Story of Heart touching Indian Poet Kamala Das.
Kamla Das self-sufferer from the Patriarchal Society and was unafraid of honest expression, and whose progressive stance on sexuality was ahead of her time.
Kamala Das was one of the most significant Indian poets who wrote in English. Her poetry is all about herself, about how she intensely felt desire for love, for emotional involvement of her and her failure to achieve such a relationship. Her life and personality are mentioned in most of her poetry because her poetries were self-reflective.
Google celebrates publication of author Kamala Das’s autobiography ‘My Story’ with a doodle.
Let’s know when and where such a famous heart touching Indian Poetess was born:
Kamla Das was born on 31st March 1934 and died on 31st May 2009. She was born in Punnayurkulam, Ponnani taluk, Malabar District, British India (present-day Thrissur district, Kerala, India).
Childhood of Kamala Das and how was she influenced in writing:
A part of her childhood was spent in her ancestral home in Malabar, Kerala, and the other part between Calcutta, where her father, V. M. Nair was a employer as a senior officer in the Walford Transport Company that sold Bentley and Rolls Royce automobiles and the Nalapat ancestral home in Punnayurkulam.
She excelled in writing, just like her mother Balmani Amma, a writer of critical acclaim who published over 20 anthologies of poetry. Both her parents were poets, so poetry was in the blood, so to say. Her love for poetry got influenced by her great uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer.
She was educated mainly at home, and her grandmother showered a lot of love and affection on the growing child, and she is often recognized in her poetry as “A hot noon in Malabar” and “My Grandmother’s House”.
Kamala Das married Life :
Kamala Das was married to Madhava Das at the early age of fifteen.
She married an older relative, a bank officer Madhav Das, he encouraged her writing interests with his support, she soon started writing and publishing in both English and Malayalam, under different pen names. The couple had three sons — Chinen Das, Jayasurya Das, and M D Nalapat. In an autobiographical work of hers, she tells of her husband’s brutish sexual inadequacy and her lifetime of desire. Unfortunately, her encourager husband died before her in 1992 after 43 years of marriage.
She is popularly famous by her one-time pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das.
Her Literary works:
Kamala Das was among the first women in India to speak frankly about sex and the negativity of marriage in a deeply conservative and patriarchal society. Her one of the autobiographical books, “ My Story ” instantly drew criticism after its release for being ‘vulgar’ and designed to encourage adultery.
At the age of six, she started a manuscript magazine in which she used to write a sad story about dolls who had lost their heads and had to remain headless forever.
She has noted for her many Malayalam short stories as well as many poems were written in English. “Summer in Calcutta”, Kamala’s first book of poetry was a breath of fresh air in Indian English poetry.
“The Descendants”, her second book of poetry was even more clear, urging women to:
Gift him what makes you women , the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers … — The Looking Glass
Let’s Know How Her Poetry, “An Introduction” Clears her Early Personal Life in Patriarchal Society.
“An Introduction” is one of the poems that represents her in a self-reflective and confessional tone, from her maiden publication “ Summer in Calcutta “ (1965). This poem is a solid remark on Patriarchal Society and highlights the pain, bondage, and miseries suffered by the female in such times.
Don’t write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak inAny language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
Here, what Kamala Das wants to say is very clear to us. She says that people asked her not to write in English because it isn’t her mother tongue but a colonial language.
She then asks her critics who are always there to criticize her, her friends, and her cousins who visit her that why all of them don’t leave her alone. Her frustration can be understood here when she asks them why they don’t let her speak the language she likes.
She says that whatever language she speaks becomes hers if there is any deformation and oddity present in her language then also it is hers.
“We can see that Patriarchal Society at her time which don’t even let her speak the language she liked.”
I was child, and later they
Told me I grew, for I became tall, my limbs
Swelled and one or two places sprouted hair.
When I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door, He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breasts and womb crushed me.
I shrank Pitifully.
“After reading the above lines, we can imagine, what she had gone through when she was just a child. This scene has made my mind continuously thinking that how such an inhumane act was accepted. How?? Let’s take our-self instead of her and think about what had she suffered from not knowing what was going on. She was physically grown up but by her mind and by her heart she was just a child who just asked for love and nothing else.”
Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother’s trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorizers.
Now, Kamala Das tries to avoid her womanliness by being tomboyish. But her parents enforced her to be wear sarees instead of a boyish dress and to be like a girl and a wife.
Their main intention is to make her fit to become a wife, a mother, and to be confined in a domestic routine. They threatened her to remain within the four walls of her female space.
“We can see how in a patriarchal society, guardians and even society enforced a female to be bound within four walls and to do the homely duties like to be a cook, embroiderer, be a quarreller with servants. Women’s feelings were of no value by society. She was the puppet for the community.”
I met a man, loved him. Call
Him not by any name, he is every man
Who wants. a woman, just as I am every
Woman who seeks love. In him . . . the hungry haste
Of rivers, in me . . . the oceans’ tireless
Waiting.
In the above line, she says, when she falls in true love with a man then she recognized that he was too like the other man who just wants a woman, not true love.
She expresses with such a nice comparison- the man with whom she falls in love was having the haste like the river which want to reach a destiny as the river is never still. Then she compares her love with the ocean which is still and doesn’t have the haste to reach anywhere.
“We can now think, how such women used to feel at that time, how her creativity was within the walls. Kamala Das is not the only one of that time woman was all like the other women. Woman’s feelings remained suppressed at that time, gentlemen signified given all rights including everything remained controlled by men only.
It is sad to say, but still, today also such things are there, women stand still enforced to do domestic things that a girl should do according to society like, cooking, now also maximum women are not allowed to have foreign dreams. In many modern cities also women are given misleading advice by their guardians.
From the child age, only girls are forced to believe that they can do household work only, even parents who are at high profession think that woman should not do the full-time job because if they will do so then how she will take care of her in-laws. How can we say that such people are educated? They reached the profession by the degree actually if they are still having such misconception, then actually they are not educated properly.
Women also play a big role to suppress their daughters and other women. If parents will not empower their wives and daughters then how can society even think to do so? We only make society so we can improve it as well. One should know, that if a woman can carry a baby in her womb for nine months and can do household work as well then she can do anything.”
Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it!!!
