Calling Kamala Das Queer Rereading My Story

Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading "My Story"
Author(s): Rosemary Marangoly George

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3, Points of Departure: India and the South Asian
Diaspora (Autumn, 2000), pp. 731-763
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
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CALLINGKAMALADAS QUEER:
REREADINGMY STORY
ROSEMARY
MARANGOLYGEORGE
... When
I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask

For,he drew a youth of sixteeninto the
Bedroomand closed the door. He did not beat me
But my sad woman-bodyfelt so beaten.
Theweight of my breastand womb crushedme. I
shrank
Pitifully.
KamalaDas, from "AnIntroduction,"
1965.
At this time my husbandturnedto his old friendfor comfort.
They behaved like lovers in my presence. To celebratemy
birthday, they shoved me out of the bedroom and locked
themselvesin. I stood for a while, wondering what two men
could possibly do togetherto get some physical rapture,but
after some time, my pride made me move away. I went to
my son and lay nearhim. I felt then a revulsionfor my womanliness. The weight of my breasts seemed to be crushing
me. My private part was only a wound, the soul's wound
showing through.
Kamala Das, My Story, 1976.
Today, literary, critical, and feminist territorial boundaries are not

as clearcut as they were imagined to be even a decade ago when
modes of communication between scholars (often working on the
very same texts) and between audiences in the First and Third
Worlds were much slower. Speed has not created equality among
all critical voices, but nevertheless, we are at a new site, one that
approacheswhat we might call "global literary studies in English"-a situation that requires a radical rethinking of the claims
Feminist Studies 26, no. 3 (fall 2000). ? 2000 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
731

732
Rosemary Marangoly George
we have become accustomedto making when we produce literary scholarship.We can no longer claim knowledge of how literary texts function as culturalartifactsand as political tools without thinking hard about how such texts might play out in other
locations;we cannotproceedwith our scholarlyprojectsoblivious
to how our work speaks to scholarshipor readershipsproduced
fromdifferentlocations.
Much of my interest in the challenges and excitement of this
new phase of global literarystudies was occasionedby my recent
rereadingof My Story,the 1976 autobiographicaltext written by
KamalaDas, one of India'sforemostwomen writers.Readingthis
autobiographyin the late 1990s,I found that Das's accountof her
eventful and uneven blossoming, throughchildhood,youth, and
adulthood into a writer,wife, mother,and sexually active adult,
amountedto a wonderfullyqueertext. I was not surprisedto find
that my assessment of Das's autobiographyhad changed some
twenty years after I first read it as a teenagerin India. However,
my late-1990sassessmentof My Storyas a "queer"text was clearly
produced and complicatedby several shifts-in time, in location,
in the different trajectoriesof local literary criticisms, in feminisms, in popular and academic understandingsof sexual practices and sexual preferences,to name a few among several variables. In the concept of "queerness"as I understood it from my
United Statesacademia-basedlocation,I had finally found an interpretive frame that was adequate to the prodigious body of
work by this exceptionalIndianauthor.However,calling Kamala
Das queer, in itselfprovides no grand resolution to the myriad
challenges posed by her work; rather,it serves as an initial vantage point from which one can glimpse the changingEnglish-language literaryterrainof this new century.
Bornin 1934into an aristocratic,Nair' Hindu family in Kerala,
India, Kamala Das has the distinction of being one of the best
known Indianwomen writersin the twentiethcentury.Writingin
two Indianlanguages,Englishand Malayalam,Das is the author
of many autobiographicalworks and novels in both languages,
several highly regardedcollectionsof poetry in English, numerous collectionsof short stories,as well as essays on a wide range
of topics. Her work in English has been widely anthologized in
the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and the West; and she has
won numerous awards for her writing, including the Sahitya

RosemaryMarangolyGeorge
733
Akademi Award (the highest Indian literary/culturalhonor) in

1985and the nominationfor the Nobel Prize in literaturein 1984.2
Fromthe 1970swhen her careerwas at its peak, to the late 1990s,
India-based,English-languageliterarycriticshave written extensively on KamalaDas. Yet,in this criticism,all the non-heteronormative protests and pleasuresin My Storywere (and continue to
out. This state of affairsemerges in part because,
be) straightened
as elsewhere, many India-based,English-languageliteraryfeminists have a highly developed sense of patriarchaloppressionbut
do not feel any compulsion or urgency to work throughthe links
between heterosexism and the oppressive weight of patriarchal
systems:theirwork on Das has tended to make her metonymicof
their largerfeministproject.Hence, althoughmainstreamliterary
and literaryfeminist criticismin India (as well as in postcolonial
feminist criticismproduced from outside India) offers considerable discussionof sexualityin Das'swork, such discussioncontinues to be almostexclusivelyon heterosexualrelationshipsin these
texts. In particular,the materialin My Storythat concernssamesex desire or is otherwise too disruptiveor contradictoryto be of
use to literary feminism is simply dismissed in the criticism as
manifestationsof Das's stylisticor personaleccentricitiesthatborder on artisticweakness.
In India, as in most locations today, there are multiple feminisms whose founding ideologies, practices,and foci differ dramatically.Thus,outside of literaryreadingsof women's writingin
English, feminist commentaryfrom the Indian subcontinenthas
produced groundbreakingwork on the ways in which the colonial and/or nationaliststate has used gender and sexuality to its
advantage and concurrently to the disadvantage of women
whose lives are subjectto such authority.3In their introductionto
A Questionof Silence?TheSexualEconomics
of ModernIndia,Indiabased feministsMaryJohnand JanakiNair have cautionedthat "a
focus on the conspiracy of silence regarding sexuality in India,
whether within politicaland social movements or in scholarship,"
must not "blindus to the multiple sites where 'sexuality'has long
been embedded. In the spheres of the law, demographyor medicine, for instance, sexuality enjoys a massive and indisputable
presence that is far from prohibited."4Indian feminists have
worked extensively on sexuality in these contexts,and this scholarshipis at the forefrontof globally cited feminist theorizingthat

