Theme of Love in Kamala Das's Poetry

Kamala Das (1934-2009) was one of the most distinctive and original of Indian poets writing in English. Although she wrote only six volumes of poems, Das stood out as an Indian English poet by virtue of the sincerity and ―uninhibited frankness of her poetry (Naik 2004:208). Das‘ poetry reveals her concern for woman and search for genuine love. She looks into a woman‘s consciousness and places two aspects before her readers: ―First, the relationship of man and woman the second, the woman‘s quest for true love. She writes poetry because of inner compulsion, a need on the part of the poet to come to grip with her urgent inner problem by externalizing it in poetry ( Kirubahar et. al 2010:98). Quest for love, or rather the failure to find emotional fulfillment through love, is the central theme of Das‘ poetry, and her greatness as a love poet arises from the fact that her love poetry is rooted in her own personal experiences. It is an outpouring of her alienation and sense of frustration. This article makes an attempt to focus on how the poet‘s quest for love develops out of her alienation, by selecting three poems
from her first anthology, Summer in Calcutta.

The greatness of Kamala Das as a poet is often attributed to her love poems, so much so that she is called the queen of erotica. She has indeed written extensively on love and passion. Most of her poems deal with the theme of unfulfilled love and yearning for love. However, she does not belong to the tradition of the English love poets such as Donne and Rossetti. As Ahmed observes, ―But to those readers whose notion of love poetry as a subgenre is shaped by poets like Donne, the Rossetts, Swinburne, Morris and others, Das may prove challenging. The experiences in Das‘ love poems can not be assessed at their face value. She writes of the pains and wounds of love, of the final disillusionment and very seldom of fulfillment in love. Love is a mere dream to be sought for in the world of fantasy and myth. These loveless poems are elegies on the death of love against which even a marriage, often drab and banal to the person, is no insurance (Ahmed 2005 : 79) An alternative to love is death and hence the two finds place in her poetic canvas.

The note of profound anguish in Das‘ poetry issues from her experience of alienation from early childhood. This leads her to an awareness of identity crisis. Her autobiography My Story reveals that she is alienated as a child from her father, a symbol of patriarchy and from her mother who all the time lay on the bed, writing poetry and therefore had no time for the children. She experiences alienation even from her classmates and teachers at the English Boarding school in Calcutta. She depicts her brother and herself in her autobiography as the children of loveless parents. She says, ― Gradually our instincts told us to keep away from limelight (My story P 5). By ‗limelight‘ she means affection, the desire of attention in every child. This painful sense of alienation makes her write sad poems at a very early age about dolls that lost their heads. Thereafter she feels isolated from her own Nair community that understood her. Above all, her premature marriage isolated her grandmother and the Nalapat house, her safe haven. The marriage intensifies her sense of alienation. She soon realizes that the union through the marriage is only a physical union and nothing else. Lust comes in the guise of love - the ―Skin‘s lazy hunger‖. So, the female persona feels betrayed in every way. Alienation inevitably leads to loneliness which is one of the recurrent themes of her poetry. She often gives a visual presentation of this loneliness: ―At three in the morning/ I wake trembling from dreams of a stark white loneliness/Like bleached bones cracking in the desert sun was my loneliness…..(―Ghanashyam‖). However, as a child she is alienated in the company of the ―white children‖. She sinks into the morass of loneliness and remains so through out her life. This alienation is emotional and spiritual. It further intensifies as a result of her humiliation and domination. ―Humiliated at the boarding school by the Britishers and at home by the brutally domineering husband, she becomes a psycho-pathological dwarf: Cowering beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and/ Became a dwarf(―The old play house). (Ahmed 2005:80). Das also feels alienated from the society which has been largely male dominated. Her embracing of Islam in 1999 caused great dismay to many Indians and the Hindus shunned her. However, her poems are the outcome of her intensely felt personal experiences which she express honestly and with great conviction. According to B.K. Das, childhood and memory are the chief sources of her poetry. She has often been compared with such modern confessional poets as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton who made an effective use of the confessional mode to unburden the psychological pressure that overrode their sensibilities. Like the modern poets, she uses the confessional technique to peel off the layers of her self and to reveal the pain, honour, miseries and frustrations that engulf her. In poem after poem, she speaks of her failure in love or need for love. She expresses her experiences and passions with an openness and frankness unusual in the Indian context. She does not advocate free-sex but constantly voices her quest for a relationship which gives both love and security, and which should have been her right from the beginning.

The first published volume of Kamala Das‘ poems Summer in Calcutta (1965) sets the tone for her entire poetic output. The fifty poems of this anthology, except a few, deal with the theme of love or failure of love in her life. The opening poem of this poetical work, ―The Dane of the Eunuchs‖ was written against the background of the poet‘s sudden contact with ―a man who had hurt me when I was fourteen years old (My story, P.15) In this poem she finds an objective correlative in the dance of the eunuchs to represent the theme of suppressed desire within. Dancing eunuchs are a familiar sight in India but in Das‘ poem their whirling movement is contrasted with ‗inner‘ vacuity and so they are mere convulsions.

