Kamala das Poet

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 Kamala Das's My Story

 
Kamala Das (Suraiya)
Merrily Weisbord   describes what she have noticed and experienced with kamla surayya, when she flew to Cochin, after receiving the letter….
 
"I open myself to a laughing, entrancing Kamala in burqua and black. We've been talking for hours, between and over the heads of the new cast of '. visitors
I notice too that Kamala's posture and body language are looser and more relaxed than on my last visit. She says '.s are friendlier than Hindus, and with them she feels a complicity and trust. There's more laughter in the house and she looks radiant dark eyes bright, full lips puckering, gold on neck, diamonds in nose – her face dramatically framed by a regal, high-capped, black chador.
 
Whatever her new reality, Kamala's warmth to me is unchanged. She shows me a shiny silver cell phone resting like an idol on a pedestal, and says it is a gift from thirty-eight-year-old Sadiq Ali, ---c scholar, national '. League MP from Malabar, and her absent lover.
 
All day she wears the phone on a gold belt slung rebelliously around the waist of her black dress, keeping the line open and, as he requested, "dedicated to our love." As her bangles flash and her visitors delight, Kamala listens for the phone strapped to her body. She longs for Sadiq Ali to call. And when the visitors leave, she tells me that after their first meeting, he called for days, at midnight, every night".
 
Sadiq Ali asked Kamala's cousin to arrange a meeting. He said he had admired Kamala for years and wanted to meet her. Kamala gave him a two-hour appointment, and Sadiq Ali drove five hours from his small town to Cochin.
 
"He sat at my feet laughing the attractive, reckless laugh of a monarch. He was a preacher who delighted large audiences with ballads and narratives lasting five hours. He held his listeners in a spell with his four-octave range and a pure voice that resembled a newborn's cry."
 
Sadiq Ali charmed Kamala with his eloquence, scholarship, rough wavy hair, white teeth, and "smile of wondrous innocence." He asked if she would permit herself to be photographed with him, and they posed on the cane sofa, nibbling on plum cake, laughing together. "I no longer recollect the topics of our first conversation, but laughter entered our home as spontaneously as sunshine that morning, filling each crevice of emptiness."
 
"Feed me," Sadiq Ali requested playfully, when Kamala allowed the two hours to stretch into lunch.
 
"But I cannot touch your lips," Kamala responded. Her grandmother had warned that '.s ate the corpses of sacred cows, which made their breath stink, and that touching them led to exile. "A staunch vegetarian like me would never touch the mouth of a mlecha [ flesh eater]," she said.
 
"Then I will feed you," Sadiq Ali offered, breaking food into small pieces.
By the time he left Kamala's home, his flirtatious play had stirred long-buried feelings and desires. "For many years I had not witnessed the blush spread on the cheek of a young man finding himself embarked on a new love."
 
And it had been many decades since she had felt desire, that slow ache in the abdomen, blood surging as on a fast-moving swing.
 
"I was almost asleep when Sadiq Ali climbed in beside me, holding me, breathing softly, whispering endearments, kissing my face, breasts ... and when he entered me, it was the first time I had ever experienced what it was like to feel a man from the inside."
 
Abstract:
Kamla Das was born on 31st March 1934 in Punnayurkulam, the then Malbar district belonging to the Madras Presidency. Her pen name was Madhavikkutty. Her father was V.M.Nair, who was former editor of Mathrubhumi, a periodical and later on he became a senior officer of Walford Transport Company in the erstwhile Calcutta. Kamla's mother was Balamani Amma, who had reasonable poetic talents. At the age of 15 Kamla was married to K. Madhav Das, an officer, Reserve Bank of India in Bombay1. This marriage gave rise to three sons - Madhav Das Nalpat, Chinnen Das and Jayasurya Das.
 
Key Words: Male Domination, Kamala Das's My Story, autobiography, Literature.

[lkveni58]

Kamala Das's My Story
 
INTRODUCTION:
Kamla was quite intimate with only two persons, the first was her brother and the second was her grandmother. She was emotionally tied with the Nalpat House in Punnayurkulam. Her marriage with K. Madhav Das was not much fruitful; therefore, she had to find 'love' outside the marital relation. The death of her grandmother and the decline of the Nalpat House were discouraging developments in her life. The only source of relief for her was writing, which did create a thebangutic impact on her life. She profusely contributed her stories and poems to the periodicals, sometimes under the fake name 'K. Das'. A lot of sensational reactions were given to her when she came out with her serially published autobiography titled “Ente Katha” in Malayalanadu in 1973. In the year 1988 she translated her autobiography into English
under the title “My Story”. The book covers a period of 40 years in the life of its author. Kamla Das published different collections of poems. She has also written stories which were published in different anthologies.
 
