INTRODUCTION
KAMALA DAS
Recognized as one of
India’s foremost poets, Kamala Das (also known as Kamala Surayya) was born on
March 31, 1934 in Punnayurkulam, Kerala. Kamala Das was raised in Calcutta. Her
mother was a poet in Malayalam and her father the editor and managing director
of Mathrubhoomi, a leading Malayalam
language newspaper. She is probably best known for a racy autobiography, My Story (1976), and an eventful life
that has included a period in politics and a conversion to Islam. The
autobiography became something of a publishing sensation in its time, drawing
readers who had possibly never before read a literary memoir. But the writing
may have little bearing on her life. The speakers in her poems and the speaker
in her autobiography –‘Unhappy woman, unhappy wife, reluctant nymphomaniac’, in
Eunice de Souza’s words- may be nothing more, or less than various personae.
At the age of fifteen,
Kamala Das started writing and publishing. Her poems gifted a revolutionary
movement in Indian-English poetry as well as in post colonial literatures.
Unlike other post colonial literary works, she has changed the theme of
colonial experiences to the personal experiences, along with her
contemporaries. At the same time, she was also active in Malayalam literature
with her fictions. As a post colonial writer she wrote more about ‘sexual
colonization’ in her works. Throughout her writing career, Kamala Das moved
adroitly between genres (poetry, fiction, and memoir) and languages (English
and Malayalam). “I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one”, she
wrote in An Introduction, a poem from
her first collection, Summer in Calcutta (1965).
In 1949, when she was
fifteen, she married Madhava Das, a bank official. In her autobiography My Story (1976), she openly discussed
about her marriage life, which was not at all successful. By this
self-awakening story of Kamala Das, as a woman and writer, she became a role
model for those women who were struggling to liberate themselves from sexual
and domestic oppression. Though it was supposed to be an autobiography (and
indeed was provocatively subtitled “the compelling autobiography of the most
controversial Indian writer”) Kamala Das later admitted that there was plenty
of fiction in My Story.
Kamala Das’s poems were
also controversial like her autobiography, because she always challenged the
boundaries of society towards women. She openly discussed about female
sexuality in her poems. The Looking Glass,
from The Descendants, (1967) ,is an
example.
Gift him what makes you women, the
scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat
between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood,
and all your
Endless female hungers. Oh yes,
getting
A man to love is easy, but living
Without him afterwards may have to
be
Faced. A living without life when
you move
Around, meeting strangers, with
your eyes that
Gave up their search, with ears
that hear only
His last voice calling out your
name and your
Body which once under his touch had
gleamed
Like burnished brass, now drab and
destitute.
(The Looking Glass, The Descendants, poem No: 804)
Through lines like
this, she celebrated her sexuality and emotions. Kamala Das’s poems are
enriched with various aspects of womanhood and feminism. Even though people
like Amar Dwivedi criticizes Kamala Das for her “self imposed and not natural”
elements in her poem An Introduction,
“I am every women who seeks love”, the feeling of oneness permeates her poetry.
According to Kamala Das,
womanhood involves certain collective experiences. Indian women, however, do
not discuss these experiences in deference to social mores. Kamala Das was not
ready to be silent like other women in her age. She argued that, women are not
supposed to suffer in private; they have to bring their personal problems into
the public sphere. Through her poems Kamala Das tried to explain certain
feelings, which cannot be identified by a biased society. In The Maggots, Kamala Das corroborates
just how old the sufferings of women are. She frames the pain of lost love with
ancient Hindu myths. On their last night together, Krishna asks Radha if she is
disturbed by his kisses. Radha says “No not at all, but thought, what is it to
the corpse if the maggots nip?” Furthermore, by making a powerful Goddess prey
to such thoughts, it serves as a validation for ordinary women to have similar
feelings.
‘Feminism’ is an
another unavoidable ingredient in Kamala Das’s poetry. People might label
Kamala Das as a ‘Feminist’ because of her love for womanhood, but she “has
never tried to identify herself with any particular version of feminist
activism”. Kamala Das’s view can be characterized as ‘a gut response’, a
reaction that like her poetry, is unfettered by other’s notion of right and
wrong. None the less, poet Eunice de Souza claims that Kamala Das has “mapped
out the terrain for post-colonial women in social and linguistic terms”. She
has ventured into areas unclaimed by society and has provided a point of
reference for her colleagues. She has transcended the role of a poet and simply
embraced the role of a very honest woman.
