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ShareWriters usually do not get a state funeral, complete with a gun salute. Kamala Das did. Her body was flown from Pune to Thrissur, Kochi, Alappuzha, Kollam and finally to Thiruvananthapuram, allowing her countless admirers to pay their last respects, and bringing to a fitting end the tale of Kamala Das, alias Madhavikutty, alias Kamala Suraiyya.
Her burial on Tuesday at the Palayam Juma Masjid concluded the story of Kamala, the legend behind My Story, her celebrated and controversial autobiography written at 42.
And true to the legend, right after the state funeral, Hindu fundamentalists protested that she should have been cremated, not buried. 'Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better/ Still, be Madhavikutty.
It is time to/ Choose a name, a role.' That was the young Kamala, starting out on her life as a poet and writer. She never did choose. She lived many lives in one. With a healthy disdain for "categorisers" she strode through life, exploring love, womanhood, poetry, art, sensuality, beauty and devotion in myriad ways. 'Dress in sarees, be girl/ Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,/ Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,/ Belong...'
She didn't fit in, but she belonged. She made a space for herself in the hearts of millions as Madhavikutty the author in Malayalam and Kamala Das the poet in English. Her sincerity and sensitivity, her talent for expressing complex sentiments simply, and her unsettling, bewildering honesty made her not just a literary icon (she was even nominated for the Nobel) but a woman whom readers deeply loved.
Long before chick lit was dreamt of, she gave it a voice -- through My Story, her columns, poems and fiction. For her, there was hardly any difference in degree or validity between divine or erotic love, between lawful domestic love and forbidden adulterous love. Only honesty mattered. 'Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of/ Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,/ The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your/ Endless female hungers.'
Along with this in-your-face sexuality, Kamala Das's poetry brims with devotion. She worshipped as a Hindu, drawing on imagery from the intangible Brahma to the loveable, kissable Krishna. So when she converted to Islam at 65 and started writing poems for "Ya Allah" as His slavish handmaiden, it shocked everyone. Kamala Suraiyya said she liked the orthodoxy of Islam: "Freedom had become a burden for me. I want guidelines to regulate and discipline my life. I want a master to protect me." Had she converted for the love of a Muslim scholar? Kamala never denied being in love at any age.
So controversies never left her alone. They hounded her when she wrote as a sexually aware woman, when she started painting (mostly nude women) in her fifties, when she converted to Islam, when she stopped painting nude women and put on the burkha, when she decided to gift part of her family property to the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, when she left Kerala to live with her youngest son in Pune a couple of years ago.
Even when she won the Ezhuthachan Award, Hindu fundamentalists objected to the name of the creator of Adhyatma Ramayanam being associated with Kamala Suraiyya who wrote about lust. "It is the ranting of jealous people," she scoffed. "I write about love. If love is a rose, lust is its fragrance."
Very few can love with the passion that Kamala Das had. Her affection and honesty made her very special. I was deeply privileged to have received her very generous affection, and her trust as she shared her poems even from her sickbed. We published her last poems, as beautiful as ever, in The Little Magazine in April. But the lines in my head are of a feisty young Kamala: 'I am sinner,/ I am saint. I am the beloved and the/ Betrayed.'
Antara Dev Sen is Editor, The Little Magazine.
