Interrogating the Gendered Binaries towards Symbiotic Wholeness : A Study of Kamala Das’s Poetry

Abstract

Kamala Das is one of the most celebrated Indian poetesses writing in English. Like Tom Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Nissim Ezekiel and Ramanujan, she deals with the Indianness in her poems. A critical searchlight on her poems, stories and other columns reveals a strong feminist streak in various forms. A concentrated study of her poems brings out powerful protest against the arbitrary stereotypes which subject female sensibility to patriarchal domination. Hence the readers and critics who are exhilarated by the romanticism of Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu feel startled by a new stance in the poetry of Kamala Das. This is a new voice of modern and uninhibited confession and questionings in the psyche of ‘persona’ mostly as the representation of a sensible soul in Kamala Das. It would seem that chief stuffs and substance of Das’s poetry spring from her most immediately felt trials and tribulations of her personal life. Questioning the gendered binaries i.e. male v/s female signifiers emerge as the natural corollary of her troubled and traumatic life. The present topic “Interrogating the Gendered Binaries towards a symbiotic wholeness” is a humble attempt to critically unfold Kamala Das’s poems to vindicate how the poetess begins with the poignant interrogation of male-made markers against female kind thereby experiencing a new niche through recourse to natural and psychological explorations.