Kamala Das’s rebellions
were more multidimensional than she has been given credit for. Her female
protagonists are not simply in pursuit of sexual freedom, they are in search of
poetry, intimacy and divinity. Characters like Padmavati the harlot, who drags
her bruised body to a holy shrine, personify the unworldly wisdom with which
Kamala Das endowed her best female protagonists. She has also created several
nuanced male characters for example, the hapless father in the 1991 short story
Neypayasam, who shelters his children
from their mother’s death.
In the 1980s, Kamala
Das dabbled in painting and politics. While she attained some acclaim as an
artist, her political career did not take off. She stood unsuccessfully for the
Indian Parliament in 1984 and later launched a short lived political party, Lok
Seva (public service). One of her final acts of reinvention was her conversion
to Islam in 1999, a move especially bold because of her aristocratic Nair
lineage. Ten years later, on May 31, 2009 she was laid to rest in the mosque
where she had taken her vows.
As a writer Kamala Das
has published many novels, poetry collections and short stories in English as
well as in Malayalam, under the name ‘Madhavikutty’. The novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), Short story
collection Padmavati the Harlot (1992),
My Story (1976), The Poetry
collections, The Descendants (1967), Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996)
are the major works of Kamala Das. She received several awards including
Kendra, and Kerala Sahitya Academy Award. She was nominated in 1984 for the
Nobel Prize for literature. Her works are available in more than five languages
outside India.
Krishna
Motif
In the history of Indian
literature, God Krishna or the imagery of God Krishna has much more relevance
than a God. There are so many literary and art works, in which Krishna appears
as an ideal lover and a protector of his Gopikas. Women, especially those who
have an Indian-Hindu cultural background, have an extra emotional attachment
towards God Krishna. Women of all ages have love for Krishna. For mothers,
Krishna is their naughty son, for younger women, Krishna is an ideal lover. In
most of the writings about Krishna, we can find that love is the dominant
emotion in the writings rather than fear or respect towards God. The writers of
this category (who write about Krishna), treat Krishna mush more personally
than any other God. The Radha-Krishna love tale is an example of ideal love in
Indian literature. There are so many prayer songs as well as other literary and
art works that have been created with the theme of Radha-Krishna love tale.
In Indian literature,
Mira Bhai, Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das were the major women writers who wrote
poems about Krishna. These three poets have come from three different social,
cultural and historical backgrounds. Even though we can categorize Sarojini Naidu
and Kamala Das as post-colonial writers, the form and style of their poems are
different from one another. Mira Bhai lived in an entirely different society.
All these differences apart, they selected Krishna as the major character of
their love poems and the ideal lover of their life. This can be considered as
an example of the wide acceptance of Krishna as an ideal lover among Indian
women.
Krishna Motif in Kamala Das’s poetry
As mentioned earlier,
besides Kamala Das, Mira Bhai and Sarojini Naidu were the major women poets who
used the image of God Krishna in their poems as a central character. So a
comparison is possible between these poets and their use of Krishna motif. Mira
Bhai, who was born on 1550 or 1449 A.D, due to her Vyshnava cultural
background, fell in love with God Krishna completely from her childhood. As she
grew up, her love for God Krishna became more and more powerful. Krishna was
her spiritual husband, even after her marriage. She spent a lot of time for
prayers and wrote more than 1300 prayer songs (Bhajans). Most of her songs are
written in praise of Krishna. Most of her poems are in Rajasthani dialects of
Hindi. In one of her Bhajans, she wrote,
Mara re Giridhar Gopal
Dusra Na Koi
Sadho, Sakal, lok joi,
Dusra na koi
Bhai chhodia, Bandhu chhodi,
chhodia Saga soi
Sadhu sang baith baith log-laaj
khoi.
(Mine is only Giridhar Gopal
None else
Amongst all other,
There is no one else.
I have abandoned all my relatives
close ones and others
Associating
with saints and sage, I lost the respect of society).
