Sahitya Akademi

Redefining the Genre: Kamala Das (1934-2009)

Author(s): K. SATCHIDANANDAN
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 53, No. 3 (251) (May/June 2009), pp. 49-55
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23340304 .
Accessed: 17/07/2014 12:22
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sahitya Akademi is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Indian Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Courtesy: Sajitha Gouwry

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

IN MEMORIAM

Redefiningthe Genre:
Kamala Das (1934-2009)

K. SATCHIDANAN DAN
amala

Das

had many identities which were in a fruitful

(1934-2009)
with
one
another
and coalesced into one at the point of
J/Vdialogue
realization: Amy, the beloved of the aristocratic Nalappat family in South
Malabar where she was born and the dearest and the most generous of friends
to the small circle of intimate companions to whom she opened her heart
completely; Kamala Das, the radical Indian poet writing in English who did
not mind sacrificing the sterile aestheticism of older poetry for the freedom of
the body and the mind and managed to 'gatecrash into the precincts of others'
dreams' (Anam alai Poems); Madhavikkutty, the Malayalam fiction writer who
redefined

the

very

genre

of

it singing nerves and Kamala

total

surrender

to Allah

who

the

novel

and

short

story

in the

and

language

gave

Surayya who sought refuge for her tired wings in

was

to her

the

very

embodiment

of

the

love

she

had sought all her life. She was honest in the deepest sense of the word, but
was not naive and foolish as many seem to imagine: she was strong-willed and
could interrogate her community as few Indian women-writers before her had
done. She could be naughty and mischievous when she wanted and had a great
sense of humour and irony evident in her memoirs as well as her poems. She
continued to laugh at religious superstitions even after her conversion to Islam
and was openly critical of the Indian inhibition and hypocrisy in man-woman
relationships.
I had, as an adolescent

school boy, first known her as Madhavikkutty,

writer of a novel kind of fiction that bordered on poetry that
kept appearing in the Matbrubhumi Weeklywhich in those glorious days of the
publication under the editorship of N. V. Krishna Warrier the scholar-poet
a Malayalam

Nair, the fiction writer and film maker, used to

feature all our beloved poets and fiction writers. Her first story, Kushtarogi (The
Leper) had appeared in the Matbrubhumi Weekly in 1942 when she was a little
and later of M.T. Vasudevan

50 / Indian Literature: 251

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

girl and I was yet to be born; with the publication of Mathilukal (The Walls),
her first collection in 1955, she had already established her place in Malayalam
short story. She belonged to a generation that includes M.T. Vasudevan Nair,
who had all gone beyond the socialist realist
mode employed by their predecessors to explore the tormented psyche of the
solitary human beings haunted by guilt, pain and lovelessness. These writers

T. Patmanabhan

and Kovilan

Vaikom Mohammed

Basheer

for their forerunnertravelled

from the outer

drama of social events to the inner drama of emotions; the states of mind
became more important to them than the states of the community to express
which they developed a taut and cryptic lyrical idiom. The narrative content
became so thin in their stories and the form so much an organic part of it that
they could hardly be retold in another voice.
In Madhavikkutty this inward evolution touched its peak; her stories most
often evolved from a central image and expressed a mood or a vision. Even the
titles of her stories sounded

like the titles of paintings or poems (remember

she herself practiced painting for a while): The Red Skirt, The Red Mansion,
The Child in the Naval Uniform, The Father and The Son, The Moon's Meat,
Sandalwood Trees, The Secret of the Dawn, Boats, The Smell of the Bird,
The King's Beloved, A Doll for Rukmini. Her vocabulary was limited as she
had little formal education and had mostly grown up outside Kerala; but she
turned this limitation to her advantage by her deft and economic employment
of those few words in her stories that were always spare and crisp to the point
of being fragile. Many of her stories were not longer than two or three book
pages, including the famous ones like "Padmavati, the Harlot." Here a harlot,
like in the Arun Kolatkar poem where a prostitute longs to be photographed
and Rukmai, goes to the temple, requests God to accept her
that
was like a river that does not dry up even if thousands bathe
body
ragged

with Vithoba

in it, meets her god who is growing old and gets dissolved in him for a while
to return purified. In her later stories like "Pakshiyude Manam" (The Smell of
a Bird), "Unni," "Kalyani," "Malancherivukalil"
(On the Mountain Slopes),
and "Karutta
they became

Patti" (The Black Dog) the element of fantasy grew stronger;

more and more compressed often taking the form of brief

monologues.

