Blood – Class 12 English Chapter 13 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Poet: Kamala Das (1934–2009)

Kamala Das, one of the greatest literary figures in Malayalam, was born in 1934 in Punnayurkulum, South Malabar, Kerala. Her poetry and prose have given her a permanent place in modern Malayalam literature and Indian writing in English. She is best known for her feminist writings and focus on womanhood. Her awards include the Poetry Award for the Asian PEN Anthology, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (best short-story collection in Malayalam) and the Chaman Lal Award for fearless journalism.

Blood is a long, autobiographical, free-verse poem about an ancestral house, a great-grandmother and the pull between tradition and modernity.

Section-wise Meaning

1. Childhood and the great-grandmother's lament

The poet and her brother, as children, are always playing on the sands / Drawing birds and animals. Their great-grandmother tells them the house is three hundred years old and falling to little bits. The details are vivid: walls cracked and torn, tiles fallen, windows whine and groan, rats scamper past the doors at night, the snake-shrine is dark with weeds and the snake-gods have lichen on their hoods.

O it hurts me she cried,

Wiping a reddened eye

For I love this house, it hurts me much

To watch it die.

2. The child's promise

When I grow old, I said,

And very very rich

I shall rebuild the fallen walls

The child promises to rebuild the house. The great-grandmother touches her cheeks and smiles.

3. The great-grandmother's world

She was really simple, Fed on God for years — the only dish was always God / And the rest mere condiments. She remembers riding her elephant every Monday to the Siva shrine at ten or eleven; the jewel box, brocade from the north, perfumes, oils and sandal; and her marriage to a prince who loved her for a lovely short year and died of fever in her arms.

4. The pride of 'blood'

That we had the oldest blood

...

A blood thin and clear and fine

While in the veins of the always poor

And in the veins

Of the new-rich men

Flowed a blood thick as gruel

And muddy as a ditch.

The great-grandmother believes the family's aristocratic blood is thin, clear and fine, while the poor and the new-rich have blood thick as gruel / And muddy as a ditch. These lines reveal the class prejudice of the old feudal order, which the poet presents critically.

5. Death of the great-grandmother

She dies in her eighty-sixth year, wearied by compromise, legs quilted with arthritis, with only a hard cough / For comfort. By now the poet has learnt ... Most lessons of defeat and found that to grow rich was a difficult feat. The house is crouching on its elbows, grotesque and alive in the pallid moon. When the great-grandmother is cremated over logs of the mango tree, the poet imagines the windows close like eyes, the pillars groan and the dark rooms heave a sigh — the house dies with her. The poet leaves for other towns, leaving the shrine, the sands and the wide rabid mouth of the Arabian Sea.

6. Guilt and memory

From every town she hears the rattle of its death. Rats run through darkened halls; white ants raise strange totems of burial on the walls.

I have let you down

Old house, I seek forgiveness

O mother's mother's mother

I have plucked your soul

Like a pip from a fruit

And have flung it into your pyre

She accepts being called callous and selfish, But do not blame my blood — the old blood remembers as it flows the gems, gold, perfumes and the stately / Elephant ride.

Themes

Conflict in the Poet's Conscience

She respects her great-grandmother's love for the house and regrets breaking her promise; yet she has revolted against the pride of blood and cannot (and partly will not) rebuild a dying world. The lines Call me callous / Call me selfish / But do not blame my blood capture this: she admits guilt yet insists her heritage lives on in memory.

Literary Devices & Form

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

Common Mistakes