EXPLORING WOMEN’S IDENTITY IN KAMALA DAS’ POEM – ‘THE OLD PLAYHOUSE’

We live in a land of irony. We worship goddesses and female deities and shout slogans to our ‘Bharat Mata’, yet it is no myth that Indian women today are raped, brutalized, subjugated, silenced and killed in the name of honor. This is the type of society that is our India. Patriarchal. Men superior over women. The same social construct, which Kamala Das, a Malabar-born poet endeavored to oppose with vehemence and venom. Her poetry was a bold and feisty depiction of feminine identity and sexuality at a time when women poets were stereotyped to write about girlie fantasies of eternal, bloodless and unrequited love.

‘The Old Playhouse’ is one such poem of Kamala Das that attempts to put the relationship between the masculine and feminine world under a lens. It charts the contemplations of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to an overbearing man.

The title of the poem is significant. A playhouse is a miniature rendition of a house for children to play in. The girl-child uses dolls as their own children, tenderly nurturing and cooking while their ‘husbands’ are at work, for boys would much prefer to play with toy cars or guns. Thus, the playhouse reinforces traditional gender roles and maintains hegemony of a man over woman. Hence, it becomes a microcosm for a much larger concept, symbolizing the traditional patriarchal society, as a whole. It is these dichotomous conventions of the qualities ascribed for men and women, that Das meddles with.

Das’ poem is laden with rich, heavy and no-holds-barred metaphors and imagery, as she opens with these lines:

“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.” (1-5)

The bird’s flight is paralleled to the wife’s urgency for freedom, however she is unable to break away as her husband tries to cage her and domesticate her, so that she would forget her instinctual wish for flight. He expects her to serve him routinely and eternally, of pouring saccharine tablets into his tea and giving him his vitamins. Rebelling against the etiquette of ‘never kiss and tell’, Das explicitly describes sexuality between the two partners:

“You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured

Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed

My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices" (10-12).

It is crystal clear that the love-making is devoid of any spiritual connection and passion and the man simply wallows in lust for her. His horrific form dwarfs her in comparison, as she writes:

“Cowering

Beneath your monstrous ego I ate the magic loaf and

Became a dwarf” (14-16)

The tedium of his omnipresence is also brought out in the following lines:

“All pervasive is the male scent of your breath. The cut flowers

In the vases have begun to smell of human sweat…” (22-23)

It is also evident that the playhouse has lost all its inherent meanings and innocence as she laments:

“…….There is

No more singing, no more dance, my mind is an old

Playhouse with all its lights put out.” (23-26)

Das alludes to Greek mythology towards the end of the poem, referring her husband to Narcissus and the wife to the nymph Echo. Narcissus is well known to have rejected Echo’s true love and therefore was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection in the water, at which he stared to death. Das uses this comparison to describe her husband’s love for his own self and she even sardonically spits this in the following lines:

“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" (6-8).

Das writes her poem in free verse using just one stanza and a confessional tone. This form and her frequent repetition of ideas express her urgency to fly with her thoughts feverishly alive to instill in us the intensity of her feelings. The autobiographical style conveys universality to her poem as well as it reveals it to be her own experience also, as she was subject to patriarchal domination in her household, being married off early and only fit to be a mother only when she had her third child born. Therefore, literature became a vent for her contained emotions, becoming a choral voice for the Indian womanhood, fervidly calling for equality and harmony between the two sexes - an issue which was rife during her times and sadly enough, despite all the technological and ideological advancements, still continues to be alive, even to this day.