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“An Introduction” Introduction
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In "An Introduction," the groundbreaking Indian poet Kamala Das does precisely what the poem's title says she will: she introduces herself, boldly proclaiming who she is. As she observes, her complex, fluid, nonconformist identity (and her stubborn habit of writing poetry in English, not her native Malayalam) has proven to be a little much for the conservative "categorizers" around her. These narrow-minded types would rather that she just "fit in" like everyone else, behaving like a good mid-20th-century Indian wife and mother. But Das asserts her right to her own "I"—and through her own sense of self, her universal connection with everyone who calls themself "I," everyone in the world. Das first collected this poem in her important 1965 book Summer in Calcutta.
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“An Introduction” Summary
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The poem's speaker declares that she doesn't know anything about politics, but does know who's in power: she can recite their names as easily as she can recite the weeks or months, starting from Nehru (the first Prime Minister of independent India). She is, she goes on, Indian, with dark brown skin, and was born in Malabar; she speaks three languages, writes in two of them, and dreams in one of them. People, she says, used to tell her that she shouldn't write in English, because it's not her native language. But she asks those critics, friends, and distant cousins why they can't leave her alone, and why she can't speak in any language she pleases. Whatever language she speaks, she says, becomes her own, with all its strangenesses: all hers and only hers. She sees her language as half English and half Indian, which might be an odd mixture, but it feels honest to her. Her mixed-up language is human in the same way that she is human, she tells those who don't like how she writes. Her language gives voice to her happiness, her desire, her hope, and it helps her to express feeling just as crows express feeling by cawing or lions express feeling by roaring. But it's a human kind of speech, which comes from a mind that's in one place and no other place, a mind that can perceive the world and know things. It's not the unresponsive speech of trees blowing in storm winds, of monsoon clouds, or of rain, and it's not the meaningless mumbling of a cremation bonfire. The speaker was once a child, she says, and then (people tell her) she grew up: she got tall, her body filled out, and she grew hair in a few places. When she went looking for love, she remembers, a man she knew forced her into a bedroom (though she was only 16) and shut the door behind them. He didn't hit her during that encounter, but her female body felt battered. She felt weighed down by her breasts and her uterus. In response, she made herself small. Then, she put on her brother's clothes, cut her hair short, and pretended not to be a woman. People told her to wear sarees and behave like a girl, like a wife. They told her to sew and cook and argue with servants—to be like other women. Be normal, the people who like easy categories told her. Don't sit on walls or peek past our lace curtains. Be Amy (your childhood nickname), or be Kamala, or better yet, be Madhavikutty (your pen name). Pick a name and pick a role. Don't mess around. Don't pretend you're crazy, don't have too much sex. Don't cry too hard when someone leaves you. The speaker remembers that she met a man and fell in love with him. But she doesn't need to tell anyone his name: he stood in for every man who desires women, just as the speaker feels she represents every woman who goes looking for love. The man was as starved and rushed as a river, and she felt as endlessly patient as the ocean. Whenever the speaker asks anyone who they are, the answer is always the same: It is I. The speaker sees the same "I" everywhere she looks; he fits into the world like a sword fits into its scabbard. It's "I" who drinks alone at midnight in unfamiliar hotels; it's "I" who has sex and then feels ashamed; it's "I" who dies breathing hoarsely. "I" is a sinner and "I" is a saint. "I" is loved and betrayed. This same "I" doesn't have any delights or pains that everyone doesn't share. The speaker, too, is this "I."
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“An Introduction” Themes
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Independence, Individuality, and Identity
In "An Introduction," the poet Kamala Das proclaims her own distinct identity, laying claim to a selfhood that goes outside the boundaries of any traditional idea of what an Indian woman or an Indian writer should be. Being herself, she suggests, has always meant refusing to listen to what other people tell her she should do, asserting her independence and self-determination at all costs.
