write an article on kamala das a great poet words limit 100000
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Kamala Das was one of the most prominent feminist voices in the postcolonial era. She wrote in her mother tongue Malayalam as well as in English. To her Malayalam readers she was Madhavi Kutty and to her English patrons she was Kamala Das. On account of her extensive contribution to the poetry in our country, she earned the label ‘The Mother of Modern Indian English Poetry’. She has also been likened to literary greats like Sylvia Plath because of the confessional style of her writing. On the occasion of her birth anniversary, we look into the remarkable life of this literary icon.
Childhood
Kamala Das was born on 31st March 1934. A part of her childhood was spent in her ancestral home in Malabar, Kerala and the other part in Calcutta where her father was posted for work. Kamala Das belonged to a family considered the literary royalty of Kerala. Her mother Balamani Amma was a famous poet and her grand uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon a respected writer. Das’ childhood as described in her autobiography was very culturally enriched.
Her fascination with writing began at a young age while watching her elders immersed in their work. When she was as young as six, she started a manuscript magazine where she would write ‘sad poems about dolls who had lost their heads and had to remain headless for eternity’ while her brother would illustrate the verses. As she grew older she put together a children’s theatre with her brother, where they performed plays ranging from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to Kalidas’ Sakuntalam. The stage was set in the patio of their ancestral home and was open for all the villagers to come see.
Early Work and the Struggles of a Female Writer
She was married off to Madhava Das, an employee at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) at the age of 15 and moved to Bombay with her husband. At a very young age, she had to find a way to pursue her passion for writing while being weighed down by the expectations of her husband, her family and the society at large of her ‘duties’ as a wife and mother. On being a female writer in that day and age, she said:
“A woman had to prove herself to be a good wife, a good mother, before she could become anything else. And that meant years and years of waiting. That meant waiting till the greying years. I didn’t have the time to wait. I was impatient. So I started writing quite early in my life. And perhaps I was lucky. My husband appreciated the fact that I was trying to supplement the family income. So, he allowed me to write at night. After all the chores were done, after I had fed the children, fed him, cleaned up the kitchen, I was allowed to sit awake and write till morning. And that affected my health”.
With her poems she tried to give voice to a generation of women who were confined to their households, and considered a commodity to be exchanged through marriage. She portrayed the women in her poems as human; with desires, pain and emotions just like men.
HER WRITING CONSISTED OF VIVID DESCRIPTIONS OF...........
In her poem titled ‘A Widow’s Lament’ she describes feeling isolated in a male-dominated society that she could never call her own, because it had no place for its women:
‘This has always been
Someone else’s world not mine
My man my sons forming the axis
While I, wife and mother
Climbed the glass panes of their eyes’
In one of her earliest works, in the poem ‘An Introduction’ she expresses her resentment in being confined to gender roles that she did not choose for herself and her desire to break out of them:
‘. . . Then I wore a shirt and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of this womanliness.
Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife, they cried.
Be embroiderer, cook or a quarreller with servants.’
When her family landed in financial trouble, she had to switch to being a columnist because it paid better and poetry took a backseat in her life. She wrote regularly for the popular weekly, Malayalanadu. She described her experiences of womanhood, with a certain guiltless honesty that the people of Kerala had not witnessed so far. Her father V M Nair, Managing Director of the Mathrubhumi group and a powerful figure in the journalism industry tried to put pressure on her editor to stop publishing her work but she did not yield to his demands.
My Story: An Autobiography
In 1973, her autobiography ‘Ente Kadha’ (My Story) was released in Malayalam. It consisted of a compilation of her weekly columns in Malayalanadu that had already become a sensation across the state. Fifteen years later, it was translated into English with more text added, many parts rewritten and published with the title ‘My Story’.
Answer:
Kamala Das, a prominent Indian poet, memoirist and short-story writer whose work was known for its open discussion of women’s sexual lives, a daring subject when she began publishing in midcentury, died on May 31 in Pune, India. She was 75.
The cause was respiratory failure, her doctor told the news service United News of India.
A prolific writer, Ms. Das composed most of her poetry in English. Most of her fiction, which appeared under the pen name Madhavikutty, was written in her native Malayalam, a non-Indo-European language spoken primarily in the South Indian state of Kerala.
She wrote several memoirs, the most famous of them, “My Story,” written in English and published in 1976. In it, Ms. Das recounts her childhood in an artistic but emotionally distant family; her unfulfilling arranged marriage to an older man shortly before her 16th birthday; the emotional breakdowns and suicidal thoughts that punctuated her years as a young wife and mother; her husband’s apparent homosexuality; and the deep undercurrent of sexual and romantic yearning that ran through most of her married life.
Originally serialized in an Indian journal, “My Story” is organized into 50 fragmentary chapters. In a detached, dreamlike voice, Ms. Das tells of her husband’s brutish sexual inadequacy and her own lifetime of desire, often unrequited but sometimes consummated in affairs with other men and occasionally with women.
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