• Rama Rao Vadapalli V.B

  Author

Indira Babbellapati is an academic with a deeply sensitive thinking and powerful expression. Her
first book Echo was published in 2003, second one affair de Coeur in 2009, the third Vignettes of
Sea in 2010 and then came out From the Biography of an Unknown Woman in 2015.
Writing a critique of Indira’s latest book is not a run of the mill affair. The work is about the
many facets of woman’s life, trials, and tribulations, feelings of pain and very rare sweet
pleasures and infinite hues in deep feeling. Though the title says unknown woman, as the poet
tells us in the beginning these are vignettes culled from the lives of many women she came
across into very close mental proximity. There are a number of poems but none has been given a
title. This is particularly significant since each poem is a wailing, a different breath, a different
spasm and very little smiles of joyousness. Among these there are a few, just few, about faith
devotion and happily forward-looking.
The experiences of umpteen women – now called fashionably, second sex – are recorded in this
collection. Calling them (persons of) second sex is a travesty of justice. The poet’s ‘I’ is the
speaker’s, the sufferer’s ‘I’. All these ‘I’s are the unfortunate birds whose wings are
unmentionably maimed. One woman, many a woman and all in inexpressible pain are the
speakers. The feelings given expression are facets of the essence and the multiplicity of the sad
but helpless lot of those silent sufferers. The image of femininity is here in the poet’s vision
though not much in sight of all in the contemporary actuality right now:
Sky is her heart,
river is her desire,
sea, her passion,
fire, she breathes
and walks upon the earth,
She’s the universal woman. (p.10)

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