Das's speaker (a voice for the poet herself) lives in a world where people constantly tell her what to do. "Critics, friends, visiting cousins": everyone she encounters feels they have the right to tell her that she should write poetry in her "mother-tongue," Malayalam, not the English she prefers. And when she was a rebellious young woman dressing up in her "brother's trousers," she recalls, a whole crowd of people she dismisses as "categorizers"—people who think very much inside the box—harangued her to "dress in sarees, be girl, / Be wife." All her life, then, she has been harried by people who want her to behave in conventional, traditional ways.
But, as her bold "Introduction" amply shows, this speaker refuses to be categorized. Her sense of self demands that she resist "choos[ing] a name, a role": she knows that to be herself, she has to be her full self, not cutting off the parts of her that don't fit into conventional ideas about how she should be. Only by resisting the categorizers, this poem suggests, can this speaker experience (and write about!) the whole range of human experience. Being fully human, to her mind, means embracing one's own "distortions" and "queernesses," one's uniqueness—and resisting other people's fretful, narrow-minded attempts to force one into any single category.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-59
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Shared Humanity and Universal Experience
To be human, this poem's speaker observes, is to have a "mind that is / Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and / Is aware": that is, to be a self-aware individual completely distinct from any other individual, seeing things from one's own unique perspective. But there's a paradox here. Because every human being is an individual, individuality is also the thing that unites all of humanity. Like Walt Whitman before her, this poem's speaker rejoices in the idea that to be one separate "I," one separate person, is to share the experience of every "I" in the world.
Whenever the speaker asks another person, "who are you," she observes, "the answer is, it is I." And wherever the speaker goes, she observes "the one who calls himself / I." These lines suggest that a sense of distinct selfhood is the thing that unites all human beings. Nobody isn't "I," in some sense.
If this is the case, the speaker goes on, then oddly enough, she can take part in the experience of the big collective "I," in all its variety. "I am sinner, / I am saint," she says; "I am the beloved and the / Betrayed. I have no joys which are not yours, no / Aches which are not yours." In other words, being an individual also means being part of the shared human experience, feeling and relishing and enduring what every other person feels, relishes, and endures.
In this poem (as in Whitman's poetry), this idea has big political implications. Claiming her place as one "I" among many, this poem's speaker also implicitly questions the little boxes that "categorizers" would force her into. To those categorizers, who want her to behave like a decorous Indian lady, she retorts that she's not only Indian and not only a woman: she's a human being, and her experience is at once unique and shared with all humanity.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 17-20
- Lines 43-59
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The Restrictive Demands of Traditional Indian Womanhood
In describing all the cultural expectations she's rebelled against in her life, Kamala Das paints a picture of what it was to be a proper Indian woman in the 1960s (when this poem was published). The lives Indian women were expected to lead, she suggests, were limiting and oppressive. To live a full life, in her experience, meant rebelling against everything a woman was expected to do.
The poem's speaker (a voice for Das herself) remembers being shouted down by an army of well-meaning, conventional voices whenever she tried to do anything outside the norm for a young Indian woman. Her family, her friends, and people in general told her: "Dress in sarees, be girl, / Be wife [...] Be embroiderer, be cook, / Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in." This short list of things that a woman was allowed to do suggests just how straight a line Indian women of Das's generation had to walk if they wanted to "fit in" with the world around them. Being a proper lady (in Das's aristocratic world, at least) meant being a compliant homemaker: a wife, a mother, and not much else.
Because she was raised with so narrow an idea of what a woman should do with her life, the speaker recalls, she agreed to a marriage at the age of only 16: she didn't "know[] what else to ask / For." The consequences of this early marriage were severe. Sex with her husband (a man much older than she was) was traumatic. Though he "did not beat" her, the experience nevertheless made her "sad woman-body" feel "so beaten" that she rejected "womanliness" altogether for a time, choosing to dress up in her "brother's trousers" in order to protest (and evade) the restrictive demands of womanhood and wifehood.