Das herself suffered from such an ‗emotional‘ vacuity and so her dance is also symbolic of her inner life. The dance of the eunuchs with their wide skirts going round and round, ―cymbals/ Richly clashing and anklets jingling, jingling……… is contrasted with their vacant ecstasy, suggesting a gulf between the external, simulated passion and the sexual drought and rottenness inside. The contrast is sustained all through the poem. The dance of the eunuchs is a dance of the sterile and, therefore, the unfulfilled and unquenchable love of the woman in the poet.

The poem has received considerable critical attention as it strikes the keynote of Das‘ poetry as a whole. The poem is powerful and bold, indeed and displayed an admirable sense of proportion in the use of images and symbols, The poet is greatly successful in creating the impression of summer heat, as successful as Keats was in creating the impression of winter cold in ―The Eve of St Agnes‖:

It was hot, so hot, before the eunuchs came
To dance, wide skirts going round and round, cymbals
Richly clashing and anklets jingling, jingling
. . . . . . . . .
The danced, Oh! They danced till they bled . . .‖

The details of the weather, dancers and set up contribute to build up the atmosphere for the poem. The hot weather is emphasized by the repetition of the word ‗hot‘ and in the second repetition an addition of a prefix ‗so‘ heightens the sense of weather. Indeed, the poem is an organic whole where each detail contributes to the total design.

In another fine lyric, ―An Introduction‖, the poet nicely captures her own metamorphosis: ―I was child, and later they/told me I grew for I became tall . . . Alienation hastens the poet‘s premature transformation from a child into a woman.

As A.N. Dwivedi puts it, ―It (―An Introduction) is highly revealing of the poetess of her political knowledge, of her linguistic acquirements, of her physical growth and marriage, of her sad experience in married life, of her belongingness, of her love to another man, and of her eventual frustration and loneliness‖(Dwivedi 2009:112).The poem begins colloquially with the poet introducing herself as an innocent Indian girl.

I don‘t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
……. ….. …….
….I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in 

Two, dream in one.

But soon there are tensions and conflicts. Though the lyric is concerned basically with the question of human identity, it effectively uses the confessional and rhetorical modes in order to focus in questions relating to a woman‘s and Indian poet‘s identity in English. ―Fit in‖ they said, ―Belong, cried the categorizers‖. But she responds to this by transforming her alienation from ―critics, friends, visiting cousins‖ who says ― Don‘t write in English‖ into a larger and more universal alienation that seems to characterize some of the best literature of our age and is perhaps at the heart of every attempt at self exploration and selfintegration.

First, there is the freedom to choose her own language, and confidence in her creative talent: ―The language I speak/becomes mine‖ and ―It is as human as I am human.‖ Then comes the puzzling adolescence and the pain of growing up. This is followed by a desire to be even with the made world on its own terms, despite the family and social pressures to conform to the traditional feminine role:

―Dress in sarees, be girl/Be wife, they said‖. And finally comes the realization that her experiences are experiences of ever woman:‖ I met a man, loved him. Call/Him not by any name, he is every man...........just as I am every/Woman who seeks love........In sum, there is in this poem both passivity and rebellion against a patriarchal society.

In is right that kamala Das is not always true in outpouring her personal experiences .But she gives in her poetry the emotional equivalents of her own mental states. Emotional and sexual humiliation is the central experience in her autobiography My Story and this humiliation finds poetic expression in ―The
Sunshine Cat‖, published in her anthology Summer in Calcutta. The lyric narrates the life of a forlorn woman who was subjected to much humiliation by her own husband as well as by other men .Her husband was mean and cowardly. He used her sexually but failed to respond to her love. He was beastly and brutal, and the woman in her suffered and felt humiliated. The humiliating experiences keep coming to her mind and they cause her much spiritual suffering.

So painful have been the experiences, the memory so lacerating that at times she feels that she would go mad. Her life has become a bed of tears. She wishes to cut herself off from all contacts with the world of men. But her husband is there and she makes her a prisoner in a room, her only companion being a streak
of sunlight which appeared to her heated imagination to be ‗Yellow Cat‘. Very much like the yellow cat, the woman reconciles herself to the prison of domesticity that her husband has built for her. There is no escape from it and she plays the conventional role of wife. But, though apparently reconciled to her lot,she gradually pines away in grief, becomes lean and thin, a mere shadow of her former self. Such is the lot of a woman in this male-dominated world. She must play the roles she is expected to play as wives and mothers. Nobody cares for their own personality and for their frustrations and disillusionments.

The poet has voiced in this poem her own inner frustrations by using the woman persona as an objective correlative. It is certainly a psychic striptease and the poet has articulated without inhibitions, the hurts she received in a largely man-made world. Dwivedi traces the genesis of this poem to chapter 41 of My
Story. In it Das first complains of the unsympathetic attitude of non-writers towards writers and then of her own aching loneliness:

―I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself
where I wrote stories and poems and become safe
and anonymous. There were books all round
me, but no friend to give me well-meaning advice, ...........‖
Thus she goes on narrating her helpless and hapless situation in her
Bombay home. ―It stresses her utter loneliness and frustration, with no one to
counsel or guide her‖.(Dwivedi 2009:101)

The foregoing discussion amply shows that search for love and alienation are central to the poetry of Kamala Das. No doubt, there are different types of poems in Summer in Calcutta. But majority of the poems have a tone of betrayal and they present the poet as a prisoner of her own loneliness and complex moods. Having failed to find true love in human beings, she turns to the Radha-Krishna myth which receives a highly innovative treatment at her hands in her later poems.