An outline of Mira
Bhai’s whole life is represented in this Bhajan. It shows the ultimate love and
belief which she had towards Lord Krishna. All her relatives, friends left her
due to her divine love, but still she has faith in God Krishna. In short, Mira
Bhai’s poems are enriched with a divine love between God and a human. Even
though Mira Bhai was an ordinary woman, due to her incomparable devotion and
love for Krishna, her soul has uplifted into a divine level. Because of her
this divine quality, she is also known as an incarnation of Radha.
Sarojini Naidu, who
lived during 1879-1949, treats Krishna in her poems much differently from Mira
Bhai and Kamala Das. Even though Sarojini Naidu quotes the term of Mira Bhai,
‘the divine love’, for Sarojini Naidu Krishna exists as a powerful God in her
poems. In her poem Ghanashyam,
Sarojini Naidu depicts Krishna not as her lover but as a God who is omniscient
and omnipotent and is the centre principle of this universe.
Thou givest to the shadows on the
mountains
The colours of thy glory,
Ghanashyam
Thy laughter to high secret
snow-fed mountains
To forest pines thy healing breath
of balm.
Thou lendest to the storm’s
unbridled tresses
The
beauty and blackness of thy hair…..
(Ghanashyam)
This poem is written in
the form of ‘Stotra’, a prayer song in praise of God. The tone of the poem
suggests the high seriousness of a devotee. She offers the lord not her body
but her “yearning soul”; “O take my yearning soul for thine oblation”. She is
not in search of any physical pleasure; what she needs is spiritual
completeness. In her Songs of Radha,
Sarojini Naidu describes the restless anxiety and pain, Radha experiences in
waiting for her Krishna. Her songs are rhythmic and have a musical appeal.
According to Dr. Mallikarjuna Rao:
In Sarojini Naidu, Radha-Krishna relationship
is a metaphor for that between ‘Atman’ and ‘Brahman’, a relation which is
completely spiritual not physical. Sarojini Naidu’s Radha is not anti-sexual,
yet sex is not the primary concern in the Radha poems. In short, Sarojini
Naidu’s treatment of Krishna in her poems is spiritual and with all the dignity
of a God. (Rao par.18).
In Kamala Das’s poems,
‘search for love’ is the major thematic concern. Through her love poems, she
discovers herself. In most of her love poems, Lord Krishna is the ideal lover
who comforts her. Her concept of ideal love is explained in these following
lines,
Love is Narcissus at the water,
edge, haunted
By its own lovely face, and yet it
must seek at least
An end, a pure, total freedom, it
must will the mirrors
To
shatter and the kind night to erase the water.
(The Old Playhouse, Only The Soul Knows How
to Sing 38)
For Kamala Das, ideal
love means ‘total freedom’ by overcoming the egos. She finds this ‘total
freedom’ of both body and soul in the divine love of Radha and Krishna. Most of
her works have influences from her real life. She was not satisfied with her
married life, that’s why the concept of ideal love or the relationship with
Krishna is more physical for Kamala Das. She says that, “A poet’s raw material
is not stone or clay; it is her personality”.
Kamala Das’s love poems
can be divided into two phases. In the first phase, her over concern about
physical pleasure is prominent, where as in the second phase we can realize her
drift towards Lord Krishna. In most of her love poems, Kamala Das openly
discusses about love and sex. She confesses, “I was looking for an ideal lover.
I was looking for the one who went to Mathura and forgot to return to his
Radha”. In her poems, Kamala Das lives simultaneously in two worlds- in the
actual world and in the in the mythical world, Vrindavan. The following poem
will illustrate her love for the imaginary world, Vrindavan and her desire to
become Krishna’s Gopika.
Vrindavan lives on in every woman’s
mind
and the flute luring her
from home and her husband
who later asks her of the long
scratch
on the brown areola of her breast
and she shyly replies
hiding flushed cheeks, it was so
dark
outside,
I tripped over the brambles in the woods…
(Vrindavan, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing 128)
Kamala Das realized
that in the real world, the ultimate form of love is sex. So she turns towards
the mythical world of Krishna and Vrindavan to seek lasting love and fulfillment.
