Kamala Das (Madhavikutty, Kamala Suraiya), died this morning, May 31, 2009, aged 75.
Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own (1929):
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”
In an interview in 1996, the interviewer Shobha Warrier reminds Das of something she had once said “about the pathetic condition of a woman writer who does not even have a writing table. The dining table has to serve as her writing table once it is cleared.”
Kamala Das replies:
“I was thinking about the middle class woman who plans to become a writer. I was talking about myself, of course. There was only the kitchen table where I would cut vegetables, and after all the plates and things were cleared, I would sit there and start typing. That was my work area.
Work area normally would remind you of the grinding stone, or the mixie or something, but in my case, it was the typewriter and plenty of paper. Then I would sit there for hours and hours while the house was asleep because nights became my domain. I could find freedom only at night when I could ignore my family and become an independent person. I felt like myself only in the quiet hours of the night.“
In 1999, at the age of 65, she converted to Islam, the popular rumour being that she did so because she fell in love with a Muslim man, a rumour she did not exactly deny. But her conversion was far from superficial. She wrote:
“I’m converting Krishna into Allah and making him the Prophet after naming him Mohammed. If you go to Guruvayoor now, Krishna will not be there – he will be with me”
There are others far more qualified than I to celebrate this maverick and iconoclastic woman’s life and work – discomfiting alike to feminist and patriarch, to religious bigot and secularist.
But also, for some ordinary middle-class Malayalee women like my mother, dazzling in her iconoclasm. Trapped inside her own domesticated life, my mother read Kamala Das in fearful and overwhelming hero-worship, for she gaily, carelessly expressed every half-formed sense of rebellion that seethed in my mother’s breast. As my mother moved through her daily routines, Kamala Das “sang her a another song, sweetly subversive, like wine…” (a line I – probably (mis) – remember from the poet Marge Piercy). Some of that wine trickled down her chin to her daughters, I think…
I hope our very own J Devika will write a post here, but in the meanwhile, do read Devika’s marvellous essay “Housewife, Sex Worker and Reformer. Controversies over women writing their lives in Kerala” (Economic and Political Weekly, April 29, 2006).
An appetizer:
“The ideal woman was imagined to be …the union of two distinct figures, which may be called the domestic woman and the aesthetic woman…However, within the ideal woman, the aesthetic element was to remain strictly subordinated to the domestic element….
Madhavikutty’s autobigraphy, Ente Katha, effectively broke open this fine faultline…In Ente Katha, Madhavikutty uses the romantic notion of the self brilliantly to critique the entrenched womanly ideal of Malayalee modernity.”
A woman who made almost everyone uncomfortable while she lived her life fully and honestly, as best as she knew, and with all her might.
Alvida.
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
Loved this. I am also wondering, in the same moment, if lettered women are the only bearers of the privilege of rebellion.
Poornima, who works in my parents’ apartment, who I have known since I was ten or so, has built herself a paka bari ( a concrete house) today. That’s probably her rebellion. Her writing of self. As she continues to work as a domestic help person. Or a woman I heard speaking on the road, who was expressing the euphoria of wearing shorts when she moved to Gujarat (from Bengal) as a casual labourer.
I use Poornima’s name and identity in flippant self-revelation. But I believe the point may still be alive- of rebellions outside of letters.
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RIP ! It must be said, that her writing (especially poetry) in English was vastly over-rated, to say the least.
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I agree that her poetry in English tends to be fervid but is that the point here? I thought the idea was to indicate the difficult ways in which women – even relatively privileged women – still struggle to carve out a spot on the dining table to write.
Atreyee, dont you think it a little patronising to assume that working class women can only “write their selves” by building concrete houses or wearing shorts? Do they not have songs, poetry, letters? Why should they have to content themselves with the basics of life and “never speak” while YOU write on their behalf?
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this is wonderful essay on the life of Kamala Das aka Kamala Surayya. Here goes the woman who lived life her own way and never followed societal diktats.
May God bless her, forgive her and keep her in best of heavens.
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@ S anitha,
I understand my ‘writing’ about others’ rebellions sounds precocious, which is why my comment carried sort of an apology at the end. But I suppose, I was trying to put forth an argument that demystifies ‘writing’ per se. Not about class at all, for some upper class women, it lies in travelling alone, or being able to buy themselves a car. ‘Do they not have songs, poetry, letters?’- they may, but why are these texts somehow more gloried forms of self-expression than others?
