For better and for verse

A woman of verse and verve. Not only did poetess and writer Kamala Das’ 
works articulate unconventional views and beliefs, but as a woman, too, 
she shattered stereotypes, writes Humra Quraishi

KAMLA Das was one of those poets whose verse and words spread out. Maybe, it’s because of the image she’d built or the unconventional views she aired, not to forget the personal upheaval she’d been through – falling in love with a Muslim doctor and converting to Islam. And, as in the case of most love affairs, the going wasn’t smooth, leaving her forlorn and in deep sorrow. Perhaps, she released much of that pain through her verse, through the stories she gently weaved, through the connectivity she built over the years ...

As K. Satchidanandan, a Malayalam poet, bilingual critic, translator and former secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, puts it, "As a poet, Kamala was a pioneer: She took Indian poetry in English far ahead of her women predecessors, like Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, giving it a new feminine charm, a confessional quality and, yes, a political slant. She always identified with the downtrodden, the maidservants, the so-called lower caste helpless women exploited by landlords. Her poems on the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and on the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka are powerful indictments of the ethnic hatred and genocide of our times.

"While she was different from her women predecessors, she was also different from her male contemporaries, like A. K. Ramanujan, Keki Daruwalla, Nizim Ezekiel and others, as she brought a distinct emotional quality to Indian English poetry by weaving her poems around women’s bodily desires and a spiritual love`A0in the tradition of Mirabai, that only women can articulate and fully expressed in her poems on Krishna as well as on Allah in her collection Ya Allah! No wonder, she became a role model for almost all Indian English women poets who rose to fame later, like Eunice D’Souza, Charmagne D’Souza, Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Imtiaz Dharker and younger ones like Priya Sarukai Chhabria and Arundhati Subramaniam, despite the differences in style.

"As a short story writer in Malayalam, she went ahead of her predecessors like Lalitambika Antarjanam and K. Saraswati Amma in terms of sensibility as well as idiom. She brought the short story close to the lyrical, infusing narrative situations with a`A0luminous poetic quality and building her stories around images rather than events. Her stories were more expressions of the inner drama of the modern man’s (and woman’s) conflict-ridden and asphyxiated mind, closer to soliloquies than articulations of the outer drama of historical and social events. She easily crossed over from one genre to another; many of her poems have a narrative quality, while many of her stories are almost like poems.

"Her autobiography My Story , which she kept revising all through her later years and kept the readers guessing as to whether all those love affairs were real or imagined, is one of the most lyrical and heart-rending memoirs ever written in India. Kamala will be remembered for long for having championed a breakthrough in the way we perceive human reality."

Perhaps what had got her close, almost face to face with the reader, was the simplicity of her verse. There were no complex weaves or that stumbling interplay of high-sounding words. All very direct. All very touching. As novelist and short story writer Shinie Antony, who also hails from Kerala, comments, "Impulses, insecurities, loving too much, not being loved enough, love past fantasy, love`85 all nitpicked by Kamala Das in an almost spiritual manner. As in her short fiction, Das was able to carry a sensitive and lyrical sense of the self in her poetry. For instance, she concludes the poem "The Looking Glass" with such pathos that it is difficult not to identify with that level of pain. She says: ‘Oh yes getting/ A man to love is easy but living/ without him afterwards may have to be/ Faced a living without life when you move/ Around meeting strangers`85’ Emotional truisms applicable for a long, long time."

But who exactly was Kamala Das?

If you sit back and ask yourself that under all those layers and heaps of words where lay the real Kamala Das, conflicting views emerge.

H. K. Kaul, poet and secretary-general of the Poetry Society of India, had this to offload about her, " Though I had met Kamala Das at the India International Centre on some occasions, there was no special interaction `85you could say our meetings were without much interaction. So, I will not be able to comment much except that to me, her behaviour didn’t seem quite normal. Can’t elaborate on this but it seemed she wasn’t at peace with herself. This could be because of several factors or maybe because of internal pressures and turmoil... ."

But Satchidanandan puts her on a pedestal: " Kamala Das (Kamala Surayya in her last few years and dear Madhavikkutty for the Malayalees) was an exemplary new woman in many ways: she was bold, uninhibited, full of creative energy that she sustained to the very end, as is proven by her last few poems in Closure, and secular enough to try another religion in the last days of her life and`A0declare she had Krishna in her intact still. Her burial in the mosque at Thiruvananthapuram was a great lesson to those with insular minds: people of all religions congregated there to pay their last homage to a writer they adored, a feat few secularist campaigners have managed to achieve... ."

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