Substantiate the view that Kamala Das in ‘An Introduction’ expresses a conflict between

poetic self and social convention.

As a writer of English poetry, Kamala Das is in the Indian English poetic tradition who wrote
openly and frankly about female sexual desires and the experience of being an Indian Woman.
The nature of some of her poems puts her in the tradition of confessional poets. As a poet who
addresses issues of gender, female identity, experience and sexuality, she is a feminist poet. As
an iconoclast and rebel in her poetry and life, hers is the poetry of protest. Therefore, the multiple
aspects of her poetry make Kamala Das a watershed in India's history of modern poetry. To
understand the poetry of Kamala Das, much written in the sixties and seventies, it is crucial to
regard the social and political currents of the period. The sixties, when Kamala Das was living in
Calcutta, was also the beginning of the Naxalite movement in Bengal, which drew hundreds of
young persons from well-to-do, educated families into emotional, political solidarity with the
rural poor on the path of revolt against the system. Kamala Das' mother (Balamani Amma) has a
Malayalam poem entitled 'Naxalite Night' where she expresses the thought of a Naxalite girl
reviewing her own life as she lies handcuffed and blindfolded. This poem has an uncanny
resemblance to Kamala Das's tormented style of writing. Lines such as the following show the
ethos of the sixties:
"Many things have crashed
In my heart much has broken
All around ideals are gasping...
I have no regrets now...
It is my mother after all
who has sharpened me
to remove the cancer from other souls".
(Rati Saxena: 'Balamani Amma: Kavya Kala Evam Darshan)
Written by Balamani Amma, they could also have been inspired by the uncompromising attitude
of her daughter Kamala Das, and Kamala represents this new voice in Indian English poetry.
Das' English writing in the sixties makes her break from family and the beginning of what may
be termed an adult phase.
In this connection, It needs to be added that the critical approach to Das has been framed by what
feminist discourse calls the 'male gaze'. Das' candid autobiographical work in English 'My Story'
and her poetry tends to be viewed as the outpourings of an enraged and anguished female mind.
Her iconoclasm has been read as being about man-woman relationships rather than social ills.
The unorthodox and candid expression of the person has drawn attention away from the severe
social critique in her work. Today in a feminist-criticism-informed age, we can see in this
reception of Das' poetry the mad-woman-in the attic-syndrome. Kamala Das has been relegated
to the literary attic of confessional poets' for many years. Das herself writes about this problem in
the poem 'Composition,' of how "with every interesting man I meet, / be it/a curious editor, /or a
poet with a skin yellowed / like antique paper, /.....I must extrude / autobiography".
Disenchantment with marriage is found in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel and Parthasarathy as
well. Still, reading Das' poetry takes on a different dimension as women are traditionally
expected to be silent about such things. An Introduction sternly tells off those labellers---- "Why
not leave / Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins, / Every one of you."
The clinical description of adolescence and the need to transcend her female body by wearing
trousers are also linked to Das' recurring engagement with the question of gender. The
questioning of gender boundaries is linked to the issue of female creativity.
Virginia Woolf had asked in 'A Room of One's Own', "...who shall measure the heat and violence
of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" For Kamala Das, the need for
love nevertheless remained. In her poem, this need is expressed thus---- "I met a man, loved 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".
Her description reminds us of D. H. Lawrence and Arundhati Roy, the winner of the Booker
prize, who presents the theme of sex through the beautiful connotative languages in her well-
known book The God of Small Things. Here Arundhati takes the image of sailing in the river
which contains a sexual implication "..... She was as wide and deep as a river in spate. He sailed
on her waters. She could feel him moving deeper and deeper into her. Fřenzied. Asking to be let
in further".