734
works to reach a decolonized understandingof the relations of

power and gender.Yet,as JacquiAlexanderhas succinctlynoted,
even in feminist critiquesthat are cognizantof the importanceof
sexualityto institutionalapparati,much work remainsto be done
"onelaboratingthe processesof heterosexualizationat work within the state apparatus."5
More specifically,literaryfeminism that
Indian
women's writing in English operates within
champions
and against the parametersof a middle-classnotion of women's
worth. From the 1970s to the present, feminist criticswriting on
Das have been willing to celebrateand second her critiqueof the
institution of marriage,and of maritalrape, of the obligation to
wifely fidelity in marriageat all costs but not her critiqueof heterosexuality itself. Following Alexander, one could argue that
such feminist projectsunintentionallyfall into the service of the
state by striving to make heterosexual and reproductive roles
(that are so necessary to the state and to citizenship) more
amenableto women.
In this article,I examine some of the contradictions,challenges,
and resolutionsthat emerge when we read My Story,written in
English in India in the 1970s, in light of currentfeminist/postcolonial/queer theoreticalinterests.Given that the Indiansubcontinental discussion on KamalaDas over the last thirty years has
centeredaround very differentand urgent feminist issues in her
work, I turn firstto the implicationsof discussingsame-sexdesire
in KamalaDas's work in a United States-basedjournallike Feminist Studies.Despite its point of origin, this journal does travel
outside the United States,and this special issue on India will circulate in Indian academicvenues. Writingto this enlarged audience calls for the kind of theoreticaland practicalnegotiationthat
will soon be requiredas a matterof coursein this new era of global literarystudies.6
KAMALA DAS AND LOCAL FEMINISMS
Alreadywell known in literarycirclesfor her poetry in English,it

was the publicationof My Storythat earnedKamalaDas national
notorietyamong the English-speakingelite in India.7My Storyis
to date the best-sellingwoman's autobiographyin post-independence India. Vincent O'Sullivan notes that when My Story ap-
peared in book form in 1976,it went throughsix impressionsand

George
Rosemary
Marangoly
735
thirty-six thousand copies in eleven months.8 My Story is a

chronologicallyordered,linearnarrativewritten in a realiststyle.
It follows Kamala'slife from age four throughBritishcolonialand
missionary schools favored by the colonial Indian elite; through
her sexual awakening; an early and seemingly disastrous marriage;her growing literarycareer;extramaritalaffairs;the birthof
her three sons; and, finally, a slow but steady coming to terms
with her spouse, writing, and sexuality.My Storyset the terms in
which Das's entirebody of work has been evaluatedby feminists
and other scholarsin the subcontinentand in the West.The standard Indian literary feminist reading of Das's work commends
her for her determined protest against patriarchalnorms and
practicesthat oppress women and for her couragein continuously mining her own life experiences for material.Thus, much of
this feminist championingof Das was intended as a correctiveto
the mainstream, masculinist reading of My Story as titillating
trash.9
Outside the subcontinent, feminist literary critics who have
written on Das have taken their cue from the local feminism
which Das's work is shaped by and shapes in turn. For instance,
United States-based scholars Ketu Katrak,Harveen Sachdeva
Mann, and Shirley Geok-linLim have variously pulled Das into
discussions on gendered resistancein the writing by ThirdWorld
women.10Katrakreads Das alongside Bessie Head and works
throughthe themes of "motheringand m-othering"in their work.
On sexuality in My Story,Katrakwrites: "InDas, the sexuality is
often so completely self-absorbed,so navel-gazing as to become
both narrowlypersonal and problematicallysensationalisedand
Mann reads Das's work and three other texts in
voyeuristic."11
English by South Asian women through a feminist framework
that is attentive to the stakes of minoritycommunities in Indian
nationalistdiscourses.Mann readsthese women writers in order
"notonly to underscoretheir contestationsof the dominantpatriarchalnational discourse but also to articulatethe heterogeneity
and plurality operative within subcontinental women's resistance."12Lim's essays elaborate on the theme of self-empowerment in Das's writing by reading her within the context of Asian
women writers and the larger context provided by a materialist
analysis of Asian women. These scholarsdo not disturb the heterosexist logic of the usual considerations of sexuality in Das's

