30 Kamala Das: My Story
Anindita Das
Born on 31st March1934 in Kerala’s Malabar District, Kamala Das Surraiya began to be known popularly as Kamala Das in the Indian literary scenario for her remarkable contribution to Indian writings in English as a poet. She received her education privately at home. Moreover, being a bilingual writer, Das also wrote poems and short stories in her native language Malayalam, most of which were published under her pen name Madhavikutty. From her childhood onwards she had been exposed to a literary environment at her home as her great uncle Nalapat Narayan Menon was a poet and she was greatly influenced by him. Her mother Balamani Amma’s poetic passion and the religious writings of the Nairs too were great sources of inspiration for Das. Her father V.M Nair worked as the managing editor of the Malayalam Daily ‘Matrubhumi’. The oeuvre of her writing in English include the collection of short stories Padmavati the Harlot and Other Stories(1992), poetry books Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems(1973), The Anamalai Poems (1985) and also Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996). There is the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977) to her credit also. She was conferred with the PEN Poetry Prize and Sahitya Academy award. In the year 1984 she was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
My Story (1976) by Kamala Das is the translated version of her autobiography Ente Katha(1973) written in Malayalam. It was serially published in a weekly named Malayalanadu. In the preface she declares about writing the autobiography as:
Das’s desire to reveal her secrets constitute one of the important elements of an autobiography. My Story thus traces her childhood in Calcutta and Malabar, her marriage as well as her literary journey. It also documents her personal experiences of being a woman, her quest for love and most importantly her assertion of self.
To situate Kamala Das’s My Story in the milieu of women autobiographers, a brief account of the development of women’s autobiography in India is discussed here. Bahinabai’s autobiography (1700) is recorded as the earliest autobiography written by an Indian woman. Rassundari Devi wrote Amar Jiban (1876), and she became the first woman autobiographer in Bengali. She was an ordinary housewife but possessed an extraordinary zeal to read the holy books, for which she learned the letters painstakingly from her son’s book. Ramabai Ranade (1862-1924) wrote in Marathi Amachya Ayshyatil Kahi Athwani (Memoirs of our life together), Binodini Dasi (1863-1924) wrote Amar Katha (My Story) in Marathi. These women autobiographers hail from conservative patriarchal background, always remaining in the periphery, devoid of any space of their own. They were expected and taught by the senior women to be good wives. In their autobiographies, women like Lakshmibai Tilak, Ramabai Ranade express their view on marginality in parental households where singing, playing, reading and writing were out of question. Lakshmibai Tilak’s husband converted to Christianity, and to live with her husband she also had to convert herself. She had tough time in trying to shed her original identity. On the other hand Ramabai Ranade was married to a western-educated husband, who insisted her to learn Marathi and English. In order to do so she had to confront the scornful attitude of the other women of the house, who tried to dissuade her from learning. She had to sustain her effort in difficult circumstances. She always remained careful not to offend her husband in any condition. Kashibai Kanitkar (1861-1948), who was associated with reformist Prarthana Samaj, writes in her autobiography that women simply considered themselves unfortunate beings. Her own mother and stepmother, who were educated, believed that education made women harsh and ambitious. She also made tremendous effort in learning. These women were silent sufferers who were taught to please men and never to worry them with their problems.
Most of the mentioned memoirs are the women’s personal experiences as individuals. The early women autobiographers always concealed their sexual life. There are no references therefore to menstruation, menopause and sexual experience in their autobiographies. Their autobiographies also reflect the turmoil and disagreements overshadowing their expectation of a liberal society, attaining freedom from their situation of being colonized. Their life stories also throw light on the ways through which they overcome the obstacles of life, making a space of their own. In the nineteenth century the common themes of the women’s memoirs are their happiness and satisfaction derived from their husbands’ progress along with their own education and the prospect of a renewed life for themselves.
The later group of women autobiographers is marked for their assertion of right to create new identity models for women to meet the challenges of the changed times. The autobiographies of Binodini Dasi and Cornelia Sorabji bear testimony to the mentioned fact. Binodini Dasi is a legendary figure in Bengali theatre. Her autobiography is a major document of the Bengali theatre and the earliest first person records of a woman who remained single and worked for a living. She was victimized and used by the male dominated society while trying to restore the theatre she was working in. Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) was the first woman to be graduated. She was not given the scholarship which she obtained from Govt. of India after she acquired the first place in Bombay Presidency College. She had to wait for thirty long years to qualify as a practicing lawyer after she received her degree of Bachelor in Laws.
