Quest for Self: A Study of the Poetry of Kamala Das

Kamala Das was an iconoclast who shook the literary world with her frank, bold and controversial writings. She emerged as the pioneer of those who expressively articulated the taboo experiences of Indian women. She asserted her feminine identity on the firmament of Indian English Poetry by honestly writing about her experiences as a woman that break through the hypocritical veneer of man-woman relationship in Indian traditional society.Though she made a significant departure from the tradition of writing poetry by the erstwhile female Indian poets such as Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, she apprehended a celebration of the universal experience of self, love, despair, anguish, failure, disgust against the traditional mode of gender manifestations through an Indian feminine awareness.