A Radical Feminist Reading of Kamala Das’ Poetry

Abstract

“I am different; I am an entity” —uttered Kamala Das, one of the India’s renowned poetess who was known for her iconoclast views regarding the female issues and their sexuality. She openly waged a war on the hypocrisy of society and fought against it to establish a society where women are not deprived of their rights and discriminated on the basis of their sex and gender. She was fearless when it comes to women issues and vehemently opposed the dictum ‘angel in house’ or ‘men for the field and women for the hearth’ which were used to confine the women to four walls of the house. Her poems celebrate the female sexuality and uniqueness of female body. She doesn’t shy away from putting it into public through her writing which has fetched her, the title of being the ‘radical feminist’. The paper will show how audacious was Kamala Das in her protest against patriarchy and embracing of matrilineal culture with a romantic fervour, the exploration of female sexuality and sexual desires of women — and, in the words of K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, “aggressively individualistic,” is Kamala Das aka Madhavi Kutty, the icon of Indian feminism.