Female Identity and Existential Crisis in the Poetry of Kabita Singha: A Critical Study

This paper explores the subject of female identity and existential crisis in the poetry of Kabita Singha where she made her contribution to the modern Bengali feministic literature. Singha wrote at the 1950s, when the patriarchal system was still at its best, women social roles strongly posed by patriarchy insisted on traditional images of the female form as devi (goddess) and dasi (servant). Through her poetry, she counters the limiting images of women and introduces them as conscious persons who find it hard to establish their identity in a social environment dominated by men. Singha uses strong imagery, symbolic diction, and unorthodox poetic structures to delve into the contradiction between the socially constructed roles and women in their internal need to be independent and express themselves. The idealized womanhood as shown in poems like Ajiban Pathar Pratima because despite the symbolic worship of women, real life opportunities to act are denied to women. On the same note, Eve Speaks to God also redefines the biblical myth of Eve to portray her as an intelligent and disobedient being who prefers to be knowledgeable and free rather than actively obedient. Much existential anxiety is also present in the work of Singha, as the authors styles the emotional crisis of women who want to be independent when they have to deal with social norms of love, marriage and domesticity. Her poetry has been shaped by influential thinkers like Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir whose works were based on existentialist ideas, which have described alienation, loneliness, and self-definition in her works. Through the fusion of feminist commentary and experimental style of writing, the poem by Kabita Singha can be viewed as a very strong tool of challenging the patriarchal ideology and an expression of the oppressed experience of women, thus, playing an important role in feminist and existential literary discussions.