THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEN AND WOMEN IN

THE INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH

Dr. Charanjit Singh

Department of English
Lyallpur Khalsa College
Jalandhar (Punjab)
miltonjohn@rediffmail.com

Orientation

In one of their tasks, Feminism and its subsequent offshoot

Feminist Literary Criticism probe the artificial binary
oppositions formulated by patriarchy in terms of which
women and men are positioned in society and literary texts.
Quoting Kate Millet in this regard who says “The essence of
politics is power”, Toril Moi (1997: 118) asserts that the task
of feminist critics and theorists is to expose the way in which
male dominance over females constitutes what Millet calls
'perhaps the most pervasive ideology of our culture”.
Undoubtedly, this ‘most pervasive ideology’ is patriarchy.
The work of the French feminist critic Helen Cixous is
notable in this regard. She (1997: 1001) lists up the following
binary oppositions prevalent in the patriarchical society:

Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
Day/Night
Father/Mother

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Head/Heart
Intelligible/Palpable
Logos/Pathos
Form, convex, step, advance, semen, progress.
Matter, Concave, Ground―where steps are taken, holding
and dumping ground.
Man/ Woman

In these categories the first term relates to men and the second
to women. Thus, Cixous shows that patriarchy brings man at
the centre and leaves no space for women or just keeps her at
the margin. This is what prompts her to comment, “Either
woman is passive or she doesn’t exist.” Simone de Beauvoir
(1949) indicates the prevalence of the process of naturalizing
these binary oppositions constructed by patriarchy in almost
all manifestations of human culture including law, religion,
philosophy, science and literature. She observes:

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, and

scientists have striven to show that the
subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven
and advantageous on earth.

And this is true in almost all literatures written in almost all

the lands. It is this naturalization of the binary oppositions
that the feminist writers expose, oppose, deconstruct and
subvert in their writings. In the writings of women writers this
phenomenon is more at work. Patricia Spacks (1989: 48)
notices, "There seems to be something that we call a women's
point of view on outlook sufficiently distinct to be

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recognizable through the countries.” Here it is to be noted that
this distinct women's point of view has resulted in an
altogether different representation of women in the literary
texts written by women who have been called feminists,
whereby women are shown negatively constructed and
victimized in the society or liberated, having a distinct
identity and living life on their own terms. In the light of this
representation of women by the feminist women writers, there
seems to be a curiosity to probe the representation of men by
these writers. It is this curiosity that the present paper caters
to. Specifically speaking, it analyzes the construction of male
in the poetry of Kamala Das, one of the founding figures of
Indian poetry in English. For the purpose of analysis, eleven
of her poems are selected. These are A Losing Battle,
Conflagration, In Love, The Looking Glass, The Sunshine
Cat, An Invitation, The Maggots, The Stone Age, The
Suicide, The Old Playhouse and The Freaks.
Kamala Das and Feminism

Kamala Das (31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009) is perhaps the

most outstanding and debated Indian woman poet who wrote
in English in the post-independent India. Nominated and
shortlisted for Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984 and Winner
of the PEN Asian Award for poetry (1964), Kerala Sahitya
Academy Award (1969), Sahitya Academy Award (1985) and
Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries
(1999), she is acknowledged to be a poet in whose poetry the
feminist literary agenda has been foregrounded. K.R. Srinivas
Iyenger (1985: 680) observes, “Kamala Das is fiercely

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feminine sensibility that dares without inhibitions to articulate
the hurts it has received in an insensitive man-made world.”
Similar is the view of Sunanda P.Chavan (1984: 60), “Kamala
Das embodies the most significant stage of development of
Indian Feminine poetic sensibility not yet reached by her
contemporaries”. Obviously, she is brutally bold and blunt in
accepting her distinct identity as a woman, an identity which
does not conform to the norms of the patriarchical society.
The result is conflict. An Invitation beautifully portrays this
conflict:

I wore a shirt and my

Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don't sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role.

And if she is dubbed as a freak, she is proud to be called so.

In The Freaks, she declares:

I am a freak. It`s only

To save my face, I flaunt at
Times, a grand flamboyant lust

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Tejinder Kaur (1980) writes in this regard, “Kamala Das did
display tremendous courage in revolting against the sexual
colonialism and providing hope and confidence to young
women that they can refuse and reject the victim positions,
that they can frustrate the sexist culture’s effort to exploit,
passivise and marginalize women”. Another critic, Devendra
Kohli (1980: 190), also endorses this view, “Her poetry is in
final analysis an acknowledgement and a celebration of the
beauty and courage of being a woman. Kamala das is
essentially a poet of the modern Indian woman’s
ambivalence, giving expression to it more nakedly than any
other Indian woman poet.” Beyond doubt, Kamala Das in her
poetry voices the agony of a woman who is frustrated in her
endeavours to belong to somebody, to seek love, to have a
distinct identity and to be recognized as a woman with human
passions and feelings and not as an object for the gratification
of lust. K.V. Surdendran (2000: 25) puts it more explicitly,
“Her main concern happens to be suffering and humiliation
meted out to women.” Obviously, in her poetry, Kamala Das
endeavours to expose or at times dismantle the trap of binary
oppositions, specified by Cixous, in terms of which patriarchy
constructs woman as negative and passive. But does this
endeavour reflect when it comes to the construction of man in
her poetry? In other words, does Kamala Das dismantle the
binary oppositions in the construction of man as she does in
the construction of woman in her poetry or does in her
endeavour to get rid of a trap laid for woman she push man in
another similar trap?

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The Construction of male in Kamala Das’s Poetry

Written in the first person narrative, An Invitation by Das

makes explicit statements on the nature of men and women.
Here the man the speaker meets is denied any identity as the
speaker does not call him ‘by any name’. Further, he is
presented as a being with ‘hunger’ i.e. lust who ‘wants a
woman’ for its gratification. On the contrary, woman is
presented as a being with patience and a seeker of ‘love’.

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.

Obviously, the poem positions women and men in a binary

opposition – love/lust – wherein the first element relates to
women and the second to men. This painting of man as a
being with lust is not occasional in Das’s poetry, but quite
regular. The male in The Freaks is shown to be given to
‘skin's lazy hungers’ and the female speaker is shown to be
wary of all this and in search for something ‘more alive’.
Obviously, this something ‘more alive’ means love.

Can this man with

Nimble finger-tips unleash
Nothing more alive than the
Skin's lazy hungers?

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Likewise, In The Sunshine Cat, all men the female speaker
turns to in her quest for love are shown to be brimming with
‘young lusts’, something which the female speaker
disapproves of and wishes to ‘forget’. Further, the nature of
adjectives used to describe men in the poem needs to be taken
into consideration. For instance, men are called ‘selfish’,
‘coward’, ‘ruthless watcher’ and ‘cynics’. Needless to say,
that all these are thoroughly negative constructions.

They did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget,

Not only this, through the agency of the female speaker, men
in the poem are reported to be incapable of love as love is not
in their ‘nature’.

they said, each of

Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love,

The Looking Glass, another poem by Kamala Das, also

reinforces the similar construction of man. Here the female
speaker is of the view that to get ‘a man to love’ all that a

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woman needs to do is to gratify his lust, to satisfy him
sensually and sexually, for a man does not long for anything
beyond ‘the scent of
long hair’, ‘the musk of sweat between the breasts’ and ‘the
warm shock of menstrual blood’.

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.

Next, man in the poetry of Kamala Das is presented as

overflowing with ‘monstrous ego’ who makes use of ‘love’ to
tame woman, to make her ‘a dwarf’, to kill her ‘urge to fly’
and to hinder her growth. It is this portrayal of man that we
get in The Old Playhouse. For a speedy comprehension of the
idea, the relevant phrases in the following lines are put in
bold

You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her

In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. It was not to gather knowledge
Of yet another man that I came to you but to learn
What I was, and by learning, to learn to grow, but every
Lesson you gave was about yourself.

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 You called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and
To offer at the right moment the vitamins. Cowering
Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and
Became a dwarf. I lost my will and reason, to all your
Questions I mumbled incoherent replies.

he strong man's technique is

Always the same, he serves his love in lethal doses,

A cursory look at these lines reveals at least two binary

oppositions at work here – humility/ego and
liberty/imprisonment. Again, the first and the positive
element in both these pairs has been assigned to woman and
the second and the negative one has been made the identity of
man. Another interesting thing in the poem is that the female
speaker denounces the ‘love’ of her male partner almost in
the same way as in other poems of Das the female speakers
denounce man’s ‘lust’, and looks upon this love as man’s
‘plan’ to ‘tame a swallow’, as ‘man's technique’ and as
something which is ‘lethal’. Almost similar is the case in
The Looking Glass. Here once again the female speaker
presents man as egoistic by suggesting that in order to make
man love her all that a woman needs to do is to satisfy his ego
by making herself ‘softer’, ‘younger’ and ‘lovelier’ so that he
finds ‘himself the stronger one ‘. Her long list of suggestions
to women in this regard is as follows:

Stand nude before the glass with him

So that he sees himself the stronger one

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 And believes it so, and you so much more
Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your
Admiration. Notice the perfection
Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under
The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,
Dropping towels, and the jerky way he
Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man.

In addition to lust and ego, another characteristic

assigned to man in Das’s poetry is fickleness. In The Suicide
the female speaker observes that ‘holding’ the ‘moving water’
of sea is easier than holding a man even ‘for half a day’.

