Book Reviews by Anushree Joshi
Kitaab, 2020
This paper attempts to analyse the feminist tones in the poetry of Indian-English writer and poet... more This paper attempts to analyse the feminist tones in the poetry of Indian-English writer and poet, Kamala Das, particularly focusing on the expression and problematisation of gender roles in her 1965 poetry collection, Summer in Calcutta. It argues that her gendered identity manifests itself in her poetic style and aesthetic, wherein she questions the patriarchal expectations of gender - of women rooted in immanence and domesticity and of men rooted in transcendence and the public sphere. The custom of arranged marriage, domestic emotional abuse, confinement to the private sphere of domesticity, and daunting standards of feminine beauty, are some of the gendered expectations in the Indian woman's experience that Das' poetry interrogates. The confessional movement of poetry in the West, iconised in the poetry of women writers like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, also appears to influence Das' mode of expression, since she emphasises on the 'I' in her poems, while voicing the experience of not only her own self, but also of women as a community who have been disenfranchised socially, linguistically, politically, or culturally due to the gendered roles and expectations imposed upon them.
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Book Reviews by Anushree Joshi