At 65 Kamla, having lost her husband, got married to Sadiq Ali, a '. League Member of Parliament. She converted to .,, which changed her name into Kamla Surayya. She formed a political party named Lok Seva Party in 1984. She contested Parliamentary elections, but in vain. She was felicitated several times for her literary contributions. She received the PEN Prize, the Kerala Sahitya Academy Award, the Sahitya Academy Award, the Asian Poetry Prize, the Kent Award, the Vayalar Award, DLitt by University of Calicut and to top it all she was nominated and shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1984. She died on 31st May 2009.
 
BACKGROUND TO “MY STORY”:
Kamla Das was motivated into writing down the autobiography by her circumstances. She was born in a conservative Malayalam family coming from Punnayurkulam, which is now in Kerala. Her father and mother were a mismatched couple, who couldn't bless their children with enough love and care.
 
EXPOSITION OF MALE DOMINATION IN KAMALA DAS'S MY STORY
Kamla found a durable relationship in her brother, her grandmother and the Nalpat House. Kamla was not lucky in her husband, who was not able to initiate his young wife into a healthy physical relationship, who maintained illicit relations with his friends and who would be busy up his neck in the work of his employer, i.e. Reserve Bank of India. Kamla got married at a tender age of 15 and gave birth to three sons within a short length of time after the marriage. To make the matters worse, she had to live in different places like Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi with an insufficient income of her husband. There was a time when she felt that she should commit suicide. However, she didn't do that, instead she engrossed herself into writing. Thus, she started to be noticed in the literary circles. Gradually, she rose to fame as a writer with a liberal style of expression. Her writing was an outcome of the way she lived her life, maintaining relations outside her marriage, nevertheless keeping the marital tie intact.
She first serialized the episodes of her autobiography in Malayalam under the title “Ente Katha” in 1973. The publication of these episodes generated a lot of controversy.
 
Her parents tried to smother her voice, but she resisted them and staunchly published the autobiography. She, later on, translated the Malayalam book into English. The Malayalam autobiography has 27 chapters, but the English translation is made up of 50. A number of chapters in the English version begin with epigraphs. The book exhibits genre-crossing, as it incorporates different genres. The text is polyphonic, since the narration in it is done at different levels by Kamla Das as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, lover, writer, middle class woman. The overall tone of the autobiography is confessional. The writer has put forward a number of facts in her life as she underwent them.
 
EXPOSITION OF MALE DOMINATION:
Kamla Das's entire life might be seen as a combination of an anti-male consciousness and an incessant search for the ideal male companionship. The beginning of her life saw the shadows of her father's dominance and a total surrender of her mother to him. Kamla's childhood was marred by the socio-political scenario in the nation and the familial conservatism at the domestic level. Her father, though a modern man off the home, practiced his Gandhi-oriented austerities making his wife wear the Khaadi sari and hardly any jewelry. Kamla's mother was a poet whose poetry couldn't flower, due only to the dominion of her husband. The early life of Kamla had few genial male members, like her brother, who was very affectionate and talented. Kamla was married against her willingness to K. Madhav Das.
 
Their meeting in Kolkata after they were engaged didn't motivate Kamla into thinking positively about her forthcoming marriage. However, she couldn't oppose the decision of her father, who was all set to see her married off. Kamla's relation with her husband got petrified due to her inability to cope with his sexual demands and her ideas about an ideal husband. Madhav Das couldn't initiate his young wife into a physical and emotional relationship which is the consequence of a married life. He extracted the carnal pleasure and Kamla had to surrender herself to the overwhelming passions of her husband. She had to give up her education due to a hurriedly done marriage at the behest of her father. Thus, Kamla's father, V.M.Nair has been depicted in the autobiography to represent the male domination, a frequent phenomenon in the Indian society.
 
