Assigment paper 202

Name – Hirva Pandya

Roll No.: 10

Enrollment No.: 4069206420210022

Paper no: 202

Paper code: 22407

Paper name: Indian English Literature

Topic: An Introducation As confessional poem

Sem.: 3 (Batch 2021- 2023)

Submitted to: Smt S.B. Gardi Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University

Introducation

Kamala Das, Malayalam pen name Madhavikutty, Muslim name Kamala Surayya, (born March 31, 1934, Thaissur[now in Kerala], British India—died May 31, 2009, Pune, India), Indian author who wrote openly and frankly about female sexual desire and the experience of being an Indian woman. Das was part of a generation of Indian writers whose work centred on personal rather than colonial experiences, and her short stories, Poetry  memoirs, and essays brought her respect and notoriety in equal measures. Das wrote both in English (mostly poetry) and, under the pen name Madhavikutty, in the malayalam Language of southern India

Das was born into a high-status family. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was a well-known poet, and her father, V.M. Nair, was an automobile company executive and a journalist. She grew up in what is now Kerala and in Calcutta , where her father worked. She began writing poetry when she was a child. When she was 15 years old, she married Madhava Das, a banking executive many years her senior, and they moved to Bombay . Das had three sons and did her writing at night.

Das’s poetry collections included Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), and The Old Playhouse, and Other Poems (1973). Subsequent English-language works included the novel Alphabet of Lust (1976) and the short stories “A Doll for the Child Prostitute” (1977) and “Padmavati the Harlot” (1992). Notable among her many Malayalam works were the short-story collection Thanuppu (1967; “Cold”) and the Memoir  Balyakalasmaranakal (1987; “Memories of Childhood”). Perhaps her best-known work was an Autobiography  which first appeared as a series of columns in the weekly Malayalanadu, then in Malayalam as Ente Katha (1973), and finally in English as My Story (1976). A shockingly Intimate work, it came to be regarded as a classic. In later life Das said that parts of the book were fictional. 

In 1999 she controversially converted to Islam, renaming herself Kamala Surayya. She received many literary awards, including the Asian World Prize for Literature in 1985.

Confessional Poetry

Confessional Poetry is a style of poetry that is personal, often making use of a first-person narrator. It is a branch of Postmodernism that emerged in the US in the 1950s.

Confessional poetry is a part of current poetry. There is no spot either for religion or ethics in this poetry. The writer does not anticipate any recovery or reprisal as there is no regret. It is only, that they open up about their inner feelings to get a mystic alleviation. It is of some remedial esteem.

These confessional poems are seriously close to home, exceedingly abstract. There is no 'persona' in the poems. 'I' in the poem is the writer and no one else. The themes are in an exposed fashion humiliating and concentrate too only upon the agony, anguish and offensiveness of life to the detriment of its pleasure and magnificence.

The confessional poets were named as despondent people by the general public, as they didn't pursue any tradition nor regarded any shows. They needed to be remarkable and not a piece of the conventional social set up. This contention with the general public leads them to thoughtfulness. In the course, comes a limit when they couldn't bargain with themselves. They free themselves defenselessly in the fight and begin looking for the lost self. This contention has brought forth various excellent poems. The delicate artist can't underestimate disappointment. At this point, life ends up horrendous and the call of death ends up overpowering. They are more than persuaded that passing can offer them more comfort than life (Das, 2009).

The Origins of Confessional Poetry

The term “confessional” was first used by a reviewer looking over Robort Lowell ’s fourth book, Life Studies in 1959. The reviewer, a man by the name of M. L. Rosenthal, described Lowell as moving beyond what other poets had engaged in when it came to sharing one’s emotions and experiences. The poems, Rosenthal stated, read as personal confidences. Readers connected with Lowell’s desire to engage personally. He broke through the barriers of the traditional, idealized poetic figure and became an individual, one of a kind and relatable to those who sought out his work.

KAMALA DAS: AS A CONFESSIONAL POET

Kamala Das is pre-prominently a confessional poem and, in this regard, she might be viewed as an exceptional Indo-Anglian artist. A confessional artist is one who brings the pursuer into certainty about his or her own and private life , and uncovers those actualities of her life which a customary individual, regardless of whether that individual be an artist , would remain quiet about carefully or herself due to the fragile idea of those realities. A confessional writer has shed all his or her hindrances and to compose honestly, authentically, and in a candid way, in this manner challenging the limitations and restrictions which the social code and the shows of society force upon the person in question.

Even more starting late, especially among the American poets, like John Berryman and Robert Lowell, there has risen a poetry which gives off an impression of being less stressed to total up its investigations and articulations of the writer's very own interior state. It is a kind of poetry which M. L. Rosenthal has called "Confessional." Here the word 'Confession' ought to be explained. As shown by the Oxford English Dictionary 'Confession' would imply "recognizing that one has messed up, make known one's transgressions to a priest." It is plainly a religious definition. In criminal law, 'confession' involves "a verbal affirmation by a reprimanded individual for facts which, nearby different substances, will in general exhibit coerce yet are not in themselves sufficient to support a conviction, or which show indiscriminating conduct tending to set up guilt.'" Confession has its own one of a kind tradition: Long tradition in religion and life. The association of confession is Christianity. In Christianity it is orally made assertion of a bad behavior to a clergyman to get direction and possible abatement. Confessional writers in their own chronicles have told the truth in regards to their past presences with all of the frivolities and waywardness of youth. Figuratively speaking, by conceding all of their transgressions, they endeavored to exorcize themselves. They expected to discard the heaviness of blame. The purpose behind confessional writers was to experience their past, separate the waywardness and debasement of their youth and by suggestion free themselves of the blame squeezing upon their inner voice. By conceding their careless activities and shortcomings, these writers went for purging themselves of each and every existent negative behavior pattern inside (Rosenthal, 1959).

