Madhavikutty

The following article was initially published in The New York Times by  MARGALIT FOX ,  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 em...

The following article was first published in theguardian.com Kamala Das, who has died aged 75, was a renowned Indian poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and memoirist. She was also known as Madhavikutty, the pseudonym she used when writing in the Malayalam language. Then there was Ami, the pet name with which she referred to herself in her memoirs. Much later in life, she gave herself yet another name, Suraiyya, to mark her conversion to Islam. Straddling many names was one way in which Das straddled multiple identities. She was born into a literary family. Her mother, Balamani Amma, was a well-known Malayalam poet and her great-uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, was a writer and translator. Das was home-schooled and most of her education came through extensive reading. Her childhood was divided between Punnayurkulam, her ancestral village in Kerala, in the south-west, and the north-eastern city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), where her parents lived. This early lesson in disloca...