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6/13/2012

ABHIJITH T R

Introduction

Indian literature in English is a curious cultural phenomenon. English is not an Indian language in the same way as it is the language of England, Australia, Canada, and USA. India has several sophisticated literary languages. The languages have long standing literary traditions. English in the main literary language in India because it has been given the status of National Language by the Indian constitution. In reality, Indian- English literature is the newest and the latest developed branch of Indian literature. For an Indian writing in English involves a conflict between the mother tongue and English. The essays brought together in the present volume deal with cultural contexts of that conflict. Since they were written or a period of fifteen years for publication and presentation in a variety of forums. English literature was introduced into the Indian education system during the nineteenth century. The British rules of India saw it as an intellectual tool to be used to civilize the natives. When English literature was included in school and University courses in India already had a long and rich tradition of literature. It is with well developed forms of poetry, drama and prose. Indian literature at the juncture of this encounter was being written in more than a dozen living languages.

But since English literature was produced in the country of the rules, and was praised by them, it immediately acquired a high cultural status in India. It continued to enjoy that status till the beginning of the Second World War. Indian English literature may be defined as literature originally in English by authors Indian by birth, ancestry or Nationality. Historical and political circumstances combined to give the educated nineteenth century Indian a certain proficiency in the use of the English language. Isolated instances stand out in the nineteenth century as literary curiosities. Toru Dutt and Manmohan Ghosh these writers could not constitute a trend. They were National products of the general, social and cultural conditions of their time. Most of the early Indo-Anglean experiments in literature done in verse. Prose of non-fictional variety existed in abundance. It was motivated mostly by extra literary impulses like political protest or social reform. The novel as an art form came to India with the British and it was new in every Indian literature. The novel as it developed in the western world is particularly with time and space and their effects on man. In the medieval age, different countries could borrow stories from each other. The Prototypes of some of the Canterbury tales have been traced back to the Panchathantra. A novel by an Indian writer demands direct involvements in values, experiences which are valid in the Indian context.

Bengal was the first region to come in close contact with the British. The earliest Indian novels came to be written in Bengali. It is interesting to note that the novel emerged at different times in different regions of India. The full development of the Indian novel as a whole, historical romance, social realism and Psychological novels showing an introspective concern with the individual. In most Indian languages especially in Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada and Malayalam, the development occurred in this order. Social realism was ushered in some time during the twenties by Munshi Prem channel in Hindi and Sarat Chandra Chatterji in Bengali. They dealt with everyday problems of the rural community and their immense popularity marks the next phase of development in the Indian novel. Contemporary public issues whether social or political began to interest the writers and the National movement for Independence offered them rich and ready material. Social problems and politics have always been difficult to separate in India and in Bhagavathi Charan Varmas more recent Hindi novel Bhule Bisre Chitra (1959).This novel deals with the thirteen we find a portrait of society chequred by the conflict of political beliefs and social ideals. Indo-Anglian fiction as a branch of Indian fiction rather than English fiction. The Indo-Anglian aspiration in literature faces two large handicaps, first, it endeavors to create literature in a language which in most cases has been acquired

rather them spoken from birth. Second, it seeks to establish a distinct literature in a language in which great literature already exists. Indo-Anglian novelists are controlled by a number of artists problems. He has to allow the heterogeneous nature of his immediate audience. The English language cuts across diverse ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds, and although theoretically this given the novelist a wider audience. Subtle nuances in literature are possible only when the reader and the writer participate in the same process of living. One way of by passing the handle of the diverse background and simplifying the linguistic problem would be to write about Urban and cosmopolitan situation. Some of the best works in Indo-Anglian fiction deal with non-meta Politian situation. The awareness of historical forces manifests itself in another preoccupation of the Indo-Anglian novelists. A large number of their novels tend to concentrate in the so-called encounter between East and West. Not only at the level of people but also at the level of ideas. The successful writer can exploit the dramatic as well as the symbolic potential of the theme holding the two sides in a poised suspension in international dialects. The theme that seem to have fascinated many Indian Anglo novelists in the place of faith in the social cultural life of India. There were writers tired with a mission and burdened with a purpose outside the merely aesthetic scope of

literature. They were waiting in order to promote the betterment of their fellow beings. The most recurrent technique in the Indo-Anglian fiction has been that of the first person narrative moreover, a large number of recent novels are autobiographical in method, if not in substance since the theme of some of the best works is the quest for self. The technique in often the most suitable and has been applied in widely diverse situations by Indo-Anglian novelists. It is often said that the achievements of the Indo-Anglian novelist falls for short of the achievement of the novelist in some of the regional languages. This may true, especially in view of the late development and quantitative disadvantage of Indo-Anglian writing. A dozen or more distinct languages and literature flourish today and the Indian literary scene. These are mostly distributed on a regional basis. There are three exceptions-Sanskrit, Urdu and English. Sanskrit is our classic language and of many of as a sacred language. Urdu has some extent lost its importance after the creation of Pakistan. For English its vogue is almost uniformly distributed all over the country. English is spoken in India may be or more 50 million people as their second language. Thus the books in English published in India account for about fifty percent of the total for all languages. The English newspapers and Magazines cumulatively command in a more impressive and influential circulation than those in any other language. The popular vogue for Hindi is of course much greater at

