Swagata Saha
(B.Ed. 1st semester, 2023-25)
Title: My Story
Author: Kamala Das
Genre: Autobiography
Page count: 214
I am Indian, very brown, born in Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one.
Don't write in English, they said, English is
Not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
⦁ Kamala Das, An Introduction
The above extract belongs to a beautiful poem I came across in the final year of my graduation and instantly fell in love with the author and her writing. The starting line says “I don't know politics but I know the names/Of those in power”. For someone who is not so fond of poems, this particular poem has got into me so much that not only I cherished each and every word of it but read and searched about the Author soon as I finished it… and as a result I came across her autobiography.
The girl who was married off at the age of 16 had no idea of what love is. Her husband could never be that companion she longed for, could never gave the love she craved for… her only companion her grandmother was way too old to understand her unconventional way of thinking. The loneliness once got her into depression, she thought she was going crazy. She had no one to share her thoughts to, which made her start writing the poems, in which later she found her solace.
Like every mother she also invested most of her life for her children’s happiness, for her family but what made her exceptional was her love for writing, if ever she had to make a choice she would choose writing because that’s what made her who she was. she chose to give herself a separate identity rather than to be known just as someone’s wife or mother or daughter. And I think it is what every woman should do. The stereotypical ideology that suggests women live for others should be changed, as human beings we do live for each other but along with that we have to find a purpose for ourselves also, for at the end we only have us and no one can know or understand us better than our own selves. One of the many reasons why I like her poems so much.
This masterpiece has got my heart, a women’s inner desires, her feelings that worked as a voice for the women, probably couldn’t be captured well enough than it is in this autobiography. I would recommend anyone and everyone to give it a try.