Holding you is easy

Clutching at moving water,
I tell you, sea,
This is easy,
But to hold him for half a day
Was a difficult task.
It required drinks
To hold him down.
To make him love.

Among other things that are useful to probe the

construction of male in Das’s poetry, the most noteworthy is
her use of imagery to build up the image of man. Often it is
animal imagery as in The Stone Age, where man is called ‘a
lion’ and his hand is compared with ‘a hooded snake’.

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 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.

Similarly, in The Maggots, lying in ‘her husband's arms’ at

night, the wife considers him a maggot feeding on a corpse.

At sunset, on the river ban, 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?

In another poem, In Love, the female speaker compares the

limbs of her male partner with ‘Carnivorous plants’. Here it is
to be noticed that carnivorous plants make their food by
trapping and consuming insects and other arthropods.
Obviously, the comparison paints man as violent, brutal,
hurting, heartless and parasite:

his limbs like pale and

Carnivorous plants reaching
Out for me

Further, in Conflagration, murder imagery is used to describe

the aftermath of the sexual act performed by man. Obviously,

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here man, who goes physical with a woman, is presented as a
murderer.

How well i can see him

After a murder, conscientiously
Tidy up the scene, wash
The bloodstains under
Faucet, bury the knife

And finally, this advice to women in A Losing Battle

is above all:

Men are worthless, to trap them

Use the cheapest bait of all, but never
Love

The inference that this analysis brings forth is that in

the construction of male Kamala Das seems to be falling in
that trap of binary oppositions which the feminists revolt
against when it comes to the positioning of women in the
society and literature dominated by patriarchy. If patriarchy
positions woman in a disadvantageous position and paints her
in negative colors as Helen Cixous suggests, while
constructing male in her poetry Kamala Das seems to be
doing almost the same. She paints man as a being with lust
and ego, brands him as ‘selfish’, ‘coward’, ‘ruthless’, ‘cynic’,
fickle and incapable of love, compares him with a ‘hooded
snake’, ‘maggots’, ‘carnivorous plants’ and a murderer and
goes to the extent of calling him ‘worthless’. Here it needs to
be stressed that such negative constructions of male in the

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products of popular culture like literature, film, news or
advertisement give birth to a negative assessment of man in
real life too. A recent evidence in this regard is the rejection
of an Indian student for internship by a Professor at the
world-famous Leipzig University citing the following reason:

“I don’t accept any Indian male students for

internships. We hear a lot about rape problem in
India which I cannot support. I have many female
students in my group”

Needless to say, all the constructions which position man and

woman in binary oppositions, wherein one element is
negative and the other is positive, are faulty and need to be
dismantled as human species are neither absolutely black nor
thoroughly white. Manju Kapur (cited in Naik 2003: 13)
observes:

There is a man within every woman and a woman

in every man. When, manhood is questioned
womanhood is fragmented.

References
Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949). The Second Sex.
URL:https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-
beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.html

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Beck-Sickinger, Annette G. (2005). An e-mail assessed at
http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2015/03/09/leipzig-university-
apolog_n_6829270.html on March 12, 2015.

Chavan, Sunanda P. (1984). The Fair Voice: A Study of

Indian Women Poets in English . New Delhi: Sterling
Publishers Pvt.Ltd.

Cixous, Helene. (1997). “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks, Ways

Out, Forays”. In Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (ed.) The
Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of
Literary Criticism. Second Edition. Malden, USA: Blackwell
Publishers Inc. p. 91-103.

Iyengar, K.R.Srinivas. (1985). Indian Writing in English.

New Delhi: Sterling Publishers.

Kaur, Tejinder. (1980). "Images of Indian Woman in Kamala

Das's "A Doll for the Child Prostitute". In Perspectives on
Kamala Das 's Prose. New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing
House.

Kohli, Devendra. (1980). "Kamala Das". In Chirantan

Kulshrestha (ed.), Contemporary Indian English Verse. An
Evaluation, New Delhi : Amold-Heinemann.
Moi, Toril. (1997). “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” In
Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (ed.) The Feminist Reader:
Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism .

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Second Edition. Malden, USA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. p.
117-132.

Naik, Bhagwat. (2003) "Feminine Asserssion in Manju

Kapur's 'A married women'. In R.K. Dhawan (ed.) The Indian
Journal of English Studies. New Delhi: IAEI. p. 13
Specks, Patricia. (1989). Stage of Self: Notes on
Autobiography and the Life Cycle in the American
Autobiographies. Washington DC: Pen Craft.
Surdendran, K.V. “Suffering and Humiliation in Kamla Das’s
Poetry”. In Manmohan Krishna Bhatnagar and M. Rajeshwar
(ed.) Indian Writings in English, Volume 8. New Delhi:
Atlantic Publishers. p. 25

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