least in North India. But for administrative purposes and in higher education and the higher judiciary English still plays an uneasy but indispensable role. It would thus be not wide off the mark to say that Indo-Anglian literature has a substantial base today. This base not withstanding periodical scares seems like strengthened rather than weakened as the years pass. Many of a creative writer in India has himself translated his work into English. The writers cant their reflected light on the history of Indian writing in English. Such a literary history becomes something more than in a survey of one of the dozen flourishing contemporary India. One salutary development in that our writers and academies are being aware of the Indian literary and critical tradition. Literary criticism not being an exact science the responses of different people to a poem or a novel or a drama. It stands to reason that what makes Indo-Anglian literature an Indian literature. The choice of subject in the texture of thought and play of sentiment, in the organization of material and in the creative use of language. We should expect Indian writing in English rather than any of the regional literatures to project a total vision of India. National identity is a spiraling concept ranging from the material to the spiritual. The Ramayana is the epic of India and the Mahabharata is the veritable grammar of Indian National literature. It is not necessary that a novel of today should in geographical terms try always to cover whole of India. It may be

located in some nook or other of this subcontinent like Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable, Kabirs Men and Reverse, Raja Raos Kanthapura, Kushwanth Singhs Train to Pakistan. But novels like Anands coolie suggest in their different ways the moving multiplicity of the life lived in the vast spaces of India. The last twenty-five years have seen our novelists the great survivals as well as the enterprising new arrivals. These years have witnessed the emergence of Nirad Chaudhari and Ved Mehta, both masters of prose. There has also been an explosion of new poetry (Dom Moraes, Kamala Das, and A K Ramanujan) including workshop poetry. Indian literature presents to us, in addition to Vedantic, Buddhist, worldview, in poetry or in prose, Marxist, socialist, humanist, existentialist or other world views through which life is seen. There are also genuinely Indian prospective because it is the writers experiences that given them shape and substance. Thus the Indianness of writing consists in writers intense awareness of his entire culture. This awareness has to be vertical as well as horizontal. Each Nation has its own tradition in the cultivation of the values and life. Art and the literature become great of the extent to which they realize the values in terms of living, artistic or literary expression. And this is how, where, why the Indianness of an Indian works of art comes in for consideration when we think of national or world literature.

Indian writing in English, which has received unstinted admiration both at home and abroad, is now in its full swing. It has carved out a new track, a new vision-a vision that is replete with an unswerving faith and hope, myths and traditions, customs and rites, our great country has enshrined in her bosom from the immemorial. If we dive deep into the works of the Indian stalwarts of English fiction, it is revealed that their works are not an imitation of English literary pattern but highly original and intensely Indian in both theme and spirit. They have given a new shape and colour to English literature in the same way as the Australians and Americans have evolved their own literature in their respective countries. The real challenge the writers of today face in the enforced homogenization and standardization of culture. It is due to globalization and the new easy and superficial internationalism which tempts Indian English writers to market themselves abroad. There has been a movement to take Indian writing across the globe. Fictional writings and even representations of nature and characters in its best form of writers like Amitabh Ghosh, Vikram Seth, and Salman Rushdie have taken Indian writing and writers and writers to great heights. These are efforts of several generations of Indian authors writing in English that they have resulted in international success, particularly since the publication of Midnights children (1981) by Salman Rushdie. The Indian novel in English has finally been accepted as an important literary endeavor. It could also be mentioned that Indian women

writers have began to gain recognition, Arundhathy Roy winning the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things in 1997. Prior the rise of the novel, many Indian women composed poetry and short stories in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. Women were the chief upholders of a rich and oral tradition of story-telling, through myths, legends, songs and fables. But the major movement in post-independence Indian English poetry has been modernism. Poets like Saojini Naidu, Toru Dutt, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, and later Nissim Ezekiel and even Henry Derozio came up to their own time in an unbroken sequence. They were the modernists who preferred to think of themselves as the inventors of new poetics, a new generation without literary ancestors. The 1950s and 1960s saw poets like Dom Moraes, P Lal, P Nandy, A K Ramanujan, Jayanta Mahapatra, K N Daruwalla, Kamala Das to name a few, each having a style and craftsmanship of his/her own. Such poets such as Moraes frequently resorted to a variety of person or masks behind to hide themselves; others like Jayanta Mahapatra have repeatedly explored both external and internal poverty and sorrow with remarkable persistence. Writing about Kamala Dass poetry is the most moving and tortured. Apart from writing in English, Das also wrote under the pen name Madhavikutty in

Malayalam before her conversion to Islam ten years ago. She had not only established herself as an English writer. Her popularity in Kerala was credited mostly to her short stories and the autobiography My Story, which was translated into 15 languages, a book where she openly discussed her unsatisfactory sexual life with Madhav Das, her husband, a senior Reserve Bank of India official who died a few years ago. While her autobiography My Story gives several descriptions of her own marriage as unsatisfying and unfulfilling, her poems presented an image of a marriage which grew lifeless, empty and dull. Dass protest against such a system made her turn a rebel. Her offended feminine self went on emotional wanderings attempting to explore an identity and freedom. Nevertheless, her traditional make-up of a conventional woman was a factor which persistently forbade her from breaking away completely from the role of a traditional wife. A conflict naturally arose between the passivity and rebellion against the male oriented universe. And the conflict persisted all through her life. It was this conflict that caused shock time and again to the readers and people who were close to Kamala Das. However, her achievement as a poet was that her poetry gave a different definition of poetry altogether. Her feminine sensibility can be described as her personal self; her feelings as a woman, her physical desires and her evolution from teenage bride to an adolescent and a mother figure.

Das lived alone in her world with feelings of loneliness and yet maintained her tradition, the security of her home. She always felt that poetry meant studying life and its objectivity in a very realistic way. Kamala Das died at the age of 75, leaving three sons behind after fighting a long battle with Diabetes. Known for her frank and explicit expression on matters of sexuality, Kamala Dass writings focused on love, betrayal and the resultant agony that often unsettled the orthodox readers. She leaves behind a legacy that is hard to be fulfilled, a legacy where she could touch human heart with her lucid and charming style and great economy of words. The world of poetry and prose will miss her for long. Farewell Kamala Suraiyya Das.