Discussion on Raja Rao's Short Storeis 'The Police Man' and 'The Rose'

Ancient Indian Literature has rich tradition of short story. It has primarily two forms the fable and the folk tale. We see these forms in ―Panchatantral and Kathasaritsagara respectively. A considerable change was seen in the genre short story with the advent of the Britishers in India. Some of the Indians made an attempt to write short story in English. Like their counterparts in the west, they wrote the atmosphere-dominant short stories and the character dominant short stories.

R. K. Narayana and K. Nagarajan in their tales showed a strong streak of autobiographical element in their short stories. In the west, we find Catherine Mansfield and Irish Mordich introducing Metaphysical element also by creating eerie atmosphere in some of their stories. It may be a little exaggeration to say that they may bee categorized under Ckafkesque. In India Raja Rao was the first creative writer to introduced both Metaphysical elements in his short stories. The Police man and the Rose is one such. It is a powerful story of Raja Rao with strong element. We find in 'Autobiographical story the narrator is fore grounded, Cultural symbols are perplexed by personal symbols and the protagonist himself in a complicated obscure metaphysical sense and the writer endeavors to put into it man‘s aspiration and destiny towards the realization of God himself. The theme of the story is primarily metaphysical and is introduced with the quotations from scriptures and other sacred writings of India. The action dealing at once with the eternal and the immediate, the universal and the individual, the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth, moves back and forth,within as well as beyond the bounds of space and time. The reader is not surprised when he is confronted by such material. He may feel that the 'Figure in the carpet' eludes him. He may even feel that to read it through is like treading a maze. The writer finds himself fascinated by the sureness of its tone and vibrant quality of its language. To have a grasp of the story one is supposed to have a knowledge of a Advaita philosophy. The begins thus :
 

When I was arrested my Problem was not me but it. These lines suggest the idea of bondage and the speakers‘ awareness of it. In the next sentence, the theme is universalized. All men are arrested the moment they are born. So are the women. Two major symbols are introduced straight away. The policeman holding men and women assisting them are briefly described. There is a Rose, which is naturalistic and inevitable. The policeman remaining as private symbol. The function of the symbols will soon be dwelt upon. The narrator gives a retrospective account of his life upto his going to Travancore and living the ―retirement‖. The story develops through a series of transactions, encounters and conflicts between them and the protagonist. The narrator is ―I and the ―Policeman. All the experiences described are in the first person narrative. The narrator says!

Every living man has a policeman, And his name is your name, his Address is your address, his Dreams your dreams‖.
 

The protagonist feels that the story of the policeman is his own story. There are apparent contradictions in their distinctive identities. The policeman is in a way an alter-ego, another self of the protagonist. If the policeman is different person from the narrator whom he addresses, then who is he? What does he standfor? In advaitic philosophy the policeman holding ―I‖ in the state of arrest suggests the ego overpowering ―Jiva‖ and thereby hampering its attempts at selfrealization. It is the process of advaita philosophy.
 

The policeman is a familiar figure in the civilized world. He is usually associated with the idea of authority and arrest. To make the story credible, the policeman in this story appears often in his uniform and he is always ready to spring into action. He is given a number also. In the same way the word ―I‖ in the story symbolizes ―Jiva‖ in its empirical outfit. Other details like the upbringing, his illness as a child and the gifts given to him by his grandmother, his several travels in France and India are very graphically described. The narration draws the attention of the readers immediately.
 

Philosophically speaking, so long as the 'Jiva' remains bound by ego and ignorance and it remains in duality. The earth bound ―Jiva‖ grows in its knowledge of his identity and he loses his hold on it. In the absence of such knowledge and with darkness everywhere the policeman becomes monstrous. In fact, he believes that he has attained the knowledge of God and paradise. His actions are drawn by the lure for Holy paradise after death, Girls and all.
 

Jiva takes thee cycle of rebirth until it achieves its liberation following the annihilation of the ego. The world in which there are so many egoistic individuals, becomes the 'police state'. The policeman says that 'he is awake when I am awake, He sleep-dreams as I have wake Sleeps, and he just has no existence In the deep-sleep state‖.

The policeman continues his story 'My policeman' was born thousands and thousands of years ago. He was a native of space and his germwas the atom. The atom played at the cross-roads and created water…..your policeman is naked but he is all blind. These lines show that the policeman is in utter darkness as he doesn‘t have any knowledge of non-dualism. Absence of duality-Atman and Brahman are out and the same.

