the one who went to Mathura and forgot to return to his Radha”. ⁴ Thus the poet lives simultaneously in two worlds, the actual world, where love usually is a synonym for lust, in her words “Skin communicated love”, and the mythical world of Vrindavan.

While there is so much in her poetry which seems to draw from earlier Indian traditions, there are also various shades of physical love described in the confessional mode. This mode of expression suits her as she ventilates her personal experiences and humiliations and also the intensity of her experience. In con­formity with the confessional tradition, she talks in poetic terms about her unpleasant sexual experiences. Inevitably her poems are autobiographical. This lends a kind of authenticity to her poetry which is found lacking in much of love poetry written today. She says, “A Poet’s raw material is not stone or clay; it is her personality”.⁵ Hence the emotional and sexual traumas she ex­periences become the subject matter of her poems. In the initial stages she submits herself to sexual desires and pleasures: “now here is a girl with vast/sexual hungers/a bitch after my own heart”. She is not ashamed to call herself a bitch. Marriage comes as a disappointment to her for “in the orbit of licit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence”.⁶ This failure to get love within the framework of marriage leads her to seek it out­side wedlock. “...beg now at strangers’ doors to /Receive love, at least in small change?”

But very soon she realizes the futility of her search. She finds the remedy worse than the disease. For instance, when she fails to receive love from her husband, she turns to a “band of cynics”. But “they said, each of/Them, I do not love. I cannot love, it is not/In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you ....” What she needs is not kindness but love. They only toy with her body and do not fulfil her psychic needs. They assuage the “skin’s lazy hungers” with a violence and primitiveness described in “Convicts”. “That was the only kind of love/This hacking at each other’s parts/Like convicts hacking, clods./At noon.” Such talking about one’s personal humiliation is typical of a confessional poet. So to save her face she would, “...flaunt, at/Times, a grand, flamboyant lust.” And consequently. “With a cheap toy’s indifference” she entcrs other’s lives, and makes every trap of lust “A temporary home.”

The agony of not finding a true lover and a sense of defeat oppress her and she finds no way out of this limbo of sex. She becomes aware of the fact that reliance on body cannot carry her far enough and it is a trap which prevents her from ex­periencing true love.

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.
(The Prisoner)

She discovers that after all the pleasures the body offers are of cloying and ephemeral nature. A love which flourishes and thrives on body is bound to wither with it and the search for true love in a world of philanderers is a futile exercise. So she turns to the mythical world of Krishna and Vrindavan to seek lasting love and fulfilment. She imagines herself as Radha and finds comfort in the arms of imaginary Krishna. Further she can experience absolute liberty from the rigid social code and the constraints of super ego in the presence of Krishna. In psychological terms, Krishna, as Sudhir Kakar remarks, “encourages the in­dividual to identify with an ideal primal self, released from all social and supper ego constraints. Krishna’s promise, like that of Dionysus in ancient Greece, is one of utter freedom and instinctual exhilaration”.⁷ Contrary to her husband’s love which cribs and confines her, Krishna promises total freedom.

Her grandmother’s younger sister Ammalu, also a poet, exerted a positive influence on Kamala Das. She was a worshipper of Krishna and wrote several poems in His praise. Though she was pretty and eligible, she remained a spinster until her death. She was very faithful to Lord Krishna and, in her last poem she wrote, “My chastity is my only gift to you. Oh, Krishna….” Her writings seem to have “disturbed” Kamala Das very much.

The haunting image of Krishna becomes inseparable. She remembers him on her bridal night and when she is pregnant and also while playing with her son. He appears to her in “myriad shapes” and residers in her consciousness: “....whose blue face is/A phantom-lotus on the waters of my dreams.”

During one of the bouts of her illness, she has a mystical experience. While the fear of death grips her heart, she hears “a low whistling...that sounded like the playing of a flute...”⁸

It is against this ground that one can appreciate the significance of her Krishna poems. “Ghanshyam” depicts vividly the transformation that was wrought in her by her relentless search for love. She realizes that her husband can never establish a rapport with her soul, because “And each time his lust was quietened, And he turned his on me ...” What she seeks is a total merger in her lover. But since it is not feasible in the actual world, she searches for Ghanshyam, the ideal lover. Dis­solution of the individual self and the total indentification is possible only with her mythical lover. This is illustrated by the poem “Radha,” where she somewhat sentimentally depicts the ecstasy Radha experiences in Krishna’s embrace. She cries:

Everything in me
is melting, even the hardness at core
O, Krishna, I am melting, melting
Nothing remains but
you ...