Chapter I Cast and Gender in Post-Colonial Kerala: My Story as a History

Autobiographies are produced and circulated in plenty. Nowadays, a phenomenon not so prominent early in history. In almost all the discussions of the marketed stories of the self in Kerala the reference to Kamala Das and her books My Story appear and still people keep turning on to her to know the secret of the creation of such books. The author, the unique genius who writes has not yet been replaced as a concept and the thought that more unconscious discourses. The writer is oblivious; shape the material and the possibilities of what can be said in a particular text is rather ignored. The independent author concept is still ruling the minds of the readers who actually become part of the margins of a book. The unconscious of the society of the readers/producers, its ideology which constructs a text which may be other to the actual writer, is largely ignored. By the late nineteenth century, the caste system of Kerala had evolved to be the most complex to be found anywhere in India. The exploitation of it had become considerable. Caste system was not prevalent in Kerala during initial of history.

Sri.Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai had recorded that in olden times when people lived in the Western Ghats, categorization on the basis of work done by them was in practice. There were seven such categories. Thudiyan (one who beats thudi, a musical instrument) Parayan (one who beats para, a kind of drum) Panar (singer)Kadambar(Agriculturist)Valayar(fisherman)Vanikar(traders)and Uzhavar(workers)are these seven categories. Though Brahmin migration to Kerala took place during three or four centuries B.C, they became powerful only during eighth century. Cast system began in Kerala only after this period. Sabdatharavali (1923) names the caste as Brahmins eight Newna Vargas (minorities) two Antharala jathy (temple dwellers) twelve, Sudras eighteen shilpi six. Pathithar (untouchables) ten.Thnajathy (lower caste) eight and 64 numbers of sub- castes. There was no caste system in Kerala till the end of Buddhist renaissance period. People were known by their profession like Panan, Parayan, Villavan, Ushavan, Paravathan, Ayer etc. Brahmins also migrated to this area and there was no caste among them. By about the second half of the 8thcentury, Brahmins become more influential and powerful in the society. This marked the beginning of the caste system. Kerala society divided into two. Those who recognized Brahmin supremacy stood on the one side and others who opposed them. The first was within the fold of Hinduism and latter was out of it. Those who embraced Hinduism were grouped into several races. Rulers or Kings

became Kshatriyas. The trader group known Vaisyas was not there. All others who followed Brahmanical faith later came to be known as Sudras. They were Nairs. There is considerable controversy regarding the actual place of Nairs in the caste system. It is understandably, a very touchy subject. One of the main reasons is that the caste system in Kerala is very different from the caste system elsewhere in India. According to the caste system followed in the rest of India, only the lowest class, the Sudras, was considered to be "untouchables". However, in the case of Kerala, anyone who was not a Namboodiri was treated by the Namboodiries as an untouchable. The Namboodiries had different rules regarding the degrees of pollution for the different classes. A Namboodiri could only be "polluted" by the touch of a Nair, whereas the other classes had different distances after which they could be considered polluting. For example, if an Ezhava got within 24 feet of a Namboodiri, the Namboodiri was considered to be polluted. In this regard, it would seem that the Nairs were like the Sudras in the rest of India. However, the Sudras in the rest of India were never a martial class, since warfare was the profession of the Kshatriyas. According to this interpretation, Nairs would seem to be more like Kshatriyas since they were a martial class as well. Similar to Kshatriyas, they were second to the Brahmins (Namboodiries). Furthermore, many Nair families were aristocratic. They owned large feudal

estates and in some cases, even took part in the ruling of Kerala. An example is the Paliam family of Kochi. The oldest male of the family, the Paliath Achan, served as the Prime Minister to the Raja of Kochi. It is believed that there were 64 classifications in Nair society. Sri.K.P.Padmanabha Menon who wrote Kerala Charithram (History of Kerala) has recorded that Nairs who were grouped as Sudras were turned into three main groups called Illam, Swaroopam and Padamangalam. According to him, the first group were servants of Brahmin houses, second were servants in Kshatriya homes and the third were servants of temples. Besides, there were a number of sub castes among Nairs like Idachery Nairs, Maranmar, Athikurichikal, Chembukottikal, Odat Nair, Chalia Nairs, Kalamkotti Nair, Pallichal Nairs, Veluthedathu Nairs, and Vilakkithala Nairs etc. The Nairs may be considered as constituting the soul of the (Travancore Cochin) population. They are split into various classes. The Velloyma hold the first rank, seen in the more northern parts. Illakure and the three succeeding ranks predominate throughout Travancore; the term denotes one belonging to the house of the Namboori. There are different communities of Nairs like Shroobacurre (vassals of chiefs), Shacoular (oil mongers), Vellakathura (washer men who only do the job for Brahmins and Nairs), and Yedacherry (cowherds), Oodatu Nair (boatmen) Attychorchy (who perform the necessary offices of the dead). The

higher order of the Nairs is known under the collective term of Madamby, or Prubhookanmar. Designations are comprised various others. Based on profession and status in society, Nairs were classified into 18 castes. The caste system had its legitimacy in the positive responses to many of its institutions by the nonBrahmins. The opposition to caste system took various forms. While some castes refused the position of their community or refused to accept higher position of other community. In other cases, many individuals completely disagreed with caste divisions. Ayyankali, Chattampi Swamikal and Sri Narayana Guru were some of the social reformers who fought against the inhuman and disgraceful practices that their respective communities were subjected to. Kerala Varma, a Raja from the Kochi royal family, voiced against the caste system incurring the wrath of his Generals (Kurups). Throughout its long history and well into the twentieth century, one could see regional and material variations in family forms and matrilineal could exist in both polygamy and polyandry versions. But attempts have been made to flatten out the diversity representing particular forms of family as normative and others as deviant. Creating systems of gradations and hierarchies of the types of family with the patriarchal, matrilineal, upper-caste family at the top being regarded as the norm.