Kamla's husband turned out to be another source of misery for her, as she had to move from one place to another with her husband who worked as an officer in Reserve Bank of India. We see different dimensions to the personality of K. Madhav Das. He was introduced to Kamla as a poet and a lover of literature. However, the very introduction to her fiancé was not worth remembering. Thus, she was totally disgruntled after she saw the real face of the man with whom she tied the knot. Madhav Das was a husband who looked at his better-half as a source of sexual gratification, he was an employee who brought the work & tensions of his work-place home and to make the matters worse he, as the autobiographer discloses, was a gay. Kamla's life was a series of disillusionments. She had cherished the image of Lord Krishna for her companion. She desired for a man who would gradually initiate her into the pleasures of a sustained marital life. This desire soon became an obsession. Kamla wandered from one man to another in search of the ideal man. Nevertheless, when she got one, she couldn't really enjoy the pleasure as her life was witnessing the fall.
 
Another man who dominated the life, indirectly so, of Kamla was her great grand uncle. The ninth chapter titled 'Grand Uncle Narayana Menon' presents a complete picture of this man who was a poet4. His mother, Madhavi Amma, was a daughter of a sorcerer of Malabar. Narayana Menon was well-versed in English and Sanskrit literatures. He joined the Theosophical Society of India. He entertained different types of persons to his house. He had a clout in the literary circles in south India. His library had different types of books ranging from literature to books on sex. The grand uncle had his own authority in the Nalpat House. After his death the house witnessed a type of degeneration. This is an indication of the weightage the male members of a family exercise. The Nalpat House witnessed the oppression of women by the male members for years together.
 
Thus, Kamla had to cope with the continuous domination by different men who were in some way or the other related with her. Her life was engaged in a struggle with males and their domination. Nevertheless, she overcame the masculine dominion and proved her mettle. A time had come when she thought about committing suicide, but she gave up the fatal thought & embarked upon the career of a creative writer. She satisfied her father by way keeping stuck to the marital relation, but liberally followed the demands of her emotions and passions.  She met with the ideal man; she had been longing for years together and satiated her mind and body. Finally, Kamla realized the importance of her being a writer. Her creative faculty turned out to be a remedy for all the ills she had to tackle in her domestic and public life. The story of Kamla Das's life comes to an end with her ideas and insights into the social issues and problems in India.
 
          Kamla Das My Story
I read My Story, thanks to my teacher Ramamani, who had instilled a sort of curiosity about Kamala Das. The writer looked very rebellious and revolutionary and I instantly drawn towards her works and my teacher had given me to read Kamala’s autobiography My Story. After her demise, I just browsed few passages and here is a few which I got from various websites.
 
My Story is to date the best-selling woman’s autobiography in post-independence India. My Story is a chronologically ordered, linear narrative written in a realist style. It follows Kamala’s life from age four through British colonial and missionary colleges favoured by the colonial Indian elite; through her sexual awakening; an early and seemingly disastrous marriage; her growing literary career; extramarital affairs; the birth of her three sons; and, finally, a slow but steady coming to terms with her spouse, writing, and sexuality.
 
Over the years Kamala has proffered several contradictory accounts of the genesis of My Story. In her preface to the autobiography, Kamala claims that she began to write the text in the mid-1970s from her hospital bed as she grappled with a potentially fatal heart condition. She wrote the autobiography, she states, “to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could depart when the lime came, with a scrubbed-out conscience” and in order to pay mounting hospital bills. Since the publication of her autobiography, Kamala has repeatedly changed her stance on this topic in interviews and essays.
 
She has presented herself as either too bohemian to care about revealing her sexual adventures and her periods of mental breakdown or, conversely, as the submissive wife following the dictates of her husband who was apparently more eager than herself to cash in on a spiced-up and heavily fictionalized account of her life. And yet, at every opportunity Kamala reverts to the convention that she is India’s most unconventional woman writer with no regrets about her work or her foci.
 
