“Death, that awful thug”

Revisiting the late poems of Kamala Das

01 October, 2015

KAMALA DAS, BORN IN 1934, was arguably one of India’s finest poets in English and Malayalam. She became known to Malayali readers by her pen name, Madhavikutty, and on converting to Islam in her final years took the name of Kamala Surayya. As a member of a landed Nair aristocracy, Das, in her writing, projected a modern, urban, bohemian self that was dismissive of social mores. Her conversion, allegedly the result of a marriage with a younger Muslim man, seemed to embody the multiple paradoxes that characterised her life. Was she a radical poet, or a conservative performing a transgressive identity through her writing and life?

Since her death, in 2009, most of her writing in English has been reissued in India, allowing us to discover once again the intensity, as well as the repetition, in her work. It is wonderful to have her Selected Poems, published in 2014 with a superb introduction by the literary scholar Devindra Kohli, that provides an intellectual history of modern Indian poetry. A number of the poems in Tonight This Savage Rite: The Love Poems of Kamala Das and Pritish Nandy, reissued in 2010 after first being published in 1979 as an experiment counterpointing two distinct new voices in poetry, are reproduced in Selected Poems. The issue of this new edition is justified by its inclusion of some evocative graphics by the modernist artist Manu Parekh. Wages of Love: Uncollected Writings of Kamala Das, released in 2013, consists of short stories, one-act plays, and slight essays such as her refutation of the novelist Khushwant Singh’s allegation that she put out a self-promoting news story about being nominated for the Nobel Prize. It reminds us how so much of Kamala Das’s writing verges on mawkishness, self-regard and banality. This book, in particular, is of historical rather than literary value.

However, her late poems, collected in the posthumously published 2009 volume Closure: Some Poems and a Conversation, are remarkable. In them, Das adopts a mode of ironic repetition, and the recurrent themes of her work over three decades surface: tradition, femininity, lust and abandon. The restaging of these familiar themes is inflected by a wry irony: “could a flamboyant past/ spawn this dowdy form?” she asks in the poem ‘End of Youth’. There is also the strength of a life lived on its own terms, on show in her poem ‘No Envy’.

Perched on the very edge

of life, and wearied

by it all

do I envy any mortal

the pleasures his youth

may earn for him:

no, no, truly

I don’t.

the literary historian paul fussell has written with great eloquence, in the context of English poetry on the First World War, about irony in the face of immeasurable loss, as the flower of English youth went from their mansions and public schools into the trenches. An aristocracy, schooled in rigid social hierarchies and freed from work by wealth from the colonies, suddenly found itself at a loss for words in the squalor of the trenches. Trained in restraint, irony became these writers’ default mode of relating to too much of reality.

Arguably, the Nair elite in Malabar saw the twentieth century through the tropes of loss: the loss of caste status, of inherited land, of a matrilineal way of life and, finally, of a sense of inherent superiority. They projected the Malayali Nair imagination, through literature and film, redolent with nostalgia, as a universal condition. Das inherited this aesthetic, and made it her own.

In 1932, the president of the All Kerala Nair Association, Ramavarma Thampan, announced at its annual meeting that the whole world should become Nair, since the Nair “was the epitome of humanity itself.” Within a decade, this self-absorption had been undermined by legislation, radical politics and reforms. The traditional ruling castes lost their land, and were pushed inexorably towards professions such as journalism, engineering, and the civil services. Travelling out and experiencing a wider geography than their backyards, they continued to look back on an imagined Kerala preserved in aspic. Those who stayed back, such as the writer MT Vasudevan Nair and the filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, burnished this narrative, and produced a male, elite, self-absorbed art that came to stand in for Malayali art throughout the country.

Nairs in the early twentieth century were an embattled class, as reform and notions of tradition came into conflict. Young Nairs and Nambudiri Brahmins turned to radical politics, to religious tradition, and to communism, in the making of a new world. However, their discussions of regeneration could not remain sequestered within an internal discourse alone. The communist party in Kerala formed a democratically elected government in 1957 that had as its major objective the restitution of land to the tiller. Its land reforms created a new class of absentee landlords, as also a massive market in land put up for sale by those reluctant to continue as farmers. With the dissolution of old land holdings came the dissolution of traditional authority, as also the dismantling of networks of patronage for temples, for the arts and for local schools. From the 1970s, the acceleration of labour migration to the Gulf countries led to the accumulation of wealth by erstwhile agricultural labourers, who then bought the lands and houses of their former overlords.

