A HOT NOON IN MALABAR - A POEM OF REMINISCENCE

Abstract

Kamala Das is considered as one of the best known women poets in the cannon of contemporary Indian writing in English. The sixties of the twentieth century saw the upsurge of poet writing in English and writing as a woman on the women issues closely related to women. To Kamala Das, poetry serves as a handy tool of social criticism and social consciousness and thus makes her poetry truly confessional in nature. Taken from the collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta (1915), Kamal Das’s poem, A Hot Noon in Malabar deals with her happy childhood days spent in her grandmother’s house in Malabar. The nostalgic poem, A Hot Noon in Malabar shows her longing for the days in Malabar as an escape from the torturing experience of city life she lived after her marriage. She feels nostalgic of those golden days of her ancestral house where she spent a carefree life, not bogged down by worldly or domestic responsibilities. Apparently, the poet who is now living far away from her ancestral home recalls every minute detail of that place. Malabar is not only the place where her loving grandmother lived. It was the place which was associated with love and emotion. The Poem is conspicuous of autobiographical element with a pouring of personal sorrows and feelings etc. Through the vivid description of her childhood days, the poem beautifully records the eternal bond of attachment between the grandmother and the poetess, Kamala Das.