Unusual but Honest: Kamala Das and Confessional Poetry

Many critics from India, such as Ramesh Kumar Gupta, C. Santhosh Kumar, A. Selvalakshmi, Z. F. Molvi, describe the poetry of Kamala Das as being unusual, while the poet believes that she writes with ‘candour’ about her experiences of womanhood. Speaking of her poetry as ‘unusual’ is an expected reader’s response to poems written in the confessional mode that transgress accepted norms of tradition, conventions and culture in her society. Confessional constitutes an interesting dimension of women’s writing, in which the poets uncover confidentialities that bond her private and public spheres together. This paper is an investigation into the poetry of Kamala Das (1934-2009), the prolific Indian woman writer of the twentieth century to explicate confessional elements in her poetry. Das borrows this style of writing from her contemporary American writers and employs it as a means of articulation, negotiation and resistance through projecting the self.