Published Paper Details:

This paper undertakes a comparative literary study of Kamala Das's "An Introduction" and Nissim Ezekiel's "Night of the Scorpion" to examine how Indian English poetry negotiates identity, gender, and cultural consciousness within postcolonial contexts. Rather than approaching the poems as isolated expressions of feminist confession or cultural realism, the study places them in dialogue to explore how poetic voice mediates between individual self-articulation and communal belief. Employing qualitative literary analysis and close reading, the paper draws on feminist and postcolonial theoretical frameworks to investigate how language, embodiment, and belief systems shape differing modes of subjectivity. Das's poem is examined as a linguistic assertion of female selfhood that resists social and cultural regulation, while Ezekiel's poem is analysed as a narrative of collective response in which suffering is absorbed into communal ethics and inherited belief. The study argues that reading these poems comparatively reveals the coexistence of divergent yet interrelated postcolonial sensibilities within Indian English poetry. By foregrounding both individual and communal modes of experience, the paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how gender, culture, and identity are articulated through poetic form in postcolonial Indian writing.