At times her stories became pure poetry, just emotional contexts with no
narrative content. Look at "Premattinte Vilapakavyam" (An Elegy for Love):
You

are my beloved.

jasmine

creeper

sad halo of a banished

your wounds

You

to wind

are the old sweet

round.

You

appear

mango
before

tree for my
me with the

king. I longed
and ease your weariness.

are the fortune. You

to have you in my lap, heal

You are fortunate and you
are pure, unmixed manliness. Woman's soul

K Satchidanandan / 51

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

is the garden where you roam. You are inside me and outside me.
rest on the banks of the sanguine streams inside me like a
king tired of hunting. You trample my nerves with your boots,

You

thinking they are the roots of the wild trees long ago dead...

the character Janu, a house

maid, Madhavikkutty employed the dialect of her Valluvanad to great effect.
Thus the stories collected in her seven volumes in Malayalam show great
In some

stories, especially

those around

thematic and structural diversity while being linked together by their essential
femininity, their sisterhood with nature (her stories are full of birds and trees,
sand and fields and moonlight) and the presence of her rural locale, either as
real setting or as a nostalgic landscape. She is one with the Modernists like O. V.
Vijayan, Anand, M. Mukundan, Sethu, Kakkanadan and Punattil Kunhabdula
in urbanising fiction in Malayalam, but she had her own way of doing it: her
urban women are mostly schizophrenic, torn by conflicts and desperate for
real love while her rural women, mostly drawn from the lower classes, are less
inhibited and openly critical of the master-race and patriarchal interventions.
They also seem more at peace with themselves as they feel the presence of a
community

and

of

comforting

nature

around

them.

Women

and

nature

here

appear to fertilize each other. Even in the city the woman feels pacified by
the soothing touch of the tender mango leaf on the terrace. Ammu who in
Sarkara Kondoru Tulabharam (An Offering with Jaggery) visits Guruvayur for
the offering with her husband Biju cured by her prayers and refuses to go
back with him to the city, charmed by her farmer-cousin in the village living in
harmony with nature, sums up this attitude.
Probably her autobiographical writings grew out of her monologic tales.
Ente Katha (My Story) that was written during her treatment for lukemia
created

a sensation.

The

readers

were

drawn

into

a charming

and

threatening

life of love and longing, of desire and disloyalty. She wrote other memoirs
too: Balyakalasmaranakal (The Memories of Childhood), Varshatigalkku Munpu
(Years Ago) and Neermatalam Poottappol (When the Pomegranates Bloomed).
It is safe to view all her works as part real and part fantasy as she was adept

Her novels there are seven of them if we follow the

Trees)
publishers' categorization, including Chandanamarangal (Sandalwood
that obliquely deals with same-sex love are long stories, most of her stories
at genre-crossing.

are like poems, the style of her poems is often not very different from that
of her stories and the one-act play, Memory, Great Moody Sea combines all these
genres!

I came to her poetry later, reading, in 1968 her Summer in Calcutta (1965)
and Descendants (1967) together, being charmed by her eloquent images and her
52 / Indian Literature: 251

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

attitude to the art of poetry. I had already started corresponding

with her by now and had received generous praise from her - she was the
- for
my early poems like
poetry editor for The Illustrated Weekly of India then
we
began meeting occasionally later, mostly
Anchusooryan (Five Suns), though
unconventional

in public functions. Now I began following her poetry closely and read her
later collections like Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1976), The Best of Kamala
Das (1991) and Anamalai Poems (1992). I knew how much she trusted me only
when she insisted on my writing the introduction to her collected poems Only
the Soul Knows How to Sing. I undertook the mission with genuine involvement,
finding in her poetry unnoticed nuances and muted voices that transcend the
narcissistic obsession with the body and with herself often attributed to her.
This transcendence comes partly from her political engagement and partly
from her secular spiritual concerns.
I am a million, million people
talking all at once, with voices
raised in clamour...
I am a million, million
onto someone

silences

strung like crystal beads

else's song...

