Ranjit Hoskote, reviewing Ms Militancy for Biblio writes:
In Meena Kandasamy’ s Ms Militancy, we encounter a series of self-dramatisations, each the result of an acute consciousness of having to address the pressures of perception that attend poets, women, and poets who happen to be women. Sometimes, this self-consciousness summons forth a generic response, cast in the approved form of resistance essayed by numerous women poets who draw on subversive mythic exemplars while affiliating themselves to heterodox woman saint-poets from the Bhakti teaching lineages.
In this spirit, Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take offence…’, which serves this collection as a Preface:
My Maariamma bays for blood.My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips. My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s lap. All my women militate. They brave bombs, they belittle kings…. Call me names if it comforts you. I no longer care. The scarlet letter is my monogram. (Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)
Fortunately, there is a considerable current of surprise and elusiveness that does battle with the strain of predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry; even when she rehearses a well established choreography of feminist self-assertion, she does so with a sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly insight, and an appetite for phrasal shape-shifting. Her poetic personae— actors, commentators, drama queens, rebels—segue through history, cinema, television, myth and the venues of metropolitan culture.