Nair women have a meal in Malabar in the early 1900s. The matrilineal system followed by the community started to come under attack from the early twentieth century on. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIBRARIES

NAIR WOMEN IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY possessed a distinct identity. The Nairs were matrilineal—property passed through the female line—and also largely matrilocal—women stayed with their brothers and children rather than with their husbands. From the late nineteenth century, there was an assiduous assault on this seeming anomaly. Judges of the colonial courts, besieged by ideas of equality between men and women back in the metropole, sought to carve out a space of unchallenged patriarchy in the colonies. Even as the rights and powers of Nair women were being curtailed, a contest began between younger and older men over authority and control of property. A gentlemen’s agreement, as it were, between Englishmen and the native elite, cleared the ground for politics, familial and otherwise, as a contest between men. It was only as late as 1975 that matrilineal inheritance was fully abolished, even though legislation in the early 1930s began the shift towards nuclear families and patrilineal inheritance.

There were other complications that arose from matrilineality, not least the absence of marriage in an institutionalised form till the early twentieth century. Among the higher echelons of Nambudiri Brahmins, only the eldest son of the family was allowed to marry, while the younger male siblings entered into liaisons with Nair women of higher classes. (The Nairs are Sudras, and this was the only instance in India of Brahmins entering into sanctioned sexual liaisons with those of the agricultural Sudra castes). The children born of such unions were not acknowledged by their Brahmin fathers. Among the Nairs themselves, women stayed on in their natal home while they had serial partners, and their children became part of the larger matrilineal household. But, with the passage of time, questions of paternity were to become a sticking point among younger men. Nair women, as much as women of other castes, also became the objects of missionary attention. The fact that they did not cover their breasts occasioned both prurience and outrage among the Victorians. Within colonial discourse, Nair femininity became a metaphor for unbridled sexuality; just as it became the target of a reforming urge among Nair men.

Kamala Das’s grand-uncle, the distinguished litterateur Nalapat Narayana Menon, produced a Malayalam translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and also wrote Rathi Samrajyam—“The Realm of the Senses”—the first manual of modern sexology in the language, influenced by the English physician and writer on sexuality, Havelock Ellis. In a sense, Das and her mother, Balamani Amma, a respected Malayalam poet in her own right, represented the twin trajectories of the Nair woman in an emergent patrilineal modernity. Balamani Amma’s poetry celebrated motherhood—a domestication of sexuality. In over 50 years of writing, she produced works such as Amma—“Mother,” published in 1934—and Mathruhridayam—“A Mother’s Heart,” her last collection of poems, released in 1988. Das’s writings looked back with nostalgia to the times when women experienced their sexuality as neither celebration nor aberration, but as a lived condition.

Kamala Das writes about the loss of the tharavadus, or family homes, in which generations lived back to back. VINAMRA AGRAWAL/ CREATIVE COMMONS

Das dredged up her matrilineal past to craft a new, uninhibited voice in an India still in the thrall of a colonial morality. She was one of the first English-language writers in India to adopt an insouciant register in her descriptions of an unrestrained life. She was not trying to shock; it was just that her tone was unfamiliar to the largely urban audience that read her work.

Devindra Kohli’s introduction to Selected Poems reprises the common reading of Das as a libertine, feminist and flower child. Few of her readers seem aware of the conservatism regarding family, marriage and tradition that undergirded her work. The debates about monogamy and patriliny that shook Kerala as she grew up are echoed in her deliberate irony towards the urgency of lust. Throughout her poems, it is as if she wished it could have been otherwise. The god Krishna is a recurring presence as a metaphor for the possibility of an ideal love.

Das, and other Nairs such as MT Vasudevan Nair and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, created what I would call the “Nair High-Modern style.” One could argue that Das was among the first generation of post-independence cosmopolitans. She lived much of her creative life in the cities of Calcutta and Bombay, where the intelligentsia of an independent India tried to forge an avant-garde modernism. Her famous soirees at her Bombay home, between 1975 and 1980, were attended both by distinguished poets, and young poets seeking distinction. She was part of a constellation of bilingual “Indo-Anglian poets,” to use the contemporary appellation, that included Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre.

