ROLE OF VICTIMIZED WOMEN IN KAMALA DAS’S SHORT FICTION (Pages 280-291) by Mrs. V. Chithra Devi in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Kamala Das, also known by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty, is a major Indian English poet and at the same time a leading Malayalam author from Kerala. She is universally branded as a confessional poet. On the other hand, she carves a new role for the women in society and contributes voice to the themes of loneliness and subaltern anguish. There is a central woman character in all her stories and the women are inquisitively referred to as ‘she’ without a name. It is deliberately done to suggest a type rather than an individual. The ‘she’ in Kamala Das’s stories sometimes thinks and acts independently and sometimes they are average Indian women, not rebellious or radical by nature. In her short stories, she arranges and rearranges female character in various patterns in order to depict her as a victim in the society and also patriarchal prejudices. Her fictions reflect her concern for the social and cultural consciousness of gender, raising her voice against humiliation and neglect of women. She concentrated only on the shrunken world of the marginalized and also exposed throughout her short story that women have no separate identity free from men and to observe them in their fallen magnificence and beauty.So through short stories, Kamala Das articulates the despair and longing of fellow women through her writings. By protesting against the oppression of the female class she wants to emancipate woman from the stereotypes of her colonized status. Das reveals her protest against the conventions of the society and the constraints and restrictions which husbands or society in general impose upon women. She made her verses as a vehicle for the expression of her oppressions against patriarchal prejudices. She strove to establish her identity as women through her works, and she, in fact, tried also to impart an identity to Indian women as a neglected class of Indian society. Thus she is unanimously accepted as the strong supporter of the rights of women to break the chains of slavery. Key Words: confessional, loneliness, subaltern anguish, humiliation, marginalized, identity, oppression, patriarchal prejudices etc.