The policeman arrests the new born child. He urges his victim to seek his freedom, assures him of his deathlessness. In doing so, the policeman seems to become the benefactor of the protagonist. Perhaps the author suggests that the Jiva understands the meaning and value of freedom. Only after experiencing
bondage one seeks liberation. The narrator quotes the example of Ravana who sought death by Rama. He even calls Ravana 'the police Jamedar‘. If the policeman is the ego, the police-Jamedar becomes the super-ego which cares for values and ideals. In that case Ravana may be called the police-Jamedar. The narrator uses the Ravana-Rama myth to exemplify the urge in the self to seek the eradication of the ego through the attainment of true knowledge which alone frees the self from the dualities of earthly existence and from the cycle of free birth. This myth also serves as a means to connect the present with the past and the protagonist narrator with the mythical and epic characters in the past, since he claims to have been once a contemporary of Rama and Ravana. After giving a brief account of different places, the narrator talks about the contacts with the child :

At night policeman sits beside you and tells you, child, you know what that is – it is me. It is all me. Don‘t worry.

The protagonist protests that he does not understand his meaning. The policeman urges him to give up the travel. The protagonist makes a long journey to understand 'self'. He gets his major experience of duality when he gets involved with a woman whom, he has to marry. In a bid to free himself from this bondage, he 'jumps the wall‘, flees his country India and goes to 'the western world,-world of honour and liberty‘. His self enquiry begins. He comfortably reaches France, the crown of flowers, on the Queen of Reason a rock dear France of liberty. Perhaps this suggests his search for release from the dualities through a strictly rational, intellectual inquiry.

The protagonist experiences his dualities on he marries a woman. In self inquiry, he goes to France. With the growing of the policeman two inches small, he feels that the policeman lost his hold on the protagonist. No doubt he accompanies the narrator even in France. He becomes a divine person receiving
recognition from all. Suddenly he grows bigger that the narrator and goes back to India. His Virtue would now have confirmation, my miracles have rupee value, my mouth world smell of fresh roses.
 

For the first time there is a reference to ‗rose‘. It is here that his spiritual quest in its second phase is to be seen. He makes his way to Travancore,‘ the sanctuary of the Beacon‘. It is here that he falls ill and goes through‘. Unexpectedly a nightmarish experience which helps him to move a step towards his final spiritual enlightenment. He wakes up from his sleep and finds himself surrounded by crowds and lizards. This extraordinary experience makes him realize that he is neither a 'divinity‘ nor 'God‘, but only a policeman who is under arrest‘ and who would be discharges when the time came. The policeman accompanies the protagonist in Paris. This is described through the eyes of the protagonist sees in Paris and elsewhere. The irresistible fascination and its variety exert on him. Again the distinction between the two gets narrowed down and even becomes blurred for sometime as the protagonist who happens to acquire certain occult powers in his practice of ―Yoga as a means to spiritual enlightenment. He performs miracles, effects, cures, deals in portions, foretells the future, listens to confessions from virgins and promises enlightenment. God becomes his business and he thrives remarkably in this trade.He becomes famous and also wins recognition. He is called ‗the policeman of God‘. Soon this policeman of God himself becomes 'a legitimate divinity‘. This marks the Ultimate ………… reached by the protagonist, when he is hardly distinguishable from his policeman. No wonder that the policeman who had grown 'small‘ now grows bigger. The policeman urges the protagonist to grow up and travel. One notices the travel ‗motif‘ here which symbolizes his quest for knowledge.

With this realization he goes back to Avignon to sell his 'shop‘ and clear his 'debts‘. He appears to his former disciples and admires as a different person. 'You smell differently, you are too funnily clothed for words'.
 

He notices a perceptible change in him. He finds his followers to be ignorant. To his dismay they make him offer flowers to his own statue. So he leaves France for good, thoroughly dissatisfied with the role he has played so far. While most other seekers would have stopped with the attainment of occult powers, the protagonist continues his quest. Even after returning from America, Japan and France, he comes back to India once again and pays, a visit to Travancore. The protagonist asks the questions, ‗why Travancore‘? and immediately gives an answer :

For there you have Two Feet and a Rose‖. Travancore is not a very big city. The significance of this place can be related to Raja rao‘s own preoccupation with it and his own pilgrimage in 1943 to Trivandrum to meet his spiritual mentor, sage Atmananda Guru. The protagonist journey to Travancore is no ordinary travel but a pilgrimage earnestly undertaken. In a metaphysical fancy towards his journeys end he grows 'Two Feet', not as a mere intellectual inquirer or a miracle man as he was at one time, but as one who would surrender himself in humility to his mentor. The need for a guru felt with a extraordinary urgency brings him to Travancore. Appropriately, he places the rose of realization he has brought alongwith him at the ―Feet in Worship which suggests his surrender to the Lord‘ through whose meditation he has to free himself of all attributes of his ego which have clogged his soul. There is a need for an explication of the use of the two roses. At one level the red rose is a medieval symbol of romance and its chivalric aspects of passion and compassion. The ―white rose‖ symbolizes an aesthetic Indian corollary of a European ideal of love or beauty or truth.

For an aesthetic enjoyment of the story it is not necessary to fix any single meaning to the story. Though the story has number of advaitic echoes, we enjoy it even without reference to the advaitic matrix, philosophically, the dual narration the ―I and the ―Policeman‖ is a cultural specimen of an Indian kind. Both his aspects are products of Godhead and or in quest of God here. Perhaps their duality is intended to reflect the truth of illusion. The ―I is a confident advisor of God. The policeman‘ is one becoming many. His account of the past includes his vegetable incarnation in the think of Rama. So, ―it illustrates the victory of ideal truth over impermanent beauty.

