Innovative Lesson Plan

PPT on From a Railway Carriage

Kamala Das: An Introduction

One of the productive leftovers of two hundred years long British rule in India was an impressive mass of writings in English that could be conveniently described as "Indo English Literature" or Anglo- Indian Literature. Indian English literature is noted for its diversity of works from different social, political and cultural backgrounds. Different states , its  numerous cultures and languages  enrich Anglo Indian Literature to such a level that no other country in the world can be proud of  such a diversity in their literary productions. Anglo Indian writing started with Ram Mohan Roy, first great Anglo-Indian writer of prose. If Ram Mohan Roy was the first Indian to write English prose with self-confidence and masterly ease, Henry Derozio was the first of the Anglo-Indian poets. Half Indian, half Portuguese, Derozio was wholly Indian in spirit and aspired to be India's National bard. Set on roll by  Henry Derozio, Anglo Indian Literature, in general, Anglo Indian poetry in particular gave birth for many canonical figures like Don Moraes, Nisim Ezekiel, P. Lal, A.K. Ramanujan, Kamala Das and others contributed to various literary movements and phenomena which emerged from time to time like romantic poetry , confessional poetry , feminist poetry etc. Giving an estimate of contemporary Anglo-Indian poetry Amalendu Bose writes, "As a historical phenomenon, it is engrossingly  interesting that since 1947 a great deal of poetry  has been written by Indians in English; that both in quality and quality, this poetry compares very well  with the English poetry that Indians wrote from the days  of Derozio and Kashiprasad Ghose till 1947; that in both quality and quantity, this poetry perhaps compares well also with the poetry of quite a few of the current Indian languages and that this poetry is the expression of certain attitudes and values believed in by certain sections of today's Indian society, wholly urban and metropolitan, middle-class, familiar with the Euro-American world either by direct personal experience as in a derivative manner that claims the validity of direct experience. This poetry, in respect of its pervasive sense of direction as much as of it's balance-sheet of achievement, deserves the attention of the serious student of

Indian poetry."[1]

Kerala, the southernmost state of  India has the credit of being the cradle of many eminent Anglo-Indian writers like Arundathi Roy , Shashi Tharoor, Kamala Das etc… Among the writers Kamala Das, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and memoirist out-shines the others  for carving out her own niche in world literature. She finds herself among the circle of confessional  poets like  Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass.  Her noted autobiographical  work “My Story” is often equated with Lowell’s “Life Studies” , a seminal work which brought  in the new genre in poetry , popularly known as “confessional Poetry”.

Kamala Das: Life Sketch

Kamala Das, the rebel Indian English poet and the firebrand short story writer is also known as Madhavikutty, the pseudonym she used when writing in the Malayalam language. She used  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

Social Life

Kamala Das was born with a literary spoon as she was descendent of a well-known  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 Kolkata, where her parents lived. In 1949, when she was 15, she married Madhava Das, a bank official. Her experiences in different stages of life are clearly reflected in her writings throughout her life.

 In the 1980s she dabbled in painting and politics. While she attained some acclaim as an artist, her political career did not take off. She stood unsuccessfully for the Indian parliament in 1984 and later launched a short-lived political party, Lok Seva (public service).

In 1999 she took  her final acts of reinvention to  convert to Islam in 1999, a move especially bold because of her aristocratic Nair lineage.On her decision to convert to Islam, she said “"No one came home when I was a Hindu. Islam brought me friends and love. Several poor women and children come to me, they love me and I reciprocate their affections."

 In 2009, aged 75, she died at a hospital in Pune.As per her already written will her body was flown to her home state of Kerala. She was buried at the Palayam Juma Masjid at Thiruvanathapuram, Kerala with full state honor.

