The Sunshine Cat 

                                                          – Kamala Das

Kamala Das As a Poetess:

    Kamala Das is a confessional poetess. Her poetry has largely been autobiographical. Therefore, it is largely reminiscent. She reveals her inner mind to the readers. She reveals secretes of her life through her poetry. Most of her poems are written on the subject of her own marriage, her dissatisfaction with her husband and her extra-marital relationship with other men.

Major Themes in Kamala Das’ Poetry:

       Love, sex, man-woman relationship and death are the major themes in Kamala Das’ poetry. 

Poetic Works of Kamala Das:

Analysis of the Poem:

    The poem “The Sunshine Cat” is taken from Kamala Das’ collection of poetry  –“Summer in Calcutta” (1965). It is a confessional poem. It deals with the theme of ‘frustration in love’ and ‘sex’. The poetic persona is the poetess herself. She makes a very scathing attack on the male-dominated society. It is a personal poem with universal implications. 

    The poem opens with the third person plural pronoun ‘they’. It refers to her own husband and her other sex-partners. They just exploited her physically. She loved her husband but her love was never reciprocated. She calls her husband ‘selfish’ and ‘coward’. He neither loved her nor used her. He just ruthlessly watched her going from one man to another man. She craved for love which was denied to her every time. Therefore, she becomes a forlorn woman miserably craving for true love. It led to sexual anarchy in her life. She turned to a band of men for love. But all of them appeared to be ‘cynics’. Thus, Kamala Das attacks on the ‘world of men’ in the poem. Craving for true love, she clang to their chest where new hair was sprouted like great-winged moths. All of them appeared to be lustful. They told her that they can be kind to her but cannot love her. It is not in their nature to love her. It made her shed tears helplessly in the bed. She ironically tells that she can build walls with her tears.

    The poetic persona then describes cruelty of her husband. Her husband was suspicious about her. He locked her up in a room every morning and opened it every evening. In that loneliness, a streak of sunlight was there to keep her company. She calls this ‘yellow sunshine streak’ ‘the sunshine cat’ in the title. In this way, the title refers to ‘yellow sunshine cat’.

    Very soon winter season came. One day, her husband closed her in the room. He noticed the half-thin sunshine streak. When he came back at the evening, he found his wife cold and half dead. Here, the poetess ironically remarks that she was now of no use to men at all. In this way, the poetess attacks on the hypocrisy and cruelty of her sex-partners including her husband. 

    The poetess felt extremely suffocated in such a life of loneliness and confinement. She was dehumanised As a result, she lost balance of her mind. She developed a very negative approach towards the outside world. Gradually, she lost relevance as a woman, unfit for sexual pleasure. 

     Multiple Choice Questions:

1) Kamala Das is a………………poetess.

    a) love                 b) war

    c) confessional    d) African

2)   The poem “The Sunshine Cat” is taken from Kamala Das’ collection of poetry         ………………..

    a) “Summer in Calcutta” 

    b)  “The Descendants”