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Forgive me, Atreyee, but you have to be pretty short of real issues to debate when you actually ask the question – are forms of self-expression such as singing, poetry, letters (not necessarily written, then, but also oral – singing – and non-verbal – e.g. madhubani painting) – are such forms of creative self-expression that mark a break from everyday drudgery to be treated more seriously than the simple buying of a commodity? Are the two equally complex forms of self-expression?
Sorry, it sounds like the sort of academic debate you have around cups of tea when nothing real is at stake.
And of course, it completely escapes me why you should imagine that all of Poornima’s self-creation is fully captured by her being able to afford to get a house built; that her self is enclosed fully within that act. Do we not need to know about the songs she sings too? Your own sense of self is not exhausted by your owning a car or a house, why should hers?
Nor do I get why struggling to make life better within certain given parameters (building a house or buying a car) should be termed as “‘rebellion’ outside of letters.” These may be actions that seek fulfilment within the constraints of daily life but cannot certainly be construed as rebellion.
But more disturbingly, why the insistence on invoking this kind of flowing away in the mainstream of life against a woman who did manage to rebel AND to write about her rebellion? Nothing in the post suggests that this is the only form of rebellion possible. Valorizing such a flowing away over breaks and resistances to it, is also precisely to insitutionalize the actual writer (the academic) who will tell us that this is so. Because of course, the buying of the car becomes an act of self-expression, not when the woman actually buys it, but only when the academic writes about it!
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Atreyee, why must an obituary to a writer – obviously middle class – be made to sound like an illegitimate act? You seem to think that every time somebody opens his or her mouth to say something about middle class people they should feel sorry. Are people allowed to mourn in your convoluted world? As far as I could make out this post was an obituary and your oblique points about women buying cars and wearing shorts sound completely bizarre and out of place.
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Kamala Das, Madhavikutty, Kamala Suraiyya — the fact that she reinvented herself three times is good enough for me to write something that’s far more than just an obituary. I wish people people wouldn’t trivialise her in the way Atreyee did. For us who live and work in Kerala and understand her as a writer shaped intensely by this society and the challenges of this literary public, she isn’t just the writer of a few English poems or someone who managed to express herself to her satisfaction. The intellectual premises from which wrote were those of romanticism, and irrespective of whether one finds that aesthetically exciting or not, the point for me, as a historian of gender in Kerala, is that she used it in an amazingly aesthetic way to question the solidities and certainties of modern patriarchy in Kerala and its central figure, the reformer-man. I will soon post a translation of a chapter from her autobiography Ente Katha, which is quite different from the English version, My Story. In a way, her lineage is somewhat close to be that of Akka Mahadevi and the other subversive Bhakti women poets.
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Apologies, my point was general. Probably not well-fitting in an obituary post, but thought the post also read as a commentary on feminist poetry etc.
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atreyee, even if the post did “read about feminist poetry in general”, your response still puzzles me. It is a non-sequitur to say that the world of letters is restricted to certain women. Also given that, historically, the world of letters and writing and the making of discourse is well within patriarchy, women who have claimed this world for themselves are outside of it. You of course are aware of this. Nor is a recognition of struggles in this realm, necessarily carried out at the cost and exclusion of other forms of “writing the self”, as you put it. So exactly what discomfits you about this post? Unless we take a position, (that in fact is strongly entrenched in certain forms of 20th century Marxism), that all intellectual activity is necessarily bourgeoise, I am mystified by your attack against writing.
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Lakshmi Menon on the feminists-india list:
I have noted with deep regret the passing away of Kamala Das.
I have fond memories of her. As a post graduate student, I used to frequent the monthly meetings of her literary initiative, Bahutantrika at her home in south Mumbai in 1975-77.
She was indeed dedicated to the literary field and she encouraged people with literary skills, whether they were well-established writers/poets or young people struggling to make a break in the literary arena and be recognised.
I was touched by her humility and her large heartedness in inviting minnows like me to read my pathetic “literary” pieces. She was a gracious host, welcoming us all with warmth and sincerity and providing delicious spread which was greatly appreciated by hungry young artists of all hues.
More than anything, I admired her courage in penning what many considered scandalous, and how she stood steadfast in the face of so much criticism – Lakshmi Menon
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Ramlath Kavil posted this poem of Kamala Suraiya on the feminists-india list:
My mother at sixty six
“………I saw my mother, beside me,
Doze, open mouthed, her face ashen like that
Of a corpse and realized with pain
That she was as old as she looked, but soon
Put that thought away………………
……………I looked again at her, wan, pale
As a late winter moon and felt that old
Familiar ache, my childhood fear
But all I said was, see you soon Amma
All I did was smile and smile and smile…”
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