The structure thus came into being shaped the ideology of the upper castes, and continues to underpin beliefs and practices extant today. This occurs here not simply as a natural process, but due to the presence of the colonial institutions. Speaking from within the regimen of colonialism, the colonialists called the native practices barbaric. A possible starting point for an exploration of the historical evidence on the crucial place of control over matrilineal within the larger structure. In which brahmanical patriarchy was located could be the practices and beliefs prevalent among the natives. The Nair men living in polygamy and Nair women in polyandry was not a practice in the upper caste Namboodiries. The matrilineal Namboodiri men practiced polygamy whereas matrilineal Nair women practiced polyandry. With Christianity, the patriarchal religion, the new motive of avoidance of sin enters in. The moral standard becomes in theory the same for men as for women. In practice the difficulty of enforcing it upon men has always led to a greater toleration of their failings than of those of women. The bulk of colonial writing thus focused on demonstrating the peculiarities of Hindu civilization and the practices pertaining to women. The Anglican writers, especially Christian missionaries, were methodically building up an indictment, also in print, about the hideous state of Indian society.

Western anthropological scholarship on Malabar also shows that the sexuality of women, more than that of men, is a subject of social concern. The best known among the colonial writing is James Mills account of India and her past; its reach and impact were tremendous because it was the first comprehensive history of India. Mill deemed the Hindu civilization as crude from its very beginnings and as plunged in the lowest depths of immorality and crime. This was the general context in which the womens essential nature came to be identified with their sexuality. The natives of Malabar, as part of their attempts to absorb the mainstream national culture. They were active recipients of this perception of the past prepared by the western intervention. The women are not in control of men and the modern books where the male wielded power over the others. Ravi Varmas painting and Chandu Menons novel etc. of this period thus made a clarion call for the end of matrilineal. Chandu Menons novel, though titled Indulekha, was actually about the emergence of the modern Malayali Man. The young professional middle class Nair men became part of the colonial notions of morality. They raised the demand for marriage reform to gain control over the sexuality and fertility of women. With their engagement with the colonial state the men in matrilineal Nair families. They were the agents of change dismantled the last vestiges of barbarism. Hindu laws and patriarchal descent had thus become factual parts of Nair life.

It has taken historians and anthropologists a very long time to accept the multiplicity of cultural practices that exist in India, instead of treating the region as a homogenized space. But the colonial rule took only two centuries to level down the diversity and flatten the culture into a monolithic one. The abolition of matrilineal Kinship by the (post)colonial Kerala legislature in 1976 was a predictable consequence. It was of two centuries of legal interventions of the colonial rule. Between the 1930s and the 1970s most landed Theravadas all over the state were in a process of disintegration and a new integration of individuals. The extension of the Hindu code in the 1950s to govern Nairs made Indulekha - a Hindulekha and Man - a Madhavan. It is again a historical coincidence that Mr. V.M. Nair married Balamani Amma in the year 1933 and My Story, the autobiography of Kamala Das was published in 1976. The former, an act of integration & the latter, disintegration. Kamala was born in 1934 and the life she led for four decades could be accounted as a life against the grain. But the reading public subverted her attempts by reading the book with a patriarchal/pornographic eye and My Story thus becomes the history of the modern Malayali men.

Kamala Das resoundingly rejects the central figure of Malayali social reformism, the manly reformer. She reveals that the housewife may have a domain beyond the domestic, a private in which the bodys pleasures are not forbidden: the aesthetic woman bound to the domestic longs to be free, to reorder the space of the home on her terms. In My Story, she portrayed herself as an ordinary woman. In this sense My Story can be read as a rewriting of Indulekha. Indulekha, the protagonist of the novel is a rebel, equipped with classical education, as well as English, independent, witty, open-minded, and strong which transforms her into a thinking, feeling subject capable of choosing her own lover. This reconstitution of female self confined her to the domestic space of the patriarchal nuclear family. My Story revisits the same site of Indulekha to discover that nuclear family is corrupt, oppressive institution. Where both the male and female become alienated and can only become themselves through various kinds of transgression. This should alert one to the significance of the self-assertion of men and market in our society. In narration, the story teller, Kamala Das represents conditions both for her own benefit. It also for the benefit of those reading but the narrator may be held by the imaginary position in a series of misrecognitions as in the case of her readers/critics, most of them male. Reading public is also already

positioned by ideological beliefs. So that they read the text in a way which accords with their own ideological assumptions.

Chapter II Cast and Gender in Kamala Dass My Story

Ive spent long years trying to locate my mind Beneath skin, beneath flesh and underneath The bones. Ive stretched my two-dimensional Nudity on sheets of weeklies, monthlies, Quarterlies, a sad sacrifice. Ive put My private voice away, adopted the Typewriters click as my only speech; I Click-click, click-click tiresomely into your Ears, stranger, though you may have no need of Me, I go on and on. - Kamala Das, My Story (1976) Throughout My Story, Das identifies and resists so-called morality as an oppressive source of gendered ideology .It functions through the exploitation of womens bodies, sexuality and emotions in Kerala. Das argues that the repression of womens intellectual and cultural productions in Kerala (frequently cited as a women-centered culture) exposes the inherent hypocrisy of a Phallocentric society. According to Das, the voices of women from Kerala their standpoints, their awareness, their worldview are not only unheard but, at times, condemned in the name of morality. My Story studies the underlying power structure at play that has kept a significant section of the population in Kerala. It oppressed in the name of various social institutions based on conceptual categories such as gender, caste,