She was first published at the age of 14 by PEN—Poets Essayists and Novelists, the international association of writers. In 1952, she was introduced to Nissim Ezekiel, the doyen of Indo-Anglian poetry, and their association continued with the publication of her poems in Quest, a literary and political journal he started editing in 1955. There was an archipelago of cities at the time—scattered across India, but connected through the enterprise of literary modernism—where poetry and poetry magazines bloomed under resident magi: Ezekiel in Bombay, P Lal in Calcutta, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in Allahabad, Jayant Mahapatra in Cuttack and Srinivas Rayaprol in Hyderabad.

Das was one of their kind, but her language—not adhering to classic metre or rhyme, and forging a register drawn from her bilingual inheritance—was both regional and cosmopolitan at the same time. Her work represents a vernacular cosmopolitanism that has a notion of home, and of staying at home, while travelling. This is apparent not only in the themes she writes about, but also the seemingly awkward and idiosyncratic engagement with English that marks her work.

In her third collection, The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, published in 1973, she writes, “… my blood/ So thin, so clear, so fine/ The oldest blood in the world/ That remembers as it flows.” Such assumption of aristocracy and of ancientness was one of the features of Nair modernity. In more recent times, the leading critic Bruce King, in his landmark book Modern Indian Poetry in English, has seen Das’s self-definition as an aristocrat as the basis of her seemingly natural genius as a poet; he argues that it underlay her temerity in rejecting formal metre and rhyme schemes. In short, she wrote poetry as if she were to the manner born.

As the Malayali literary critic VC Harris astutely points out in his introduction to The Old Playhouse, there are two halves of memory in Das’s poetry: the proximate and the distant. While the former comes through in Das’s mercurial, intense, ironic style while speaking of love and loss—the “address,” as Harris puts it, is to “you,” “he,” “him”—the latter works through the trope of nostalgia and reflects on time past: village, grandmother, ancestral home. Her local cosmopolitanism is ever-present in both her language and form as she bends English to her bilingual rhythms, an endeavour that is only partially captured by what King describes as the “Indianisation of English.” In the innocuously titled poem ‘An Introduction,’ she speaks of the multilingual inheritance that constantly attends upon her writing in English: “I am Indian, very brown, born in/ Malabar, I speak three languages, write in/ Two, dream in one.”

THEMES OF LOVE, LUST AND BETRAYAL pervade Das’s last collection of poems, but they have also recurred in all her poems since 1973. In that sense, Closure (which I draw upon for the rest of this essay) is both a culmination and a condensation of her oeuvre. It can be argued that these are universal subjects, but seeing Das’s treatment of them as a Nair woman allows us also to understand the particular role of history and individuality in her life.

These poems pose an urgent set of questions: is passion a legacy that one inherits, a perception that one holds, or an irreducibly personal choice one makes? In Das’s life, these three themes were inextricably woven together as each act of passion also bore the historical record of a putative Nair promiscuity—the ghost of a tradition past attendant at every mating, as it were. But eventually, the decay of the body, and its eccentric behaviour as it ages, resists attempts at either its control or its rejection.

In ‘The Roosting Time,’ Das writes, “I am a series of/ emptiness/ assembled/ without care”. The lines invoke the individual’s uncertain hold on what seems truly hers—her memory of the past. Memory is created by history, a relentless force that leaves a wake of debris for the individual to collect and burnish. Das, coldly and rationally, asks the poignant question of what it means to feel evacuated of memory, or of the ability to have memories. This is a peculiarly elite Nair position: a disaffection arising from being done in by history.

Apart from history is the question of posterity. Her children, as Das would have it, have become—to use a phrase from ‘The Roosting Time’—“strange foes,” whose only use for the past is to whet present resentment, carrying in their scabbards “sharpened words.” Balamani Amma’s evocative renditions of blessed motherhood are ages away: in Das’s poems, neither she nor her children have lived up to the sentimentality invoked by filial duty. Under matriliny, one’s children were undeniably one’s own, since fatherhood was never a valued commodity, and was very often repudiated, particularly by Nambudiri fathers seeking to disown their Sudra offspring. Yet, the children were also members of a larger household, recipients of a dispersed love, and subject to the authority of the eldest male—the karnavan.

Within the emerging paradigm of patriliny, male children turned against older women, and against their own siblings, whom they saw as antagonists in the struggle for the inheritance of property. “Strange foes” indeed—destined to be so, living outside the intimacy and quarrels of matrilineal life, and later, as adolescents in a modern world, seeking to differentiate themselves from their parents through conflict and separation. Having children becomes “a series of emptiness”, a series of evacuations and castings off. What one can call one’s own is only the inevitable and intimate sense of the decay of one’s body, divested of lust and passion and, in the end, more flesh than gender.

