THE OLD PLAYHOUSE

Kamala Das

            Kamala Das is a well-known Indian poet writing in English.  She is one of the most controversial poets of post-independence India.  She deals with sexual problems in a frank manner. In The Old Playhouse, Kamala Das emphasizes the dominant role played by men in the man-woman relationship ignoring the woman’s self.

.           The speaker of the poem is a woman. She gives an account of her unsatisfactory and disappointing marriage life with her husband. She compares herself to a swallow and her husband a captor who wanted to tame her and keep her fully under his control by the power of his love-making. 

The husband wanted to make her forget all those comforts which she had enjoyed in her home before being married. He also wanted her to forget her very nature and her innate love of freedom by keeping her in a state of dependence to him. 

The speaker says that she had come to her husband with a view to developing her own personality. But all she has had from her husband are lesson about him. Her husband, who is a self-centered person, makes love with her and he feels pleased by her bodily response to his love-making. He approves her state of mind and her mood when he makes love to her and he feels pleased by the tremors of her body during the sexual union. 

However, he fails to understand that her response to his love-making is purely physical and therefore, superficial. She never experiences any feeling of oneness with him. According to the speaker,  love and affection  mean nothing to her husband. To him, she is nothing but a plaything, a sexual partner and a housewife.

 In the course of the sexual union, he kisses her very hard , pressing his lips against hers and letting his saliva flow into her mouth. He presses his whole body against hers with great vehemence gratifying his sexual desire in this process. In this physical union, her husband is successful. But he never realizes that she is still   emotionally unsatisfied and hungry. In the emotional and spiritual sense, he completely fails. 

The Old Playhouse, is a poem of protest against patriarchy in which  Kamala Das voices against the domination of the male and the consequent dwarfing of the female.