She assumes herself as Radha and finds herself comfortable in the arms of
Krishna. In his essay ‘Love Poetry of Kamala Das’, Dr. P. Mallikarjuna Rao says
that:
She
can experience absolute liberty from the rigid social code and the constrains
of super ego in the presence of God Krishna. In psychological terms, Krishna as
Sudhir Kakar remarks, “encourages the individual to identify with an ideal
primal self, released from all social and super ego constraints, Krishna’s
promise, like that of Dionysus in the ancient Greece, is one of utter freedom
and instinctual exhilaration”. (Rao
par.6)
Dr. P. Mallikarjuna Rao
also quotes something about Kamala Das’s past which made her closer
to Lord Krishna as:
Her grandmother’s sister Ammalu, also a poet,
exerted a positive influence on Kamala Das. She was a worshipper of Krishna and
wrote several poems in his praise. Though she was pretty and eligible, she
remained a spinster until her death. She was faithful to Lord Krishna and in
her last poem she wrote, “My chastity is my only gift to you Oh Krishna…” Her
writings seem to have ‘disturbed’ Kamala Das very much. (Rao par.7)
Later in her unsuccessful
married life, Krishna became her only motive for living. As a woman who needed
‘love’ more than anything else in this world, Kamala Das exposed herself
through the lines like,
The long waiting
Had made their bond so chaste, and
all the doubting
And reasoning
So that in his first true embrace,
she was girl
And virgin crying
Everything in me
Is melting, even the hardness at
core
O, Krishna, I am melting, melting,
melting
Nothing remains but
You…
(Radha, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing 77).
In one of her
interviews, she explained one incident of her life which shows the ‘extreme
level’ of love and devotion which makes her comfortable with God Krishna. For
the question “Isn’t Krishna a fabulous myth?” she answered that,
To
me he is not. Even now he is with me, as my friend, lover and protector... I
remember having gone to Poonthanam’s illam to attend a religious function. The
organizers took me around the house. Pointing to a pillar from a distance, they
told me “That is where Lord Krishna appeared before Poonthanam”. I tried to be
very skeptical and asked “Isn’t Krishna a mere myth?” But when I reached the
spot, I felt my hair standing on ends. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I rushed
to the stage and began my speech with “Oh, Krishna…” I don’t know what all I
said. But within a few minutes, the whole audience was profoundly moved. They
were literally seething in the ocean of devotion. When I stepped down from the
dais, many rushed to me and touched my feet. They might have taken me for Krishna’s
Radha… I might be her… (Nair par.15)
According to Kamala
Das, for an Indian woman, the love for Krishna is not forbidden. She gives the
example of Mira Bhai, to justify her argument. Her poems can be defined with
William Wordsworth’s definition for poetry, ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful
emotions’. Here the ‘powerful emotion’ is not spiritual; it is completely
physical in Kamala Das’s poems. For her Radha, she does not have separate
existence in this world, she is merged with Krishna. So Kamala Das, who assumed
herself as Radha, tried to posses Krishna as a friend, companion, lover,
husband, and as a God throughout her life.
Most of the love poems
of Kamala Das are very short in form, but a lot of emotion and ultimate
meanings of words are hidden in these poems. By using the apt symbols, she has
succeeded in it. An analysis of the given poem will illustrate her capability.
This becomes from this hour
Our river and this Old kadamba
Tree, ours alone, for our homeless
Soul to return someday,
To hang like bats
From
its pure physicality.
(Radha Krishna, Only The Soul Knows How to
Sing 132)
In this poem, the usage
of symbols is very significant. Here the ‘river’ can be considered as a symbol
of the speaker’s careless or endless flow of life. The ‘Kadamba tree’
symbolizes the mortal human body into which the homeless soul is reborn.
‘Radha’ and ‘Krishna’ represent the soul and the ultimate reality respectively.
‘Bats’ hanging on the kadamba tree symbolize the immortal souls that migrate
from one body to another. She has portrayed all these ideas as ideal lovers-
Radha and Krishna, Vrindavan, immortality of soul, in just six short lines.
In her poem ‘Ghanashyam’, we can also see this wide
use of symbols. Unlike her other love poems, ‘Ghanashyam’ is a long verse. Through the following lines from the
poem, we can analyze the use of symbols in the poem.
Ghanshyam,
You have like a koel built your
nest in the arbour of my heart.
My life until now a sleeping
jungle, is at last astir with music.
You lead me along a route I have
never known before.