class and color. Here Im going to discuss mainly about the caste and gender the author explored in My Story. My Story appeared in 1976, it went through six impressions, and thirty six thousand copies, in eleven months. My Story is translated from Ente Katha.It was first published in a serialized form in Malayalanadu, a sensationalist weekly magazine in Kerala. My Story examines the life and times of its female author through the lens of an autobiographical (often cited as confessional) mode of narration. The story deals with the themes of childhood, ageing and death. My Story also becomes a venue for Kamala Das to display her deep insight into human relationships, her confident yet delicate handling of sexuality, her eye for the minutest detail. My Story is undeniably Kamala Dass signal achievement as a novelist. In terms of both magnitude of meaning and the superb artistry through which she challenges oppression regulated in the name of morality. Kamala Das began writing My Story in 1971.From her family, especially her father, tried to shelve the publication of the text. Das did not yield to the pressure and continued to engage her readers with her life-story. The forthrightness with which Kamala Das discusses exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, homosexuality, violence associated with gender, caste and shocked Keralas dominant patriarchy. Who in turn, branded the text and its author as immoral. After the publication of My Story

Das confesses that she received no warmth in her home state and says that the book has cost me many things I held dear (Preface My Story). As part of the agenda in exposing Keralas oppressive rules to the world, Ente Katha was rewritten in English by the author herself under the title My Story. It is to date the best selling womens autobiography in post-independent India. The English version, though following the autobiographical mode of narration, differs from the Malayalam text in its presentation and also in its content. Even on a cursory glance of both the texts, it is easy to spot the dexterity .In which Kamala Das slips in and out of the linguistic, cultural and social contexts of Malayalam and English. In her poem An Introduction Kamala Das writes of the predicament of the multilingual writer I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar, I speak three languages, write in two, and dream in one. Kamala Dass views on translation, expressed in her poem An Introduction fairly representative of the general attitude towards language of many Indo-English writers. Also, My Story provides ample scope for Kamala Das to transform the sense of distance found (if any) while writing in another language into an aesthetic product. This is especially evident when she pauses to clarify cultural connotations that could pose an impediment to understanding for the non-Malayalam reader. For example, the concept of Nalappattu, her ancestral house in Kerala connotes the

contemporary matrilineal hypocrisy where women are merely the named players. In actuality are subservient to the maternal uncle that rules the joint family. Kamala Das attempts to detail the historical nuances of Nair Kerala in her English version. This could possibly explain why My Story, with its fifty chapters, is almost double the size of Ente Katha. Before embarking on a close reading of My Story, it is worth looking briefly at the social context of Nair Kerala to which Dass writing refers. The state of Kerala, with a population of thirty odd million people has been hailed as the epitome of womens educational and cultural development. In a country that that does not fare too well in terms of womens development. Keralas performance over the last two decades, in terms of social and healthrelated indicators, is well-documented. The comparative egalitarian development is oft upheld by economists and sociologists as the Kerala Model of Development. Health indicators in the state of Kerala are equally impressive, with its high level of life expectancy for women, which is the case in all the so-called developed countries of the world. It is often claimed that part of the credit for Kerala to differ from other states in India. It is perhaps due to the unusual importance given to its long history of the matrilineal society of Nairs that reside in the state. Indeed it is, if one goes by the conventional indicators and tools of measurements and adopts a comparative perspective with other Indian states.

When detailing Nair womens autonomy in Kerala explains that, though the system was not matriarchal, women didnt govern the household. It accorded them greater freedom, choice and respect than they would found elsewhere in the world until the twentieth century. Nairs are not matriarchal group; it is the eldest maternal uncle who resided in the joint family known as the tharavadu that controlled family affairs. Traditionally, the Nair women lived in their own tharavadu and husbands visited often. Dass ancestral home that gets featured in My Story is the 400 years old tharavadu of Nalappattu. Which she claims was the house gifted to her ancestors, the fifteen year old Kunji. My Story demonstrates that the pervasiveness of the ideology of the Nair women as a historical model of self assertion has little or no direct connection to its living counterpart. This is not to deny the existence of some domestic agency, which often gives a few women considerable control over family members and family affairs, despite complete dependence on males in financial and civil society. Still, even such agency is not always forthcoming varying considerably across the spectrum that it becomes imperative to showcase women such as Kamala Das. The manner in which Keralas Nair caste system endorses its collective norms highlight a concrete set of ideas of what is morally acceptable, distinguishing between being a good Nair and an evil one. The morality endorsed by castism can be seen to constitute the subjectivity of the feminine Nair subject in

Kerala. The regulated cast rules allow the Nair patriarchy to construct an ethical project. It recognizes and controls sexual behavior and practices as a vital aspect of maintaining a moral society. As a result, Nair women are often coerced into submission for upholding caste values. For instance, Nair women occupy an oppressed space in the domestic society of marriage where the norm up to the last decade was that of Marumakkathayam. That is the early arranged marriage of young girls to a much older relative, sometimes as old as or older than their own fathers. As in the case of Dass family, men regularly controlled women of their family by using the practice of Marumakkathayam. The Nair patriarchs of the Nalappattu family too find their daughters sexuality valuable assets, a commodity that they exchange with whomever they deem fit. Most often with a much older male relative in order to safeguard the family property. Das herself was not exempt from this as she was asked to marry her cousin. Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. It was enough to proclaim to the friends that the father had spent half a lakh on its preparations. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue. Das reveals that most of the Nalappattu women, right from her great grandmother Kunji up to Das herself, were sold into marriage under the pretense of maintaining a good caste unit. Nair men, however, were free to marry anyone they pleased, irrespective of caste or class differences. Das claims that women are