Raja Rao has received due acclaim for his infusion of metaphysical element in Indian short story in English. His ―India- A Fable and ―The policeman and the Rose‖ are fraught with the metaphysical concerns. In these, he experiments with language, symbolism, cross cultural narratology, philosophy and romance. One is naturally reminded of the dictum :

Literature as anything but a
Spiritual experience is outside
My perspective‖.

These two stories illustrate not only the oldest of themes (The enigma of Truth) and the Paradox of Paradox (the nondualist School of Vedantha) they also focusOn the Philosophical faith which Constitute an essence of metaphysical Fiction. These two stories appear simple but they are very deep.

Experiences of the Indian Women in Kamal Das‟ Poems: A Feminist Reading

Colonial custom and practice stemmed from a World view which believes in the absolute superiority of the non-human and the sub-human, the masculine over feminine, and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage. In recent times, feminist scholarship originates and participates in the larger efforts of feminism to liberate women from the structures that have marginalized women as such, it seeks to redefine ideas of male and female. Feminists claim that literature bears the stump of male domination. A major portion of literature has been written from the male point of view either by ignoring or suppressing women‘s point of view. The ideology is inscribed and it is produced and reproduced in cultural practice. Feminists examine experiences of the women from all races, classes and cultures. The traditional images of women as on evil force, a temptress, an inferior being, and as an impediment in man‘s spiritual path have been totally discarded in favour of a more human, egalitarian image mainly due to the efforts of the feminist and the male humanists.

This paper proposes to highlight Kamala Das‘ assertive voice for the rights of women and explicate her attacks on the convention-ridden Indian society by subverting the traditional roles of a woman. Kamala Das suffered ‗double colonization‘ – one form from European domination and then separately she was
domination, exploited and apprised as a women and wife. Her poetry may be labeled as the poetry of protest which is direction against the poetry of protest which is directed against the injustices and the persecution to which women in India have always been subjected.

In the select poems, 'An Introduction,‘‘ 'Old Play house,‘‘ 'The freaks,‘‘ Luminol,‘‘ 'The Sunshine Cat‘‘ and 'A Feminist‘s Lament‘‘ from the collection 'Only the Soul Knows How to Sing‘, she pleads for the liberation of her sisterhood from the clutches of the sex-obsessed World of the domineering male.

Kamala Das has created a permanent place for herself in the contemporary Indian English poetry. She is one of the most popular poets of India who has gained space even in the West. Like Jane Austen, Kamala Das moves within her limited range with grace and skill. She is a Feminist blazing a new trial of emancipation for the Indian women. She is called the poet of the body for she is the first to speak frankly about sex. Das uses of franker, more pervasive anatomical imagery. She is against the conventional. She, by her bold confessions and iconoclastic attitudes towards taboos , emerges as a Western Oriented Indian women-on emancipated women-coming to terms with her modern existence even within the background of her Hindu ethos. She is feminist poet who in Showalter‘s terms-‗tries to be biological, to write from the critic‘s (her) body, has been intimate, confessional, often innovative in style and form‘ (314). Her attacks on senseless restrictions and conventions implore for the liberation of her sisterhood
from the clutches of the conventional roles set by the sex obsessed word of domineering male. Amritta Pritam of Panjab is her Indian counterpart in her passionate plea for the emancipation of women from the dominant male ego.

Das‘ poems reveal her protest against the conventions of the society and the constraints and restriction which husbands or society in general impose upon women. She made her poetry a vehicle for the expression of her resentments against all males because of her sad and bitter experience of her indiscriminate sexual relationships with a large number of men. She strove to establish her identity as a women through her poems, and she, infect, tried also to impart an identity to Indian women as a neglected class of Indian society. As a critic, Shayam Asuani says, hers is a fiercely feminine sensibility which articulates without inhibitions the hurt it has received in an insensitive and largely man-made world. She may be regarded as the champion of the rights of women‘s who sits upon breaking the chains of slavery. 

Das, in the poem, ‗ An introduction‘‘, portrays herself as a liberated modern women. The way she handles IndianEnglish with all its peculiar traits is as personal as she puts it: 'The language I speak Become mine …….All mine, mine alone‘‘(12). She is not happy about the critics, comment that writing in English is not appropriate to her as writing in her mother tone. She is not bothered about the critics. Like a true feminist, she asserts her individuality and does not brother about being accused of using a language half English and half Indian :

It is half English, half Indian, human perhaps, but it is honest, it is as human as I am human, don‘t you all? It voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing is to crows or roaring to the lions, it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and is aware (12-20).

Das feels at each with the English language and identifies is as the language of her past experience she raises her voice against the concept of early marriage to a man. With agony she says,……………he drew a youth of sixteen into the Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me my sad women body felt beater.

Her body has shrunk at the onslaught of her lover‘s lust. Her psychological and physical yearnings are not fulfilled whereas she is compelled to fulfill the needs of her husband. This experience make her react like a rebel. She against the convention ridden Hindu society which insists on her accepting a name, a role and a function. She hurls defiance at the do‘s and don‘t‘s inflicted upon her by the traditional society.