736
work. Although this reveals the usual biases of literarycriticism,

more importantly,it also demonstratestheir scholarlyallegiance
to one of postcolonial feminism's most important injunctions.
What feminist postcolonialtheory advocatesto feminists located
in the FirstWorldis as follows:First,we are urged to read outside
the Westerntraditionalcanon;second, we are, as far as possible,
to read ThirdWorldwomen writerswith due emphasis given to
the local contextof their reception;third,in the best-casescenario
we are to read these texts alongside the local feminist interpretations of their feminist value.13MarilynFriedmansets forth feminist guidelines for postcolonial studies in the 1990s, which is
mostly accepted (in theory if not always in practice) by EuroAmerica-basedfeministscholars:
It is most respectful to women in cultures and subcultures other than my own
to remind myself repeatedly that they know, as I seldom do, what it is like to
live as a woman in their cultures. Unless very strong reasons suggest otherwise, I should, thus, avoid activities and teaching styles that challenge the
practices of their lives unless invited and welcomed by them to do so.'4
Also, in an essay titled "TheBurdenof English"published in a

collection on English LiteraryStudies in India, GayatriChakravorty Spivak urges that we pay due attention to the "implied
reader"of any text. Spivakwrites:"Thefigureof the implied reader is constructedwithin a consolidatedsystem of culturalrepresentation.The appropriateculturein this context is the one supHowposedly indigenous to the literatureunder consideration.""15
this
context
that
is
concern
for
the
ever,
"supposedlyindigenous"
(to use Spivak'sterm) to KamalaDas leads scholarsto pay little
attentioneitherto same-sexdesirein Das'swork or to heterosexuGiven
ality from the vantage point of the non-heteronormative.16
this situation,my attemptat a queerreadingof Das'swork, originating as it does from the South Asian diaspora, has no option
but to acceptthe implicationsof going againstthe interpretivedirection set by local feminist readings of Das's work. This encounterof one local feminismwith anotherlocal feminismunder
the sign of diasporais a scenariothat is worth examining,not just
for the purposes of this rereadingof KamalaDas but also because
diaspora studies provide a productive albeit tight discursive
space that has been carved out in a rapidly changingworld. And
yet, as I hope this articlewill demonstrate,a queerreadingof Kamala Das need not necessarily originate from or circulate only

737
among the diaspora. As the anthology Same-SexLovein India:

and Historymakes clear,there has been a
Readingsfrom Literature
India-based
of
writing on same-sex desire."
long history
17This anInRuth
Vanita
and
Saleem
showcases
edited
Kidwai,
by
thology,
dian writings on same-sex"love,"in various genres,over a period
of more than 2,000years, translatedfrom more than a dozen languages. In recentyears therehas been an increasedvolume of discussion on same-sex desire and homosexualityproduced in Indian cultural/academic/literary contexts. Ashwini Sutthankar's
groundbreakingedited collection of autobiographical"comingout"narratives,fiction,poetry by Indianlesbians,titled Facingthe
Mirror:LesbianWritingfrom India,along with the controversies
surrounding Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Firein which two Indian
sisters-in-law embark on a sexual relationshipwith each other,
has broughthomosexualityto the attentionof the Indianpopular
and academic press.18Given the current proliferation of new
media and modes of communication,access to queer networks is
not the exclusive privilege of those located in the geographic
West.19And in the last few years there is a growing cross-continental queer discoursethat has gained in visibility and assurance
This articlethen could be
with every new culturalproduction.20
read as yet anotherproductof this cross-continentaldiscussion.
It is now de rigueurto begin such essays written from the First
World with the rituals of a kind of "locationalhand-wringing."
My referenceis to preliminarystatementsand disclaimersoffered
by criticsas they ventureinto texts or spaces where they feel only
partially authorized to speak and yet compelledto speak.21In an
essay titled "MultipleMediations: Feminist Scholarship in the
Age of Multinational Reception," Lata Mani makes several
thoughtful connections between the "question of positionality
and locationand their relationto the productionof knowledge as
well as its reception."Mani writes of presentingher groundbreaking work on sati to audiences in the United States, Britain,and
India and of her surprise in learning that these different audiences saw completely differentaspects of her work as "politically
significant."22Following Mani, I am aware that Indian literary
feminists see the protest against patriarchaloppression as the
most politically significant feature of Das's work. Within such
feminist plotting, it is Das's extramarital(hetero)sexualadventures that mount this protest against patriarchy. The same-sex en-

738
counters and erotics that abound within these pages, if noted at

all, are immediatelydismissed as distractionsor as furtherproof
of the distortionsthatpatriarchaloppressionforceson women.
In some ways, Das is the perfect "queerwriter."Her work is
centrally preoccupied with sexuality and female pleasure that
breaksout of a heteronormativematrix.Her work exemplifiesthe
"resistanceto the regimes of the normal"that MichaelWarnerhas
identified as the hallmark of queer.23From the 1990s onward,
queer theory has offered a terminologyand a set of interpretive
tools that can explicatedeviationsfrom bothheterosexualand homosexual conventions.And unlike more disciplinarilyanchored
interpretivemodels, "noparticularprojectis metonymicof queer
commentary" as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have
noted.24Of course,Das herselfutilizes the term "queer"for its sexual and, on occasion, nonsexual, purchase. For example, in her
most widely anthologized poem, "An Introduction,"first published in 1965, Das uses "queerness"in the plural to indicate her
multiple deviance from multiple norms. She writes of her choice
to write in Englishand Malayalamas follows:
... Why not leave
Me alone, critics,friends,visiting cousins,

