Kamala Das
Punishment in Kindergarten is a little autobiographical poem. She recalls one of her childhood experiences. When
she was in the kindergarten, one day the children were taken for a picnic. All the children except her were playing and making merry. But she alone kept away from the company of the children. Their teacher, a blue-frocked woman, scolded her saying. “Why don’t you join the others, what
A peculiar (cgf}7f]) child you are!” (a)
This heard, all the other children who were sipping ( r’:b}, ;’Sof{pFb}) sugarcane (pmv’ r’:b}) turned and laughed. The children are funny things because they laugh in the pain of others (c). The child felt it very much. She became sad at the words of the teacher. But the laughter by the children made her sadder. She thought that they should have consoled her rather than laughing and insulting her. Filled with sorrow and shame, she hid her face in a hedge and wept. This was indeed a painful experience to a little child in the nursery school.
Now after many years she has grown into an adult. She has only a faint (sdhf]/) memory of the blue- frocked woman and the laughing faces of the children. Now she has learned to have an ‘adult peace’ and happiness in her present state as a grown-up person. Now there is no need for her to be perturbed (lrlGtt agfPsf]) about that bitter kindergarten experience. With her long experience in life she has learned that life is a mixture of joy and sorrow. And she consoles herself ‘today the world is little more my own’ (b). She remembers how she has experienced both the joy and sorrow of life. The long passage of time has taught her many things. She is no more a lonely individual as she used to feel when she was a child. The poet comes to a conclusion that there is no need for her to remember that picnic day, when she hid her face in the hedge, watching the steel-white sun that was standing lonely in the sky. The present world is in her side (d).
Interpretation
Kamala Das, an Indo-Anglian poet, has been typecast as a confessional ( ;To :jLsfg]{) poet. It is her brutal frankness of her verse that shocked and attracted readers. The poem is warm and muffled (g;’lgg]), and recounts the picnic of the poetess at Victoria Gardens to which followed it (as Kamala Das tells us in her autobiography). She was all alone near the hedge (?vsf k+ª\tLx?,_ while other girls were playing at a distance. The poem demonstrates the poet’s capacity to smell the flowers as well as the pain of being slighted.
The subject matter of the poem has two parts, the first of which being the description of the painful experience of the kindergarten days and the second, the adult’s attitude to the incident at present when she is no more a child. Thus the major theme of the poem is nostalgia and the sense of moving on with life.
The poem is very simple in its construction and in its delivery it’s very much like the narrative of a film which goes back and forth in time to bring out a small incident in the life of the poetess which sets off her introvert nature that gets all the more pronounced as she grows up. Thus from the psychological perspective, too, the poem is simple only on the surface level. The tone of the poem is pensive (ulDe/ d’b|fsf] sljtf) if not sad. It is a tone of compromise in the face of inevitability (cj:odefljtf). Kamala believes in letting go and she does exercise the minor ghost of her past only to bring out the one she is still haunted with – isolation (PSnf]kgf).The poem tends to forget their pain and moves on in life for better things.
The images used again are deceptively simple. In tune with the theme of the poem the images are inspiring. The teacher’s identity gets shrinked (v’Dr]sf]) to a blue skirt but the words she ‘threw’ at her are still remembered. Words had hurt the young girl more than real hurts and today after so long they have taken a more materialistic from in the memory of the grown person..
It’s not only the above mentioned zeugma that adds the ting to the poem but also the simile, the metaphor, the
metonymy and the personification in the following lines respectively – “throwing Words at me like pots and pans”, “That honey-coloured day of peace” “A blue-frocked woman”, “The years have Sped along, stopping briefly at beloved halts and moving sadly on.” Add the necessary and indispensible ring of poetry to the lines.
Thus the poem is a true modernist poem which at the same time nostalgically remembering an incident of childhood remembers it not in a moment of glorification but as an insight into an event of pain due to inborn desire for isolation and of difference. Kindergarten thus transforms from celebration of innocence to the mourning yet with a positive note of the desire or capability of letting go. Punishment, physical or mental, is worse for children.