forced into assimilating into the customs and codes of gendered behavior in patriarchal Nair Kerala. In My Story, Dass dissatisfaction with patriarchy becomes explicit with her concerns about the customary nature of contemporary Nair castist norms. The men of Dass family were typical in that they set forth rules for the women folk to obey. This form of hegemonic control even extends to appropriating the personal freedom to the extent of choosing what the women wear .According to Dass father stipulated firmly that her mother was not to wear anything but Khaddar and preferably white or off white (Das 5). Yet another example of patriarchal and castist oppression in My Story can be found in Dass valiyamma (grand-aunt) .She was worried about public opinion, had not stepped out of the Nalappattu House for over thirty years except to go to the privy that was a furlong away and to the pond for her baths (Das 35). This quote suggests that Dass valiyamma was concerned of public opinion that might cast her as not being a good Nair woman. Similarly, in the Malayalam version of her text, Das claims that as a young girl she was made to conform to Nair rules and regulations and was admonished for self-expression (i.e. if she danced or expressed her love for a servant girl by hugging her) by patriarchy and given a sermon about the need to uphold the family name which was ascribed primarily to the women folk (Das 46). Das states that she realized early in her life how the very fact of

their gender constitutes for women in the Nair world in which she grew up an almost insuperable limiting factor to their life-chances. Nair women are thus constructed as possible victims for acquiring a bad reputation that could harm the harmony of the Nair kinship. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, no evidence of a desire from Nair men for good reputation can be found in Dass text. However, Das by exposing this hypocrisy occupies a position of resistance as she discusses her awareness of the predicament of her genderedself .It is along with the fellow oppressed subaltern women trapped in the ethical project of patriarchy within the Nair caste system. Nair women of Kerala because of the matrilineal system of inheritance and existence have been falsely hailed as a group. They enjoy considerable amounts of freedom from patriarchy compared to other women in the country. However, this is false conception because, in reality, the maternal uncle (the Karnavaar) simply replaces the role of the authoritarian father as in any non-Nair the family unit. Nonetheless, what differentiates the Nair patriarchy from the rest is that in their desire to maintain the upper caste/class Nair values. And they deliberately construct their women as potential victims that may pollute castist purity through sex with non-Nair members. Such an inter-caste sexual relationship could lead to dispersal of family property into non-Nair societies. This is one of the reasons why Nair patriarchy constructs their women as nave, child-like beings devoid of any

agency that can contribute towards building/ maintaining let alone resisting social norms. In fact, most Nair women are even named with the common suffix of Kutty that can be roughly translated to mean female child. Actually das too was named as Madhavikutty, literally remaining child of Madhav (coincidently Madhav her husbands name) till her death. Thus, the promotion of Marumakkathayam, the arranged marriage of women to older men within the Nair caste, along with literally naming women as Kutty (child) .It suggests the hegemonic role adopted by Nair patriarchy to produce a gendered Nair woman. For instance, my grandmother was given the name Kunjukutty (transl. small child). She was known as Kunjukutty till she died at age eighty one. Nair women in Kerala by always associating them to the helpless victim. They are devoid of any agency to perform reactive action (and thus any act for the self) to oppression (the woman lives, labors and dies for patriarchy). While its true that Nair women or man binary in terms of a parent or child relationship. The women are made to believe that they need to constant supervision lest they inadvertently violate their own caste codes. For instance, in a chapter entitled Calcuttas Cocktail Season Dass husband is seen to assume the paternal role in their marriage You are always a child in my eyes, Amy, he said, you may play around with love but be choosy about your playmates. I do not want you ever to get hurt in your life (Das 151).

The patriarchal conception of the nature and role of women in a Nair society is a conception that governs attitudes and social practices. That imposes on its women an immense burden of fear that limits expression, a turning away from oneself, which in turn is misread as being good. For example, Dass conception of a relationship and marriage greatly differed from other Nair women in her family who often suffered Das wonders how life would be if she was to follow the normative rules set forth by her caste

I would be a middle-class house wife, and walk along the vegetable shop carrying a string bag and wring faded chappals on my feet. I would beat my children and then make my thin children and make them scream out for mercy. I would wash my husbands cheap underwear and hang it out to dry in the balcony like some kind of national flag, with wifely pride (Das 96).

Most of her female relatives lived their lives in the fashion described above, Das would rebel against these prescriptive behavior patterns that ideology dictated her to follow. For her mother and grandmother timidity helped to create an illusion of domestic harmony which satisfied the relatives and friends (Das 5). For Dass mother, such timidity, was the response to fear of the hegemonic patriarchal norms that plotted her destiny She was afraid of her father and afraid of

her uncle, the two men who plotted and conspired to bring her a husband who was to provide her with children .Dass mother did not fall in love with her father rather, she simply obeyed him to keep up the faade of a good marriage. After the wedding he made her remove all the gold ornaments from her person, all except the managlsutra. To her it must have seemed like taking to widows weeds, but she did not protest. This lack of protest (due to fear) coupled with the historical (false) conception of the Nair women to have agency leads to oppression of the female subject in Dass text and connotes the general condition of Nair women in Kerala. The commitment to be a good Nair woman required Dass mother to hold up such a dissimilar and horribly mismated marriage which expresses a lack of resistance to Nair patriarchys ethical project. Most Nair women accept/imitate this patriarchal law/custom and lived the rest of their lives in misery. A questioning child, Das too is oft told by her immediate family to follow the norms of society to be a good Nair woman. However, Dass claim that she was drunk with power and spoke her mind strikes an opposition exactly to the submission of that of her mothers or as figuratively represented in her mute great grand aunt Ammalu .It was not seemly for a Nair child to call an aged relative by name but I called her Ammalu. She could not protest anyway. Das advocates the exhibition of the autonomy to act in ways that suggests that gendered and castist norms. Such as the need to uphold the family name should be