Through her story, this speaker suggests that traditional gender expectations are terribly harmful to young women's souls. Being taught from a young age that one's whole purpose is to be a compliant wife and mother makes womanhood feel like a "crush[ing]" weight, one that can make a person "shr[i]nk / Pitifully."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 23-43
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Anglo-Indian Writing and Post-Colonial Identity
Kamala Das wrote "An Introduction"—and, indeed, all of her published books of poetry—in English, not Malayalam (her first language). This, she observes, was a controversial choice: everyone from "critics" to "visiting cousins" felt it their duty to scold her that she should write in her "mother-tongue," not the language of British colonizers. In this poem, she declares that to write in a "half English, half / Indian" language is, in fact, to write as herself. Since her past, her education, and her identity are all marked by the vestiges of British colonialism in India, she feels that her truest voice is one that embraces her whole complex history.
To the many people who badger her to write in her "mother-tongue" and not in English, the poem's speaker replies: "Why not let me speak in / Any language I like?" The language she chooses, she says, "becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses / All mine, mine alone." These lines suggest that Das feels her poetry to be a voice, not for England or for India, but for her own idiosyncratic self—and the language that self happens to speak is "half English, half / Indian." Because she was brought up speaking and reading both Indian languages and English, she feels her "honest" voice is one that acknowledges and embraces that fact. Her choice to write in English reflects a loyalty, not to one culture or another, but to her own personal history.
That history, of course, is tied up in the history of British colonialism in India; if the British hadn't colonized India, it's unlikely that Das would have been educated in English! But Das's choice to write in English further suggests that there's no point trying to pretend that this didn't happen for the sake of loyalty to a "mother-tongue," or to reject the possibilities of a second language she has come to know, love, and master.
Indeed, writing in English, making the language her own, is also a way of claiming her own experience as an Indian woman in a colonized country. Her language is "human as [she is] human," she proclaims: her complex voice, "half English, half / Indian," celebrates an idiosyncratic personal identity, one that she refuses to reject any part of.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-23
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “An Introduction”
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Lines 1-4
I don't know ...
... Nehru.The poem’s speaker begins her "Introduction" to herself by declaring, “I don’t know politics.” What she does know, however, are “the names / Of those in power.” She keeps careful track of who’s in charge, “beginning from Nehru”—that is, Jarwaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India after the country gained its independence from British colonial rule in 1947. As the speaker will go on to explain, she is “Indian, very brown, born in Malabar”; she may claim not to “know politics,” but she clearly takes a personal interest in what’s happening in her country. That her attention to who’s in power starts with Nehru suggests that the life of an independent India matters a great deal to her; who was in power before Nehru is irrelevant.
As readers will discover, this poem is an autobiographical “Introduction” to the Indian poet Kamala Das herself (also known as Kamala Suraiyya, among many other names). "An Introduction" appeared in her first book of poetry, Summer in Calcutta, published in 1965. Das was born in 1934, and the fact that her accounting of “those in power” starts from Nehru suggests that she gained a political consciousness (the political consciousness she claims she lacks) when she was a teenager, at the time of India's Independence. If she doesn’t “know politics,” then her declaration that she can recite a litany of Indian politicians would be rather an odd way to begin her introduction to herself.
This poem will go on to reveal that this speaker certainly does “know politics”: she takes a keen interest in the way that the dominant powers in society shape the lives of individuals, and in the way that various stripes of oppression have wounded her and separated her from others. For this feminist speaker, the personal is political.
The poem’s first lines thus feel a little playful. They also suggest that the speaker takes an interest in the way that politics move. Not only does she “know the names / Of those in power,” she can reel them off “like / Days of week, or names of months.” That simile subtly connects the movements of politics to the movements of time itself—and suggests that politics are a process involving a rhythm that marries change and predictability. When Das published this poem in 1965, that idea might have felt particularly potent because India was about to elect its first (and only, to date) female Prime Minster, Indira Gandhi (change!)—who happened to be Nehru’s daughter (predictability!). (Indira Gandhi’s son would later become a PM, too.)
These lines also introduce the reader to the speaker’s characteristic poetic voice. The speaker frames her self-contradictory playfulness in snappy free verse (without a regular rhyme scheme or meter). The poem's many enjambments make the speaker’s voice seem to overflow the lines:
I don’t know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week…Breezing right past the line breaks, these enjambments make the speaker sound irrepressible, uncontainable—an energy that, as readers will see, suits her character through and through.