Another group of women autobiographers like Brinda (1910), Urmila Haksar (1922) and Sharan-Jeet Shan (1945) record their trauma of being women. But they cultivated the conviction that women can be liberated only when she is economically independent. Education and career assume great importance for these women. These autobiographers seek their fulfilment outside their domestic role. They were achievers by nature who would not remain satisfied only with their men’s success. They had to excel in their own pursuits individually to satisfy their craving for self-fulfilment. The autobiographies of Durgabai Deshmukh, Dhanvanti Rana Rao, Kamala Devi Chattopadhay had the highest honor of being awarded the Padma Bhushan for their successful public life. They challenge the myth that woman is made only to be confined in the four walls of their home.
Kamala Das’s My Story does not fall into the category of a typical woman’s autobiography. For several reasons, her autobiography is considered as a notable one written by an Indian woman. She has revealed the bitter truth of life in a stunningly simple manner. The contribution of her memoir to women’s autobiography in general and specifically to Indian women autobiography is also significant. She, while narrating her life without much apprehension, has crossed the gender boundaries of what is considered to be correct for a woman. Moreover, the autobiography reflect the life of an artist, giving us an insight into the creative development of one of India’s controversial woman writer who seems to be compassionate about the possible protest of Indian women as extremely exploited agent in the social and domestic circumstances. She strongly protests against victimization in My Story. Her protest is directed against the injustices and the persecution to which woman in India have always been subjected to. My Story brought Kamala Das to prominence for being exceptionally vocal about her most private experiences.
Kamala Das passed her childhood very nicely at Nalapat house with the host of relatives around. She studied in a European school in Calcutta for a few years. Her father used to work in a private firm. She mentions that at that time British families had friendly relation with Indian families. So, her family too had close connection with a number of British families. But Das’s experience in school with the British and the Anglo Indian classmates was not good at all. She and her brother were treated very rudely by the other students. They were made fun of their colour. Kamala was called as “Blackie”. She also realised that the white students were given priority in everything. Once, a poem written by Das was given to an English girl called Shirley Temple to be read in the assembly saying that the latter wrote it. Though her parents never expressed their disappointment over their colour, but her father made them drink a monthly purgative and insisted her grandmother to apply turmeric and oil on Das’s skin. There are so many other things that affected young Kamala’s mind. For instance, she was conscious of the reality that her parents were awfully incompatible. Her mother never loved her father, and only because she was a typical Indian wife who never raised her voice that domestic harmony prevailed in their household. Her father never articulated any word of appreciation for his children, which affected her as well as her siblings. Kamala felt a sense of alienation at school and at home also. The life she led all throughout might also have been affected by her childhood experiences.
Therefore, Kamala Das’s autobiography My Story can be termed more of a personal memoir, through which she reveals her most private and personal experiences. It is an account of her childhood days, her married life and her growth as a woman as well as an individual too. On reading her life story it becomes quite explicit that she had never been a tradition bound woman, who would conform to the social norms. She led her life on her own terms and conditions, turning a deaf ear to what others said and thought about her. She epitomizes a modern Indian woman who is extremely vocal about her feelings and experiences, and rarely succumbed to the situations which did not suit her temperament. She, through her courage and confidence, asserts her identity as an individual. She puts forward the reason of being different than the other women of the time as:
It therefore becomes evident that her extensive reading of different authors moulded her sensibility. Kamala Das’s My Story thus appears as a document through which she endeavours to find a voice for herself that transcend her own experiences as the ones of every other Indian women who attempt to free themselves sexually and domestically, from the bondage imposed by the society.
When Kamala Das’s autobiography My Story was published, it shocked the mainstream Kerela for the descriptions of her encounters with men and her most intense personal experiences. The editor of the weekly in which her biography was published in serialised form was asked to be suspended by her father V.M. Nair. Her unconventional lifestyle and rebellious attitude seem to be the outcome of a demoralised and desolate woman, who tries to relieve her frustration and anguish inflicted upon her by the situations and conditions corresponding to the tradition bound society she represents. The unpleasant circumstances have rendered her vision tragic for various reasons such as her upbringing by careless parents, her marriage to an egoistic and indifferent person, her disappointments in love, and her illicit love affairs with other men that she got involved in to remove her boredom and anxiety. Her autocrat father fixes her marriage against her wishes to a man who is much older than her and obsessed with sex. Her marriage proved to be an absolute failure because her husband treated her merely as a means of providing sexual gratification while giving her no love and affection. She has described her husband’s unemotional and mechanical way of performing the sexual act with her, which undoubtedly satisfied her sexual urge but denied her the love and affection which every woman expects from her husband. After her marriage to an indifferent husband who is always preoccupied with sex and his job, all of Kamala Das’s hopes and desires of a loving and caring husband shatter. At a point of time when she even thought of a divorce, which she could not initiate. She reasons about it as:
I could not admit to all that my marriage had flopped. I could not return home to the Nalapat House a divorcee, for there had been goodwill between our two families for three generations which I did not want to ruin. . . My parents and other relatives were obsessed with public opinion and bothered excessively with our society’s reaction to any action of an individual’s broken marriage was as distasteful, as horrifying as an attack of leprosy.
