Kamala Das, later named as Kamala Surayya was a fiery Indian writer. Her confessional writing invited comparisons with great writers like Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Love and betrayal were recurring themes in her poems and prose.
Kamala was born on 31st March 1934. A part of her childhood was spent in the Malabar area of Kerala. Her father worked in Kolkata, and the great city was also home to Kamala during her growing years.
‘Summer in Calcutta’ was her first published book of poetry. The poems in this volume were highly original, and radically different from traditional Indian verse. ‘The Descendants’ followed.’ ‘The Sirens’, ‘The Anamalai Poems’, and ‘Only the Soul Knows How to Sing’ are other well known works of Kamala Das.
She was also a popular columnist. Kamala wrote a sensational autobiography titled ‘My Story’, at the age of 42. Originally, it was written in Malayalam as ‘Ente Katha’. However, she later confessed that the autobiography was largely fictional.
She passed away on 31st May, 2009. Kamala Das or Kamala Surayya is known as ‘The Mother of Modern Indian English Poetry’.