Short Biography of Kamala Das
Kamala Das(1934- 2009),she was a leading figure in Indian English literature, her Malayalam pen name Madhavikutty, Muslim name Kamala Surayya. She was Indian author who wrote openly and frankly about female sexual desire and the experience of being an Indian woman. She was a part of a generation of Indian writers whose work centred on personal rather than colonial experiences, and her short stories, poetry, memoirs, and essays and a number of articles brought her respect and notoriety in equal measures. She wrote in both languages,mostly poetry in English and also for south Indians in Malayalam under the pen name Madhavikutty.
She was born into a high class family. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, she was a well-known poet and her father, V.M. Nair, he was an automobile company executive and a journalist in our country. She grew up in what is now Kerala and in Calcutta where her father had been worked. She started writing poetry when she was a child and another turning point came into her life when she was only 15 years old, she married Madhava Das, a banking executive senior to her and both of them (wife and husband) moved to Bombay. There she gave the births of three sons and she did her writing at Meet extraordinary women who dared to bring gender equality and other issues to the forefront that time in the society. She had been walking through darkside of her life and in that way, she got immense experiences of different issues. By experiences, she gained high confidence to speak freely and frequently about sexual desire and other issues of women across the country.
Her collections of poetry as Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), and The Old Playhouse, and Other Poems (1973). Subsequently, her English language works included the novel Alphabet of Lust (1976) and the short stories “A Doll for the Child Prostitute” (1977) and “Padmavati the Harlot” (1992). Notable among her many Malayalam short-story collection as Thanuppu (1967; “Cold”) and Balyakalasmaranakal,1987; (“Memories of Childhood”). Her best-known work was an Autobiography, was first appeared as a series of columns in the weekly Malayalanadu, in Malayalam as Ente Katha (1973) and finally in English as My Story (1976).Fortunately, it came to be regarded as a classic work. In later life, she said that parts of the book were fictional(1999), she controversially converted to Islam,she changed herself as Kamala Surayya. She received many literary awards including the Asian World Prize for Literature in 1985. A long period, Indian English literature was dominated by Kamala Das, made records of her literary life.
