PPT on Nature and co-Relation

1. Nature and Co-Relation in Kamala Das and
Other Modern Woman Poets
Notes
by
Dr Ramesh Pandu Chavan Assistant Professor Shri Shankar
Arts and Commerce College Navalgund Dist Dharwad
Karnataka
Introduction.
Kamala Das’ diction is marked by simplicity and clarity. It is
the language of her emotions and she speaks to her readers as
one human being to another.
In this way lie her originality and her distinctions. There
are no abstractions no complexities, and no intricate,
tortuous constructions. 1

2. Images drawn from the human body are used most
frequently. Thus in ‘the Freaks’ presents the male anatomy
furnishes her with images of horror and ugliness. It is
represented as repulsive and destructive. The mouth is ‘a
dark cavern’, the cheek is, ‘sun-stained’ and the teeth ‘are
gleaming and uneven’.
It is an instrument of destruction, her rejection of the male
body is total and is symbolic of her revolt against the male
ego and the male-dominated world.
She is conscious of the beauty and glory of the human
anatomy and is attracted by it, but its raging lustfulness
disgusts her and hence the uses of images like those cited
above.
She is also conscious of disease and decay to which the
human flesh is heir to and this awareness also colors her
imagery. In the lines of ‘The Looking Glass.
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3. Kamala Das themes go beyond stereotyped desire and
complaints. Even her feelings of aloneness and
disappointment are part of a larger-than-life personality,
obsessive in its awareness of its self, yet creating a drama of
selfhood. inner contrasts, conflicts, ironies and extremes.
 In Lakshmi Kannan’s Mirrored in the Waters, the poet
articulates about this river-woman element the ever-
changing yet apparently stable tide of survival when a
woman’s life look like the indistinct mirror image seen in
the waved waters of a river.
 Just as the river’s waves lash at and beat physically
powerful rocks to a smooth texture, the woman’s
experience whips into shape and casually moulds, a life out
of her conditions.
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4.  Feministic principles are noticeably expressed in Imtiaz
Dharker’s poetry.
 She gives expression to feelings of deep sad, doubt and
sorrow over the fact that her elders guess her to become
great in life whereas they themselves just lived life hand to
month.
“I want to be like you papa
OR like Rani Laxmibai
You’re not sure what greatness is,
But you want me to be great”(Dharker’ )
Mamta is not ignorant of the sadness of women in the
obtainable social set-up where at times she is measured
fairly deft in patchworks. Kalia portrays expressively the
quandary of women in general.
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5.  In another of her poems,’ Subterranean Agents’, Lakshmi
Kannan rebuts the time-honored tradition of comparing
women to flowers.
They are not flowers she insists, they are really the
nurturing spring that feeds the plant which blossoms into
flowers. Women, thus, become subterranean agents.
 They bear a resemblance to plants which flourish as water
seeps into the soil and pushes up the tender shoots which
then burst forth in beautiful colour.
 Women are into the product of nourishment and labor
rather, they are the source and origin of life and color in our
universe.
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6. Finally the confessional forms include the telling metaphor
of the poet as actor in the drama of sexual conflict is
evocatively worked out.
The transient, subtle nature of this thing called love
between man and woman, the desire to find it and the
expected dissatisfaction of that longing, are haggard out
through this metaphor of relationship s being no more
than role playing.
 The poems of Kamala Das beautifully maintain the tone of
joyous-sad feeling that haunts a deep relationship between
a man and a woman.
 The poet describes attention to her role playing skills and
symbolizes her mind as an old playhouse. The nervousness
in the poem is once again set up on the opposition of the
man-woman relationship. The complaint of the woman
continues against the inadequacies of love, the intolerable
sexual tyrannies. 6

7. Conclusion
 Kamala Das has made a very effective and artistic use of
images and symbols in her poetry. They are not decorative but
artistically and thematically very relevant.
Kamala Das draws her imagery from the vast reservoir of
personal memories.
The sun and heat, house and window, cremation and
burning, objects of nature, human anatomy, sleep, sea, the
mythic grandmother and Krishna constitute her whole range
of imagery.
 Kamala Das makes a frequent use of the images of human
body in her poems. She is the poet-prophet of the human
body who gives it a dignified place in it.
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8. In some of her poems, The Sun is the symbol of intense
heat which can harm the human body.
 The image of ‘darkness’ is suggestive of sleep or death in
the poetry of Kamala Das. The image of fire emerges as the
destroyer of the human body in Kamala Das poetry.
The image of the bird is used for bondage and oppression
in it. The Radha-Krishna myth assumes the shape of a
recurrent symbol in Kamala Das poetry.
 Though Melanie Silgardo started writing the poems
which appear in Three Poets when she was an
undergraduate, there is nothing of the apprentice in any of
them. The poems are deeply emotional but never mawkish.
Stressful states are precisely evoked.
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9. It is important in the development of national literature
that writers free themselves from the linguistic standards
of their colonizers and create a literature based on local
speech; and this is especially important for women writers.
 Such a development is not a matter of national pride or a
linguistic equivalent of ‘local colour’; rather it is a matter of
voice, tone, idiom and rhythm, creating a style that
accurately reflects what the writer feels or is trying to say
instead of it being filtered through speech meant to reflect
the assumptions and nuances of another society.
Sujatha Bhatt, In her words: I could see the hurt darkness
in my mother's eyes turn into stones... In the poem
'Partition', one sees her mother, now seventy, recalling the
violence of partition: How could they have let a man who
knew nothing about geography 72 divide a country? For
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Thank you