List of chapters:

Preface
1. The humiliation of a brown child in a European college
2. About childhood nightmares and the only “good friend”
3. Each poem of mine made me cry
4. Nalapat House gifted by amorous chieftain
5. In the secret drawer was a brown bottle which smelt of Ambergris
6. I was infatuated with his charm
7. Women of good Nair families never mentioned sex
8. Lonely Goddess
9. They would have liked him to go to bed with a ghost every night
10. She was half-crazed with love and hardly noticed me
11. The girls in boarding college came from a very different background
12. Homely Annie gets handsome young lover!
13. The nuns used to censor the letters we wrote
14. “I wanted to marry a rich man…To be a snob”
15. We were subject to subtle sadism of several kinds
16. I prayed to the sun God to give me a male child
17. One morning the Sanyasi had gone… Only the smell of opium remained
18. Was every married adult a clown in bed, a circus performer?
19. Her voice was strange…It was easy for me to fall in love with her
20. She lay near me, holding my body close to hers
21. His hands bruised my body and left blue and red marks on the skin
22. Wedding night: Again and again he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali drums       throbbed duly
23. A gold coin for love
24. I sent the cook out to get some barbiturates
25. The blood-stained moonlight
26. The first chapter of darkness
27. For the first time in my life I learned to surrender totally
28. My love was like alms looking for a begging bowl
29. I still yearned for my grey-eyed friend
30. Sex and the co-operative movement
31. He walked in silence a few yards ahead of me…
32. It was the beginning of delightful death
33. Passing away of my great-grandmother
34. Again and again the same man phoned
35. Calcutta’s cocktail season
36. I was Carlo’s Sita
37. For the first time I saw the eunuchs dance in Calcutta
38. Delhi streets were fragrant and murky… I felt very young
39. Calicut gets a good crop of lunatics
40. Like the phoenix I rose from the ashes of my past
41. I withdrew into the cave I had made for myself
42. The last of my lovers: handsome dark one with a tattoo between his eyes
43. “I too tried adultery for a short while”
44. I was never a nymphomaniac…
45. Return to Nalapat: Was my 24-year-old marriage on the rocks?
46. Only the wealthy hated me… They spread Iush scandals about me
47. The sorcerer came on a bike at night…
48. The ancient hungers that once tormented me were fulfilled
49. Who were we to sit beside their favourite God?
50. I have ceased to fear death…
 
Kamala chose quite explicit and titillating titles for most of the 50 short chapters that make up the autobiography. Chapter headings for 38 of the 50 chapters are quite clearly sexual or at least hold the promise of some sexual content.
 
In Chapter 10: “She was half-crazed with love and hardly noticed me,” Kamala describes her experiences as a nine-year-old in an all-girl boarding college where she shares a room with three other girls. The eldest and prettiest of her roommates’ is 15-year-old Sharada who has many admirers among the young collegegirls. The chapter ends with the following passage that also provides the title: “The lesbian admirer came into our room once when Sharada was away taking a bath and kissed her pillowcases and her undies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on my bed watching this performance but she was half-crazed with love, and hardly noticed me.”
 
In Chapter 19: Kamala, 15, is herself enthralled by a series of older women, unmarried aunts, teachers, women who are family friends.
 
Chapter 20 begins with Kamala being warned against associating with an 18-year-old college student. Of course Kamala goes on to describe how in spite of (or because of) the warnings, she felt “instantly drawn to her….She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculine grace….When her eyes held mine captive in a trance, for a reason that I could not fathom, then I felt excited”. In the summer of her sixteenth year, Kamala’s father arranges for her to make an overnight journey by train to her grandmother’s house, in the company of a group of professors and students.

“As luck would have it,” Kamala writes, the “girl who was different from others” is part of the group. Kamala describes the seduction on the train: “I hate the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if anyone was awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close to hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of my mouth with a gentleness that I had never dreamt of finding. She kissed my lips then, and whispered you are so sweet, so very sweet; I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling…. It was the first kiss of its kind in my life. Perhaps my mother may have kissed me while I was an infant but after that no one, not even my grandmother, had bothered to kiss me. I was unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She kept stroking my hair and kissing my face and my throat all through that night while sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish, she said, before dawn, your mouth is hot.”
 
A friend of Kamala’s family meets the group at the station where they have to change trains, and another family friend invites the whole group for lunch. The college student coaxes Kamala to bathe with her and to allow herself to be powdered and dressed by her.
 
“Both of us,” Kamala writes, “felt rather giddy with joy like honeymooners.” By the time they join their group, the meal is well underway, and their host, Major Menon, Kamala wryly says, “seemed grateful to me for having brought into his home a bunch of charming ladies, all unmarried.”
 
Kamala continues in the same passage to blend this romance with the girlfriend into the romance with her husband-to-be. In the next paragraph, Kamala begins describing her courtship with a male relative. She learns from her grandmother that the family wants them to marry.
 
