SOURCE: Raveendran, P. P. “Text as History, History as Text: A Reading of Kamala Das's Anamalai Poems.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 1 (1994): 47-54.

In the following essay, Raveendran examines how Das's later, more political poems, embody tension between the timelessness of the landscape and the minutiae of human history.

Anamalai Poems are a series of short poems that Kamala Das wrote during her sojourn at the hills of Anamalai in Tamil Nadu following her defeat at the parliamentary elections of 1984.¹ Although she has reportedly written twenty-seven poems as part of the sequence,² only eleven have so far been published.³ Inhabiting a space “too near [the poet' s] nerve”,⁴ and expressing the pain and anguish of a lonesome soul, these poems provide a peephole into the troubled psyche of a writer, Third World and female, and quite unsure of her position in a world growing increasingly mercenary. They are...