The intermittent theme of her confessions is her unfulfilled love, communicated through her self-perceptions. The contemporary feminists, actually, want women writers to be confessional to express their requirement for love transparently. Helen Cixous feels that a lady's self-governance is her factuality and Elaine Showalter underlined gyno-analysis, since they feel that the female innovativeness, her realness lies in having solid relationship with the other that she is a body for the other, as the other is the body for her. This relationship of mutual objectification lies in the core of her poetry.

III. CONFESSIONALISM IN KAMALA DAS’ POETRY:

The confessional poets are film their feelings laying on manuscript, craft and development. They are enormously basic to their exertion. It is a division of contemporary refrain. There is no position planned for conviction just as standards inside this stanza. The versifier may not envision some liberation or retribution. This is on the grounds that there is no distress. It is promptly that they endured their soul to look out an extraordinary discharge. It is of different useful significances.

Confessional poetry speaking to the poets claim conditions experience and feelings, Kamala Das broadens her poetry as a test against the standard male organization. The poetry reveals private or cold marriage issue about the person in question including sexual experience, mental anguish and ailment. She communicates her longing through her beautiful words. In the realms of Swati Guleria, 

Confessional element also help to expose how patriarchy assigned only sexual identity to women and that too not independent of patriarchal will as well as bring out the major difference that mark a great void between men and women. According to this difference, men hanker after pleasure, whereas women crave for an ideal niche full of love, care, mutual respect and a sense of thankfulness for what she does for the man instead of taking it for granted.(Guleria)

A. The Confession in the Poem Entitled The Sunshine Cat

That there is a poem entitled 'The Sunshine' cat which she complains about the pain and the suffering which, first her husband, and then the many other men with whom she had a sexual experience, caused to her. She accuses her husband of having been a selfish and cowardly man who neither loved her nor used her properly but who was a ruthless watcher of her sexual act with other men. She had tried her utmost to please her sexual partners by clinging to their hairy chests, but they all told her that they could only gratify her sexual desire but could not love her. The consequence was that she lay in bed sexual desire but could not love her.

Kamala Das as a confessional writer has rendered some important support of the female sex making them aware of their torpid sexual wants and their smothered discontent with their spouses from the sexual perspective. She has subsequently given a kind of impetus to women to stand up for themselves or if nothing else not to smother themselves. In these confessional poems Kamala Das shows up as a feminist, in a roundabout way upholding the freedom of women from the conventional social limitations and taboos.

Confession of Motherhood in Her Poems

Two of Kamala Das poems contain her inclination as a mother. The poem entitled Jaisurya communicates her sentiment of exultation when she in going to bring forth a tyke and her sentiment of pride when the chind coes out of the haziness of her belly into this splendid world lit by daylight . Amid the labor, Kamala Das felt that to her around then neither love was significant nor lust, and that the man or men, who had been selling out her by satisfying their lust and afterward spurning her, did not make a difference to her at all. She observed labor to be a superb marvel. The other poem about her motherhood has the title of The White Flowers.

Confessional composing can be a wellspring of power; it takes solidarity to uncover ones individual and private experience. Her confessional poetry likewise bargain among satisfaction and an un-fulfillment love in her life. For her poetry is something profoundly close to home. Summer in Calcutta has an extensive number of love poems bearing distinctive shades of love. She herself concedes that in her poems there is an excessive amount of love. In her life account My Story she communicates that, "Love has a beginning and an end yet lust has no such faults."

THE THERAPEUTIC AND CATHARTIC EFFECT OF HER CONFESSIONAL POETRY

Kamala Das' confessional poetry, as most confessional poetry composed by Nissim Ezekiel, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath (Sylvia, 1971) has a therapeutic and catharic impact on the perusers too s on the essayist herself. Confessional poetry is composed by a writer under an inward weight so as to offer vent to his or her complaints or feeling of resent mentor a feeling of the bad form experienced by that person. By admitting what a writer has experienced, the individual in question can get some help; and such poetry normally conveys some alleviation to the pursuer too by making him feel that his own feeling of bad form should mean taking note of when contrasted with the more intense and progressively excruciating feeling of shamefulness of people significantly more significant and considerably more gifted then he. After all, cleansing just methods the sentiment of alleviation which an individual experiences After seeing the display of sentiment of help which an individual experiences in the wake of seeing the scene of other experiencing the impacts of the worry of conditions or of incidents or from a feeling of guilt. All confessional craftsmanship, says a critic*. is a methods for executing the brutes which are inside us, those awful mythical serpents of dreams and experiences that must be chased down, cornered , and presented so as to be decimated .

CONCLUSION

The confessional poetry of Kamala Das is a versified response of this author to segregations, limitations and choppiness that she has experienced in her life. This response frequently goes past the typical furthest reaches of tradition, show and the set up conviction arrangement of family, society, religion and culture. If there should be an occurrence of women writers such responses might be thrown in feminist casings and sounds like a voicing challenge, and obstruction against man centric codes. Works of experts of this school, including Das uncover indications of "chaotic psychic situation" of the author (Das, 1988).

As indicated by the investigation of Kamala Das poems we presume that the confessional poetry originates from her fruitless marriage life. She generally talks about love, love which is identified with men women relationship, as a confessional writer she is looking for love, she was candidly broken in light of the fact that she finds no love in for her entire life. Enduring and torment hues her beautiful structure.

Works cited:

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Kamala Das". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 May. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamala-Das. Accessed 6 November 2022.

“Confessional Poetry.” Poem Analysis, 11 Dec. 2020, https://poemanalysis.com/genre/confessional-poetry/.

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