Critically analyse the poem ‘A Hot Noon in Malabar’.

Kamala Das was versatile writer. She wrote essays, fictions, short stories, criticism and news features very successfully in Malayalam and English. The first volume of her collected poems was published in 1984, it won her Sahitya Akademi Award for 1985. Her other collection The Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections From Kamala Das was published in 1997. Her other well-known books included Summer in Calcutta (1965) and The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Stories (1973).

She made new experiments in Indian English poetry and explored those labyrinths which inhibit many a brave poets. She talked about biological matters bluntly and openly. Kamala Das allowed the poetic impulse to flow into poetry before the social conventions came to arrest the flow. According to C.D. Narasimhaiah says: “Kamala Dasis perhaps the only Indian poet who owes little to Yeats or Eliot and trusted herown resources and culture”. She transformed her personal experiences into poetic art. Often she depicted about women’s plight in a society dominated bymen. Her poetry has the rapeutic and cathartic effect on the poet as well as on the readers.

Critical Appreciation

In ‘A Hot Noon in Malabar’, the poet talks about some experiences in her home in Malabar. The poet seems to be fascinated by time at noon. The title is not about what happens to the living and non-living things during a hot summer noon in Malabar. It can be interpreted in terms of the background of the poet’s past memories. The word ‘noon’ is repeated six times in the poem to create the atmosphere of noon. The mood of the poem is sad and tone somber. The theme is the loss of the poet’s sweet experiences at Malabar home.

The poet has created the atmosphere of her Malabar home through the imagery depicting the men and women who passed her home in the summer noon. Those men and women included men from hills with parrots in cage and fortune cards, kouba girls who read palm in light singsong, bangle-sellers withred and green and blue bangles and strangers who part the window drapes andpeer in for shelter and other things. The realistic imagery impart authenticity to the poem. As bangle-sellers’s feet covered with dust of roads of growth of cracks on the heels and strangers deluded with the sparkle of sum no seeing a thing in shadowy rooms, turn away further authenticates the description.

Some of the phrases including a couple of similes show the verbal felicities. The bangle-sellers’ feet devouring rough miles’, the hot eyes of the bangle-sellers brimming with the sun’ and the strangers who rarely spoke so that when they did speak, their voiceran wild like jungle-voices’ are among the verbal felicities. The word devour has been used metaphorically convey the idea of the travellers covering miles and miles of dusty road. ‘Brimming with the Sun’ is another expressive phrase.

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