Poetry of Protest and Confession: Kamala Das

English Poetry started with Henry Loius Vivian Derozio, when he published his collection of poems in 1827. The study of Indian English poetry is incomplete without the study of women poets. After 1960, women poets’ poetry was focused on feminism. It is the ‘new literature’which began after the World War II. In the west, poetry reflected patriarchal and subalterns in the beginning as the society was male-dominated and the writers were aware of their subjugated position. Women were economically, politically and socially backward. In India, women’s poetry started with tribal songs of early inhabitants. Before writing poetry, English language had to be fully indianised and Indians had to be appropriately Anglicized. After independence Indian writers struggled for their literary identity in Indian literature in English. They had to face many challenges from intellectuals who asked a renaissance in poetry but the only answer which Indian writers could give was to write authentic poetry about Indian lives as delectable as that of American and British poets.

A woman’s attempt to self discovery leads to interrogate that she has not been only born as a woman but she becomes one as she is hardly a product of socio-cultured environment in the making of which she has any part. Her true identity is smothered by the ubiquitous, all pervasive, too dominant and too oppressive patriarchal culture which pushes and assigns her a place away from centre to periphery to a margin of existence. To define and salvage herself, to find out who she is and what she has lost too break the fetters of servility, it becomes imperative that she opens up, she ventilates to unleash her innermost pangs of guilt, misery, fears, doubts and anxieties to reinstate her experience as woman, so that she can acquire autonomy over her being and discover her true self. This realization triggers off a journey into the recesses of her being and like a phoenix she strives to rise to be reborn. It is this struggle of self-realization that becomes the text of most women writers.

Shibla Sherin. P, Assistant Professor of Commerce, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna