Discuss the literary achievements and contribution of Kamala Das

Discuss the literary achievements and contribution of Kamala Das to Indian English Literature.

Ans.

Kamala Das was one of the most prominent feminist voices in the post colonial 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 poetry. 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 menstruation, puberty, love, lust, lesbian encounters, child marriage, infidelity and physical intimacy.”

In her poem entitled A Widow’s Lament, she describes feeling of a woman isolated in a male dominated society ‘that she could never call her own, because it had no place for its women’.

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.”

As a columnist, she described her experiences of womanhood with a certain guiltless honesty that the people of Kerala had not witnessed so far.

Kamala Das went on to produce what is considered some of the best work in modern Indian literature. Some of her notable works in English are the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), the collection of short stories Padmavati the Harlot and other stories (1992) and a compilation of her poetry Summer in Calcutta (1973). In Malayalam, they include Balyakalasmaranakal (The Memories of Childhood), Chandanamarangal (Sandalwood Trees) and many more.

Her literary work earned her a lot of recognition and won her numerous accolades. She won the P.E.N’s Asian Poetry Prize in 1963, the Kerala Sahitya Academy in 1969 for the short story Thanuppu (cold) and the National Sahitya Academy Award in 1985. She was also shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984. So wide was her reach that much of her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages including French and German.