It shows that in an Indian society the institution of marriage rests on many things other than the bonding between two individuals. The communication gap with her husband, the loveless marriage confined only to lust, makes her life miserable and she leaps into a few relationships outside her marriage, for which she is criticised extensively by the society. Her straying thus becomes an escape for her from the unfulfilled desires of being loved.
On the other hand, her husband’s heterosexual and homosexual relations with maids and his friend respectively leave her more devastated. Once, while she finds her husband and his friend becoming intimate in her presence, she expresses: I felt like revulsion for my womanliness. The weight of my breast seemed to be crushing me. My private part was only a wound, the souls wound showing through…. It shows her helplessness as well as the pride of an individual soul which forbids her from demanding any explanation from her husband. Such hostility of her husband towards her prompts her to search for love and companionship outside her marriage. She had a severe nervous breakdown for which her husband took her out of the town according to the doctor’s advice. While remembering that period, she recalls:
Das is more or less iconoclastic in her straight discussion of sex, especially the lack of sexual fulfilment for Indian women trapped in rushed arranged marriages. She describes sex as “the principal phobia in Nair women” that claims that women are constantly indoctrinated with the idea of sex as illicit, brutal and above all physically unsatisfying. She illustrates her own wedding night as “rape” It shows that Kamala Das brings forth her experiences of womanhood, which the other Indian women do not discuss in reverence to social norms. She, in fact, constantly seems to refuse to remain silent and discusses her feelings of longing and loss at length.
My Story also throws light on the orthodoxy of traditional Nair families. The women in Nairs are models of neatness and simplicity particularly in their dress, food and living. Kamala Das’s great grandmother’s younger sister, who was a single, “had a passion for order …….was finicky about cleanliness and bathed thrice a day” She was a “deeply devout”
woman, and her habit of taking three baths a day became the cause of her paralysis. Nair society is basically matrilineal, the members of which owned property jointly, including brothers and sisters. Perhaps this might be one of the reasons behind Kamala Das’s daring attitude towards life, as she seems to have the conviction of being supported by her family at the time of crisis. Even history says, Nair women were autonomous, self-reliant, and enjoyed greater personal freedom than women in the rest of India. But, Kamala Das credits her awareness to be the product of her ‘exposure to life’. Her conscious mind could not accept anything that came her way. The question arises whether the Nair women are endowed with the liberty they are supposed to possess? She witnesses many incidents of the Nair society, which reflects its true nature. For instance, in a typical Nair society, women wear heavy jewellery to show off the wealth of their husbands. Kamala Das in this regards mentions …My grandfather liked to see woman glamorized with jewels, flowers…. On the other hand, her father imposed his Gandhian ideals over her mother.
Das recounts:
This shows how a woman had to submit to the will of her husband for the fear she had for men, be it her husband, father or uncle. In the same context she talks about Madhavi Amma, her granduncle’s daughter, who lived a very secluded life. Earlier, she was married to a scholar with whom she was very happy. But, her husband had to walk out of her life as he “fell out of favour” with her uncle. Kamala Das comments: The Nairs, particularly the males, were coarse when their ire was aroused….It shows how a woman’s happiness is overlooked just to feed fat a man’s ego.
Kamala Das’s autobiography is a loud protest of a married woman suppressed in a male dominated society. It illustrates that in a world dominated by man she tries to assert her individuality, to maintain her feminine identity. From this revolt rose all her troubles, psychological trauma and frustrations. It is a search for self through her feminine experience, especially her passionate relationship with different men. She seems to rise up against male supremacy and insensibility particularly in relation to marriage, love, sex and the freedom and individuality of women. In her own way she comes out with a forceful resistance to gender constraints. While playing her roles of a daughter, a lover, and a wife she fell into the rigid grip of a male centred world. Kamala Das has made hysterical attempts to revolt against the domination of “second sex”, as Simone De Beauvoir argues: The world is too strong and if a woman persists in her opposition, it breaks her…..Kamala Das too was on the verge of becoming insane out of the weight of her frustration. Fortunately, writing, which was a passion for her, helped her to lighten her soul and she sustained serious nervous breakdown.