But at each time when I near you
Like a spectral flame you vanish
The flame of my prayer lamp holds
captives my future
I gaze into the red eye of death
The
hot stare of truth unveiled.
(Ghanashyam, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing 117)
Here she says that the
divine touch of the ‘koel’ (Krishna) has changed the ‘sleeping jungle’ (the
poet’s life) into a magical world of music. The small spark becomes a ‘spectral
flame’ relating itself to the flame of the prayer lamp, a symbol of her shining
devotion. The flame of the lamp is also the flame of the funeral pyre and
therefore “the red eye of death”. Death is experienced as heat. “Death is the
hot sauna leading to cool-rest-rooms. The body is dissolved in the heat but the
soul is released into the cool rest-room of immortality. There is a total
involvement and surrendering attitude in the adoration of the Lord:
O Shyam, My Ghanashyam
With words I weave a raiment for
you
With songs a sky
With
such music I liberated in the oceans their fervid dances…
(Ghanashyam, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing 117)
The devotion to Lord
Krishna has eventually made her happy and contented and she never forgets
Krishna. Thus the use of symbols in Kamala Das’s poems, especially in her love
poems is very significant. She conveys all the love and devotion towards Lord
Krishna through symbols.
Kamala Das’s love poems
can be analyzed also through the post-colonial and feminist points of view. In
her love poems, post-colonial and feminist elements are almost the same
because, as a post-colonial writer, she wrote more about sexual-colonization,
which can be considered as a branch of feminism. She wrote about the depression
and loneliness felt by a woman who is left alone by her beloved ones and her
need of love and joy, through the character of Radha. In her poem Krishna, she effectively portrays the
mind of Radha, who is left alone by her Krishna. She cries that,
Your body is my prison, Krishna,
I cannot see beyond it.
Your darkness blinds me,
Your
love words shut out the wise world’s din.
(Krishna, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing 82)
In another sense, we
can say that she tried to use the tool of ‘hitting back’ against the male
dominated world as a feminist writer. For this process also she used the
Krishna motif. In Indian culture, Krishna represents the ideal lover or in another
sense, an ideal man. By using this ideal man Krishna as her major male
character, she is concentrating more on the emotions of her female characters.
The given lines can be taken as an example,
At sunset on the river bank,
Krishna
Loved her for the last time and
left.
That night in her husband’s arms,
Radha felt
So dead that he asked, what is wrong,
Do you mind my kisses love, and she
said
No, not at all, but thought, what
is
It
to the corpse if the maggots nip?
(The Maggots, Only The Soul Knows How to Sing
52)
In this most famous
love poem of Kamala Das, Radha is worried about her remaining life without
Krishna because; Krishna is going to Mathura to fulfill his destiny. In a
feminist point of view, we can give a simple interpretation to the poem by
comparing Radha with those women who were left alone when their husbands went
for wars. These women become alone in their life, not because of their destiny,
but because of their men’s destiny. The patterns and forms of the war had
changed a lot, but the lives of the ‘warrior’s women’ remain unchanged along
with time. So in one sense, she is hitting back against the male supremacy of
the society by standing within her culture and beliefs. She is throwing light
on things which are ‘not fair’ (like inequality of women) in a culture and
society.
CONCLUSION
Through the analysis of
various aspects of Krishna motif, in the poems of various poets, we have
arrived at the conclusion that: Mira Bhai, Sarojini Naidu and Kamala Das, three
major Indian women poets who wrote poems about Krishna, had treated the imagery
of Lord Krishna in three different ways. In Mira Bhai’s poem, her relationship
with Lord Krishna is purely spiritual. In her poems, there is no element of
physical pleasure in it. Most of her poems are known as Bhajans (devotional
songs). In these Bhajans, it is devotion that dominates more than love. She
needs to acquire Krishna on a divine level. Through her uplifted soul, Mira
Bhai became capable of acquiring the divine love. In her poems, the speaker and
Lord Krishna, both of them are standing on the same divine level, where the
worldly pleasures are considered as something ‘other’ which is completely away
from Mira Bhai’s soul. Spiritually she became one among the Gopikas of
Vrindavan or rather Krishna’s favorite lover Radha itself. So this ‘Divinity of
love’ is the prominent theme in Mira Bhai’s poems.
