1. Rereading Indian Writing in English
Kamala Das (1934 – 2009)
Meena Kandasamy (1984 - )
Selective Reading of the Poems
Monday, 5th November, 2012
Refresher Course
ASC, Uni. Of Mumbai, Mumbai
Dilip Barad
Dept. of English
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar – Gujarat
dilipbarad@gmail.com
www.dilipbarad.com

2. Let us define . . .
• What is literature? (Terry Eagleton Pg. 1- 14)
• What is Indian Literature? (Umashankar Joshi and
the Idea of Indian Literature – K. Satchidanandan – Indian
Literature Pg. 31 – 44)
• What is ‘Alternativism’? (A.K. Singh – Alternative
Systems of Knowledge: A Study in Process and Paradigms’ 27
Pgs.)
• Where to relocate Indian literature?
(E.V.Ramakrishnan pg. 44)

3. Terry Eagleton
• Is it objective or subjective?
• Is it a mirror, or photographic or X-Ray image?
• Is it the response of readers?
• Is the undercurrents of social change captures in
lit?
• “Literature does not exist in the sense that
insects do, and that the value-judgements by
which it is constituted are historically variable,
but that these value-judgements themselves have
a close relation to social ideologies. They refer in
the end not simply to private assumptions by
which certain social groups exercise and maintain
power over others.”
• (From Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983))

4. Umashankar Joshi’s Idea of Indian Literature
• His significance – partial rejection – S.
Radhakrishnan’s statement - ‘Indian Literature
is one written in different languages’…
• His recognition of the complexity of idea, the
gaps and silences in the earlier formulations,
the inherent plurality of Indian literature, the
importance of translation in the
understanding and sustenance of the idea and
the need for a relative and comparative
approach rather
than an absolute and normative one.

5. • He recognized possibility of the idea being
hijacked by the right wing Hindu ideologues –
idea means upper caste Hindu community.
• He was careful to distinguish himself from
these dogmatists who refuse to recognize the
multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-
cultural nature of the country and its
literature that lends itself to a plurality
of readings.

6. His rejection of Nihar Ranjan Ray’s opinion
• He arrives at a dialectic standpoint by refusing to
accept a standpoint and rarified idea of Indian
literature --- opposing Ray’s opinion that idea
itself is untenable – given the fact that literatures
in the country are written in different languages
and belong to those languages rather than to an
abstract non-literary entity called India.
• … India has eighteen languages to speak but her
thinking is one (Subramania Bharati – tamil poet)

7. A.K. Singh – Alternative Vs /as Revolution
• “Probably, humanity to a large extent is either
fatigued with revolutions or it is incapable of
affording yet another disenchantment with
revolution and their failures.
• In such a situation, an alternative is an
alternative to ‘revolution’.
• Since the romantic self or human psyche remains
fascinated with the myth or romance of the
revolution, the ghost of revolution haunts us
despite a not so pleasant tryst with the history of
revolution.”
• Critique as Alternative: End of Postmodernism
and Altermodern as new Modernity.
• (From Indian Literature – March-April 2012)

8. E. V. Ramakrishnan
• We need to relocate Indian literature in the
context of caste gender, region, religion etc.,
where issues of everyday struggles for
subsistence in a living society find their
expression. . . The struggle against hegemonic
structures of power defines the nature of
lower-caste subjectivity.”
• (From the Pedagogical to the Performative – Locating Indian Literature:
Texts, Traditions, Translations. Delhi 2011)

9. Let us recall . . .
• - that infamous "f" word… man-hating feminazi's . . .
• Simone de Boeuvir: "One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman”. (The Second Sex)
• Helena Cixous: “Censor the body and you censor
breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself.
Your body must be heard.” (The Laugh of Medusa)
• J. Lacan: ‘Otherness of language – in that gap desire is
born’ (pg. 57-59-OUP)
• Julia Kristeva: ‘foreignness of language’ (pg.63-64-OUP)
• Northrop Frye: The Archetypes of Literature
• Carl Jung: Collective Unconsciousness

