MY WORLD

It was during the Onam of 1971 that Ente Kadha, the autobiography of Madhavikutty alias Kamala Das began to be serialised in a magazine in Malayalam. She threw to the winds all codes and conventions that a patriarchal society had held sacred and invested its women with. Thus she literally wrote a new woman, hitherto unimagined, into language; a woman, who refused to be confined underneath the horizons of male expectations or within male literary canons. After four long decades a sequel to Ente Kadha titledEnte Lokam, has been compiled and published by DC Books.

Ente Lokam, though a slim volume of random writings, comes densely packaged with the cries of an agonised yet unrepentant soul who paid the price for her unconventionality. To a society that would rest easy only after wringing from the writer the confession that her story was only fictional, Madhavikutty plays her trump card again in these memoirs, of keeping her readers guessing about her life and self through constant play.

Many of these memoirs chronicle the emotional turmoils of a woman on the run after daring to speak the unspeakable, on sexuality, desires and the female body. Her emotional roller coaster rides, her terrifying fear of mediocrity, her striving for effect, the constant re-invention of her self, are all there for the reader once again. It is interesting to note that for a woman who flaunted many roles and shed many masks she begins the second round of her candid memoirs by speaking of the fancy dress competition called life. However, what is most fascinating about this book is the simple honesty with which Madhavikutty dramatises her self and places her life at the vortex of the controversial maelstrom unleashed by the publication of Ente Kadha. In that sense it s a taking stock of one’s own life and its perennial poetry.

Her confessions regarding her prolonged stints with religiosity, her bouts of scepticism, the attempts to project herself as a sinner before her readers and a saint before her gods all add to the enthralling enigma we love as Amy or Kamala Das or Madhavikutty. Harshly critical of Malayali women, who according to her can be much more patriarchal than men themselves, she claims that her poetic freedom of speech was often a red rag to many. Her ruminations on the deep bonds she enjoys with Punnayoorkulam and the Nalappat tharavadu are at the same time tinged by the searing knowledge that what she actually inherited are the streets of Bombay and her numerous quests for her own self there.

She writes with a binocular combination of feminine charm and feminist vigour. Political and polemical, raw and confessional, with a stark simplicity that is the mark of a truly great writer, she continues to rip the mask off the conventional Kerala society of her times. Once again we are enthralled by this strange muse who dazzles us with her lyrical prose and her sensational thoughts, by the intimacies and confessions she yields, and the easy readings she resists. This volume is further proof that here is a writer who will not go gently into the swirling mists of easy oblivion but will continue to haunt this world and the readers she so loved to enthral.