In the 'Old playhouse‘‘, Das exposes a love that seeks fruition through the fulfillment of the skin‘s lazy hungers‘‘ (12). She lances a strident attack on the social exploitation of women by man to station his carnal cravings. She approaches her husband considering him her lover with an intention to perceive her real self : ‗ I came to you but to learn/ what I was‘‘ (6-7). On the contrary, wherever she turns she finds the sex obsessed and dominant male World. Das is against the male egotism when she writes :

You were pleased With my body‘s response, its weather, its usual shallow convulsions. 

You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you powered yourself into every nook and cranny, you
embalmed my poor lust with your bitter- sweet juices(8-12).

The poetic persona feels that her husband, not bothering about her feelings, indulges in such things only to satisfy his needs. She makes a virulent attack on the constraints of conjugal life, the snares of domesticity as suggested by the phrase- tame a swallow‘‘. The ‗swallow‘, stand that her sense of freedom is stifled in this largely male dominated married life. She feels as if she customary subordination of the female sex to the male.

Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Become a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled in coherent replies (14-17).

The domineering male ego suppresses the women who become dwarf‘ and the poet considers that all men‘s techniques are similar. This autobiographical poem thus expresses a voice against the pressure of domesticity and against the male domination in the routine of family life. In another poem The Freaks‘‘ the poet protests the fulfillment of sexual urge and refuses to identify ‗‘skin‘s lazy hunger‘ with love Hence she asked the following significant question :

…………… Can this man with
Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin‘s lazy hunger?(9-12)

The poet‘s male partner in this poems is a man sun stained cheek. He is a womanizer as his sun stained cheek symbolizes his frequent visit to different women at different times. Her male partner cannot surge on wings of love since he is rooted bodily responses whereas she is extremely doubtful whether he can be her match in her hunger for the higher riches of fulfillment.In Kamala Das‘s vision womanhood involves certain collective experience. Indian women are expected to be docile and not allowed to express their agony. Kamala Das consistently refuse to longing and loss as collected experience.

In the poem 'Luminol‘‘ the poet registers her protest against the skin communicated‘‘ ecstasies as they cases to gratify the earning of the souls. The poet longs for an escape from the sex obsessed world of man through pills into a beautiful state of sleep. She suggests that the higher reaches soul can be attained
only by an instance fulfillment through love and not through lust. The inner agonies expressed in the poem are not nearly those of Kamala Das, but of entire women folk.

In The Sunshine Cat‘‘ Das describes a specific case of abuse of a woman. The title suggests a yellow cat. It was not nearly a cat but a near streak of sunshine which spilled into the room when her husband kept her contained in a room. He could confine only her physical body. Her husband shut her

In, every morning; locked her in a room of books
With streak of sunshine lying near the door, like
A yellow cat. (14-17)

However clever the husband may have been, he could not stop the spirit‘s flight from her body. On the contrary, one day when he retuned, he had found her ‗cold and half-dead‘‘. To the world outside, she is sunshine cat appearing always happy with all physical comforts. In reality she is a yellow cat, a deceased cat. The denial of freedom and fulfillment has taken away all her charm, youth and beauty. In ‗A feminist‘s Lament‘‘ Das raises her voice against the concept of ‗I deal women‘. She begins the poem with a charge: ‗An ideal women, they said was but/ a masochist.‘‘ Masochist is a person who gets pleasure in her own pain or humiliation. An ideal women is supposed to be:

Trained from infancy
To wear the flannel of cowardice

Next to her skin, trained to lie inert
Under a male, committed by vows
To feed her, clothe her and buy for her
The 1000 sq ft flat with a loft
For storing the debris of passing years.

Das laments at the curtailment of freedom of the so called ideal women who seem to live with all comforts. As the title suggests, she laments about the helpless state of the woman. She urges every woman to the courageous and not to be a coward and asks, ―What was co urge with /at the very end.

Kamala Das, a revolutionary poet, has thus started the trend towards frankness in the treatment of the subject. Every poem of her has come directly from her heart and is based on an actual personal experience. Though such open hearted expression of her sense of insecurity and helpless, she legitimizes her feminine ego and her female identity. In her poems she expresses her desires to seek a pure and total freedom for the whole society and articulates the anguished assertive voice of woman who is silenced by the conversation ridden society.

The Portrayal of the Lower Class People in Mulk Raj Anand's Novel Untouchable

One of the prime concerns of a great author is to highlight the cause of the dumb and the deserted, the lowly and the lost of an adverse society. The author also flings a harsh irony on the snobbery and hypocrisy, ostentation and fabrication of the aristocratic people who, sometimes stoop low to achieve the end. A writer, the prince of the pen, is the true voice of the million mass particularly of the untouchable and the vulnerable victimized by undeserved tyranny and injustice from the time immemorial. And this is what prompted Mulk Raj Anand to present the deplorable description of the destitutes. Anand‘s novel Untouchable expresses his great advocacy of the marginalized and defenseless against their age long humiliation, persecution and oppression. Anand himself observes :

“All these heroes as the other men and the women who had emerged in my novels… were dear to me because they were the reflections of the real people I had known during my childhood and youth. And I was only repaying the debt of gratitude I owed them for much of the inspiration –they had given me to mature into manhood, when I began to interpret their lives in my writings. They were not phantoms. They were the flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood and obsessed me in the way, in which certain human beings obsess an artist‟s soul. And I was doing no more than what a writer does when he sees to interpret the truth from the realities of his life.”

