Madhavikutty

Kamla Das was born (March 31,1934) in a Nair family. She hails from the Southern Malabar in Kerala.  She opened her eyes in the beautiful lap of nature and blossomed beside a fathomless sea. As her  autobiography reveals her maiden name is Madhavikakutty. She attended a European school in  Kolkata then the elementary school at Punnayurkulam (her birth place) and then a boarding school  run by the Roman Catholic nuns. At the Catholic boarding school, she got ill and sent back to Kolkata where private tutors were engaged to teach her fine arts.  She was nurtured in an autocratic atmosphere in her home. About her parents’ and their relationship she reveals, “My mother did not fall in love with my father. They were dissimilar and horribly mismatched”1.But her mother’s timidity created an illusion of  domestic harmony and produced some half a dozen children of swarthy skin and ordinary features. Her parental home was influenced by the movement of Gandhi an...

Among the Indian writers of English, there are not many to whom English is as natural a medium of expression in both prose and poetry as it is to Kamala Das(1934-2009). The sixties of the twentieth century saw a poet writing in English from India and in Indian English and writing as a woman on the themes and issues that directly related to women.Bold, free, frank and unconventional in expression and resentment and protest about how the male-world has abused the female body and restricted its freedom of the soul , she made poetry the very instrument with which much could be achieved .Poetry to her was a tool to work towards freedom. . Not immediately, adequately, sympathetically evaluated and appreciated, this poet being a woman herself made it her mission to expose the hypocrisy of the husband-wife relationship in the Hindu society - almost a manipulative and coercive practice to keep woman subjugated in all matters including the area of sex life. There is in her poetry an awareness ...

K amala Das lends a new dimension to her love poetry by revealing her kinship with an anterior Indian tradition which has its roots in Indian epics. Apart from this, her Nayar background not only provides a suitable background but also strengthens the confessional streak of her poetry. Thus the significant aspect of her love poetry is the merger of two traditions – the Indian and the western. It is in this light that an attempt is made here to examine Kamala Das’ love poetry. Search for love is the principal preccupation of Kamala Das’ poetry. She confesses with utmost candour that she “began to write poetry with the ignoble aim of wooing a man”.1 As a result love becomes the pervasive theme and it is through love that she endeavours to discover herself. As she concerns herself with various facets of love, her love poetry can be divided into two phases. While in the first phase her obsessive concern with physical love is quite prominent, in the second; her drift towards ideal...