The Aesthete: An e-Journal of Department of English & Foreign Languages
ISSN: 2455-5770 | Volume 1
| January 2016 |
Pp- 78-83
ISSN______
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Volume 1
|
September 2015
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Kamala Das: A Literary Journeyin Searchof True Love
Pp-
--- Dr.RashmiVerma
Assistant Professor
Ram-Eesh College
Greater Noida, U.P
“Indian author who inspired women struggling against domestic and sexual oppression
with her honest assessments of sexual desire and marital problems”(The Editors of
Encyclopedia Britannica)
The present paper is an attempt to focus on the search of true love by Kamala Das. She is
a writer, poet and a keen observer but her aim is to do something different in her life. She wants
to spend her life not like an ordinary person but to give something to this world with her own
identity as a female. She was born in Malabar in the maritime state of Kerala. She is the first
Hindu writer who gives her thoughts on the desires of female. Her aim is to stand as an
unbreakable stone in front of the male society which always deny the importance of the feelings
of a woman. Man always does whatever he needs, if he wants to fulfill his carnal desires then he
can do with any female without knowing about his relation with lady. He only believes in sex not
in love. But here first, time in India, a female raises her voice against of the male tendency and
she gives her views on this subject which really attached directly to the female’s heart.
Through this paper I am going to focus on the Kamala Das’sstrongest desire of true love.
In her whole life she fights and struggles for love which is just not physical but intellectual. Her
life starts at the age of fifteen where she knows about both kind of love physical or intellectual.
She marries a man who is mature man not by mind but by age also. A girl is innocent, without
knowing the meaning of marriage, wife, husband, sex, love or any other custom of a married life.
But her whole life changes suddenly, her way of wearing cloths, way of talking, and way of
living. She explains her inner conflicts through her poem as
“Darkness to bring it here to lie behind my bedroom door like a brooding Dog…you
cannot believe, darling, can you that I lived in such a house and was proud, and loved…I
who have lost my way and beg now at strangers doors to receive love, at least in small
change?”(Poem: My Grandmother’s House)
Her whole life has changed and she is in this confusion that what is happening with her,
she is unable to understand the things properly.
Kamala Das is a writer who mainly writes about the male-female relation and search true
love between both of them as she belongs to a very conservative family and this is the reason of
her early marriage. At the age of playing with toys, she becomes mother. Her husband who is
enough elder then her with a mature body and stronger sexual desire, a man who is ready to eat a
woman without knowing about her mental and physical stage. Few lines can explain her state of
mind.
“It is her brutal frankness of her verse that shocked and attracted readers. Kamala writes
about sexual frustration and desires, of the suffocation of an arranged love-less marriage,
of numerous affairs, of the futility of lust, of the shame and sorrow of not finding love
after repeated attempts, of the loneliness and neurosis that stalks women especially.”
In search of true love this is a topic by which all women can convince because they all
are in same race. Kamala Das spend her whole life to find out the reality of love. She does not
find true love from her husband with whom she intimate every night but every time she fails to
contact her soul with him. She feels like freaks that are doing nonsense activities. She expresses
her feelings in her poem “The Freaks”
“His right hand on my knee, while our minds are willed to race towards love; But they
only wander, tripping idly over puddles of Desire… can this man with Nimble finger-tips
unleash Nothing more alive than the Skin’s lazy hungers? Who can help us who have
lived so long and have failed in love? The heart, an empty cistern, waiting through long
hours, fills itself with coiling snakes of silence… I am a freak. It’s only To save my face,
I flaunt, at Times, a grand, Flamboyant lust”(Poem: The Freaks)
Every man come and go in her life but nobody satisfied her soul. Her search is for true
love of man. According to her physical love is important instead of inner love. But her priority is
inner love. She has affair with male and female in her life. She has thirst of love that’s why she is
running behind blindly for love without thinking anything. This we can see when she explains
her experience in her my story.
“The Lesbian admirer came into our room once when Sharada was away taking a bath
and kissed her pillowcasesand her Indies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on
my bed watching this performance but she was half-crazed with love, and hardly noticed
me.”