Writing career

During her teenage itself, she started writing and publishing. Along with other poets of her generation like Nisim Ezekiel, A. K Ramanujan, Das was at the forefront of a new movement in Indian English poetry, a shift in focus from the colonial experience to the personal. However, unlike most of her contemporaries, she was actively writing fiction in her mother tongue and English at the same time. Throughout her writing career, Das would move adroitly between genres (poetry, fiction, memoir) and languages (English and Malayalam). "I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one,"[2] she wrote in An Introduction, a poem from her first collection, Summer in Calcutta (1965). She tells about her wiring career "I started writing stories when I was 17. I wrote my first story and sent it to Mathrubhumi. It was published, and I got Rs. 12 for it, ... I would publish a story every month. My first story was a love story. I published it under the name of Madhavi Kutty (Madhavi because I was Madhava's wife, and Kutty because I was just a child) because I did not want my grandmother to know. And since then there has been no stopping me. I write about the poor and the disadvantaged. They are voiceless... little maidservants who get beaten up, little 12-year-olds fetching pails of water, who do not even get proper salaries. I wrote a story about a child prostitute after visiting a brothel. K.P. Kumaran has made it into a beautiful film."

She began to break taboos with her early poetry, in which she celebrated her sexuality and advised women to

“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 ..." – 

 (The Looking Glass, from The Descendants, 1967).

Catapulted to the limelight with her poetry, Kamala Das won a deep-seated popularity and recognition as a woman of letters with her autobiographical novel “My Story

About the open- handling of sex, love  and lust in her works , once she said “"If love is a flower, lust is its fragrance. Without love, where is lust and without lust, can life be created?" Kamala Suraiyya quotes Jayadeva's Gita Govindam. "I think of Radha and Krishna when I think of love. Life is all about various dimensions of love." 

It is noteworthy about her literary career that she has won a series of international and national literary awards like Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries , Asian Poetry Prize , Kerala Sahitya Academy Award , Ezhuthachan Puraskaram of Kerala government. As a golden feather to her literary crown, she was Nominated and shortlisted for Nobel Prize for Literature in 1984.

The  spontaneity and literary out-burst  characterize her writings. In 1984 in an interview with Shobha Wariyar for Eve's Weekly, she made the following statement: "Yes, I know, yesterday I might have been against liberation, today I am for it. Tomorrow I do not know what I would say, and how I feel".

References

1.   Kamala Das: “Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems” published by “R. Paul for Kamala Das, Orient Longman, New Delhi,1965.

2.   Kamala Das: The Old Play House and other poems, Orient Longman, New Delhi,1973.

3.   Kamala Das: “My Story”,  D C Books Publications , Kerala, 1997.

4. P.P. Raveendran, "Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das," Indian Literature 155 (May-June 1993)

5.   Das, Kamala. “An Introduction.” Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Eunice De Souza. 1997. New Delhi: Oxford U P, 2004.

6.   Eunice de Souza, Essay "Kamala Das," in Indian Poetry in English: A Critical Assessment, ed. V.A. Shahane and M. Shivaramakrishna (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1980)

7.   Pier Paolo Piciucco “Kamala Das: A Critical Spectrum”, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, New Delhi,  2001

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[1] Amalendu Bose : Contemporary Indo-Anglian Poetry

[2] “ An Introduction” from “Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems” published by “R. Paul for Kamala Das, 1965

[3] The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 199

[4] “ An Introduction” from “Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems” published by “R. Paul for Kamala Das, 1965

[5]“ An Introduction” from “Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems” published by “R. Paul for Kamala Das, 1965

[6] "The Old Playhouse" from “The Old Playhouse And Other Poems” by Kamala Das, Pub: Orient Blackswan, Mumbai, 2004

[7] Composition”  from “The Old Playhouse And Other Poems” Pub: Orient Blackswan, 2004

[8] “ An Introduction” from “Summer in Calcutta: Fifty Poems” published by “R. Paul for Kamala Das, 1965

[9] My Story : D C Books Publications , New Delhi, 1997

[10] Page-47, My Story : D C Books Publications , New Delhi, 1997

[11] Page: 90 , My Story : D C Books Publications , New Delhi, 1997

[12] Page: 93 , My Story : D C Books Publications , New Delhi, 1997

[13] P.P. Raveendran, "Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das," Indian

Literature 155 (May-June 1993)

Stevenson and Scenes from Train

Robert Louis Stevenson was a 19th century Scottish writer notable for such novels as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

In 8th Class Englsih Coursebook of SCERT, there is a beutiful poem "FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE" which describes an exciting experience of a train ride and how  the people, places and other things appears to him  from a  fast moving train.

 Some Views from Train

Kamala Das: Two Poems (In Love , The Blood)