Everyone of you? Why not let me speak in
Any languageI like?The languageI speak
Becomesmine, its distortions,its queernesses
All mine, mine alone. (P.7)
In "Composition"(1967), another often anthologized poem, she
concludesa sectionwith the flat declaration:
I have lost my best friend
to a middle-agedqueer,
the lesbianshiss theirlove at me. (P.46)
Das's use of queer marksboth a continuityand a breakwith the
term's presexual connotations. Clearly, her understanding of
"queer"does not neatly overlapwith the currentusage of the term
by queer theorists,even though both usages sharea common late
history of the associationof
nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century
the term with homosexuality.For Das "queer"signifies sexually
and otherwise-thus,at times exceeding the term's dimensions in
queer theory.25
Yet, can one use a queer reading practice as currently espoused

739
in literary/culturalstudies to explain the work of an authorwho

is quite solidly entrenchedin an Indiancontext?One might argue
that although the category of "queer"might provide a precise
understandingof the complex texture of Das's texts, such export
of Western-orientedtheory reveals its "locality"when transported. A more complicatedand, I believe, more accurateassessment
is offeredin Johnand Nair'sintroductionto A Questionof Silence?
in which they thoughtfully contest the very distinctionbetween
in the course of articulatingtheir unthe "West"and "non-West"
to
"Indian"
theoriesof sexuality.In responseto
willingness proffer
the hypotheticalquestion"Whybring up western theories[of sexuality] at all?"They write that
our response would be that "the West" is at once a particular geographical
place, and a relation. From where we are, this relation is one of domination,
and about as complicated as they come; to all intents and purposes, we are effectively located in the West. It is to the credit of feminists in India that they
have refused to be silenced by accusations of being western-identified, and so
unable to deal with the real India. Ironically enough, the very conception of
the other of the West as being something to which western concepts do not
apply (or only as an act of violation from which one must be redeemed) is itself a western legacy. Such constructions of cultural difference leave the West
firmly in command.26
Here John and Nair's insistence on the global circulationof "the

West"is congruent with my understanding of this new site of
"globalliterarystudies in English."At the risk of belaboringthe
point, I wish to repeat that one of my goals here is to alert us to
the ways in which literary-criticalideas and terms alreadycirculate in a global frameworkalbeit with differentinflectionsin different locations. Consider, for instance, the use of the term
"queer."
My usage of the term "queer"in this articleis mindful of both
Das's usage and ongoing reformulationsproducedby queercommentary.Das'swork queersour understandingof queer.Most importantly,it enlarges (in both chronological and spatial dimensions) the very notion of "queer"which is usually imagined as a
purely First World phenomenon from the 1990s. Given that
"queer"is constantly reformulatedin usage, ratherthan attempt
to work out a viable, global definitionof the term,a more productive approachwould be to focus on the issue of queermethodology as set forth by Judith Halberstamin FemaleMasculinity.According to Halberstam, a queer methodology is a "scavenger

740
methodology" that focuses on what has been "deliberatelyor

accidentallyexcluded from traditionalstudies."Further,Halberstam notes that a queermethodology"attemptsto combinemethods that are often cast as being at odds with each other,and it refuses the academiccompulsionto work towarddisciplinarycoherence."27To this I would add thata queerreading,such as the one in
process here, has to refuse the academiccompulsionsto follow a
set literaryguide map for venturinginto ThirdWorldtexts-even
maps drawnby progressivefeminist,postcolonialcartographers.
I hope to achieve a reading of My Storythat is attentiveto the
shape and objectivesof the feministliterarycriticismon Das; and
yet, in being equally attentiveto queerness,I hope also to be able
to explain the elision of same-sex desire in the receptionof this
text. At the same time, I am quite deliberatelycallingsexual what
was not hithertoseen as sexual-a stancethat carriesits own set of
problematic considerations as Karen Lfitzen has so carefully
demonstrated.28However,I am not claimingthat KamalaDas is a
closeted lesbianwaiting to be "outed"or resistingthe same. She is
not representativeof the internationalphenomenon that Dennis
Altman and others have drawn our attentionto-namely, the internationalizationof a certainform of social and culturalidentity
based on homosexualitythat is one of the signs of a rapid globalization of culture.29Same-sex desire in the work of KamalaDas
does not operate along a hetero-homodivide, nor does it confer
an identity as lesbian (a word used often enough in the autobiography) on the protagonist.Thus even while Das consistentlyencodes the homoeroticinto her work, she just as consistentlydevalues its purchase.For instance,in a 1993 interview Das insists
on certaindistinctionsand differences:
Feminism as the Westerns see it is different from the feminism I sense within
myself. Western feminism is an anti-male stance.... Most of the feminists I
met outside the country were lesbians-out and out lesbians. I do not think I'm
lesbian. I tried to find out. I experiment with everything. I tried to find out if I
were a lesbian, if I could respond to a woman. I failed. I must speak the truth.
I believe we must abandon a thing if it has no moral foundation whether it be
a belief, a political system or a religious system.30
Should such a statementfrom the authorlay to rest an investigation of same-sexdesire in her work?Puttingaside the usual postmodernist disdain for authorialintentions and declarations,we
must look at and beyond this statement if we are to capture all of
its resonance. At the same time, we need not hold back on decon-

