The Nalapat house at Punnayurkulam

Balamani Amma was born on 19 July 1909 at Punnayurkulam, a village then in the Ponnani taluk of Malabar District in the Madras Presidency and today part of Thrissur district in Kerala. The village sits near the coast on the border country between present-day Thrissur and Malappuram, and it is described in both districts in different sources, though Thrissur is the standard modern attribution. Her family home was the Nalapat house, an old matrilineal household whose name she carried in her writing and which became, through her work and that of her descendants, one of the most written-about domestic settings in modern Malayalam literature. The house, its courtyard, its serpent grove, its household routines and the women who ran it supplied the imagery of a poetic career lasting more than half a century.

She grew up in the last decades of the matrilineal joint family in Kerala, an arrangement in which descent and property passed through the mother's line and several generations lived under one roof. It was a world of aunts and grandmothers and of children raised in common, and it left a lasting mark on her sense of what a poem could be about. Where much of the poetry of her time reached for myth, nationalism or romantic love, she wrote about the ordinary interior of a household, and she did so with a seriousness that persuaded readers such subjects deserved the attention.

An education without a schoolroom

She never attended school. Her education took place entirely at home, in the Nalapat house, where the family library was open to her and where two relatives guided her reading. The first was her maternal uncle, the poet and translator Nalapat Narayana Menon, a significant literary figure of his generation whose own work and translations gave her an early and unusually direct introduction to literature. The second was her great-uncle Ravi Varma Thampuran. Between them they supervised a private education in Malayalam and Sanskrit letters that proved more than sufficient; the absence of formal schooling never appears as a limitation in her published work.

Her first poem, Kooppukai, was published in 1930, when she was twenty-one. Early recognition came in a form belonging to an older order of patronage: she received the Sahithya Nipuna Puraskaram from the former ruler of Cochin, an honour that marked her arrival as a poet to be watched. She married V. M. Nair, who later became managing director of the Mathrubhumi newspaper, one of the principal institutions of public life in Malayalam-speaking India; he died in 1977. Their children were Sulochana, Mohandas, Shyam Sunder, and the writer known as Kamala Das and later as Kamala Surayya. Balamani Amma's own reputation was established well before her daughter began to publish, and the two careers are best read as separate bodies of work in different languages and registers.

A poetry of mothers and children

Her early collections appeared through the late 1930s and 1940s and set out the ground she would occupy: Kudumbini in 1936, Dharmamargathil in 1938, Sthree Hridayam in 1939, and in 1942 both Prabhankuram and Bhavanayil. Oonjalinmel followed in 1946, Kalikkotta in 1949, Velichathil in 1951, Avar Paadunnu in 1952, Pranamam in 1954, Lokantharangalil in 1955 and Sopanam in 1958. The subjects that run through them are motherhood, childhood, the bonds and frictions of family life, and the loneliness that lives inside domestic arrangements. She wrote about a mother watching a child sleep, about the ties that bind a household and about the quiet that follows when the household disperses, and she treated these as fully serious matters rather than sentimental ones.

Because of this she came to be spoken of as the Amma of Malayalam poetry, and later as its Muthassi or grandmother, an affectionate designation that recognised both her subjects and the place she had come to occupy in the literature. The title collection Muthassi appeared in 1962 and won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1965. Around it stand Mazhuvinte Katha in 1966, Ambalathilekku in 1967 and Nagarathil in 1968, a sequence in which her range widened beyond the household without abandoning it.

The later work

Her later poetry turned increasingly philosophical. Veyilaarumbol appeared in 1971, Amruthamgamaya in 1978, Sahapadikal in 1979, Sandhya in 1982, Nivedyam in 1987 and Mathruhridayam in 1988. The concerns of these books are mortality, the passage of time and the meaning that a long life accumulates, approached with the same directness of language she had always used. The domestic imagery remains, but it now carries reflection on death and on what endures. In all she published more than twenty collections, a body of work sustained across six decades and remarkable for its consistency of voice.

Honours and last years

The honours accumulated over three decades. The Sahitya Akademi Award came in 1965, the Padma Bhushan in 1987, the Asan Prize in 1989, and in 1995 both the Saraswati Samman, awarded for Nivedyam, and the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, the highest literary honour conferred by the Government of Kerala. She also received honours from the Kerala Sahitya Akademi. Few Malayalam writers of any generation have been recognised so comprehensively by literary bodies at both state and national level.

She spent the last five years of her life with Alzheimer's disease, and died in Kochi on 29 September 2004 at the age of ninety-five. Her cremation was conducted with state honours. At Punnayurkulam the Nalapat house remains the place where a girl who never went to school read her way into a language, and where the poems that made motherhood a fit subject for serious Malayalam verse first took shape.