Sensitivity to the political dimension of literature is an accepted stance today. Contributions from a host of theorists ranging, to name a few, from Raymond Williams to Ngugi wa Thiong’O, from Stephen Heath to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, from Fredric Jameson to Jacques Ranciere, caution us against treating politics solely as a matter concerning the political commitment of the writer or the representational sincerity involved in the act of writing. In defining politics, it is natural now for one to feel compelled to go beyond the idea of a rational debate between informed political positions, and to focus also on the distribution of what Jacques Ranciere calls ‘the sensible’ in the constitution of the aesthetic. In talking about the politics of aesthetics, Ranciere himself has chosen to analyze the politics of such authors as Mallarme and Borges, who are normally judged by elite literary standards as politically insignificant.
An Indian author who would fit into this scheme is Kamala Das, who is routinely treated as a politically innocent writer concerned primarily with the passions of the mind. Whether it is in reading her poems in English or her fiction and self-writings in Malayalam, the general critical tendency has been to regard Das as a writer, whose subjective and inward journeys traverse a politically neutral terrain. The present lecture deviates from this approach, and examines Das’s materialism, her attitude to experience, her celebration of the body, her representation of memory, her articulation of the self, the interplay between fantasy and reality in her fiction, her use of language with a rustic flavor and her complex relationship with feminist thought, in order to unravel the subtle politics operative in her writings.
PP Raveendran is Professor Emeritus at the School of Letters, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala. A renowned literary critic, editor and translator, Professor Raveendran has published extensively on Indian literature, modern English literature, cultural theory and cultural studies. He is the author of several books and research papers in English and Malayalam, including Texts, Histories, Geographies: Reading Indian Literature (Orient BlackSwan, 2009), O. V. Vijayan (Sahitya Akademi, 2009), and The Best of Kamala Das (Bodhi, 1991). He was awarded the Kuttippuzha Krishna Pillai award for literary criticism by Kerala Sahitya Akademi. Raveendran is the joint editor of the two-volume Oxford India Anthology of Modern Malayalam Writing (2017).