741
structingthis statementbecause of some chivalricnotion of excessive solicitude for the ThirdWorldwoman writer'sauthorialintentions. And what is surely characteristicabout Das's statement
is the assumption that "Indian-style"feminism and lesbianism
(coded here as Western)have no shared ground.31More importantly, the statement displays Das's characteristicreluctance to
settle into and comfortablyas well as consistentlyinhabitany one
categoryof subjecthood.
READINGSEXIN KAMALADAS'S WORK
Over the years Das has profferedseveralcontradictoryaccountsof
the genesis of My Story.In her prefaceto the autobiography,Das
claims that she began to write this text in the mid-1970sfrom her
hospital bed as she grappledwith a potentiallyfatal heart condition. She wrote the autobiography,she states, "toempty myself of
all the secretsso that I could depart when the time came, with a
scrubbed-outconscience"and in order to pay mounting hospital
bills (p. vi). Since the 1976publicationof this autobiography,Das
has repeatedlychangedher stance on this topic in interviewsand
essays.32She has presentedherself as either too bohemianto care
about revealingher sexual adventuresand her periods of mental
breakdown or, conversely,as the submissive wife following the
dictatesof her husbandwho was apparentlymore eagerthan herself to cash in on a spiced-up and heavily fictionalizedaccountof
her life. And yet, at every opportunityDas revertsto the convention thatshe is India'smost unconventionalwoman writerwith no
regretsabouther work or her foci. Das'scalculatedunreliabilityas
a narratorof autobiography,of "confessional"
poetry,and of fiction
has exasperatedcritics.This slipperinessin her writing, resulting
from a perenniallyunstable set of referentialcontexts,heightens
the queer chargeof the autobiography.In this section I provide a
close readingof selected sections of My Storyusing a "scavenger"
methodology to demonstratehow much in tandem heterosexual
and homosexual desires circulatein these pages as well as to explain the very partialnature of the vociferous criticaldiscussion
of sexual pleasurein My Story.
Same-sexdesire in My Storyis always intimatelybound to heterosexualrelationships.Even at the level of structurethere is no
neat dichotomy between such sexual practices.For instance,Das

742
chose quite explicit and titillatingtitles for most of the fifty short
chaptersthat make up the autobiography.33
Chapterheadings for
of
the
are
fifty
chapters quite clearlysexual or at least
thirty-eight
hold the promise of some sexual content-rangingfrom Chapter
18:"Wasevery marriedadult a clown in bed, a circusperformer?"
to chapter19:"Hervoice was strange... it was easy for me to fall
in love with her"to chapter42: "Thelast of my lovers:handsome
darkone with a tattoobetween his eyes."And yet thereare no assurancesthat a chaptercovers only those sex attractionsand activities alluded to in the title. Furthermore,the sexual activities
hinted at in the chaptertitle may not even be her own. For example, in chapter10, titled "Shewas half-crazedwith love and hardly noticed me,"Das describesher experiencesas a nine-year-old
in an all-girlboardingschool where she sharesa room with three
other girls. The eldest and prettiest of her roommatesis fifteenyear-old Sharada who has many admirers among the young
schoolgirls.The chapterends with the following passage that also
provides the title: "Thelesbian admirercame into our room once
when Sharadawas away takinga bath and kissed her pillowcases
and her undies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on
my bed watching this performancebut she was half-crazedwith
love, and hardlynoticedme."(P.47)
By the nineteenth chapter,Kamala,now fifteen, is herself enthralledby a series of older women-unmarried aunts, teachers,
women who are family friends. Chapter20 begins with Kamala
being warned against associatingwith an eighteen-year-oldcollege student (p. 90). Of course Kamalagoes on to describehow in
spite of (or because of) the warnings,she felt "instantlydrawn to
her.... She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculinegrace....
When her eyes held mine captive in a trance,for a reason that I
could not fathom,then I felt excited"(p. 89). In the summerof her
sixteenth year, Kamala's father arranges for her to make an
overnight journey by train to her grandmother'shouse, in the
company of a group of professorsand students. "Asluck would
have it,"Das writes, the "girlwho was differentfrom others"is
partof the group.Das describesthe seductionon the train:
I hate the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if anyone was
awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close to hers. Her fingers
traced the outlines of my mouth with a gentleness that I had never dreamt of
finding. She kissed my lips then, and whispered, you are so sweet, so very

743
sweet, I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling....

It was the first kiss of its kind in my life. Perhaps my mother may have
kissed me while I was an infant but after that no one, not even my grandmother, had bothered to kiss me. I was unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She
kept stroking my hair and kissing my face and my throat all through that
night while sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish, she
said, before dawn, your mouth is hot. (P. 90)
A friend of Kamala'sfamily meets the group at the stationwhere

