An iconoclast who courted controversies

K. Santhosh, The Hindu

Thrissur: She was called Kamala Das, Madhavikutty and Kamala Suraiya. Each name represented a body of her works, a phase of her life or an aspect of her personality.

Kamala Das enjoyed the status of being one of the first poets writing in English from Kerala to be recognised nationally and internationally.

An iconoclast of her generation who unabashedly spoke about the Indian woman’s sexual desires and a maverick who courted controversies, she was decorated with prizes such as the Kent Award and nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Madhavikutty infused the lightness of innocence, force of feminine charm, complexities of the heart and the ineffable allure of simplicity into Malayalam literature through a series of delicately nuanced and daintily sensitive stories, carrying forward a celebrated family’s literary tradition nurtured by her uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon and mother Balamani Amma.

Kamala Suraiya (75) whimsically straddled a socio-cultural landscape, exploring daring new beliefs, chasing ephemeral images of youngness and happiness, and continuously shocking people. Myriad aspects of her self coalesce into a winsome whole in her work, the like of which has no parallel in Indian literature.

She claimed she started writing to augment the family income, but her forays into versification could never be dismissed as jottings in mere monetary pursuit. ‘Summer in Calcutta’ (1965), ‘The Descendants’ (1970), ‘The Old Playhouse And Other Poems’ (1973), ’The Anamalai Poems (1985), and ‘Only the Soul Knows How to Sing’ (1996) and a collection of poetry with Pritish Nandy (1990) celebrate love and womanhood.

“Kamala Das’ poems epitomise the dilemma of the modern Indian woman who attempts to free herself, sexually and domestically, from the role bondage sanctioned by the past,” wrote Prof. Syd Harrex, introducing her work to Australian readers.

“Each poem is born out of pain, which I would like to share,” she once said.

She complemented the five books of English poetry with the novel, ‘Alphabet of Lust’ (1977), a collection of short stories, ‘Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories’ (1992) and her autobiography, ‘My Story’ (1976), which earned her more fame and notoriety than those from all her other works put together.

“She came of age surrounded by claustrophobia and cramping aestheticism,” wrote Merrily Weisbord in Das’ biography.

Honesty of expression, emotional depth, crisp narration and a deceptive casualness mark her best-known work in Malayalam — collections of stories, ‘Pakshiyude Manam’ (1964), ‘Naricheerukal Parakkumbol’ (1966), ‘Thanuppu’ (1968), ‘Neyppayasam’ (1991), ‘Chekkerunna Pakshikal’ (1996), ‘Nashtapetta Neelambari’ (1998); novels, ‘Palayan’ (1990), ‘Diarykkurippukal’ (1992), ‘Neermathalam Poothakaalam’ (1994), ‘Chandana Marangal’ (2005) and ‘Vandikkaalakal’ (2005) and her memoirs, ‘Balyakala Smaranakal.’

She chose colours from a varied palette, drawing on memories of growing up in a central Kerala tharavad surrounded by uncles, aunts, cousins and a bevy of housemaids, its air heady with the scent of ripe mangos, guavas and pomegranates.

Her stories also summoned energy from incidents in her youth in Calcutta, where her father was a senior officer in a company that sold Bentleys and Rolls Royce, and experiences from her marriage to a man much older than her and early motherhood.

Her work in English, especially poetry, has been criticised for “disintegrating into chaos or trailing off into uninspired prose.”

A section of critics maintain her writings show a mind that is “incapable of rising above the immediate.”

The fact that she found every fluctuating mood and private whim worthy of articulation irked critics who assessed her English work. She, however, made this trait her major strength in Malayalam.

A free spirit, she dabbled in painting and even politics. She contested Parliamentary elections in 1984 and lost.

On December 16, 1999, at the age of 65, she converted to Islam.

On her last visit to her native village in Punnayurkkulam, before handing over the land she owned there to the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, she mused, “If I have another birth, I do not want to be a human being. I want to be a bird. I will then fly over this land, sing melodiously and soar to heights.”

With her passing, readers were left feeling like the family depicted in her short story, ‘Neyppayasam,’ about the icy touch of Death and never-ending pain of loss.

The protagonist comes home one day to find that his wife is no more. After the funeral, he worries what he should cook for his three children. In the kitchen, he finds chapatis, rice, potato curry, chips and curd. She had made them for him and their children before being snatched by Death. And in a glass bowl, she had rustled up something special: Neyppayasam (dessert made of milk, sugar and ghee). The kids greedily eat the sweet, for they will never again be able to taste anything cooked by their mother.

Compiled by C.T. William