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Lines 4-10
I am Indian, ...
... language I like?
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Lines 10-17
The language I ...
... to the lions, -
Lines 17-23
it ...
... Funeral pyre. -
Lines 23-31
I was child, ...
... Pitifully. -
Lines 31-36
Then...I wore a ...
... cried the categorizers. -
Lines 36-43
Don't sit ...
... Jilted in love -
Lines 43-48
I met a ...
... Waiting. -
Lines 48-52
Who are you, ...
... in its sheath. -
Lines 52-56
It is I ...
... in my throat. -
Lines 56-59
I am sinner, ...
... call myself I.
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“An Introduction” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
Enjambments play a huge part in giving Kamala Das's free verse its voice. Rarely does a sentence end on the same line it began on in this poem. Ideas are constantly spilling over the boundaries of the line, helping to make the speaker sound full of irrepressible energy. Her impatience with restrictions and conventions in her daily life finds expression in an impatient, overflowing style.
A great example appears in lines 7-10:
[...] Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? [...]These particular enjambments break sentences at places where one wouldn't normally pause, and thus draw attention to emphatic words: "leave / Me alone," "in / Any language I like." Perhaps these oddly-timed breaks also encourage readers to take these lines at speed, rushing over a boundary.
Another notable passage full of enjambments appears in lines 43-48:
[...] I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him...the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me...the ocean's tireless
Waiting. [...]Due to the rhythmic parallelism in this section, these enjambed lines feel a little slower and more sinuous than the ones quoted above—a suitable effect for a sensuous passage. Here, the enjambments make the language seem to flow like the "rivers" the speaker uses as an image of her lover's desire.
The fact that so much of the poem is enjambed also means that end-stopped lines feel more abrupt and dramatic. When the speaker describes the aftermath of her traumatic first sexual experience, for instance, she remembers that "my sad woman-body felt so beaten." End of line, full stop: her pain, for a while, cuts off the energy and zest of her enjambments.
Where enjambment appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “names / Of”
- Lines 2-3: “like / Days”
- Lines 3-4: “with / Nehru”
- Lines 4-5: “in / Malabar”
- Lines 5-6: “in / Two”
- Lines 7-8: “leave / Me”
- Lines 9-10: “in / Any”
- Lines 10-11: “speak / Becomes”
- Lines 12-13: “half / Indian”
- Lines 14-15: “don't / You”
- Lines 15-16: “my / Hopes”
- Lines 16-17: “cawing / Is”
- Lines 17-18: “it / Is”
- Lines 18-19: “is / Here”
- Lines 19-20: “and / Is”
- Lines 20-21: “speech / Of”
- Lines 21-22: “the / Incoherent”
- Lines 22-23: “blazing / Funera”
- Lines 23-24: “they / Told”
- Lines 24-25: “limbs / Swelled”
- Lines 25-26: “When / I”
- Lines 26-27: “ask / For”
- Lines 27-28: “the / Bedroom”
- Lines 30-31: “shrank / Pitifully”
- Lines 31-32: “my / Brother's”
- Lines 32-33: “ignored / My”
- Lines 36-37: “sit / On”
- Lines 38-39: “better / Still”
- Lines 39-40: “to / Choose”
- Lines 41-42: “a / Nympho”
- Lines 42-43: “when / Jilted”
- Lines 43-44: “Call / Him”
- Lines 44-45: “man / Who”
- Lines 45-46: “every / Woman”
- Lines 46-47: “haste / Of”
- Lines 47-48: “tireless / Waiting”
- Lines 49-50: “and / Everywhere”
- Lines 50-51: “himself / I”
- Lines 51-52: “the / Sword”
- Lines 52-53: “lonely / Drinks”
- Lines 54-55: “love / And”
- Lines 55-56: “dying / With”
- Lines 57-58: “the / Betrayed”
- Lines 58-59: “no / Aches”
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Parallelism
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Metaphor
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Simile
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“An Introduction” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Nehru
- Malabar
- Queernesses
- Incoherent
- Funeral pyre
- Amy, Kamala, Madhavikutty
- Nympho
- Schizophrenia
- Jilted
- Haste
Nehru-
(Location in poem: Lines 3-4: “beginning with / Nehru”)
Jawaharlal Nehru was the first prime minister of an independent India after the end of the Raj (the long period of British colonialism in India). He served from 1947 to 1964.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “An Introduction”
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Form
"An Introduction," like most of Das's poetry, doesn't stick to any traditional form. Instead, it flows along in 59 lines of earthy, naturalistic free verse. Most lines are about the same length, and Das often uses enjambments to draw sentences out past line breaks, helping to give the poem an unhampered, even impatient energy. There's a lot of momentum in this speaker's voice.