they have to change trains,and anotherfamily friend invites the
whole group to lunch. The college student coaxes Kamala to
bathe with her and to allow herself to be powdered and dressed
by her."Bothof us,"Kamalawrites, "feltrathergiddy with joy like
honeymooners."By the time they join their group, the meal is
well underway,and their host, MajorMenon, Das wryly reports,
"seemedgratefulto me for having broughtinto his home a bunch
of charming ladies, all unmarried"(p. 91). As always, Das employs a quiet humor to undercutheteromasculineambitions.
Das continues in the same passage to blend this romancewith
the girlfriendinto the romancewith her husband-to-be.Here, as
elsewhere in this text, there is no setting up of a binarybetween
opposing sexualities: in the very next paragraph of the same
chapter,Kamalabegins describingher courtshipwith a male relative. She learnsfromher grandmotherthat the family wants them
to marry.This chapterends a page later with this descriptionof
theirfirst kiss: "BeforeI left for Calcutta,my relativepushed me
into a dark comer behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my
mouth. He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. Don't you
love me he asked me, don't you like my touching you.... I felt
hurt and humiliated.All I said was 'goodbye'" (p. 93). That Das
intends the readerto comparethese two sexual experiencesseems
obvious. The narrativeclearly indicateswhich of the two furtive
encounters is more pleasurable to Kamala.It is significant that
this chapterin which Das meets and is courtedby her futurehusband (eventsso importantto the heterosexualplot andto the feminist reading)is titled:"Shelay near me holding my body close to
hers."In the very next chapter(titled"Hishands bruisedmy body
and left blue and red marks on the skin"),Das writes of the visit
of Madhav Das, her cousin and now her fianc6, to her home in
Calcutta,during theirengagement:
My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not know what sexual desire meant, not having experiencedit even once. Don't you feel any passion for me,

744
he asked me. I don't know, I said simply and honestly. It was a disappointing
week for him and for me. I hadexpectedhim to takeme in his armsandstrokemy
face,myhair,myhands,andwhisperlovingwords.I had expectedhim to be all that
I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversations, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from my thoughts. (P. 95, emphasis mine.)
Having just read her long and elaborateaccountof her tryst with
the girlfriendwith whom she was "giddywith joy"like a honeymooner,how does the readerprocess this passage in which Kamala denies any experienceof sexual desire even as her expectations of her fianceare shapedby her pleasurableexperienceswith
her girlfriend?
My Storyhas often been dismissed as sensationalistand melodramaticfiction,yet these very featuresof Das's writing allow her
to interruptthe narrationof everyday events with speculations
that transgressthe conventionsof the autobiographygenre.Right
afterthe passage quoted above, Das writes:
I did not know whom to turn to for consolation. On a sudden impulse, I
phoned my girl-friend. She was surprised to hear my voice. I thought you had
forgotten me, she said. I invited her to my house. She came to spend a Sunday
with me and together we cleaned out our bookcases and dusted the books.
Only once she kissed me. Our eyes were watering and the dust had swollen
our lips. Can't you take me away from here, I asked her. Not for another four
years, she said. I must complete my studies she said. Then holding me close to
her, she rubbed her cheek against mine.
When I put her out of my mind I put aside my self-pity too. It would not do
to dream of a different kind of life. My life had been planned and its course
charted by my parents and relatives.... I would be a middle-class housewife,
and walk along the vegetable shops carrying a string bag and wearing faded
chappals on my feet. I would beat my thin children ... and make them scream
out for mercy. I would wash my husband's cheap underwear and hang it out to
dry in the balcony like some kind of national flag, with wifely pride. .... (P. 96)
Like many of the passages in which Das leaves so much unsaid,

this passage also ends with ellipses. We never hear of this girlfriend again-either in the autobiography or in any meaningful
way in the many critical responses to this text.34The watering
eyes and swollen lips, we are led to understand,are the result of
the heat and dust stirredup by their spring cleaning.Das's use of
hyperboleand the melodramaticis extremelyeffectivein registering the weight of the unspoken pain and pleasures of this afternoon. Thereis an undeniablesubtextof longing thatruns through
this descriptionof their Sunday togetherand which accountsfor
the virulenceof the sudden outburstin which KamalaDas imag-

745
What we also get

ines her future as a "middle-classhousewife."35
here is a briefbut clearglimpse of Das's awarenessof the link between wifely duties and national pride-the very dynamic that
Alexanderdescribessuccinctlyin her discussionof the role of heterosexualityand reproductionin advancing national interestsin
the neocolonial Bahamas:"[L]oyaltyto the nation as citizen is
perennially colonized within reproductionand heterosexuality,
eroticautonomybringswith it the potentialof undoing the nation
entirely,a possible charge of irresponsiblecitizenship or no citizenship at all."36
Despite their contemplation of an "elopement,"these young
women know that they cannot chose this option of living with
and supportingeach other as a same-sex couple. But what is also
made clear through this episode is that young Kamaladoes not
have the option of choosingmarriageand motherhoodeither.Both
the big and small details of this conventionalheterosexualityare
chosen for her. For instance,the narrativeobliquelysuggests that
Kamala'smarriageis arrangedas early as in her sixteenth year
and to this particularcousin,because at the time her parents'marriage was under great stress and at the verge of dissolution.
Young Kamala'sconsent to this marriageis manufacturedby her
father through a postengagement courtship of a week during
which he buys the couple tickets for shows and meals at expensive hotels (p. 95). Despite many misgivings, Kamaladoesn'tcontradicther fatherwhen he declaresthat he is happy that she has
"foundher mate"(p. 96). Sexualchoice is not an operativeconcept
in this arena. And yet, Das goes on to chronicle the many instances in which she chooses to have affairswith men and, on occasion,fall in love with women.
Given these restrictions,it is significantthat Das smuggles in a
discussion of female sexual pleasure even as she protested patriarchaloppression.Much of this world of female sexual pleasure
is created through Kamala'snarration of her experiences with
other women. KamalaDas is impressive in her ability to convey
at once,a girl/woman who takes great pride in her sexual innocence even as she laments her crude awakening into heterosexuality. But this maintenance of the aura of sexual innocence requires that a whole range of pleasurableexperiencesbe recastas
innocent of sexual charge.37Ultimately, however, one of the consequences of Das's deliberate weaving of these sensual moments of

