Kamala Das was one of India’s finest authors, the mother of modern English Indian poetry, and the first Hindu woman to write frankly about sexual desire. Admired by those seeking better living conditions and human rights for women, Das was a writer who could be tender and biting, sometimes in the same sentence.
She was favourably compared to Sylvia Plath, among others. Critics hailed Das for burying 19th-century diction, sentiment and romanticised love, as no Indian woman had done before. Her first collection of poems, entitled The Sirens, appeared in 1964 and won her the Asian Poetry Prize. In 1965, at the age of 31, Das published Summer in Calcutta, after which Oxford University Press declared that: “The mentors of sham manners and peddlers of decadent morality wound up their shops and ran out by the backdoor.” The Old Playhouse and Other Poems followed in 1973, defying taboos with poems about marital discord, sexual ecstasy, loneliness and longing.
In the mid-1970s her confessional memoir My Story brought her celebrity but also a degree of notoriety, a condition that sometimes entertained but more often dogged her life. My Story was an instant bestseller, read then for its comparatively open sexuality even though Das considered it to be “a very serious, very tragic story of an Indian girl who had been sacrificed by the laws of the land”. Acknowledging her creative and personal courage, the poet Balan Chullikkad called her “the first feminist emotional revolutionary of our time”. The Indian tabloids labelled her “the Love Queen of Malabar”.
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Along with English poetry, memoirs and newspaper columns, Das wrote in Malayalam (the language of southwest India) stories, novels and plays under the pen name Madhavikutty. A celebrated autobiographical trilogy immortalised a vanished pre-independence rural world, and her contemporary stories reflected the tensions and turmoil buffeting the southwest Indian Keralites in their transition from the old world to the new. Malayalis of all ages and religions called her Amma, mother.
One of Das’s best-known stories, A Doll for the Child Prostitute, was inspired by a visit to a brothel. In it, two girls, barely even teenagers, play hopscotch. A man appears and the madam summons one of the girls who asks her friend to keep her hopscotch stone in its place. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she says. The story also tells how a police inspector gets free sex at the brothel and promises the girl a doll if she will be kind to him like, he says, his daughter is.
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A novel, Alphabet of Lust, appeared in 1977, and in 1992 a collection of short stories, Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories, was published. Two collections of poetry, Only the Soul Knows How to Sing and Yaa Allah, appeared in 1996 and 2001 respectively.
Antara Dev Sen, a close follower of Das’s work and the editor of The Little Magazine, a Delhi-based literary periodical, summed up her contribution: “Her talent for expressing complex sentiments simply, her unsettling, bewildering honesty, and in-your-face sexuality made her not just a literary icon but a woman whom readers deeply loved.”
Following the publication of My Story, Das’s serious writing was hijacked by a press that sensationalised her life rather than celebrating her literary stature. Prurient and moralistic critiques persisted until the 1990s, when a new generation of writers and critics accorded her the honours due to one of India’s foremost poets and the woman whom the writer Shahnaz Habib eulogised, using vocabularly closely reminiscent of a W. H. Auden verse, as “noon, midnight, talk and song to those who came after her”.
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Believing in the social responsibility of the writer, she established a free legal service for evicted wives. She also spoke publicly on behalf of the homeless, mentored young writers, sent disenfranchised women to college, supported orphanages, lepers, neighbours, welcomed everyone to her receiving room, and fought to enact and enforce laws to end the sexual exploitation of children, a cause she passionately espoused. In 1984 she made an unsuccessful attempt to be elected to the Indian Parliament
Das was born in 1934 in her ancestral home, Nalapat house in Punnayurkulam, in the southwest Indian state of Kerala, to an upper-caste Nayar family with a literary and royal lineage. She spoke English in Calcutta and Malayalam, the South Dravidian official language of Kerala, with her grandmother in Malabar, and had a gift for writing with lyric beauty in both languages.
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At 15 she entered into an arranged marriage to an older relative who worked for the Reserve Bank of India and had three sons. In an interview in 1997 she explained the background. “My father was a patriarch, an autocrat. He roared at us and gave us no intimacy. He wanted always to control us or to send us away. My mother lay on her bed, writing religious poetry, not intervening in any way. I was desperate for love.
“To punish us, we were sent to boarding schools where we were treated with subtle forms of sadism. When my father could no longer do that, and after I had rheumatic fever, he called our relative Das and asked him to take me off his hands. So I married him.”
Recalling her formative years in verse, in a poem entitled An Introduction, she wrote: “. . . I am Indian, very brown, born in / Malabar, I speak three languages, write in / Two, dream in one . . .”
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Das converted to Islam at the age of 67, and took the name Kamala Suraiyya. Some say she was converted by a visionary experience, others say she converted for love. It was the final grandly impulsive choice of a rebel who defied categorisation and mocked societal convention but who, drawing on tradionally based standards of purity, maintained her dignity and used her powerful celebrity in the service of others.
Das died in Pune, in northwestern India, where she had lived since 2007 near the family of her youngest son, Jaisurya. Her body was flown to her home state of Kerala, where thousands of mourners of all ages paid homage, weeping and placing flowers on her hearse during her funeral procession. The proceedings were covered live on television, and the procession stopped at public halls in Trichur, Cochin, Alleppey, Kollam and Trivandrum.
Her funeral at the Palayam Mosque in Trivandrum reflected her ecumenical spirituality: admirers of all faiths attended the service, party leaders spoke personally and non-politically, and for the first time in India women stood at the graveside in a Muslim service. Those attending were reminded of her lines, from Advice to Fellow Swimmers: “Go, swim in the sea, / Go swim in the great blue sea, / Where the first tide you meet is your body, / That familiar pest, / But, if you learn to cross it, / You are safe, yes, beyond it you are safe . . .”
Das is buried in a grove in the grounds of the Palayam Mosque, adjoining a temple, near a church. Newly planted neermathalam saplings, like those from her family’s snake shrine, will flower with the scent of jasmine by her graveside. She gave her ancestral land in Punnayurkulam to the Sahitya Akademi. On her last visit there she said: “I shall return as a kingfisher seeking the scent of the neermathalam, hovering above the ponds.”
Das is survived by her three sons.
Kamala Das, poet and writer, was born on March 31, 1934. She died of acute pneumonia on May 31, 2009, aged 75