Established women poets like Indira Sant and Shanta Shelke—who continued to write into the 1960s—stopped trying to experiment with content and form, and produced nothing very exciting or different to their earlier poetry (Ganorkar and Dahake). While Sant's earlier work expressed a graceful lyricism combined with deep thought, only a few poems, such as 'Snake-Skin', catch the eye in her later work. Post-1960s women poets who tried to break away from middle-class and gender boundaries in their writing ended up sounding overly sentimental and sometimes melodramatic, thus minimising the impact of their voices and search for meaning. Their confessional voices were not convincing, and their 'socio-political analysis not deep enough' (Dahake, "Vyatheeth", 154; Ganorkar and Dahake). The collections of poetry they produced became middle-of-the-road works, achieving some popularity and little critical acclaim. It is against this backdrop that Prabha Ganorkar's voice in Vyatheeth stands out as different, striking in its originality, depth of feeling, and control over the language.

    Ganorkar attempts to cross the boundaries of gender and class imposed upon her by society. She writes about feelings and experiences that middle-class Maharashtrian women were not supposed to experience in the 1960s and 1970s, let alone express. She does not gloss over the unsightly and the unpleasant. She writes almost dispassionately about being alienated, not belonging, being the outsider, being punished by society for daring to break with tradition, and about the loneliness of being different. This is seen in "Since Yesterday":

Since yesterday, this rain has poured
down endlessly.
But everything ends, and so will the rain.
Spring and summer will come and go too.
Who knows when new shoots will sprout from this mud?
The sky will remain distant as always
And trees will flower, yet again
... Our joys and sorrows are only ours.
Who else
Will take on their meaningless burdens?
We belong only to ourselves and are alien
Only to ourselves. (10)[i]

 
    The 'I' in the poems is not content with token gestures. She wants to be free, not contained within the framework of acceptable behaviour imposed on a middle-class woman. On the other hand, the poetic persona is always aware, even as she struggles, that a higher, autonomous Freedom or Truth is ultimately mythical, always ideal, and never attainable.

    The experience generated by an encounter with Vyatheeth cannot be categorised neatly and easily. It is difficult to read the poems as coming from an unambiguous feminist consciousness even within the Indian context, because of the layering of meaning and various nuances encountered. For instance, the poet explores how a patriarchal society constructs its women as less than human and offers them up as metaphorical or literal sacrifices. This construction is exposed as negative and limiting for women in that society. This is graphically depicted in 'Sacrificial Goat', where the poet uses vivid imagery evoking Sati and animal sacrifice to explore betrayal:

Listen, that hair-raising noise
That ceaselessly battered drum
Someone smears me with kunku
Perhaps blesses me with the sacred flame
It is hard to see in this lurid light.
Someone clutches my arms
My rubbery legs stumble forward
The crowd throngs behind me
Screaming joyfully for blood
I know where they are taking me ...
And you?
Are you among them? (50)

 
    But Ganorkar simultaneously expresses a quiet self-loathing and sometimes seems to implicate herself in her own victimisation by taking complete responsibility for her poor judgement or choices. This position is most clearly seen in 'Trickery':

It's a lie that life drags us along
kicking and screaming.
Often, we're the ones that take its hand
And drop it off, god knows where.
... It's a lie to say that it is life that has tricked us.
It is we who have laughed and deliberately
Offered our hand. (20)

 
    This is not a surprising position for a woman who has been victimized, repeatedly punished for her difference. The following lines could perhaps be seen as an expression of internalised hatred:

Do not cast your eye on this exquisite branch.
It springs from a poison tree.
It will suck the venom right out of the ground
And spread it in your veins
And you will blossom
With glittering poison flowers,
But bear no fruit. (23)

 
    This could also be seen as a poem about writing itself, where the poet's gift is a double-edged sword; on the one hand, her position allows her to formulate and express her oblique world-view from the margins, while on the other, it extracts a terrible price by isolating and alienating her from her world. Being barren of fruit—the lack of fulfilment, happiness, belonging—is the price she pays for blooming with 'glittering poison flowers', that is, her vision and poetic voice. Again—and this is characteristic of the paradoxical quality of her poetry—ambiguity, when used as a discursive strategy, works for rather than against that vision. There is not a great deal of self-pity in her confessional voice, and this serves to strengthen its impact.

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[i] All further quotes from Ganorkar are from poems in the collection Vyatheeth, unless otherwise indicated. All of Ganorkar's poems have been translated by S. Palekar.

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