In Sarojini Naidu’s
love poems, the major theme and the characters are the same as Mira Bhai: The
divine love of Radha and Krishna. Through her poems, she has said all the
things that Mira Bhai said. But in her poems, Sarojini Naidu explains her
emotions for her Krishna in a very different way. In her poems, the speaker is
human and Krishna is a powerful God. The gap between a human and God is very
prominent in her poems. Her soul has not reached to the ‘divine level’ like
Mira Bhai. The speaker of Sarojini Naidu’s poem is normal human being who needs
the care and support of Lord Krishna, to survive in this world. Through her
relationship with the God, she is trying to merge her ‘Atman’ with ‘Brahman’.
According to Sarojini Naidu, Atman is the human soul, and Brahman is the divine
soul or the ultimate power of the world. Sarojini Naidu says that, the human
life is a journey of Atman towards Brahman; that is, through the mortal human
life, every human being has to make his soul pure to merge with the divine
power, by which the human soul can acquire immortality. The gap between the
Atman and Brahman is the human life. So the ‘Gap’ is very relevant for Sarojini
Naidu. To show this gap, she used the words like ‘Thou’ and ‘Thy’ to address
the God more than ‘You’ or ‘My Krishna’ unlike Mira Bhai and Kamala Das. So we
can say that in Sarojini Naidu’s poems, devotion or rather the fear and respect
to a great power Krishna, is highlighted more than love.
In Kamala Das’s poetry,
the usage of Krishna Motif is very different from that of Mira Bhai and
Sarojini Naidu, and it introduced a new method of using the image of Krishna.
Kamala Das, due to her circumstances, gave more importance to sex or physical
pleasures in her love poems. As Dr. Sushama Pandey says:
In
spite of being so spiritual in love she talks of body in her poetry. This is
because she feels that without soul body shall be bare or incomplete and
without body soul shall be bare or incomplete. Kamala Das’s most significant
achievement is that she has tried to reconcile the world of flesh and spirit
through her efforts. She believes that sensual love is a means to evaluate, to
realize the ultimate love and humanity signifies the awakening of self. Kamala
Das moves from naked physical confession to religious confession. (Pandey par. 1)
She find fulfillment of her needs through her
poems about Krishna. But in her poems, element of ‘Bhakthi’ (devotion) is
absent. Like Mira Bhai and Sarojini Naidu, Kamala Das also has the concepts of
two worlds- Actual and Divine. But unlike the other two, Kamala Das is bringing
down her ideal lover Krishna into a human being. Here the speaker and Krishna
are standing in a human society; not in a divine world. In her poems, Krishna
is her lover; not a God. Most of her poems deal only with the theme of love,
nothing about ‘divinity’ or the ‘supernatural’ powers of Krishna. She uses the
words ‘My Krishna’ and ‘You’ to address Krishna. She never used the word ‘God’
for Krishna in her poems. By taking this as an example we can say that Kamala
Das’s relationship with Krishna is completely human; it does not rise to ‘the
divine level’. She just uses the divine images in describing the emotions of
human beings. Fritz Blackwell rightly observes that the “poet’s concern is literary
and existential, not religious; she is using a religious concept for a literary
motif and metaphor.
Kamala Das’s poems are
too personal. As mentioned earlier, her Krishna poems emerge through
“spontaneous over flow of powerful emotions”. In her poems, Kamala Das is
offering her body to Krishna, where as Mira Bhai and Sarojini Naidu offer their
soul to Lord Krishna. All the three poets believe that Lord Krishna is always
with them. For Mira Bhai and Sarojini Naidu, Krishna is a God who is capable of
protecting them from all worldly harms. But Kamala Das describes Krishna as her
companion; not as a God. In Kamala Das’s poems, the element of feminism is also
visible. Even though Mira Bhai and Sarojini Naidu were also dealing with
feminism, Kamala Das has succeeded in explaining the sufferings of women over time,
through the divine character of Radha. Thus sexual- colonization became a major
concern in Kamala Das’s poetry.
So in short, finally we
have arrived at the conclusion that, the usage of Krishna motif in Kamala Das’s
poetry is completely human and multidimensional. She treats Krishna more
personally than any other poets, and she has also succeeded in portraying
various aspects of love and womanhood. At the same time her poems also deal
with women’s empowerment and female writings.
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