transgressed if they challenge individual freedom. Thus while lack of protest and timidity are fully imbricates with Nair societal and patriarchal values. The sense of pleasure that Kamala Das is able to grasp in her relationships echoes the subjects desire for and an investment in behavior that the self has deemed necessary for resistance. Defining and delineating an ethos that is structured around constructs and performances of sexually-saturated and oppressive notions such as loyalty and fidelity to a marriage that she was forced into. Das claims that such notions composes not an investment in the self but rather supports the hegemonic social constructs. In My Story, Dass resistance to societal norms becomes an alternative ethics to the construction of good and evil, and it involves a commitment to the self as opposed to compliance for societal approval. Dealing with the flop marriage in the conventional sense between Das and her elderly husband. My Story examines the crumbling fabric of their marriage and Dass resistance to fit into the slot of the silent victim that Nair caste ideology proposes for its women. After two years of being married, Das harbors few illusions about her relationship with her husband. In chapter 22, Das narrates the brutal shock she receives from her husband during their wedding night when she claims again and again he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali drums throbbed dully (Das 79). Das becomes pregnant almost immediately and she delivers a boy by the time she was eighteen.

Das confesses that initially she had no power to resist the parent/child register that she and her husband find themselves, because she was indeed a child (fifteen) when she got married. Of her arranged marriage, Das tells her reader that My life had been planned and its course charted by my parents and relatives. I was to be the victim (Das 85). In fact, at first, the fifteen year old Das wanted to reproduce a father figure in her husband, and in the process rebukes him for not assuming the socially produced codes of behavior. Das writes of their first encounter during their engagement

My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not know what sexual desire meant, not having experienced it even once. Dont you feel any passion for me, he asked me. I dont know, I said simply and honestly (Das 95). During this stage, Das first defines her relationship with her husband as one of lack I felt that his love was never to be mine (Das104) and I felt lost and unwanted (Das126). At the same time, Das promotes her husband/father-figure to the level of regal supremacy, underlining his paternal connection My husband came from a joint family and had several young cousins who liked to flock around him admiringly (Das 90). And later, this regal sentiment is captured in the image Das portrays when she claims Whenever I lay clutching my husbands feet at night, I

felt that his love was never to be mine (Das 104). Nonetheless, the moment her husband exhibits a lack of authority, when taking her into his confidence for the first time tells her how his new superior was unreasonably brutal with him. Das is able to express a disobedience to the Oedipalization she initially finds herself in, and the emotional response she is able to muster up is that of sympathy I felt very sorry for him all of a sudden (Das 194). Later, she is able to reach a point of assertion to resist the parent-child relationship with her husband as unnecessary All commandments engraved on the columns of my mind gradually faded, the fierce winds rising out of the Ganges devoured their words and I changed into a disobedient daughter(Das 153). Das learns that for her husband, holding on to his job at the Reserve Bank was what was most valuable, more than anything else. It was and this had become the very essence of the conflicts between them. In My Story Das succeeds in eliciting the traditional gender family roles ascribed to Nair subjects, undermining the structures that we used to support the creation and maintenance of Nair Patriarchal hegemony. A major step in pursuing this sense of self by Das is attained while challenging the parent or child and man or women binary that Das and her husband initially enters by virtue of their managed marriage. Typical feminist readings would dispense with a villainous role to the husband character in My Story that represents patriarchies oppressive aspects.

Das is keen on being deliberately slippery in her representation of the role she assigns to her husband in My Story. Dass portrayal of her husband in My Story is an ambiguous on the one hand Dass husband stands for patriarchy, he is her older Nair cousin, marries her when she is fifteen, treats her as a child and is also sexually aggressive with her. This lack of attention to marital fidelity, one of the most crucial elements of the Nair civil marriage places as and her husband at odds with Nair patriarchal conventions. Also we are told by Das that she discusses her desire for other women, particularly the medical doctor who takes care of her at the hospital with her husband I kept telling my husband that I was love with the doctor and he said, it is all right she is a women, and she will not exploit you(Das 152).Later on in the text we learn of the sexual scenario where Das and her husband enjoy sexual pleasure. However, this time Das also acknowledges the need to recognize gender as one that does not pre-exist discourse. In My Story, Das illustrates the performative nature of gender when she describes the sexual pleasure she is able to enjoy when wearing mens clothing During my nervous breakdown there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical but during my illness I shed my shyness and for the first time is my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing (Das 126).

In Dass attempt to present subversive performance of gender. Das also succeeds challenge our reading o the husband figure as we begin to negotiate our understanding of the stability of gender practices. Thus in her performances Das is able to make visible gender norms prescribed by the Nair patriarchy by revealing how she gets constructed into a gendered discourse. Dass freedom doesnt merely encompass sexual freedom, but also engages all of the freedom to create the self in resistance to socially constructed interpellation.She unpacks the ways in which marriage, romance and sexuality become processes for hegemonic constructions, blinding the self processes of immaturity and acceptance of social norms. Thus if Nair patriarchy has been made to see itself, or more accurately to see itself others see it. It has now reached a moment where it cannot portray itself as either benign or normal and thus patriarchy must now reckon with its own history of aggression and hegemony. By rendering Nair patriarchy in Keralas social space visible, Das challenges both its invisibility and its outspoken claims to an essential superiority. Therefore, by making the privileged nature of Nair patriarchy that continues to plague Kerala visible. She succeeds in exposing the performitivity of gender as she subverts its naturalization.