But Radha does not snap her marital ties in spite of her love for Krishna as she considers her corporeal form insignificant. She is contemptuous of her husband who only wants the warmth of her body. The poem entitled “Maggots” embodies Radha’s experience with her husband which is analogous to the predicament of the poet. Radha does not experience rapture in the arms of her husband, but remains as a corpse, indifferent.

At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna    
Loved her for the last time and left ...
That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, what is wrong
On you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
No, not at all but thought, what is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
(Maggots)

Thus Krishna has a therapeutic role to play in the poet’s life. Her thoughts about Him give her relief from the asphyxiating male chauvinism. Another woman poet who wrote on Krishna was Sarojini Naidu. Her collection of poems The Feather of Dawn contains a section entitled Krishna poems. It will be interesting to contrast Kamala Das’ treatment of Krishna motif with that of Sarojini Naidu.

In her poem “Ghanshyam” Sarojini Naidu depicts Krishna not as her lover but as God who is omniscient and omnipotent and is the central principle of this universe.

Thou givest to the shadows on the mountains
The colours of thy glory, Ghanshyam
Thy laughter to high secret snow-fed mountains.
To forest pines thy healing breath of balm.
Thou lendest to the storm’s unbriddled tresses
The beauty and blackness of thy hair...

This poem is written in the form of Stotra, a hymn in praise of God. The tone of the poem suggests the high seriousness of a devotee. She offers the lord not her body like Kamala Das but her “yearning soul”: “O take my yearning soul for thine oblation.”

Kamala Das, on the other hand, considers Krishna as her “mate” who comes to her in “myriad forms” and to whom “In many shapes shall I surrender...I shall be fondled by Him.⁹

In her “Songs of Radha”, Sarojini Naidu describes the restlessness, anxiety and pain Radha experiences in waiting for her lover, Krishna. Her songs are rhythmic and have a musical appeal, while Kamala Das poems are short and highly personal. While spontaneity characterises Sarojini’s poems, brooding and meditation permeate Kamala Das’s poems. In Sarojini Naidu the Radha-Krishna relationship is a metaphor for that between Atman and Brahman; in Kamala Das the relationship, though one of ideal lovers, is realized in human terms, and as such it does not rise to “the divine level.” Sarojini Naidu’s Radha is not anti-sexual, yet sex is not the primary concern in the Radha poems. But in Kamala Das sex implies a “deep and intense relationship” which is not devotional; it is very much human in its concern. Fritz Blackwell rightly observes that the poet’s “concern is literary and existential, not religious; she is using a’ religious concept for a literary motif and metaphor”. ¹⁰

Thus Kamala Das love poems stand apart as they fruitfully combine the indigenous traditions such as Abhisarika and Sahaja and the confessional tradition which is western. Her love poetry is a fine blending of the two different literary traditions.

NOTES

¹ As quoted by K. Indrasena Reddy, The Poetry of Kamala Das: A Study of Her Themes (unpublished M.Phil. thesis). Kakatiya University, Warangal, 1981.
² According to Abhisarika tradition a woman goes to meet her lover braving elements, darkness, etc. She is supposed to be Radha and her lover Krishna. Radha-Krishna relation is considered as metaphoric of Atman-Brahman relation.
^3. Medieval Sahaja poet espoused free love as a means of self-realiza­tion. Kamala Das discussion of her emotional and sexual traumas with exceptional candour reminds R. Parthasarathy of Sahaja tradition. Ref. R. Parthasarathy, “Traditions and Freedom”. The Indian Journal of English Studies, 21 (1981-’82).p. 56.
⁴ Kamala Das, My Story (New Delhi: Sterling. 1976). p 191.
⁵ Ibid. p. 74.
⁶ Ibid. p. 33.
⁷ Sudhir Katkar. The inner world: A Psycho-analytic Study of Child­hood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford, 1981) p. 142.
⁸ Atma Ram “An Interview with Kamala Das”. The Book Maker, 5. No. 6 (June 1978). p. 1.
⁹ My Story, op. cit., p. 208.
¹⁰ Fritz Blackwell. “Krishna Motifs in the Poetry of Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das”, Journal of South Asian Literature, 13. Nos. 1-4 (1977-’78). p. 13.