Nashtapetta neelambari kamala das biography
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While remembering that period, she recalls:
During my nervous breakdown there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical….after bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men’s clothes, my husband bade me sit o his lap, fondling me and calling me his little darling boy….I was by nature shy….but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing.
Das is more or less iconoclastic in her straight discussion of sex, especially the lack of sexual fulfilment for Indian women trapped in rushed arranged marriages.
Once, a poem written by Das was given to an English girl called Shirley Temple to be read in the assembly saying that the latter wrote it. The autobiographies of Durgabai Deshmukh, Dhanvanti Rana Rao, Kamala Devi Chattopadhay had the highest honor of being awarded the Padma Bhushan for their successful public life. She chose to convert as she wanted to marry the person whom she thought loved her.
She had to sustain her effort in difficult circumstances. She witnesses many incidents of the Nair society, which reflects its true nature. It is not worth it.” It seems her love life that she envisaged remained unfulfilled till the end of her life.
Kamala Das paved the way for later woman writers to be vocal about their feelings and experiences and break the stereotypical image of an Indian woman.
Her protest is directed against the injustices and the persecution to which woman in India have always been subjected to. They were expected and taught by the senior women to be good wives. Cornelia Sorabji (1866-1954) was the first woman to be graduated. Her own mother and stepmother, who were educated, believed that education made women harsh and ambitious.
Bahinabai’s autobiography (1700) is recorded as the earliest autobiography written by an Indian woman. Her bouts of illness as well as of her children also left her devastated many a times. It was serially published in a weekly named Malayalanadu. S., Indian English Literarure, Vol-3, New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2003.
Though her parents never expressed their disappointment over their colour, but her father made them drink a monthly purgative and insisted her grandmother to apply turmeric and oil on Das’s skin. If we look into some of her poems closely, her intention becomes more explicit. She and her brother were treated very rudely by the other students. N. V. Raveendran notes about her that “the individual development in the area of women’s literature plays a vital role in shaping the sensibility of a writer”.
Her last book titled The Kept Woman and Other Stories, featuring a translation of her short was published posthumously. For her writing was a passion, with which she thought magic could be created. At a point of time when she even thought of a divorce, which she could not initiate. But domestic slavery never fulfils her freedom.
സുഭദ്രയെ അടുത്തറിയുന്ന പോലെ ഒരു തോന്നൽ നീലാംബരിയുടെ വായനയിൽ ഇപ്പോഴും ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു.