Re-echoing the Self against the Male Politics of Denial: A Study of the Poetry of Kamala Das

Abstract

Kamala Das has brought into the discourse those issues of women which were generally shied and shielded in the Indian academia. That women have been marginalized not only in terms of their social positions but also in terms of the basic needs of body and mind have never got that campaigning as have been aggressively expressed in the poetry of Kamala Das. She has created her distinct discourse augmenting upon those issues which European authors such as Ibsen, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath and others have done at best. Woman has the right to feel her body and its needs. Man is supposed to respect this. If not, then, Man is just one animal sans sensitivity. She enacts the whole psychology of female desire and sexuality and finds man completely miserable to understand this. Her poems aim at giving those messages on the art of love as given by Pablo Neruda in his poems.