This chapter ends a page later with this description of their first kiss: “Before I left for Calcutta, my relative pushed me into a dark corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth. He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. Don’t you love me he asked me, don’t you like my touching you…. I felt hurt and humiliated. All I said was ‘goodbye’.”
 
The chapter in which Kamala meets and is courted by her future husband is titled: “She lay near me holding my body close to hers.”
 
In the next chapter (titled “His hands bruised my body and left blue and red marks on the skin”), Kamala writes of the visit of Madhav Das, her cousin and now her fiancé, to her home in Calcutta, during their engagement:

“My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not know what sexual desire meant, not having experienced it even once. Don’t you feel any passion for me, he asked me. I don’t know, I said simply and honestly. It was a disappointing week for him and for me. I had expected him to take me in his arms and stroke my face, my hair, my hands, and whisper loving words. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversations, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from my thoughts.”
 
Right after the passage Kamala says: “I did not know whom to turn to for consolation. On a sudden impulse, I phoned my girlfriend. She was surprised to hear my voice. I thought you had forgotten me, she said. I invited her to my house. She came to spend a Sunday with me and together we cleaned out our bookcases and dusted the books. Only once she kissed me. Our eyes were watering and the dust had swollen our lips. Can’t you take me away from here, I asked her. Not for another four years, she said. I must complete my studies she said. Then holding me close to her, she rubbed her cheek against mine. When I put her out of my mind I put aside my self-pity too. It would not do to dream of a different kind of life. My life had been planned and its course charted by my parents and relatives. … I would be a middle-class housewife, and walk along the vegetable shops carrying a string bag and wearing faded chappals on my feet. I would beat my thin children…and make them scream out for mercy. I would wash my husband’s cheap underwear and hang it out to dry in the balcony like some kind of national flag, with wifely pride….” We never hear of this girlfriend again, either in the autobiography or in any meaningful way in the many critical responses to this text.
 
In Chapter 22, titled “Wedding night: Again and again he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali drums throbbed dully.” What Kamala records in this chapter is her initiation into heterosexual intercourse via marital bang, unsuccessful attempts at first and then, after a fortnight of attempts, successful. She becomes pregnant almost immediately and by the time her first son is born, Kamala has few illusions about her relationship with her husband. The consequence is that now, aged 17 or 18, she decides “to be unfaithful to him, at least physically.”
 
Chapter 27 begins: “During my nervous breakdown there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical … after bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men’s clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap, fondling me and calling me his little darling boy….I was by nature shy… but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing.”

She writes: “He (the fiancé) talked about homosexuality with frankness. Many of us pass through that stage, he said.”
 
In Chapter 32, Kamala writes of her trouble with a “women’s problem” for which she requires hospitalization. Here she is tended to by a woman doctor who saves her from bleeding to death when she haemorrhages after surgery. Kamala falls in love with her and keeps going to see her in the clinic, kissing her, watching her, smelling her. She writes: “I kept telling my husband that I was in love with the doctor and he said, it is all right, she is a woman, and she will not exploit you.”
 
 
'I Am ,.''s Handmaiden' | The Outlook | Interview
VENU MENON INTERVIEWS KAMALA DAS
She might be 65 now, but ever since Kamala Das shocked middle-class morality in the seventies by penning her bare-all My Story, she’s reinforced her irreverent image with a corpus of poems and paintings - documenting the female quest for fulfilment - that established her as a person with a hugely respectable talent for saying disrespectful things. All this sent Kerala society into a tizzy but also earned her literary prestige. Today, Madhavikutty, as Kerala prefers to call her, has shut the door on her past. Widowed and lonely, she finds security in the ‘rigidities’ of .,. Venu Menon spoke to her in her apartment in Kochi. Excerpts:
 
What do we call you now? 
Preferably  Dr Kamala Sorayya. But whatever you do please don’t call me aunty. I’m a smart-looking woman. I can go to any auditorium and be scintillating. And some fat woman who does nothing but overeat comes and calls me aunty. It’s so insulting.
 
You say you walked around in purdah long before you converted to .,. 
That’s right. I started wearing the purdah in ‘72, when I went to the bazaar or to the movies. I wore it for privacy. I didn’t want to show myself.
 
You never thought of conversion then? 
I did. But my husband put it off. He said I wasn’t mature enough yet to seek another religion. Play with Krishna a while longer, he told me.
 