The poem sometimes feels close to a stream of consciousness. The speaker changes subjects abruptly as one thought reminds her of another. The poem often marks these transitions with an ellipsis, as in lines 42-43:
[...] Don't cry embarrassingly loud when
Jilted in love...I met a man, loved him. [...]Here, the speaker's memory of how the people around her used to tell her to rein in her emotions triggers a related memory: the memory of a love affair that most certainly inspired intense feelings in her. Everything about this poem suggests that she by no means reined those feelings in.
The poem's free and organic structure matches the speaker's tone and the poem's mood. Her voice and her verse sound uninhibited and unashamed.
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Meter
"An Introduction" is written in free verse, so it doesn't have a regular meter. Das gives this poem its rhythm through other techniques—notably copious enjambment, which means her sentences often cruise right past line breaks, often splitting in surprising places. (That technique feels especially fitting in a poem all about refusing to be limited by "categorizers.")
Das's rhythms can feel both naturalistic—as if the speaker's introduction is totally impromptu, inspired—and dramatic. Take the bold parallelism of this passage from lines 20-23, for example:
[...] Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre. [...]All those quick, repeated "or ofs" and "or"s make this passage of images rattle right along, as if the speaker is being carried along by her own swift imagination.
Compare that to the very different rhythm of this excerpt from lines 28-31:
[...] He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me. I shrank
Pitifully. [...]Das slows these grim lines down with firm periods and a halting caesura ("crushed me. || I shrank").
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Rhyme Scheme
There's no rhyme scheme in this free verse poem. Instead, the speaker's voice unfurls in a naturalistic language that makes this poem sound almost like a stream of consciousness, with the speaker reporting her thoughts as they arise.
However, gleams of internal rhyme gives the poem some subtle harmony. For instance, listen to lines 18-21, where the speaker sings the praises of "human speech":
[...] it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm [...]These rhymes enrich and intensify an important moment. The speaker, here, is moving beyond the question of her own personal speech (with its hybrid English-Malayalam rhythms) to the miracle of human speech—and human consciousness—more generally. The poem will gradually build on these ideas to reach a grand conclusion on the nature of selfhood. No wonder, then, that Das's language rises to special musicality here: the rhymes highlight Das's pleasure in her own capacity for "aware[ness]," a pleasure that will become a major theme.
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“An Introduction” Speaker
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The poem's speaker is a voice for Kamala Das herself—though she might be going by a nickname or a pseudonym, "Amy" or "Madhavikutty," depending on how she's feeling in the moment when you ask her. In this bold, personal poem, Das unfolds her own identity. Paradoxically, that identity is both firm and fluid: Das, like Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. She has many names and pseudonyms. She speaks and writes in several different languages. She describes self-protectively dressing up as a boy as a young woman, then feeling as if she has become the archetype of "every / Woman who seeks love" when she falls for a man. All of these different identities, she feels, are packed into one person, making her the "I" that she is.
In her experience, the people around her—"the categorizers," as she dismissively calls them—aren't wild about her complex selfhood, wanting her to "fit in" and "belong" by conforming to narrower ideas about how a woman should be (an Indian woman in particular). These repressive voices tell her, "Don't write in English," "Don't play pretending games," "Don't cry embarrassingly loud when / Jilted in love..." But by its very existence, this poem—written in English—rebukes the narrow-minded, conformist people who would be more comfortable with Das if she were easier to fit into a familiar box.