10. Let us reread . . .
• Kamala Das (1934 – 2009):
• "If I had been a loved person, I wouldn't have become a
writer. I would have been a happy human being…I suppose
I started writing because I had certain weaknesses in my
system. I thought I was weak and vulnerable. That's why we
attempt poetry. Poets are like snails without the shells,
terribly vulnerable, so easy to crush. Of course it has given
me a lot of pain, each poem. Each poem is really born out
of pain, which I would like to share. But then you live for
that person, the sharer of your pain, and you don't find him
anywhere. It is the looking that makes the poet go on
writing, search. If you find someone, the search is over,
poetry is over."

11. • When Kamala Das wrote about ‘musk of
sweat between the breast’, ‘menstrual blood’,
‘male/female body’, ‘female hungers’, ‘beat
sorry breasts’, or ‘stand nude before the
glass’, it was considered as ‘a far cry … a
fiercely feminine sensibility that dares without
inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has
received in an insensitive largely man-made
world’. (Iyengar 680)

12. Kamala Das – a stranger to herself
• An Introduction
• Poet emerges as a poet struggling to express her
genuine sensibility in ‘man-made’ language.
• The words as signifier do not signify the signified.
• Julia Kristeva calls this signifying capability which
is not derived from the meanings of the words
‘the semiotic’. It evokes, she maintains, the sound
produced by the rhythmic babbling of small
children who cannot yet speak.

13. • The semiotic exists prior to the acquisition of
meaning, and psychoanalysis links it with the
drive towards either pleasure or death.
• These sound effects, as they reappear in
poetry, are musical, patterned; they disrupt
the purely ‘thetic’ (thesis-making) logic of
rational argument by drawing on a sense or
sensation that Kristeva locates beyond surface
meaning.
• The surface meaning in Das misguides us… (pg.
43 – 45,46)

14. ‘An Introduction’
The language I speak
Becomes mine
…
Its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone.
…
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my Hopes, and it
is useful to me as cawing
Is to craw or roaring to the lions . .
It is human as I am human, don’t
You see?

15. • Words with negative connotation…
• Lacan – the lost of real…
• Frye – archetypes of tragic animal realm –
poet’s real is dissatisfied…
“My man, my sons, forming the axis
While, I, wife and mother . . .
Insignificant as a fly . . .
(A Widow’s Lament)

16. Krishna – the language
• The language is the prison within the limits of
which she has to articulate herself.
• Her address to Krishna in ‘Krishna’ is symbolic
address to the language:
• Your body is my prison, Krishna,
I cannot see beyond it.
Your darkness blinds me,
Your love words shut out the wise world's din.
(Krishna) (Pg. 43)

17. An urge- Language of one’s own…
At sunset, on the river bank, Krishna
Loved her for the last time and left …
That night in her husband’s arms, Radha felt
So dead that he asked, what is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said,
No, not at all, but thought, what is
It to the corpse if the maggots nip?
(The Descendants)
(pg. 44)

18. Obsession with sex & body
• And, I loved his body without shame (Winter)
• Getting a man to love you is easy
Only be honest about your wants as
Woman. (The Looking Glass)
• Stand nude before the glass with him
So that he sees himself the stronger one
And believes it so, and you so much more
Softer, younger, lovelier.

19. Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers. (Looking Glass)
Some beat their drums; others beat their sorry breasts
And wailed, and writhed in vacant ecstasy. (Dance of Eunuch)

20. • I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry
haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting.
• But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
• (An Introduction)

21. • I drive my blue battered car
Along the blue sea. I run up the forty
Noisy steps to knock at another’s door.
Though peep-holes, the neighbours watch,
they watch me come
And go like rain. Ask me, everybody, ask me
What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,
A libertine, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded
snake
Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like
A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts,
And sleeps. (pg. 50)

22. Thank you!