My Grandmothers House by Kamla Das Essay

Kamala mouse hare is integrity of the best poets in contemporary Indo-Anglian literature. Kamala Das, born in Kerala in 1934, is a bilingual writer. She writes in Malayalam, her mother tongue, under the pseudonym Madhavikkutty. Her poetry is an exploration of the geography of her own mind, and the lyric is an instance of such self-exploration. Through icons of abhorrence and horror, she brings out the emotional emptiness and sterility of her married life, and the intensity of her affliction as a wife who had to submit to her husband whom she found repulsive, and with whom she had no emotional contact at all.She has won many prizes for her work . or so of them being the P. E. N. Asian Poetry Prize, Kerala Sahitya Academy Award for fiction, Asian macrocosm Prize for literature, Kendra Sahitya Academy Award etc. She was short listed for the Nobel Prize on with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer. On 31 May 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune, but ha s earned considerable respect in recent years. Themes in the Poetry of Kamala DasThe poetry of Kamala Das is a search for the essential charr, and hence the woman persona of her rimes plays the various roles of depressing woman, unhappy wife, mistress to lusty men, reluctant nymphomaniac A woman with abnormal sexual desires, silent Devdasi and honey-lord Radha. Kamala Das has also been called a poet in the confessional mode. The confessional poets deal with emotional experiences which are generally taboo.T present is a unpitying self-analysis and a tone of utter sincerity. E. V.Ramakrishnan rightly says, In her poetry, Kamala has incessantly dealt with private humiliations and sufferings which are the stock themes of confessional poetry. Reminiscent of the Poets Ancestral berth The poem is a reminiscence a mental understanding of the poem by people of the poetess granny and their transmittable home at Malabar in Kerala. Her memory of love she trustworthy from her nan is a ttached with the image of her ancestral home, where she had passed some of the happiest days of her life, and where her old grandmother had showered her love and affection. With the death of her grandmother the raise withdrew into silence.When her grandmother died, even the house seemed to share her grief, which is expressed in a very touching manner in the phrase the tin withdrew. The house soon was crushed by grief and snakes crawled among books. Her blood became acold like the moon because there was none to love her the way she wanted. She understands that she cannot take back the past but she wants to go back home, look once over again through its windows and bring back a handful of sliminess dreary and painful memories, which she would have made her constant companion, to keep as a reminder of her past happiness.The poet is unable to proceed with her thoughts for sometime as is indicated by the ellipses dots. The poet is now strangled with the intensity of grief. She cr aves for love like a beggar going from one door to another asking for love in picayune transpose. Her need for love and acceptance is not satisfied in marriage and she goes after strangers for love at least in small quantity. But she does not get it even in small change or coins. Her love-hunger remains unsatisfied, and there is a big void, a unobjectionable within her, she seeks to fill up with love but to no advantages .The image of the window is a link between the past and the present. It signifies the desire of the poet for a nostalgic peep into her past and resurrects her dreams and desires. The moon is being an emblem of love. The worms on the books seem like snakes at that moment, in comparison to the size of the petite girl. The poet also implies that the deserted house is like a desert with reptiles travel over. The poet now longs to peer at a house that was once her own. She has to glisten through the blind eyes of the windows as the windows are permanently closed.T he disperse is frozen now, as compared to when the grandmother was liveborn-the surroundings were filled with the warmth of empathy. Kamala Das pleads with us to listen to the frozen air. Neither is the air a optical medium, nor can air cause any displacement because it is frozen. In wild despair, she longs to bring in an armful of darkness. Firstly, that it is not a smattering but an armful. Secondly, darkness that generally has negative shades to it, has positive heart and soul here of a protective shadow. It also reflects the coziness inside the house. This armful of darkness is her essence of craving for her past.Kamala Das was very proud about her grandmother and the love she received. The Ellipsis after the word loved shows how much she grieves at the loss of the person who positively loved her and satisfied her to the core. She was so convinced(p) by the environment, in which she lived, that the loss of it was indigestible, and un-compromisable. She feels so proud of he r grandmother and the house in such a way that she wants all the others retire how vivid and satisfying was the atmosphere at her grandmothers home. The pronoun I here is very emphatic and also melancholic.Sudden and solid in roll to tell the world that no one would or could have be across such an admiring part of life the poet had lived and melancholic to let the readers know that she is a great loser and there can be no loser like her in the world. It also echoes her inner reverberations that when her grandmother was alive she was rich with love and after her demise she became bankrupt and started begging at strangers door. She dint expect the equal amount of love that she received from her grandmother from the society she was in but only diminished. Even that little love she was deprived of.This makes it clear that Kamalas grandmother was a take form of unconditional love. Conclusion The poem springs from her own disillusionment with her expectation of unconditional love f rom the one she loves. In the poem, the image of the ancestral home stands for the strong support and unconditional love she received from her grandmother. The imagery is personal and beautifully articulates her plight in a loveless marriage. Thus, the old house was for her a place of symbolic retreat to a world of innocence, purity and simplicity, a place of complete bliss and delight and peace world where love and happiness are still possible.