Her whole journey of life is to invent a man who really love her not her body. This is a
mystery that a man who is intelligent, smart, handsome, strong but still needs love of a woman
does not matter her love is for giving physical fulfillment. A man comes towards a stronger lady.
About whom he does not know anything but he can involve with her physically. But on the other
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side for woman its not possible that without love she feels like an unwanted object which used at
the time of need by a man. She says two people intimating with each other is like freaks.
“The men who know her, the man she loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish and
a coward, the husband who neither loved nor used her, but was a ruthless watcher”(Poem:
The Sunshine Cat)
Kamala Das is eager for love. She is borne in March 31, 1934, Thrissur, India and died
May 31,2009in Pune. Who inspires women struggling against domestic and sexual oppression
with her honest assessments of sexual desire and marital problems in more than 20books. In her
family she is feeling ignored and unloved. Her family marries her with a man when she is not
able to define different relations of man.
“I was child and later they told me I grew, for I become tall, my limbs swelled and one or
two places sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask for, he
drew a youth of sixteen into the Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me but my
sad woman-body felt so beaten.”(Poem: An Introduction)
She is totally opened her heart in front of the readers in her poems. Basically, she has
crave for love and at the age of 15 she married a man who is totally unaware of the inner feelings
of Kamala Das. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which is true in the case
of Kamala Das because she writes everything whatever she faces in her life.
“Her husband shut her In, every morning, locked her in a room of books with a streak of
sunshine lying near the door like a yellow cat to keep her company, but soon winter
came, and one day while locking her in, he nautical that the cat of sunshine was only a
line, a half-thin line and in the evening when he returned to take her out, she was a cold
and half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.”(Poem: The Sunshine Cat)
Every man who come and show her love after some time she recognizes their love only
for fulfilling the carnal desires. Which is not love which is hunger of body and like our hunger of
belly we can full fill with the help of any kind of food which is easily available. So, hunger of
bellow the belly is like that and when we think about love then we can say love is a feeling
which meets soul and body together, which a person can feel for a particular person. So, every
where she finds only deep eyes of woman hunter but not find anyone in her life. So, according to
her man is always think about the things which are related to body attraction.
“I met a man, love him. Call him not by any name, he is every man who wants a woman,
just as I am every woman who seeks love. In him… the hungry haste of rivers , in me…
the ocean’s tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and everyone, the answer is, it is i.
anywhere and everywhere, I see the one who calls himself I.”(Poem: An Introduction)
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Kamala Das finds out the dark reality of the human nature. In which reality of society
comes out that a man only wants physical satisfaction from a woman. If a man come close to a
woman it means he feels attraction of her body parts not her soul. On the other side a female
become intimate with a man only to whom she has some feelings about. But where she finds a
man who only loves her soul not her body.
It’s true that it’s a natural truth in which we cannotinterfere. It’s a process of life through
which a life move on. But a man is always practical about this truth and female always try to find
out her soul mate with whom she can spend her whole life.
“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 only with words that curl
their limbs at Touch of air and die with metallic sighs, while 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 betrayal arms…”(Poem: A Relationship)
Kamala Das is running like a small child for love. She is a deep person but her depth is
not understood by anyone. She fights for the purity of love but still society blames her that she is
so shameless and opened all the private things. But her inner suffocation is so high. She feels
insulted when she treats by a man like a puppet. Whenever she finds a new man with different
attitude her hopes become so powerful but ends like same. Her all study and experiments on this
issue proves her that male is a practical creature who lives his life just for fulfilling his own
desires. She feels so strange that if a man is not loved by female, he pressurizes her for intimacy
then what he gets from that. A female who wants some sensuous talk and care from her partner
instead of body pleasure then what is wrong with a man who is ready to intimate with any
woman and marriage is legal certificate for a man.
Life is complicated thing and Kamala is trying to define it with her own terms. Her main
focus is to give respect to female; who is very important part of the society a male? Her
questions are so strong and real but her questions are still questions because man is as usual as he
behaves with a female. A female who gives life to the society, to the relation is still fighting for
her proper place. So, many questions arise in her mind related to the position of a female. If man
is not survive without the interference of the female, if man and woman both are equally
responsible for new life, if a female is the only one who take care a baby inside her. Then why
she is not for love, why she plays a role of object for man.