A. N. Dwivedi writes about Kamala Das, Like Austen, Kamala Das also moves within her limited range with grace and skill. The advantage of this range is that it offers the reader only what the writer has personally felt and realized…It thus refers to the fact that through her personal experiences, she tried to reach the broader world. N. V. Raveendran notes about her that “the individual development in the area of women’s literature plays a vital role in shaping the sensibility of a writer”. Like Kamala Das, all who grew up in the dual worlds of tradition and modernity, increasingly found themselves vulnerable and unprepared to face the world which is still controlled by patriarchal values. My Story gives important insights into the mind of an artist as well as the body of a woman affronting the strictures of a deeply patriarchal society. It was a liberating experience for her, one with which she “could depart when the time came with a scrubbed-conscience”, as mentioned in the preface. N. V. Raveendran further remarks: “woman’s sexual freedom has been the main topic of woman writers for about two hundred years. The tendency has been to demand freedom of self expression in all fields…”. The description of homosexuality in her autobiography infuriated the conservative Indian readers. For her, it seems, writing becomes a way to vent out to the trauma of a deeply unhappy marriage.
Kamala Das through her writing chose to convey her inner feelings. If we look into some of her poems closely, her intention becomes more explicit. In ‘The Freaks’ (Summer in Calcutta: 1965), Kamala Das’s resistance to social norms is projected where the persona declares that she is a freak. It expresses her negative attitude to the contemporary social reality. In another poem “A relationship” and in several other she brings to the fore her boldness and freedom in speaking aloud the secret longings and aspirations of womankind. Prof. Syd Harrex says: Kamala Das’s poems epitomise the dilemma of modern India woman who attempts to free herself, sexually and domestically, from the role of bondage sanctioned by the past…. In fact, if she would not have expressed herself, emptying her soul, she would become totally insane, as mentioned in My Story. Writing was the only machinery which kept her alive.
The Indian social norms and conventions are so strong and deep rooted in the psyche of a woman that she hardly dares to be as vocal about her private and personal feelings and experiences as Kamala Das. It is not that she was not affected by the criticism she had to face as she mentions: Whenever a snatch of unjustified scandal concerning my emotional life reached me through well-meaning relatives, I wept like a wounded child for hours rolling on my bed and often took sedatives to put myself to sleep. She indulged herself in drinking too to retain her mental stability.
There is no doubt that Kamala Das is a woman of rare courage and strong conviction. She takes pride of being a woman, ignoring all sorts of hostility of the world towards a woman. She celebrates her sexuality, her womanhood, her body and cultivates her own notion of love, going against the conventional concepts. But, a strong sense of social concern reflects her description of Indian society in My Story as well as her other writings. She does not conform to all the established norms and freely expresses her disgust over such matters. She is generally seen in the fore front of such writers who fought for the rights of women. Indian society demands a woman to find fulfilment in domestic activities. But domestic slavery never fulfils her freedom. Das articulates the misery of a woman writer who does not have the financial support to sustain her creative endeavour. At time she would become frustrated as her domestic responsibility came in her way of writing, which she has mentioned in her narrative. It was difficult to maintain the balance. Her bouts of illness as well as of her children also left her devastated many a times. But she emerged as a woman who could direct her experiences, all good and bad, towards productivity. The adverse criticism she received all throughout her writing career could not prevent her from anything. After the demise of her husband, she got married to a person much younger to her age, which seems to be the outcome of her constant search for true love, the one that she visualised as “flowers in the hair…the yellow moon lighting up a familiar face and soft words whispered in the ear…”. She even converted to Islam at the age of sixty five and remained a Muslim till death confronting all the controversies that entailed it. She chose to convert as she wanted to marry the person whom she thought loved her. But later she realised that she should not have done it when she says “I fell in love with a Muslim after my husband’s death. He was kind and generous in the beginning. But now I feel one shouldn’t change one’s religion. It is not worth it.” It seems her love life that she envisaged remained unfulfilled till the end of her life.
Kamala Das paved the way for later woman writers to be vocal about their feelings and experiences and break the stereotypical image of an Indian woman. She also encouraged women to write as she hold the view that it could be a strong medium of women empowerment. For her writing was a passion, with which she thought magic could be created. Thus, putting an end to all the controversies, she left for the heavenly abode on 31st May 2009 at the age of seventy five.
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