746
same-sex pleasureinto her catalog of pleasurableand distasteful

encounterswith the opposite sex is to constantlymake the heteronormativevisible by interruptingit consistently.
The concept of same-sex desire and heterosexuality"interrupting"each otherover the course of an individual'slifetimeis not as
conventionalas is the theory that homosexualactivityis a "stage"
toward matureheterosexuality.Thus, one might argue that these
events, such as the romancewith the girlfriend,are no more than
unremarkablemarkersof the passage from childhood to adulthood, especiallyin terms of sexual development.Over the course
of severalbooks and articles,SudhirKakar,contemporaryIndia's
foremostpsychologist,has fashionedjust such an "Indian"understanding of the sexual development of children and youth in
India."3Kakarnotes that young Indian girls experiencesexuality
early in their lives through their interactionswith children and
adults of bothgenders.Accordingto Kakar,Indianwomen feel the
tension between the "memoryof intense and pleasurablechildhood sexuality"and "thelaterwomanly ideal which demands restraint and renunciation."The Indian woman, who is for Kakar
synonymous with the Hindu woman, resolves this tension after
marriageby weaving an identity for herself that evolves out of
the "particularsof her life cycle and childhood"and "theuniversals of the traditionalideals of womanhood.""39Clearly,much of
Kamala Das's narrative about the pleasures she receives from
(and gives) to both women and men, both before and after her
marriage, disturbs Kakar'sdichotomy between "Indian"childhood and adult sexuality with its strict "before"and "after"logic.
It would be difficult to deny the sensual texture of Kamala'saccounts of childhood visits with unmarriedaunts whose beauty,
amoroussongs, asceticism,and poetry teach her "thatlove was a
beautiful anguish and a thapasya(a fast/penance/quest)" (p. 21).
Anotheryoung marriedwoman, a family friend,the "exquisitely
lovely and very fashion-conscious"Mrs. Kunhappa,sharesbeauty secretsand informationon "thegreat orgasm"with the young
teenager (p. 80). According to Kakar'sprecepts, although what
Kamala,like other young girls, learns through such association
with women is indeed sexual and sensual pleasures,such knowledge is given (and learned)exclusivelyas preparationfor the heterosexual monogamous sexual life that awaits Indian girls after
marriage. In Das's narrative however, these episodes circulate in

747
such an evocative and meandering fashion that their impact on

the protagonist cannot be curtailed when she exchanges her
childhood for her maritalbed.
One of the ways in which Das interruptsboth the heteronormative and the homonormative is in her choice of love objectswomen, men, and herself. After marriage,Kamalacontinues to
"fallin love"with women and with men, and we are told that she
embarkson several torrid affairs.One of these "carelesslymixed
pleasures,"as she calls them, that is not given serious consideration by Das, her husband, or the critics, involves Das's love for
her doctor.In chapter32, Das writes of her troublewith a "women's problem"for which she requireshospitalization.Here she is
tended to by a woman doctor who saves her from bleeding to
death when she hemorrhagesafter surgery.Kamalafalls in love
with her and keeps going to see her in the clinic-kissing her,
watchingher,smelling her.She writes:"Ikept telling my husband
that I was in love with the doctor and he said, it is all right,she is
a woman, she will not exploit you"(p. 152).Once again,this is exactly how most critics have read this relationship-so "safe"in
terms of patriarchalexploitationthat it does not warrantserious
consideration. In the rest of the autobiography, Das writes at
length about the sexual pleasuresthat husband and wife enjoyed
togetherand separately.
And yet, almost all feminist interpretationsof My Storyreach
their crescendo in the analysis of chapter 22, titled "Wedding
night:Again and again he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali
drums throbbeddully."40
What Kamalarecordsin this chapteris
her initiation into heterosexualintercoursevia marital rape-unsuccessful attemptsat first and then, aftera fortnightof attempts,
successful.She becomes pregnantalmost immediatelyand by the
time her first son is born, KamalaDas has few illusions about her
relationshipwith her husband.The consequenceis thatnow, aged
seventeen or eighteen, she decides "tobe unfaithful to him, at
least physically"(p. 107).Das's life story provides the perfectcase
study of the sexual violence that husbands can and do subject
their wives to. Furthermore,in this case, the wife enters the marriage as a child bride matchedwith a much older man and is soon
a teenage mother.And much of Das'swork examines,in unflinching and graphic detail, the sexual, emotional, and psychological
violence that women may suffer in heterosexual domestic set-

748
tings. In "TheOld Playhouse"(1973,p. 54) she writes in the persona of "wife":

... You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourselfinto every nook and cranny,you embalmed