Kamala tries to plead that love is a natural need for every man and woman. But note how the
need is felt differently by men and by women. "The hungry haste of rivers" suggests sexual
desire. Note the comparison of the woman's patience with the ocean and how it inverts traditional
notions. In India, rivers are imagined as female, Ganga, Jamuna, Saraswati and so on, while the
ocean is imagined as a male god, 'Sagardevota'. Kamala Das reverses this, thus moving beyond
stereotypes even in imagery.
It establishes a woman's identity as specific and not general. Society wants her to be part of a
herd, be any woman, Amy, Kamala or even the pseudonymous Madhavi Kutty, anything of her
own self. But she does not want to hide behind a name. She defines herself through her
distinctive individuality, separate history, likes and dislikes, and right to speak in any language
or to seek love like any man. Critics have often read this to mean that she was promiscuous. But
that is precisely the mistake that the 'categorizers' make. They call her "nymphomaniac". The
seeking of love in her poetry is simply an expression of her need for a love that is not lust. The
social pressure to "fit in" to choose "a role" is what she rejects. In the poem’s later part, she
writes:
"Who are you, I ask each and every one,
The answer is, it is I."
"It is I" is not put in inverted commas in the poem, leading to ambiguity. The ambiguity
regarding 'you' and I suggest the poet's empathy with all persons. To see one in others is godly
sympathy or empathy. This is what Christ meant when he said, "Do unto others as you would
have others do unto you". This is what the saying from 'Hitopadesha' "One who regards all
beings as oneself is a sage". According to Virginia Woolf, this empathy is essential for the writer
who is an androgynous mind. With this empathy, Das says in the following lines of An
Introduction that she sees people locked within themselves, unable to connect with others,
"tightly packed like the sword in its sheath". She is able to empathize with all the lonely souls
"who drink lonely / Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns".
She identifies with all these souls as they live out their lonely and confusing lives, suffering and
dying alone. When she says, "I am sinner, / I am saint" she extends the scope of her own identity
to cover all states of being and suggests her deep connection to all humanity.
In An Introduction, there is a reference to coercive marriage as a form of punishment, "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". This could be a father forcing a groom upon a daughter, a husband closeted
with a male partner, or an indifferent husband asking a woman to take a lover. Whatever it may
be, it is a punishing situation thrust upon the speaker--- "He did not beat me /, But my sad
woman-body felt so beaten".
An Introduction maintains the taut urgency of passionate speech throughout. Das was resisting
the gendering of language through this poem. She rejects 'feminine' speech. She settles for a
speech that is "as useful to me as cawing is to crows or roaring is to lions".
From speech, she moves to the fact of her biology. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex traced
the making of the category 'woman' social and cultural practices. The texts of the American
women's movement were creating ripples worldwide. Protest and rebellion were part of the West
and India's sixties. An Introduction published in 1973 fits into this era.
An Introduction is a kaleidoscope of images, and although it sounds on first reading like a
passionate tirade about personal matters, we find that it is about many things that are in the
public sphere like the issues of language and literary standards, truth, politics, non-consensual
marriages, gender construction, social pressures to fit in, the hypocrisy of middle-class lives
("Lace draped windows"), of the world's people each locked within the self, of lonely persons in
strange towns. It is not just one woman's personal sorrow or complaints. It speaks for universal
human conditions but also locates the self as an individual; "Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar". Das' poetry attacks role-playing and hypocritical proprieties and upholds a free and
fearless expression of the realities of self. What is most pleasing is that Kamala Das speaks about
Feminism, but she never expresses her hatred of men. She protests against the existing social
system. She wants to tear apart the so-called rules and codes that bind women from all sides.
In fact, Das' Feminism leaves room for good man-woman relationships and peaceful coexistence.
Like Kamala Das, Amrita Pritam was also one of the major feminist icons in Indian literature as
well as major literary figures in their respective mother tongues as well as in translation. Their
autobiographies, record the story of transitions in middle-class, upper-caste Indian women's lives
in the wake of nationalistic struggles and the aspirations of a postcolonial nation with more or
less similar connotations in its predicament and struggle in a predominantly patriarchal ethos.
Though both writers have constructed the 'self' by using tropes of gender, religion, literature,
loneliness, marginality and so on, I argue that there is a tendency to see their own excellence as
exceptional, their achievements as individualistic marks of courage and intelligence which mars
the feminist potential of the texts. Amrita Pritam, best known for her poem "I Say Unto Warish
Shah," was always ahead of her time. The poem talked about the atrocities and violence during
the partition from a feministic point of view. Pritam never shied away from writing on topics
which would be considered taboo during her time, such as extra-marital affairs or acts of forced
sex resulting in unwanted pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies, sexual experiences of a woman,
prostitutes, and vulnerability of women in the domestic sphere. She wrote many of her poems in
a personalised and almost confessional manner; it can be observed in her poem 'Night'-
"I am waiting for your faltering
steps, the collar of your shirt:
so ugly, so dirty, and wet
with the stain of alcohol,
with emptied pockets,
with red, red eyes,
and humiliating curses,
Me—yes, me! Me—
the mother of your
unborn child!"
Pritam employs visual imagery to portray the pitiable condition of a pregnant woman waiting for
her husband to return from some brothel. She describes the suppressed trauma associated with a
woman's first sexual encounter. One can observe the strain of corporeal mannerism in her poetry.
The ambiguity in the poem lies with the woman’s legitimacy. The idea of right and wrong action
permeates the entire poem like an electric current. In “The Scar” poem, Pritam openly speaks of
taboo subjects such as extramarital affairs, unwanted pregnancies, and sexual politics between
men and women, her writing, overall, demonstrates the difficulties of challenging gender
expectations in order to create narratives of equalized power between men and women in the
mid-20th century. Both Kamla Das and Amrita Pritam were seen as social deviants. They were
seen as blasphemous women, who talked about brutalities, and didn’t draw filters while
expressing body-related thoughts. Kamala Das explicitly talked about lovemaking, the loneliness
of women, their physical, and psychological needs, and exploitation. She was one of the most
prominent voices amongst post-colonial feminists. Herein lies the major success of ‘An
Introduction’ as a poem about Feminism.