Her writing is like chapters of her whole life whatever she experiences. She tells about
intimacy of man and woman. A female who wants true love without lust, that she expresses
through her writing. When she comes in contact with her husband she feels a man with lots of
hunger. But she is the only one who is hungry for love. When they meet at the night, she does
not know anything about man, woman relationship but still she is forced to do the things because
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of family and society. Her feelings are not free, her love is not free, her body is a object for that
man to whom her family is giving her, but what about her feelings of freedom. Means, she is
feeling so suffocated because which kind of life she has even no freedom for her feelings. She is
pushing forcefully towards a man and its her duty to fulfill his objective and subjective
requirements.
“New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her face into smells and their
young lusts to forget oh, to forget, and they said, each of them, I do not love, I cannot
love, It is not in my nature to love, I cannot love, it is not in my nature to love.”(Poem:
Love)
In love she explains her inner conflict that“The sad lie of my unending lust. Where is room, excuse or even need for love, for, is not
each embrace a complete thing, a finished jigsaw, when mouth on mouth, I lie, ignoring
my poor Moody mind, while pleasure with deliberate gaiety.”(Poem: In Love)
“For moonless nights, while I walk the verandah sleepless, a million questions awake in
me, and all about him, and this skin-communicated thing that I dare not yet in his
presence call our love.”(Poem: In Love)
In 1999 she converts to Islam, renaming herself Kamala Suraiya. Her poems are
explanation of her journey. Her quest for love and the failure to find emotional fulfillment
through love, is the central theme of Das’s poetry. Most of her writings deal with the theme of
unfulfilled love and yearning for love. At that old age when she decides to change her religion
because of love. Her thirst for love is so deep that at end part of life when not only woman but
man became tired she is still walking on the path of searching her true love. When she meets
with a man who is muslim by religion and attracts her by his talks. He invites her to his country
and this is her madness because of that she goes to meet him. She writes her experiences in her
writing about her intimate meeting.
“Life has changed for me since Nov.14 when a young man named Sadiq Ali walked into
meet me. He is 38 and has a beautiful smile. Afterwards he began to woo me on the
phone from Abu Dhabi and Dubai, reciting Urdu couplets and telling me of what he
would do to me after our marriage. I took my nurse Mini and went to his place in my car.
I stayed with him for three days. There was a sunlit river, some trees, and a lot of
laughter. He asked me to become a Muslim which I did on my return home”(Merrily
Weisbord).
“I was almost asleep when Sadiq Ali climbed in beside me, breathing softly, whispering
endearments, kissing my face, breasts…and when he entered me, it was the first time I
had ever experienced what it was like to feel a man from the inside.”(Merrily Weisbord)
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She always want love and she says if a person cannot get it in home then outside is the
option. She says that she is standing for every woman. Generally a woman always hides her
inner part and feels shy to express about her feelings. But, Kamala Das is the first Indian author
who explains the society and the man to think and give respect to the female of your home. But
after experiences of her whole life she finds man with lust without love. Even a woman devoted
herself for him but still he needs her body, responsibilities taken by her and other things which
he wants. But the difference is female shares herself with the same man and man can share with
any woman. Here, we can say that the search of Kamala Das in search of true love is correct.
References
Das, Kamala. “The Looking Glass”.The Descendants. Calcutta: writers workshop,1967.
Das, Kamala. “Love”. The Old Playhouse and other Poems: Madras: Orient Longman, 1973.
Das, Kamala. “My Story: New Delhi: Sterling Paperbacks 1976.
Das, Kamala. “Kamala Das Biography-Poem Hunter”. Mumbai: Orient Longman Private
Limited, 2004.
Das, Kamala. “The Sunshine Cat”. Mumbai: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004.
Das, Kamala. “The Freaks”. Mumbai: Orient Longman Private Limited, 2004
Das, Kamala. “A Relationship”. Mumbai: Orient Longman Private Limited,2004.
Das, Kamala. “The Grandmother”.Mumbai: Orient Longman Private Limited,2004.
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