Is Krishna out of the picture now?
He travels with me wherever I go. Krishna wasn’t a god for me. He was supposed to be my husband, according to my grandma. So I carried on with the belief that I was really married to Krishna.
 
Another wedding is on the cards... 
Yes. He’s a '. living in America. Very  handsome. Good smile. Good teeth. Good hair.
 
That’s it? 
Well, you can’t have a good smile and not have character.
 
Was conversion a precondition for marriage? 
Not at all. He’s liberated. In fact, he is amused that I wish to be in purdah.
 
If not the wedding, then what triggered the conversion?
I was waiting for a sign from ,.'. It came when I was travelling by car from Malabar to Thrissur. I saw a pale butter-coloured sun at 7 pm - the sun at dawn appeared to me at dusk. The sky had changed. That was enough for me. ,.' was ready to take me in.
 
Were you disillusioned as a *****? 
No. I consider Hinduism to be a lenient, large-hearted religion. I was drawn by ,.'’s compassion.
 
Did you find a lack of compassion in ***** gods? 
As a child I listened to stories of vengeful gods who punished you for your sins. There’s something gruesome about it.
 
You are not known to respect orthodoxy. Are you ready for the rule-bound life that lies ahead? 
I have given up my freedom; it has made me feel so shabby. ., is not a lenient husband. ., is rigid, very stern, I think of ,.' as my master. I am his subservient handmaiden. I delight in being subservient. I always wanted to feel humbled. No man could humble me. ,.' could. I feel like a harem girl before her master.
 
Will you be subservient to your husband? 
Of course not. If the chap tries to be my master, I will say talaq and send him off.
 
He has the advantage when it comes to talaq. Are you comfortable living under that threat? 
Talaq is marvellous. A man is free to send off his wife when he’s bored. I believe in a man’s right to send off his wife if she bores him.
 
If your husband has other wives will you feel upset? 
I would feel relieved because it would save me from physical damage. If I was his only wife, he would come to me every night. It would tire me out at my age.
 
Will Sorayya write like Kamala Das?

No. Religion should not permit a woman to write nonsense like My Story.

[lkveni58]

THIS IS A BIOGRPAHY OF KAMALA DAS , A FAMOUS POET

Kamala Das  Born 31 March 1934
Punnayurkulam, Ponnani taluk, Malabar District, Madras Presidency, British India
Died 31 May 2009 (aged 75) Pune, Maharashtra, India
Resting place Palayam Juma Masjid, Thiruvananthapuram, India
Pen name Madhavikutty
Occupation Poet, novelist, short story writer
Nationality Indian
Citizenship Indian
Genre Poetry, novel, short story, memoirs
Notable works Ente Katha, My Story, The Descendants
Notable awards Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, Vayalar Award, Sahitya Akademi Award, Asan World Prize, Asian Poetry Prize, Kent Award
Spouse K. Madhav Das
Children Madhav Das Nalapat Chinnen Das Jayasurya Das
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Relatives[/size]

• Balamani Amma (mother) V. M. Nair (father)
  

