Nandita KS, a poet born in the hilly Madakkimala village of Wayand, Kerala, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-nine, left behind a Various poems which were discovered and published posthumously, much like Emily Dickinson’s belated award.
In Emily’s “Chariot of Death,” she traverses the “fields of the gazing grain,” suggesting the continuity of life cycles, perhaps inspired by the topography of Amherst and the Connecticut River Valley where Emily lived. Similarly, in her desire to “sleep forever,” Nandita inhales the “smell of your abyss to destroy the feeling of helplessness” regarding the night and contemplating death. This suggests a radical sensory longing for darkness to overcome human helplessness, perhaps derived from Nandita’s experiences associated with the nighttime highland skies over the Wayanad hills where she grew up. It transcends spatial boundaries by allowing readers to experience that such different landscapes can coexist in a parallel fantasy space outlined by the allegory of death.
Despite the inadequacies of established hierarchies, cultural capital differences, and power structures that exist in comparing Nandita, a poet from the Global South, to Emily, this prose is a bold attempt to connect Nandita with Emily for her posthumous recognition, where death functions as an unsettling place of freedom from a world that could not hear her while alive. There is another daring attempt to loosely translate Nandita’s Malayalam poems, which are mostly untitled and orphaned, wandering in digital spaces and yet constantly grapple with human alienation, love, longing, death and despair.
Gendered literary visibility, in which women’s voices remain unheard, is prevalent in non-public countries.
Western marginalized frameworks too. If Emily’s poems are canonically admired,
Nandita’s poems have not yet received due recognition. The reason for this attempt is
Explore how the appreciation they received posthumously reveals systemic indifference
and neglect and how women affirm their agency through poetry even in the face of death.
Authority over death
Neither Emily nor Nandita perceives death as the culmination of worldly experiences or the grand finale of human life. In their poems it appears as a place of resistance, where both instead push back against the conventional expectations and conditioning imposed by the traditional hierarchies with which they lived.
In Emily’s “I Heard a Fly Buzzing as I Died,” the protagonist’s posthumous voice is heard
narrative authority that subverts conventional expectations about death as the end of human existence. As the narrator refuses emotional surrender in the face of death, he consciously shifts the narrative to the everyday, a fly, chaotic and uncontrollable, in order to reframe death from the cultural expectations of spiritual submission to the “king” or death itself. The deceased narrator is probably a female voice, as she ignores pious, death-related narratives that stem from society’s patriarchal expectations.
the extinguished fire within me is reborn;
the smell of charred scalp,
Bones crumbled into ash and burned tissue
a cackling skull.
She stares at the unhappy earth, desperately hiding its barrenness
I giggled, stupid!
– Nandita.KS
The images of death against the backdrop of Hindu cremation rites confirm that the narrator refuses to submit to death; Rather, she regains her authority through combustion. The deliberately unconventional description of the burning body destabilizes spiritual expectations of death as a place of pious finality. The female Earth, whose infertility is trivialized and ridiculed by the narrator, who is the dead person who has the power to reconstruct the constraints of the living feminine.
Death as empowerment to resist social obligations
Nanditha’s picture in her book Nandithayude Kavithakal
An abandoned battlefield
an uninhabited bivouac,
some broken bangles,
Trace of the missing sindooram
the barren earth tastes good;
Love scattered from the broken clay pot.
A smile appeared in the haze.
tears in my eyes,
a farewell, along the shades of the saree.
When soaked in white,
love turns to the virtuous spouse;
Tulsi, the woman deceived by God himself;
succumbs without rebirth.
Once again I was left alone.
– Nandita.KS
The poem observes the battlefield of life, where war and love have collapsed and where symbols of femininity and marriage have fallen. The last remnant of love that could not be contained was savored by the barren earth. Death becomes a defiance in the face of a fragile society
Structures. Even in the time of grief, the narrator regains agency over emotional display by giving a smile to the ceremonial female self. The conditioned feeling of widowhood “dipped in white” is surpassed by the moral achievement when the narrator presents death as resistance to social obligations. Through the metaphor of Tulsi deceived by God and the denial of rebirth that deprived women of their agency, death is restored when the lone dead woman stubbornly refuses to be reborn to be molded by the obligatory patriarchal norms and customs.
For Emily, death acquires a room, an escape from circumstances, and a name in “For Death – or rather, for the things they would buy.” Death comes from a time when strict patriarchal and social constraints existed for women, and provides the narrator with autonomy and space outside of obligations. It redefines their name and identity. Death allows her to escape the circumstances of life’s feminine duties. The narrator affirms the woman’s agency to resist sociocultural conditions, and death confirms this for her.
Romantic longing for death
Now I realize that
For me it means death to forget you.
Because I am only you, only you.
– Nandita.KS
In Nandita’s poem, the lonely lover, lost in Vrindavanam, encounters the gap between her emotional longing for her lover and her rational decision to get over him. Ultimately, the narrator settles for the ultimate truth of her romantic longing as death itself, spiritually identifying with it. Death symbolizes divine surrender to romantic desire. Here again, death does not resemble an end; rather, it is an eventual union with the beloved. Devotion means self-assertion and freedom from demands and includes spiritual autonomy in its entirety.
Similarly, Emily embraces Death as a “flexible admirer” who initially woos the narrator with subtle signals and ultimately valiantly triumphs. Union with the narrator’s beloved is realized through death, and spiritual devotion becomes an expression of agency.
Death certainly becomes a place of resistance against everything that she left unheard in her life and in her poems. But it’s disturbing that these bright, conscientious and sensitive women had to die so that the world would be reminded of how death is addressed in their poems, forcing hard-core feminist readers to read again and let humanity hear their prescience.
Dr. Parvathy Poornima teaches at St. Joseph’s University in Bengaluru. Her research areas includeDiaspora studies and the experiences of South Asians in the UK. She holds a PhD from JNU.She is a full-time mother who pursues her career and passion with perseverance.