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“An Introduction” Setting
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"An Introduction" doesn't spend much time describing its setting: it's a much more internal, personal poem than it is a poem about the speaker's surroundings. However, the very fact that this poem is so autobiographical helps readers to figure out that the speaker (a voice for Kamala Das herself) is writing from her native India. As the speaker declares, she is "Indian, very brown, born in / Malabar," and her images of "monsoon clouds" and the "incoherent mutterings of the blazing / Funeral pyre" feel rooted in Indian soil.
So do the expectations that the speaker's more narrow-minded friends and family hold for her. When "the categorizers," as she calls them, are trying to get her to behave like a conventional Indian woman, they instruct her: "Dress in sarees, be girl, / Be wife [...] Be embroiderer, be cook, / Be a quarreller with servants." All of these demands outline what was expected of an Indian woman of Das's class and generation.
Das was born in 1934, while India was still under British colonial control. That fact makes this speaker's alertness to Indian politicians, starting from "Nehru" (Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India after it gained its independence), feel particularly telling. Though she claims she doesn't "know politics," she clearly has a keen sense of why "those in power" matter.
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Literary and Historical Context of “An Introduction”
Literary Context
Kamala Das (1934-2009)—also known as Kamala Suraiyya, Madhavikutty, and a host of other names—was born into a family of writers. Her father, V.M. Nair, was the editor of a daily newspaper; her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was a prominent poet; and her great uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, was a well-known poet, playwright, and translator. While Das wrote short stories and novels in both Malayalam and English, she chose to write and publish her poetry exclusively in English. Her frank style and intimate subject matter changed the course of Indian English poetry.
Das's verse is often associated with the Confessional movement. Confessionalism began in the United States in the late 1950s, when poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton rebelled against the conservative norms of the era and began writing about intensely personal experiences that had previously been considered taboo—mental illness, divorce, and female sexuality, for instance.
Das broke countless such taboos in her first book, the 1965 poetry collection Summer in Calcutta (in which "An Introduction" first appeared). In these poems, she wrote explicitly about her frustrations with Indian culture's traditional expectations of women, as well as her longing for love and for her ancestral home in Malabar. Alongside her poetry, her 1973 autobiography My Story, with its unsentimental, intimate, authentic voice, forged a new path for Indian literature. In this book, Das recounts her life story, including tales of sexual assault and love affairs—things not spoken of in polite Indian society when she was writing. Through such writings, Das became an important feminist literary voice and a widely renowned cultural commentator.
"An Introduction" shows the marks of an important influence on Das: the great 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman. In the swinging rhythm of its free verse, its playful examination of the author's sometimes self-contradictory identity, and its joyful, paradoxical sense of human individuality as a source of human connection, this poem takes inspiration from works like "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "I Sing the Body Electric," and "Song of Myself."
Historical Context
At the age of 15, Das entered an arranged marriage with Madhav Das Kalipurayath, a much older man. While he supported her writing, he also had quite conventional expectations for her: her literary efforts had to wait until all her other duties as wife and mother were performed. Writing only at night, an exhausted and angry Das began to question the standards of motherhood that Indian women were expected to live up to. She would discuss these pressures in her groundbreaking 1973 autobiography My Story.
To combat her loneliness, Das turned to extramarital affairs with both men and women—a subject she also tackled in her autobiographical writings. Her unabashed treatment of female sexuality and of the frustrations of motherhood in a patriarchal society reflect the influence of second-wave feminism, a feminist movement that arose in the 1960s and 1970s. Second-wave feminism encouraged women around the world to reconsider entrenched gender roles, reject the idea that wifehood and motherhood were the only legitimate paths for their lives, and pursue personal fulfillment.
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More “An Introduction” Resources
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External Resources
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Das's Legacy — Watch a video that honors Das's contribution to Indian poetry.
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Das's Obituary — Das died in 2009. This obituary discusses her influential contributions to poetry.
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Das's Later Poems — Read a 2015 article examining Das's later works.
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A Brief Biography — Read more about Das's life and work.
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A Celebration of Das — Read a 2019 article honoring Das on the 10th anniversary of her death.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Kamala Das
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