Kamala Das

Kamala Das (Madhavikuti) was born in Malabar in 1934. She was educated privately at home and at
schools in Bengal and Kerala and belonged to a writers family. Her mother Padma bhushan Nalapat
Balamani Amma was an outstanding Malayalam poet and winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award and
the Saraswati Samman and her father the editor and Managing Director of Mathrabhumi, a leading
Malayalam language newspaper. She was only fifteen when she was married to K. Madhava Das, who
rose to become an R.B.I. Officer.
Kamala Das began writing poetry at the age of six. She was only fourteen when P.E.N. India, edited by
Sophia Wadia, published her first poem. But her poetry got recognition when she was awarded the
Asian Poetry Prize instituted by P.E.N. Phillipines in 1963. From 1971 to 72 and again from 1978 to 79,
she was the poetry editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Her poems were published in Opinion,
New Writing in India (penguin Books, 1974), and Young Commonwealth Poets (Heinemann, 1965).

Kamala Das began writing poetry at the age of six. She was only fourteen when P.E.N. India, edited by
Sophia Wadia, published her first poem. But her poetry got recognition when she was awarded the
Asian Poetry Prize instituted by P.E.N. Phillipines in 1963. From 1971 to 72 and again from 1978 to 79,
she was the poetry editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India. Her poems were published in Opinion,
New Writing in India (penguin Books, 1974), and Young Commonwealth Poets (Heinemann, 1965).
Alphabet of Lust (1976), a collection of short fictions (A Doll for the Child Prostitute) and an
autobiography called My Story. Her well-known books included Summer in Calcutta (1965) and The
Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Stories (1973). When the first volume of her
Collected Poems was published in 1984, it won her Sahitya Akademi Award for 1985. Her other
collection The Soul Knows How to Sing: Selections From Kamala Das was published in 1997.
She made a new experiment in Indian English poetry. She succeeded in exploring those labyrinths
which inhibit many a brave poets even today. In her poetry she points to certain biological matters so
bluntly and openly that readers frequently feel scandalized and shocked. It appears Kamala Das
allowed the poetic impulse to flow into poetry before the social conventions came to arrest the flow.
Rajeev S. Patke remarks:

“It would be mistake to suppose that Das is obsessed with sex and marriage and social roles. What she
is intent on is honesty of impulse and a sense of direction to the flow of her wants and feelings”.
Talking about her contribution C.D. Narasimhaiah once remarked: “Kamala Das is perhaps the only
Indian poet who owes little to Yeats or Eliot and trusted her own resources and culture”. She not only
believed in her own personal experience in Kerala and her personality as fit resource for her poetry,
what is creditworthy she very successfully transformed those personal experiences into poetic art.
Often she depicts about women’s plight in a society dominated by men. Her poetry like most
confessional poetry, written by Nissim Ezekiel, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath has therapeutic and
cathartic effect on the poet as well as on the readers.

The poet is noted also for her direct public commitments. She involved herself in a number of public
responsibilities. She was not only a great votary of vegetarianism but she also initiated the Bodhiyatra
Movement for environmental protection. She played active roles as a Chairman in the Forestry Board
of Kerala and as the President in the Film Society of Kerala besides entering into politics in order to
help the poor and teaching deaf and dumb in a school. Suffering from pneumonia on 30th May, 2009
she breathed her last at Jahangir Hospital, Pune.