No-holds-barred poetry

Kamala Surayya, known for her raw emotional poetry on love and other issues, was born today in 1934. Her works would mark a break from the traditional romantic styles of poetry.

Portrait of Kamala Surayya; Source: Public Domain

Kamala Surayya, also known as Kamala Das and Madhavikutty, was a well-known author and poet in Malayalam and English. She was born on the 31st of March, 1934, in Kerala. Over time, she would come to write numerous short stories in Malayalam and her English poems - for which she used her name Kamala Das - would expound on politics, childcare and other women’s issues.

Her literary career would start as a columnist, and she claimed that poetry would not sell in India, however, her columns advocating furiously on issues of childcare and women’s rights throughout the 1960s and 70s, would be widely read and appreciated.

In English, she wrote her first book*, Summer in Calcutta*. This was a poetry anthology and is regarded as a complete break from the old aestheticism - instead of focusing on love, anguish and betrayal. No romanticisation of love occurred here, rather, there was an unspoken rawness to it, as she explicitly wrote in The Descendants, her next book - with explicit themes, sexual imagery, and a vocal expression of all things needed to be dealt with when with a partner. This was not a sterile, dumbed-down version of love - this was in fact, nearest to the human emotion to be written into poetry.

Other works indicated the self-crumbling nature of her life, or the sexual position of women in society, lamenting and commenting on their conditions.

She would also become famous for her autobiography, technically with a lot of fictional elements - presenting her thoughts and feelings, rather than actual events. She critiques the male-dominated society and asks for every woman to raise their voice against it. Love and confession, helplessness, sympathy, exposed emotion and no sterilization of terms - all reflect her style, and as she passed away by 2009, she would have become a renowned poet across the world - well-read and well admired.