Conclusion
Kamala Das wrote her autobiography My Story in 1976. Das locates the origin of her autobiography in the confessional impulse attending the deathbed. Dass intention of emptying of all the secrets (Das, Preface) reminds one of the definitions of autobiography. Her wish for a Scrubbed-out conscience (Das, Preface) prepares the reader for representations of sinful or immoral subjects. In My Story, Das tells her personal in and outside marriage and her living. Nair matriarchal rural South India after inheriting her ancestral home. Chapters in My Story are short. Each of them is about three or four pages. It is fragmented and not in chronological orders like most womens autobiographies. It is typically all about Dass domestic life, her relations with her parents and her close relatives, her husband and her lovers. Das talks about the domestic details of food, familial relations, marriage, sexual liaisons and the internal and external struggles of women in a repressive world. She also talks about her struggles in public life as a poet. Das tries to remain a centre of her story. Dass autobiography as a document expressing the writers own ambiguity as a woman asserting subjective power in a traditional Nair patriarchal society. Her female subjects make an effort to change the notions of what is female or feminine is Kerala tradition. Dass writing and life show the anger, rage, rebellion of a women struggling in a Castle- dominated mens world. Kerala women suffer

because of inequalities and social oppression. The families arrange the marriages of Kerala women very young. They thus many men they have not met before. They then move to their husbands, parents home, where they are essentially servant. Traditionally the Nair women lived in their own Tharavadu and the husbands visited often. But after the colonization the tradition changed and patriarchal system brought to Kerala. In My Story Das describes her ancestral home in Malabar which in called the Nalappattu house and the women who are living in that house. And the Nair caste ideology, which regulates the lives of women in Kerala. Generally in autobiographies that are written by women, the central theme is the relationship between the author and her mother. However, Das doesnt prefer to talk about her relation with her mother. Das focuses her relation with men to the centre of her story. Only in first chapter there is some information about her relation with her father and mother. She describes her father as a man always busy with his work. He is not very affectionate to his family. Das also married at the age of fifteen. It is an arranged marriage by her parents. Dass only expectation from her husband is conversation, companionship and warmth. But all she gets in her marriage is brutality and rudeness. Here it is seen that Das criticizes the oppression. Dass autobiography can be read as a critique of the victimization of the women in a Nair patriarchal society. Das realize the powerlessness of the female

body and she believes that for the victimized women in a patriarchal society. She wants to get a divorce but at the same time she knows it is impossible.

I could not admit to all that my marriage had flopped. I could not return to home to the Nalappattu house, a divorce, for these had been goodwill between our two families for three generations which I didnt want to ruin. My parents and other relatives were observed with public opinion and bothered excessively with our societies reaction to any action of an individuals broken marriage was distasteful, as horrifying as an attack of leprosy. (Das 102) When Das wishes to begin writing, her husband supports her decision to increase the familys income. Actually writing is not acceptable for a woman by the society. Women were expected to confine themselves to the realm of the kitchen and a woman had to prove herself to be a good wife, a good mother, before she could become anything else. Because of these, Das could not use the morningtill- night schedule. She had to wait until nightfall after her family had gone to sleep and would write until morning. Das becomes an active agent in searching for the desire. The sexuality that Das explores outside marriage is defined in a patriarchal society to the advantage of men. Her stories about her extra marital affairs are also talks about her extra

marital affairs are also talks about male abuse. Thus in the narrative of her most intense affair, she questions the hurting nature of relationship. Years after all of it had ended, I asked myself why. I took him as my lover, fully aware of his incapacity to love. I needed security perhaps it was necessary for my body to defile itself in many ways. So that the soul turned humble for a change (Das 184). On the other hand, Das able to stand outside the tradition in the women centered matriarchy of Nalappattu house. She can question the abused patriarchal that she has not read the prestigious report of the rural credit survey committee she answers, But I let you make love to me every night, isnt that enough?(Das 128). The relationship between the male and female often an economic exchange. Women lets husband make love with her, the man provides a shelter and material security (Das 114). The past Nair women enjoyed a small degree of power and autonomy within the tharavadu. The decision making was always centered on the karnavar. She shows evidence of the concept of the Karnavar as king My grand uncle Narayana Menon was a famous poet, philosopher he looked every inch a king (Das 15). My Story demonstrates that the pervasiveness of the ideology of the Nair women as a historical model. The model of self assertion has little or no direct connection to its living counterpart.

Dass relation against the Nair cast ideology which regulates the lives of sexuality valuable assets. A commodity that exchange with whomever they deem fit, most often with much older male relative in order to safeguard the family properly. Marriage meant nothing more than a show of wealth to families like ours. It was enough proclaim to the friends that the father had spent half a lakh on its preparation. The bride was unimportant and her happiness a minor issue (Das 87). Das shares everything with her readers, good and bad. She chooses to confess everything by writing rather than going to priest. She shares everything about her life with all the secrets that should not be openly expressed in her society. She writes her autobiography to take control of her life and yet power in a cast dominated patriarchal society. Despite the fact that she criticized by many people for doing an exceptional thing for a women. She becomes very successful. Das becomes a mirror for the other silenced women. She manages to speak the unspeakable instead of them.

Bibliography
Arunima G. There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matrliny in Kerala, Malabar.New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1940. Das. Kamala. My Story. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1988. Dinesen. V.Imagining Nuclear Family, Kerala Experience, Payyannur: Malabar, 1995. Iyyengar Srinivasa K. R, Indian Writing in English: New Delhi Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 1985. Madhavikutty, Nalappattu. Ente Katha. Kottayam: DC Books, 2007. Namboothiripad E.M.S. Kerala: Society and Politics. New Delhi: National Book Centre, 1984. Satchidanandhan K, Transcending the Body ,Only The Soul Knows How to Sing.