Discuss the life and works of Kamala Das.

Ans.

LIFE AND WORKS

Mrs. Kamala Das her maiden name was Madhavi Kutty was born at Punnayurkulam in Malabar in Kerala in 1934. Both her parents were poets and so poetry was in her blood, so to say. She constantly speaks of her Dravidian blood and of her Nair heritage. She was educated mainly at home and denied the advantage of regular school and college education; and again it is to be noted that she comes of very orthodox, and conservative family. This is important because her poetry is most unorthodox and almost revolutionary as compared to the environment and atmosphere in which she grew up. She was married, at the early age of fifteen, but at present she has three grown-up children, and is comfortably settled in Mumbai. Like Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala’s marriage roved an absolute failure. The result was frustration and disillusionment and this bitter personal experience colours all her poetry. It was the failure of her marriage that compelled her to enter into extra marital sexual relationships in search of the kind of love which her husband had failed to give her. Her husband was a believer in sex as a matter of routine; and his wife was therefore by no means starved of the pleasure of sex. She, on the contrary, believed in marriage as an emotional and spiritual bond; and her husband’s coldness in this respect led her to feel acutely dissatisfied and discontented in life and, not finding real love even in her-extra marital affairs, she’ slid into a life of sexual anarchy, with one lover, following another, and her discontent becoming deeper and deeper till it assumed the form of utter dispair. Her poetry is generally called confessional poetry because it is a record of her personal experiences, chiefly in the sphere of marriage and sex, though it certainly has a wider range and includes a few other aspects of her life too.

Kamala Das’s poetic output is contained in four volumes of poems which include “Summer in Calcutta” [published in I )65] “The Descendants” [published in 1967], “The Old Playhouse and other Poems” [published in 1973], and “Stranger Time” [published in 1973]. She has written her autobiography [of course in prose] to which she give the title My Story [published in 1.975]. Although she has distinguished herself as an Indo Anglican Poet, showing an extraordinary command over the English language. she has also achieved eminence as a writer of short stories in her mother tongue Malayalam.

She has published eleven books in Malayalam. Her prose, whether English or Malayalam, is autobiographical. Her short stories such as “Frigidity and Sepeatainted See MS. Photograph” clearly (Lal with her personal experiences and with the theme of love and the emotion ‘ii discontent which seems to be inseparably bound up with such experiences. Her miscellaneous essays such as “I studied All Men”; “What Women Expect out of Marriage And What They Get”; Why Not More Than One Husband?” “I Have Lived Beautifully” have fixed in the mind of the reading public the image of Kamala Das projected by her poems in “Summer in Calcutta” “Feminine but forthright, unconventional but honest, ebullient but sad, impetuous but insecure”. She has been contributing to a number of journals and literary magazines including ‘Opinion’; ‘The Illustrated Weekly of India’; Poetry East and West’; ‘Debonair’; ‘Eve’s Weekly’, ‘Femina’; ‘Imprint’; “Weekly Round Table’ and ‘Love and Friendship’.

Her literary, merits have been recognized and her poems find an honourable place in all anthologies of Lido-English poetry.. She was given the ‘Poetry Award’ of the Asian PEN Anthology in 1964 and the ‘Kerala Sahitya Academy Award’ in 1969 for Cold a collection of short stories in Malayalam.. Her poems have appeared in ‘Opinion’, New Writing in India and Young Commonwealth Poets’ 65. With a frankness and openness unusual in the Indian context, Kamala Das expresses her need for love. What is overpowering about her poems is their ‘sense of urgency. They literally boil over. With a slender corpus of poetry, she has secured prominent place among the immortals of literature.