If one is lucky, death precedes ageing. One of the consequences of Kerala’s model of development—in which access to health, education and prosperity are taken as indices of progress—has been rising life expectancy. This fact, coupled with the vestiges of matrilineal inheritance, has created a landscape of ageing women in both urban and rural areas. In an earlier age, growing old came with the advantages of increased respect, and a position as the head of the household. Now, age is coupled with decrepitude, senility and abandonment. What redeems a life devoid of power or sentiment? Is it love, or at least the possibility of love?

Das’s poem ‘Radha’s Dream’ recalls Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama, who was tricked into adultery with the king of the gods, Indra, and cursed for having abandoned herself to lust. She writes of “a woman doomed to live as stone”. If deception lay at the beginning of Ahalya’s story, in Das’s case it was reserved for the end. Waking again at a touch after an aeon of “slowly moving/ towards old age”, she discovers transient pleasure, deception and betrayal. Kamala Surayya’s romance and conversion to Islam was to end in the realisation that love was not merely the embrace of two persons. Her betrayal by her last lover leads the poet to wonder: “was paradise to be/ yet another dream?”

There is also the “blissful nonchalance” of age, where one learns to let go and live outside the prison of the body and its emotions. As Das says in ‘On Ageing,’ “No hate is worthy of conserving/ Bitterness, I realise/ is also an illness”. She seems to be referring to the tharavadus, or family homes, in which generations lived back to back, storing resentment like pearls within their flesh, and to the persistent animosity that structured kinship, with its narrow aspirations of inheritance. One waits, aware of mortality and knowing that one will be mugged by “Death, that awful thug.” There is nothing one holds back from death, because there is nothing to give.

THE MOVEMENT AWAY from matriliny took many routes. The nuclear family was one, mundane, resolution to its conflicts. There were higher paths to the same end: Marxism, religion and literature. The Nair was called upon to become something more than a regional aberration, to participate in national citizenship and Hindu life. Das resisted this imperative, both because of her affinity to Nehruvian secularism, and as someone who believed that passion and connection was all.

PK GOPINATH / EXPRESS ARCHIVE PHOTO

The disintegration wrought by an era soaked poetry with sadness. In ‘The Family Home,’ Das writes, “We tore the house apart,/ Sold the rosewood beams/ and a host of great dreams”. Rather than death, here history, in its casual brutality, is the “awful thug” casting hoarded dreams into the backwash of progress. What was once the texture of life is now rendered mere heritage—a bad bargain for a purchaser interested in price rather than value. What seemed like forever to the residents of the dark, brooding tharavadus was merely the dead and disposable past to the upstart and the parvenu. As people fled to cities “safe from snakes and rodents”, unmoored from shrines and worship, what was left were memories: of corridors, of ponds, and the faint, clinging smell of burnt incense. “When life tires us out/ we hunger for the house lost,” Das writes in ‘The Family Home.’

It was either nostalgia or acceptance that allowed Das to cope. She relied on the possibility of converting her weakness into strength rather than despair, as evidenced in ‘Timepiece’: “I never learnt/ to compromise”, and “I am hard as a nail/ on the cross”. Being ordinary is the only refuge against tragedy; the ordinary merely suffer, their sufferings don’t take on the guise of tragedy. ‘Timepiece’ goes on: “If I marry an ordinary man/ I had hoped I would become/ ordinary,/ insulated against scorn”. Being ordinary is not a gift granted to many, for most of us seek to live a life less mediocre, less banal. Das ends the poem thus: “All searches are wayward/ there is grace/ only in repose”.

Das affirms a belief in the grace of routine, of the rounds of daily life, as Icarus dashes to earth somewhere on the horizon, just out of sight. In ‘Fame,’ she writes that “fame is merely the smoke/ the kitchen-chimney emits/ when you cook a meal”. Would having been a “lesser poet” made of the poet a “better woman”? What drives Das to sentimentalise the ordinary? Is it the pressure of fame, and the censure that is hurled on one’s desire for novelty? Or is it that Das never knew what it was to be ordinary? Asserting that “life is sorrow” is, however, a leap towards understanding and greatness. As Das muses in the last poem in Closure, it is only by recognising the credo of the “Buddhist monk”—that the world is undergirded by sorrow—that one begins to understand inevitability: the grace of acceptance.


Dilip M Menon is a historian and literary critic. He holds the Mellon Chair in Indian Studies at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.