LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:2 February 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

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The Myth of Radha Krishna -
A Timeless Schema for Transcending the Body:
Critiquing Kamala Das’s Poetry

Supriya Mitra, M.A.

Abstract

‘... I am sinner / I am saint. I am the beloved and the betrayed’ (“An Introduction”) - such acute is the self-consciousness of Kamala Das that almost axiomatically she has been defined as one of the iconoclastic poets of India in the post-independence era. A woman who throughout her life has searched for pure love but has experienced only loneliness and indifference in return, now nurtures a feeling of utmost depression and isolation. Through myriads of images, she shows the audacity to expose through her poetry the shackles of authority imposed upon her by the patriarchal society. In her personal life, constant ignorance from her father and indifference from her husband has whetted her spirit to redefine her identity which had almost ceased to exist. One who has pined for pure love from her husband who has wanted nothing but her body, takes recourse to Lord Krishna-the ideal paramour known for the proliferation of sublime love, and finally like Radha who is Krishna’s alter ego, she acts as a rebel to challenge the societal norms by inordinately ignoring the taboos associated with the marital institution and sacrificing her all to run extra marital affair which is not at all sanctioned by the patriarchy. Being cornered and silenced in her domestic life she who once has denounced her body saying ‘I am / now my own captive’ (“Captive”), quite interestingly accepts such condition with sheer resignation and realizes that she is left with her body to protest against carnality and that she can transcend the bodily love and her husband’s carnality only by sacrificing herself to Krishna as she confesses- “your body is my prison, Krishna, /I cannot see beyond it” (“Krishna”). If in the drudgery of her husband’s carnal love she compared herself to a caged bird, she deliberately wants to be captivated eternally by Krishna’s love — ‘…towards you my thoughts today/must race like enchanted fish’ (“Ghanashyam”). It is not that Das merely sublimates her feminine ego by surrendering herself to Lord Krishna, rather “the affair with ‘Krishna’”, as Jayakrishnan Nair succinctly opines, “is a living experience…. She is comparing here the unavailable Heavenly bliss with the practically available detraction and disaffection in the real life”. (Cutting Edges: Biology of Experience in the Poetry of Kamala Das 206). In this paper my humble endeavour would be to re-read Kamala Das’s poetry and show how she is relegated to marginality because of her female body and finally transcends it by taking recourse to the myth of Radha-Krishna.

Keywords: Kamala Das, Body, Transcendence, Patriarchy, Radha-Krishna, Spirituality

Introduction

Kamala Das is generally known as a poet of the body. So excessively she uses the body-images in her poetry that K.R.S Iyengar calls her “aggressively individualistic” (677), Merrily Weisbord sees her as “love-queen of Malabar” and M. Prabha designates her sarcastically as “paparazzi’s dreamgirl” (225). However, if her poetry is closely examined it will be observed that all such criticism appears as a result of misrepresentation of Kamala Das because according to her, body stands for sexuality which in its turn also metaphorically represents the textuality of her poetry. Though she uses numerous images which emerge from the physical and sensual aspects of body, in actuality they project the degree of patriarchal domination and intensity of her domestic confinement. However, the internal landscape of her mind is pretty ambitious to see her body as a potential source of acute self-consciousness and as a “corporeal ground of intelligence” (Rich 62) to aggressively assert her identity. But it needs to be kept into our mind that though Das lives through her body, she eventually makes an effort to bring tranquillity to her muddled heart by going beyond physicality and immortalizing her love by sublimating her feminine ego and surrendering to the ideal love of Lord Krishna and dedicating her body to Him. Rightly does Niranjan Mohanty observe:

Das in her early poetry seems to romanticize the gender difference through her frank revelation of the anatomical imagery. In her later poetry she idealizes and immortalizes the gender difference by way of sublimating her feminine ego at the altar of Lord Krishna. (Mohanty 26)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Supriya Mitra, M.A.
Ph.D. Research Scholar
Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia
West Bengal
supriyamitra10@gmail.com
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