Untouchable, the author‘s tour de force, peeps into the life of an untouchable, Bakha, the protagonist who, represents the misery and inhuman treatment of the crushed and the have-nots before Independence. It also shows how an outcast has to lead a life meaner than the animals; how inspite of his virtue, he has to tolerate insult and abuse, ―fret and fever‖ some times on cause and sometimes without cause; how he feels like a caged bird that flutters its wings for a free flight. The novelist narrates a single day‘s events in the life of Bakha, an eighteen years old boy. He is the son of Lakha, the sweeper. Through this two prominent characters, the author hammers hard on the caste-conflict; a conflict which constitutes the core of Hindu religion and procures an obstacle in the path of peace and prosperity. Though this dangerous disease of caste-conflict was on its summit before Independence, it is still seen much or less in almost every state of India. The untouchables, the socially isolated people who form the most vital part of a nation have to lead a deplorable and miserable life beyond description. E. M. Forster rightly holds the view:

“The sweeper is worse off than a slave, for the slave may change his master and his duties and may even become free, but the sweeper is bound for ever, born into a state from which he can‟t escape and where he is excluded from social intercourse and the consolation of his religion. Unclean himself he pollutes other when he touches them…..”

As the novels opens, we see Bakha receiving so many derogatory epithets by Lakha, e.g. „son of a pig‟ (P.15), „you illegally begotten‟ (P.1), „scoundrel of a sweeper son‟ etc. We also get the detail description of the uncongenial surrounding where Bakha has to live:

“The absence of a drainage system had, through the rains of various season, made of the quarter a marsh which gave out the most offensive smell.” (P.11).

He goes to clean the latrine of Habilder Charat Singh, the famous Hockey player of the 38th Dogras regiment. He works quickly but earnestly and as such Mr. Singh promised to give him a hockey stick and Bakha was overcomed by the man‘s Kindness. Through this episode of hockey stick the author wants to point out the inner urge of the untouchable which seems to be covered with the “dead leaves” or “the sapeless foliage” (P.B.Shelley‘s phrase in Ode to the West Wind). The kindness of Mr. Charat Singh unfurls the layers of dead leaves and thus “the winged seeds” which are suppressed for the ages, begin to sprout and bloom.

In the Well Incident, Anand tries to show the water problem among the untouchables. The feeling of untouchability was so powerfully engraved in the mind of the upper castes that they never permitted the untouchables to fetch water from the public well. They were not allowed to touch even the brook or pond as they would contaminate stream. They had no well of their own because it cost a lot of money. They had to wait hours beside the well had to request the upper caste to pour water in the pitchers. This piteous plight of the untouchables reminds us of the Booker Prize author, Arundhuti Roy, who presents a similar attitude in her debut novel, The God of Small Things. Velutha, like Bakha, in this novel, is not allowed to enter the house of the upper castes. They weren‘t allowed to touch anything that Touchables touched. It is interesting to note that Roy‘s portrayal of Velutha is somewhat different form that of Bakha. The emotions full of rage and anger don‘t find any place in the character of Velutha. He never tries to hammerthe age old norms of society and tradition.

Once Bakha inadvertently touched a caste Hindu in the market. The caste men became so furious that they began to chide him by dint of abusive language e.g. „swine dog‟, you brute‟, „dirty dog‟, etc. Bakha continued to listen to their insults and humiliation but he never opened his mouth. He bent down his forehead and mumbled something. But all his requests fell flat on them. The other man sitting there also began to hiss like a snake. Bakha was surrounded by the crowd of the people. He was so confused that he was dumb-founded. He felt he should run, just to shoot across the throng away from this unbearable torment. But inspite of his earnest apologies, crowd was sadistic in watching him covered with abuses and curses. Fortunately, a Muslim tonga-wallah rescued him from this critical juncture. What an irony! A Hindu humiliating a Hindu but a Muslim consoling him. This episode created a furrow in the gentle mind of the untouchable, Bakha, whose smoldering rage broke like a volcano eruptions:

“Why are we always abused? The santry inspector that day abused my father. They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That‟s why, I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines everyday. That‟s why they don‟t touch us, the high caste.” (P.58)

It is to be noted that untouchability is one of the greatest evils of our country. The untouchables have been bearing brunt of social persecution from the time immemorial. In the “Manusmriti”, the law book of Hindu social code and domestic life, we see the pathetic plight of the untouchable, who are deprived of gaining knowledge particularly the Vedic knowledge. An untouchable, this book says, has no right to go to the temples; no liberty to listen to the incantations of the Vedas or the other great scriptures. They are also deprived of the right of reading and studying the language, Sanskrit which is supposed to be the richest language of the world. And this resulted in the deterioration of this language which has come to almost a standstill these days. So one of the causes of the degeneration of the Sanskrit language is untouchability and perhaps this is why Mahama Gandhi and Dr. Ambedkar, R.N. Tagore and Swami Vivekananda, Maharshi Dayanand – all have given a scathing attack on the casteist mentality of India. Mahatma Gandhi even went to the extent of saying the untouchable “the Horizon”; that is, the man of God. Truly speaking, the caste division mentioned in the Vedas (Purush Sukta: Sukta 90:12) and in the Srimad Bagavad Gita (IV, 13) was not to create breaches among various castes but to run the society easily and smoothly.

The fault of casteism arose through misinterpretation of our scriptures. The Temple Incident of Untouchable flings a harsh and rugged satire on the hypocrisy and ostentations of the upper caste people like Pandit Kali Nath who, though hates the untouchables, yet invites Mohini, the sister of Bakha, to the temple in order to quench his carnal thirst. He makes improper suggestion to her. On her denial he begins to shout – „polluted, polluted, polluted‟. Anand strongly believes in the uplifttment of the downtrodden specially the untouchable. His primary concern as a novelist is to present a humanitarian compassion for the Dalit and the deserted. He himself admits:

“I hope for a world in which the obvious primary degradation of poverty has been completely removed. So that man can have enough food, clothing and shelter to grow up as strong and healthy human beings, physically and mentally and pro-create a fine race to people the universe……. I want this for all men and women, irrespective of race, colour or creed with special provisions for planned health and housing facilities for the backward and extraspecial provisions for the care of the very old and the very young.” And this is what the novelist has sought to express in Untouchable. To crown the effect, he has introduced even Mahatma Gandhi as a character in the novel who delivers a lecture against untouchability, superstitions and other evils fomenting the nation from the time immemorial. Bakha feels delighted when Gandhi gives the appellation of „Horizon‟, sons of God to the ‗bhangis‟ and „chamars‟. Bakha is richly influenced by his words:

“The fact that we address God as „purifier of the polluted souls makes it a sin to regard any one born in Hinduism as polluted – it is satanic to do so. I have never been tired of repeating that it is a great sin. I don‟t say that this thing crystallized in me at the age of 12, but I do say that I did then regard untouchability as a sin.” (p.164)

Thus, the speech of Gandhi littered with humanistic compassion and motherly affection acts like the balm on the wounds of the protagonist, who longs for asserting his identity in a caste-dominated societal framework. It is his powerful advocacy that consoles Bakha‘s long suppressed heart fractured by remorse and despairs. Consequently the ray of hope and patience descends in his life.

This brief survey aptly shows that Anand‘s primary business as a writer of fiction is to attack the social snobbery and prejudice, superstitions and untouchability. He seems to urge for an attitude full of love and sympathy for the millions mass living under the poverty line and leading a life worse than an animal. This way his attitude is tantamount to G.B. Shaw and Tolstoy, Balzac and Zola, Sarat Chandra and Prem Chand. In the history of Indo-Anglian fictions the credit at first goes to Mulk Raj Anand who identifies himself with the weak and the vulnerable, the hated and the insulted.

From the foregoing discussions, it is clear that Mulk Raj Anand is a novelist with some notions; a novelist who seems to have taken a hammer in his hand to blow hard on the dead customs and misleading traditions, a novelist whopleads for those unnoticed pearls and diamonds which “the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.”

Study/Discussion Questions on The Guide by R.K Narayan

1.Bring out the typical Indian scenes and situations in R.K Narayan’s The Guide.

2. How does  Narayan deal with the theme of love and sex in the novel?

3. Write a note on the theme of family relationships in The Guide.

4. What is the significance of  the title,  The Guide?

 

5. Write a note on R.K Narayan’s art of characterization with a particular reference to The Guide.

6. Examine  Narayan’s  conception of the hero, with reference to The Guide.

7. Write a note on Narayan’sntreatment of female character.

8. Comment on the simplicity  and clearity of Narayan’s style.

9. Write a note on the use of humour, wit, irony and satire in The Guide.

10. Discuss, with special reference to The Guide, “Narayan’s major novels are serious comedies.

11.  Discuss the structure and plot of The Guide.

12. Discuss the  use of parallelism in The Guide.

13. Discuss the  use of double-narration in The Guide.

14. To achieve his aim R.K Narayan uses symbols effectively. Explain it with reference to The Guide.

15. Raju is neither passive nor an agent. He acts and is acted upon. Explain.

16. “Raju is neither totally good nor bad.” Substantiate.

17. Elaborate “ Raju is a complex and tragic figure, the most interesting and moving of Narayan’s heroes.

18. Bring out the lapses of Raju which caused his downfall and comment on them.

19. Elaborate the factors that created a rift between Raju and Rosie.

20. Substantiate, “ It is the fundamental unity of Indian society which enables Velan and Raju to communicate with each other so easily”.

21.  To what extent is it valid to say that Raju’s decision to observe the fast earnestly is the triumph of Velan.

22. “ He presented my case as a sort of comedy in three acts, in which the chief villain was Macro.” Elaborate and comment. 

23. Bring out the picaresque element in The Guide.

24. Discuss Narayan’s characterization of minor characters in The Guide.