- these lines
seemingly so uncharacteristic of a poet of solitude ever in search
of intimacy betray Kamala Das's intense desire to identify herself with the
silenced victims of oppression, patriarchal as well as political. Kamala Das's
very first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta, broke new ground in Indian
poetry in English dominated until her entry by men from Nissim Ezekiel and
to Adil Jussawallah and A. K. Ramanujan who had already de
romanticized poetry and liberated it from its earlier flamboyance and verbosity.
Dom
Here

Moraes

was

a voice

that

was

feminine

to the

core,

often

confessional

in vein,

that

spoke uninhibitedly about woman's desire and her unending search for true
love. She had little respect for tradition and yet many traditions went into the
making of her poetry: the rebellious spirituality of the women Bhakti poets,
the

sonorous

down-trodden

sensuousness

of

the

Tamil

Sangam

poets,

the

empathy

with

the

and the hatred of violence

central to the great poetry of her

mother, Balamani Amma, the melancholy tempered by a larger vision of life
characteristic of the poetry of her uncle Nalappatt Narayana Menon (who was
also the translator, of Victor Hugo; of Havelock Ellis too.) "An Introduction",
her most discussed and paradigmatic poem with its defense of her trilingualism,
her opposition to male power, her rejection of the traditional roles of the
house-wife and the cook, and her longing for love was a clear announcement
of her arrival on the scene.
K Satchidanandan / 53

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

I am every woman

who

seeks love...

I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover

and the beloved.

I have no joys which are not yours,

no aches which are not yours

we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled

dreams...

The direct kinship with her reader that she establishes here, the
identification of female physicality with female textuality, similes drawn from
nature, the opposition to feudal norms and man-made hierarchies, the quest
for intimacy and an almost clinical exploration of the landscape of the self
and the interrogation of the family as an oppressive institution became the
hallmarks of her writing in the years to come.
Kamala Das denounced the extreme forms of feminism as she could
not imagine a world without men or think that replacing male hegemony
with female hegemony would create an egalitarian world; she never wanted
to master anyone including herself. She is deeply aware of her difference as
woman but would see it as natural rather than glorify it. Her Radha melts in
the first embrace of Krishna until only he remains (Radha). In the panic of
surrender, Radha tells Krishna:
Your

body is my prison...
see beyond it

I cannot

Your darkness

blinds me

Your love words

But

she

also

wants

shut out the wise world's

din.

to escape:

As the convict

studies

his prison's geography

I study the trappings
of your body, dear love,
for, I must some

day find an escape

from its snare.

Poetry to her becomes an organic extension of the body as also a means to

ultimately transcend it.
Her poetry soon showed a widening of concerns and an extension of
empathy to embrace the victims of all forms of tyranny and discrimination. If
to begin with the personal was the political for her, later the political became
personal as in her poems like "Delhi 1984," a severe indictment of the genocide
of Sikhs in Delhi and the new cult of hatred and senseless violence it implied,
turning "the scriptural chants into a lunatic's guffaw." She denounced terrorism
in no uncertain terms: "If death is your wish, killing becomes/an easy game."
In "Toys" too her indictment is unambiguous:

"Doomed

is this new race of

54 / Indian Literature: 251

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

men who arrive/ With patriotic slogans to sow dead seeds..."

The genocide
of Tamils in Sri Lankawhose
climactic orgy we recently witnessedgrows
into a metaphor of collective violence in her poems like "Smoke in Colombo",
"After July" and "The Sea at Galle Face Green". She sees here the macabre re
enactment

of

the

first holocaust:

Hitler rose from the dead, he demanded

Yet another

round of applause; he hailed

The robust Aryan blood, the sinister
Brew that absolves
Gives

man of his sins and

him the right to kill his former friends...

(AfterJuly)
She bemoans

the loss of innocence:

We mated like gods, but begot only our killers.
Each mother suckles her own enemy
And hate is first nurtured at her gentle breast...
(Daughter

In

her last poems

transcendence

become

old

age,

recurring

of the Century)

death,

presences.

nothingness
"At

my age

and
there

the desire
are

no

longer

for
any

home comings" (Woman's Shuttles). She sees death as "life's obscure parallel."
The encounter with physical decay forces the poet to look beyond death into a
state of spirituality that has little to do with conventional religion.
Bereft of soul,
My body shall be bare;
Bereft of body,
My soul shall be bare

(Suicide)
The Annamalai Poems are full of references to this tortuous inward journey.
"There is a love greater than all you know/ that awaits you where the road finally
ends." Its embrace is truth and she seems to have found this great love in Allah

as her poems in Ya Allah testify. She was working on two books in her last
days: From Malabar to Montreal, a collaborative work on women's empowerment

and a book on Islam for Harper-Collins. They may still be incomplete, but the
tasks she completed in her lifetime are enough to guarantee her a
place among
the most iconoclastic writers of our time, a beacon and a model
especially for

every honest woman writer with a story to tell, a song to sing or a shackle to
break.

K Satchidanandan / 55

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:22:40 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions