The Nalapat House at Punnayurkulam

Punnayurkulam is a village in the northern reaches of Thrissur district, close to the coast, where old family houses sit among ponds, mango trees and paddy. It was here, on 31 March 1934, that Kamala was born, and it was here that she spent the parts of her childhood that mattered most to her imagination. The ancestral Nalapat house, with its serpent grove, its dark inner rooms and its library, became the emotional geography of her writing, a place she returned to in memory for the rest of her life and described with a longing that never quite softened into nostalgia.

She was born into a household unusually rich in literary inheritance. Her mother was the poet Balamani Amma, whose gentle, devotional Malayalam verse was widely admired; her father, V. M. Nair, was a newspaper executive who served as managing editor of a leading Malayalam daily. The Nalapat family had already produced a distinguished writer and translator in her mother's uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon. Much of her early childhood, however, was spent in Calcutta, where her father worked, and the alternation between a busy colonial city and a Kerala village gave her from the beginning the divided sensibility that runs through her books.

Two Languages, Two Names

She was married at fifteen to K. Madhava Das, a bank official, and the marriage carried her into adult responsibilities before she had finished being a child. The couple had three sons, and she wrote for years in the margins of domestic life, at night, after the household had gone quiet. Out of that constrained apprenticeship came one of the most distinctive voices in Indian writing.

She worked in two languages and, for a long time, under two names. In English she published poetry as Kamala Das; in Malayalam she wrote fiction, chiefly short stories, under the pen name Madhavikutty. The division was not merely practical. Her English poems are direct, restless and confessional, written in a plain modern idiom that owed nothing to the ornamental Indian English verse that preceded her. Her Malayalam stories are quieter, more oblique and often more devastating, built on domestic detail and unspoken feeling. Readers who knew only one half of her work were consistently surprised by the other.

Her English collections, beginning with Summer in Calcutta and continuing with The Descendants and later volumes, established her as a founding figure of modern Indian poetry in English. She wrote about desire, disappointment, the body, ageing and the loneliness inside marriage with a frankness that had no precedent among Indian women writing in English, and critics reached for comparisons with the confessional poets of Europe and America. In Malayalam her short story collections, among them Thanuppu and Pakshiyude Manam, were equally admired, and her memoir of childhood at the Nalapat house is regarded as a small classic of the language.

My Story and the Cost of Candour

In the early 1970s she published Ente Katha, later translated into English as My Story, and the book detonated. Written as an autobiography, it described marriage, sexuality and emotional hunger with a directness that Indian readers had simply not encountered from a woman of her background. It was denounced, banned from some households, defended fiercely and read everywhere. She later spoke of the book in complicated terms, and the question of how much of it was strict fact and how much was shaped for effect has been discussed ever since.

Whatever the answer, the effect on Indian writing was permanent. She had demonstrated that a woman could write about her own life without the protective screen of allegory, and a great many writers who came after her acknowledged the debt. She also wrote columns and essays for many years, ranging over women's lives, politics, religion and the follies of public figures, and she was one of the most quoted and most argued about people in Kerala for four decades. In the 1980s she briefly entered electoral politics, forming a small party and contesting a parliamentary seat without success.

Faith, Loss and Later Years

Her husband died in 1992, and the loss marked a turning point. The poems and essays of her later years dwell on grief, mortality and a search for consolation that took increasingly religious forms. On 11 December 1999, at the age of sixty-five, she embraced Islam and took the name Kamala Surayya. The decision was intensely public and intensely debated in Kerala, admired by some as an act of spiritual honesty and criticised by others as impulsive; she defended it in her own terms and continued to write about God with the same restless intimacy she had once brought to human love.

Honours had accumulated over her lifetime. Her collected poems in English brought her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985. She received the Vayalar Award in 1997, the Ezhuthachan Puraskaram, Kerala's highest literary honour, in 2002, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Calicut in 2006. Her work was translated into several languages and she was, by the end of her life, among the most internationally known writers India had produced.

She died in Pune on 31 May 2009, after an illness, at the age of seventy-five. Her body was flown to Kerala and she was buried at the Palayam Juma Masjid in Thiruvananthapuram, with the state paying its formal respects to a writer who had spent her life unsettling it.

What Punnayurkulam Keeps

The village she was born in remains central to how she is read. The Nalapat house and the country around it supplied the images she used for safety, for childhood and for everything she felt she had lost by growing up, and no account of her writing can leave the place out. It is a reminder that one of the boldest voices in modern Indian literature was formed not in a metropolis but in a Kerala village with ponds and mango trees, and that she carried it with her through Calcutta, Bombay, Kochi and finally Pune.

Her legacy is contested in the way that genuinely disruptive writers' legacies always are. She was called courageous and exhibitionist, a feminist icon and a poet who resisted every label placed on her. What is not disputed is the scale of what she opened up. She made it possible to write in India, in English and in Malayalam alike, about a woman's interior life without apology, and she did it in language of extraordinary clarity. Decades on, her poems are still set for study, her stories still anthologised, and her name still starts arguments, which is perhaps the truest measure of her presence.