She was noted for her many Malayalam short stories as well as many poems written in English. Das was also a syndicated columnist. She once claimed that "poetry does not sell in this country [India]",but her forthright columns, which sounded off on everything from women's issues and child care to politics, were popular.
Kamala's first book of poetry, Summer in Calcutta was a breath of fresh air in Indian English poetry. She wrote chiefly of love, its betrayal, and the consequent anguish. Ms Das abandoned the certainties offered by an archaic, and somewhat sterile, aestheticism for an independence of mind and body at a time when Indian poets were still governed by "19th-century diction, sentiment and romanticised love."[5] Her second book of poetry, The Descendants was even more explicit, urging women to:
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent ofLong hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all yourEndless female hungers ..." – The Looking Glass
This directness of her voice led to comparisons with Marguerite Duras and Sylvia Plath[5]
At the age of 42, she published a daring autobiography, My Story; it was originally written in Malayalam (titled Ente Katha) and later she translated it into English. Later she admitted that much of the autobiography had fictional elements.[6]
"Some people told me that writing an autobiography like this, with absolute honesty, keeping nothing to oneself, is like doing a striptease.
True, maybe. I, will, firstly, strip myself of clothes and ornaments. Then I intend to peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones.
At last, I hope you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow, in a fourth dimension" An Introduction is very bold poem in which she express es her true feelings about men.
- excerpts from the translation of her autobiography in Malayalam, Ente Katha
Kamala's "An Introduction" is an autobiographical poem written in the colloquial style. She presents her feelings and thoughts in a bold manner. She realises her identity and understands that it is the need of every woman to raise a voice in this male-dominated society. The poet longs for love it is the result of her loneliness and frustration.
The poem "A Hot Noon in Malabar" is about climate, surrounding in a town in Malabar. The people may be annoyed by the heat, dust and noise but she likes it. She longs for the hot noon in Malabar because she associates it with the wild men, wild thoughts and wild love. It is a torture for her to be away from Malabar.
Kamala Surayya is essentially known for her bold and frank expression. The prominent features of her poetry are an acute obsession with love and the use of confession. The main theme of her poetry is based upon freedom, love and protection. She wrote on a diverse range of topics, often disparate- from the story of a poor old servant, about the sexual disposition of upper-middle-class women living near a metropolitan city or in the middle of the ghetto. Some of her better-known stories include Pakshiyude Manam, Neypayasam, Thanuppu, and Chandana Marangal. She wrote a few novels, out of which Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, which was received favourably by the reading public as well as the critics, stands out.
She travelled extensively to read poetry to Germany's University of Duisburg-Essen, University of Bonn and University of Duisburg universities, Adelaide Writer's Festival, Frankfurt Book Fair, University of Kingston, Jamaica, Singapore, and South Bank Festival (London), Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), etc. Her works are available in French, Spanish, Russian, German and Japanese.
Kamala Surayya was a confessional poet whose poems have often been considered at par with those of Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell.
She has also held positions as Vice-chairperson in Kerala Sahitya Akademi, chairperson in Kerala Forestry Board, President of the Kerala Children's Film Society, editor of Poet magazine[7] and Poetry editor of Illustrated Weekly of India.
"Dance of Eunuchs" is a fine poem by Kamala Das. It has an autobiographical tone. The poet sympathises with eunuchs.
The eunuchs dance in the heat of the sun. Their costumes, makeup and their passion with which they dance suggest the female delicacy. Their outward appearance and joy is contrasted with their inward sadness. Actually there is no joy in their heart, they can't even dream of happiness.
In the poem 'A Request' ,the poetess Kamala Das realises that her life is meaningless. She is alone and her colourless life is designed of crumbling patterns.
Although occasionally seen as an attention-grabber in her early years,[8] she is now seen as one of the most formative influences on Indian English poetry. In 2009, The Times called her "the mother of modern English Indian poetry".[5]
Her last book titled The Kept Woman and Other Stories, featuring translation of her short stories, was published posthumously.[9] Kamala Das is known for her controversial writings where she openly talks about the restriction imposed on women. She is known for her rebellious nature against the conventions.[10]
Personal life[edit]
Kamala married Madhav Das at the age of 15. The couple had three sons – M D Nalapat, Chinen Das and Jayasurya Das.[11] Her husband predeceased her in 1992, after 43 years of marriage.[12] Madhav Das Nalapat, her eldest son, is married to Princess Thiruvathira Thirunal Lakshmi Bayi (daughter of Princess Pooyam Thirunal Gouri Parvati Bayi and Sri Chembrol Raja Raja Varma Avargal) from the Travancore Royal House.[citation needed] He holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is a Professor of geopolitics at the Manipal University. He had been a resident editor of The Times of India.
Legacy[edit]

On 1 February 2018, Google Doodle by artist Manjit Thapp celebrates the work she left behind, which provides a window into the world of an engrossing woman.[21]

A biopic on her titled Aami directed by Kamal, released on 9 February 2018.

Awards and other recognitions[edit]

Kamala Surayya has received many awards for her literary contribution, including:

• 1963: PEN Asian Poetry Prize
  
  
• 1968: Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for Story – Thanuppu[22]
  
  
• 1984: Shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature[23]
  
  
• 1985: Kendra Sahitya Academy Award (English) – Collected Poems[24]
  
  
• 1988: Kerala State Film Award for Best Story
  
  
• 1997: Vayalar Award – Neermathalam Pootha Kalam[22]
  
  
• 1998: Asian Poetry Prize[25]
  
  
• 2006: Honorary D.Litt by University of Calicut[26]
  
  
• 2006: Muttathu Varkey Award[27]
  
  
• 2009: Ezhuthachan Award[28]
  

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