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Kamala Das, Indian Poet and Daring Memoirist, Dies at 75


The following article was initially published in The New York Times by JUNE 9, 2009

Kamala Das, a prominent Indian poet, memoirist and short-story writer whose work was known for its open discussion of women’s sexual lives, a daring subject when she began publishing in midcentury, died on May 31 in Pune, India. She was 75.

The cause was respiratory failure, her doctor told the news service United News of India.

A prolific writer, Ms. Das composed most of her poetry in English. Most of her fiction, which appeared under the pen name Madhavikutty, was written in her native Malayalam, a non-Indo-European language spoken primarily in the South Indian state of Kerala.

She wrote several memoirs, the most famous of them, “My Story,” written in English and published in 1976. In it, Ms. Das recounts her childhood in an artistic but emotionally distant family; her unfulfilling arranged marriage to an older man shortly before her 16th birthday; the emotional breakdowns and suicidal thoughts that punctuated her years as a young wife and mother; her husband’s apparent homosexuality; and the deep undercurrent of sexual and romantic yearning that ran through most of her married life.

Originally serialized in an Indian journal, “My Story” is organized into 50 fragmentary chapters. In a detached, dreamlike voice, Ms. Das tells of her husband’s brutish sexual inadequacy and her own lifetime of desire, often unrequited but sometimes consummated in affairs with other men and occasionally with women.

For decades a public figure in India, Ms. Das by many accounts embraced both controversy and contradiction. Championed by feminists for writing about women’s oppression, she declined to be identified as a feminist herself. She ran unsuccessfully for a seat in India’s Parliament in 1984 but later turned away from political life. Born to a prominent Hindu family, she converted to Islam in 1999 and for a time called herself Kamala Suraiya. Highly publicized, her conversion drew criticism, for a diverse array of reasons, from Hindus, Muslims and feminists.

In her nonfiction, Ms. Das could be a deliberately, and an artfully, unreliable narrator. Though “My Story” caused a sensation in India when it first appeared, she presents its most sensational material obliquely. In Ms. Das’s quiet, measured telling, many passages about her romantic encounters could reflect inward, unrequited longing as easily they could outward reality.

“She’s always consistently being inconsistent,” Rosemary Marangoly George, an associate professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “She had many poems and many interviews where she talked about the oppression of the marriage, and then others where she talked about her husband and how much she loved him and how much he loved her and how much she missed him when he died.”


Critical opinion of Ms. Das is similarly hard to pin down. Some critics hail her as a major figure in world letters; others dismiss her as a comparative lightweight whose work is solipsistic at best, salacious at worst.

“The male critics saw her as titillating, writing this trashy stuff,” said Professor George, who has written studies of Ms. Das’s work. “And the feminist critics said, ‘No, she’s protesting patriarchy, and the sexual content is part of this protest.’ ”

Ms. Das was born on March 31, 1934, in Malabar, a district in South India. Her maiden name, taken by tradition from her mother’s side, was Nalapat. Her father, V. M. Nair, was a journalist who became an automobile company executive. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, was a distinguished Malayalam poet, as was a maternal uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon.

Reared mostly in Calcutta, she was educated privately before her marriage to Madhava Das, a bank official perhaps 20 years her senior. She began writing seriously in her 20s, and for years afterward, as she recounted in “My Story,” sat night after night at the dining table, long after her husband and three sons had gone to sleep, writing “until it was 5 and the milkman clanked at the gate, with his cycle and his pails.”

Ms. Das’s husband died in the 1990s; information on survivors could not be confirmed.

Among Ms. Das’s short-story collections available in English translation are “Padmavati the Harlot” and “The Sandal Trees,” whose title story centers on a tender, decades-long love affair between two women. Her poetry collections include “Summer in Calcutta,” “The Descendants” and “The Old Playhouse and Other Poems.”

Like her prose, Ms. Das’s poetry often concerned desire and its discontents. In “Herons,” from the 1960s, she wrote:

On sedatives

I am more lovable,

says my husband ...

My speech becomes a mistladen terrain

the words emerge, tinctured with sleep,

they rise from the still coves of dreams

in unhurried flight like herons

and,

my ragdoll limbs adjust better

to his versatile lust.

He would, if he could, sing lullabies

to his wife’s sleeping soul,

sweet lullabies to thicken its swoon.

On sedatives

I am more lovable,


says my husband ...

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