India has a long history of female poets, with evidence stretching back to 600 BC of women writing on various topics in their native languages of Prakrit, Pali, and Sanskrit, among others. Kamala Surayya is just one of this number, but her status as a bilingual writer who has been celebrated all over the world sets her apart from the crowd. Her poetry, which was exclusively written in English (as opposed to her prose, which was written in both English and her mother tongue, Malayalam), forms a painfully honest depiction of women’s struggles and sexualities, which explicitly emphasises gender differences and inequalities. Her style has been likened to confessional poetry, leading to comparisons with Sylvia Plath, for example, but Kamala herself disagreed with this interpretation of her work:
“I don’t belong to any particular school of poetry,” she said. “I am the greatest influence on my own poetry. I have not been influenced by Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton or Judith Wright.”
Kamala also objected to being labelled a feminist, especially as most of those who did call her one were doing so in reference to the western notion of feminism. It is important, then, to remember that Kamala was writing from the perspective of and for Indian women, and her experiences as an Indian woman undoubtedly influenced her work. Western labels and ideas have little place here.
Kamala was born in Punnayurkulam (a village in present-day Kerala) on 31st March 1934, to V.M. Nair and Nalapat Balamani Amma. Her affluent, high-status family were known for producing ‘literary royalty’ – her mother was a celebrated poet herself, and her grand-uncle a talented writer – and Kalama began writing at the age of six, inspired by this heritage. Furthermore, the Nalapat Nayar family were traditionally matrilineal and matriarchal, with Nayar women having greater personal freedoms, greater decision-making authority (those decisions were still confined to the household), and the birth of a girl in Nayar households was a welcome occasion.
These are, again, circumstances which shape how her poetry should be viewed; nevertheless, this is not to say that Kamala did not still live in a deeply male-dominated society. At the age of 15, Kamala was married off to a bank officer, Madhava Das, a man many years her senior, and she was thrust into the role of wife, mother, and housekeeper. The couple lived in Bombay and had three sons; Das predeceased her in 1992 after 43 years of marriage.
Yet, Kamala considered that she was, perhaps, lucky. “A woman had to prove herself to be a good wife, a good mother, before she could become anything else. And that meant years and years of waiting,” she once said. But Das appreciated that she was supplementing the family’s income with her writing, and so he allowed her to write at night once all the household chores were complete.
She began publishing her poetry in 1965, and it was immediately ground-breaking in its discussions of gendered power dynamics, female desires, and the body. She even briefly touches on women’s bisexuality and lesbianism, though whether Kamala was queer herself or not is unclear. She does not appear to have considered herself so.
Through her work, Kamala gave her voice to the thousands of women in India who had been silenced for generations, forced into arranged marriages and confined to the household. She wrote both from a very individual perspective (“Poetry for me is very personal and private … I write a lot in my private diary and only a fraction of it has been published”) and from all women’s perspectives; in one of her first and most famous poems, An Introduction, she writes, ‘I am every / Woman who seeks love’.
Kamala focuses heavily on the body and how it is presented. She firmly rejects the male gaze and encourages other women to do the same, and she breaks years of a collective silence by putting female desire ahead of male authority.
This does not mean that she denies femininity in the female body, or masculinity in the male body. What she does instead is attempt to change how power is seen in relation to the body, by taking it away from men and giving it to women: ‘Stand nude before the glass with him / So that he sees himself the stronger one / And believes it so’ (The Looking Glass).
As Sharmin Sultana and Nadia Sarwar write, Kamala’s ‘representation of female body transports the women from the periphery to the center of the discourse.’
‘Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Kamala Surayya, ‘The Looking Glass’
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers.’
Kamala was, briefly, also a syndicate columnist, as her family were experiencing financial difficulties and the work paid better than poetry. She wrote on women’s issues, childcare, and politics, and her columns were incredibly popular. Her father was a big name in journalism and tried to put pressure on her editor to stop publishing her work, but Kamala refused to back down.
In 1973, she released her autobiography, Ente Katha (‘My Story’, in English). It caused a sensation in India, and seemed to have been a liberating experience for Kamala. She wrote frankly about menstruation, sexuality, love and lust, desire, intimacy, and a ‘brush with love’ with another girl just before she entered into her arranged marriage. Although she later revealed that some elements of the book were fiction, her unapologetic tone in the face of a traditionally conservative society created both adoration and scandal, and turned ‘My Story’ into a cult classic in terms of Indian autobiographies.
This frankness seems to have formed a kind of self-liberation; in her poetry, she was herself able to break free from the barriers that were imposed on her by men and she can protest the type of womanhood that women are expected to perform – that of a passive, docile, obedient person.
In 1999, she converted to Islam, assuming the name Kamala Surayya. When asked why, she said, “Islam is my company. Islam is the only religion in the world that gives love and protection to women. Therefore, I have converted.” She announced that she intended to marry her Muslim lover, but this never took place, and later in life she said that she believed one shouldn’t change one’s religion.
“The only religion I know is the religion of love,” she said.
Kamala Surayya died in Pune on 31st May, 2009, at the age of 75. Her body was flown home to Kerala and she was buried with full state honours.
Her poetry is the first example of an authentic female Indian voice in English that challenges traditional patriarchal standards. Kamala Surayya’s work is exceptionally powerful and poignant in its honesty, and to this day she continues to inspire and empower a new generation of women writers.
Sources:
- Haider, Nishat, ‘Reading ‘The Endless Female Hungers’: Love and Desire in the Poems of Kamala Das’, South Asian Review, 31.1 (2010), 277-306
- Sreekumar, Sharmila, ‘“I Too Call Myself I”: Madhavikutty-Kamala Das and the Intransitive Autobiography’, Feminist Studies, 44.1 (2018), 70–94
- Sultana, Sharmin, and Nadia Sarwar, ‘(Re)locating (I)dentity With(in) Politicized (Re)presentation of Fe/Male Body in Kamala Das’ Poetry’, Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 7.2 (2016), 84-89
- Kamala Das: The Mother Of Modern Indian English Poetry | #IndianWomenInHistory (feminisminindia.com)
- Kamala Das — Indian Poet and a Woman Ahead of Her Time (literaryladiesguide.com)