My poor lust with your bitter-sweetjuices.Youcalledme wife,
I was taughtto breaksaccharineinto your tea......
In another splendid poem titled "TheStone Age" (1973),a wife
describesher sexual infidelitybut only afterestablishingthat the
husband is a "fatold spider"who has turned her into a "birdof
stone, a granite/dove." Again, in the persona of the wife, Das
writes:"Yousticka fingerinto my dreamingeye"(p. 69).
Das's feministreaders,regardlessof their location,profferjustificationsfor only those sexual activitiesthat occur aftermarriage
and repeatedly stress that she is driven to such behavior by a
cruel husband and by his numerous infidelities.Hence, because
the affairwith the college student (as well as other minor crushes
on other women and young men) happen prior to her marriage,
they are elided by the literarycriticism.At the end of the autobiography,Das describeshow, after she was well established as a
writer,she was constantlypropositionedby strangersand even
by male friends who had read her work and had concluded that
she would sleep with anyone. At this point in the narrative,she
declares:"Sexdid not interestme except as a gift I could grantmy
husband to make him happy" (p. 213). Feminist critic Ranjana
Harish uses this statementas proof that Das's sexual adventures
had never been pleasurablefor her.Harishinsists that this authoof
confirmsthat Das's "transgressions"
rial admission "ironically"
the "sacredorbit of marriage"are embarkedupon "outof sheer
disgust and a burning sense of revenge [against her unfaithful
husband]."41Similarly,in "SexualPolitics and KamalaDas,"Iqbal
Kaursets out "toprove KamalaDas' distastefor sex."Using Das's
poetry and prose to prove her point, Kaurwrites:"Iwould like to
repeatthat it is not lust or sex or carnalhunger but ratheran esFurcape from all this that drags her [Das] from man to man."42
thermore,although almost every criticcommentson the unpleasant sex of the early days of the marriage,thereis no commentary
on the joyous lovemakingof the lateryears when Kamalaparticipates in and enjoys the husband's homoerotic sexual scenarios in
which she is his "darling little boy."Chapter 27 begins:
During my nervous breakdown there developed between myself and my hus-

749
band an intimacy which was purely physical ... after bathing me in warm
water and dressing me in men's clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap,
fondling me and calling me his little darling boy. ... I was by nature shy ...
but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life
learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing." (P. 126)
Here KamalaDas calmly discloses two "unmentionable"

aspects
of her life-her period of precariousmental health and her participation in perversemaritalsex. Whatbecomes difficultto integrate
into an antipatriarchalreading is Das's candid account of how
much sexual pleasureshe found in these circumstances.Here Das
disruptsthe normativefeministnarrativeabout "wifelysuffering"
at the hands of a sexuallyvoracioushusband.In this and otherinstances,Das's narrativequeers the very institutionof marriageby
making marital sex appear perverse and enjoyableprecisely for
thatreason.
HUSBANDS AND LOVERS
Another way in which KamalaDas interruptsthe heteronormative is through the figure of "thehusband"in her autobiography,
fiction,and poetry.As recountedin the autobiography,one of the
few conversationsthat Kamalaand her fiance have before their
wedding is about OscarWilde.She writes:"He[the fianc6]talked
about homosexuality with frankness.Many of us pass through
that stage, he said"(p. 92). Despite his theory of stages, same-sex
practiceis not such a singular stage that the husband grows beyond. His obviously pleasurable relationships with other men
continuepast the wedding.
As narratedin the passage that serves as the second epigraph
to this essay, even as Kamaladeterminesto be unfaithfulto her
husband, she learns of his "friend"and "constantcompanion"(p.
118). The last three lines in this paragraphare among the most
quoted sentences from this autobiography.Read, as is the usual
criticalpractice,outsidethe contextof Das's excruciatingconsideration of what sexual pleasuresmight lie beyond the heterosexual
option (for men in this instance),these last three lines have been
interpreted as that all-too-familiar tirade about the burden of
being "awoman"-with one's breasts and genitals serving as the
source and location of one's suffering. Interestingly,Das's most
anthologizedpoem, the autobiographical"AnIntroduction,"con-

750
tains a passage that seems to recountthis exact incident-the passage that serves as the first epigraph for this article.Yet,in most
close readingsof this poem, criticsdo not dispel the illusion that
the "youth of sixteen"whom the husband draws into the bedroom is necessarilythe "I"(the sixteen-year-oldbride that we all
know Kamala was), and not a young boy-a "youth"as she so
plainly tells us.43The syntax works against the line breaksin this
section of the poem. Thus the poem makes possible either a syntacticallyawkward heterosexualreading, or conversely,a fluent
statement about same-sex desire that competes with the young
bride'sheterosexualineptness.Criticsappearto preferthe syntacticallyawkwardinterpretation.Similarly,in most criticalreadings
of this poem, the lines about the 'beaten"woman'sbody are read,
despite her insistence that "he did not beat me," as proof of the
man's physical and sexual violence.44In the lines that follow the
passage cited in the epigraph,Das writes:
Then ... I wore a shirtand my
Brother'strousers,cut my hair shortand ignored
My womanliness.Dress in saris,be girl,
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer,be cook,
Be a quarrellerwith servants.Fitin. Oh,
Belong,criedthe categorisers.(P.7)
In criticalreadings of this poem, these lines that express her dissatisfaction with her woman's body are read as the familiar
"woman'scomplaint"under the yoke of patriarchyratherthan a
rejectionof the hetero-genderedreproductivefemale body. The
lines that describe her adoption of male clothes and short hair
have not encouraged critics to consider whether the gendered
roles assigned to both wife and husband under a heteropatriarchal45order are being destabilized.Insteadthese lines are read as
inclinationsas a woman-distorthe beatingdown of her "natural"
a
tions forced upon her by sexually devouring husband. Das's
listing of the categoriesavailableto the middle-classwoman (girl,
wife, embroiderer,cook, quarrelerwith servants)all assume a heterosexual and domestic foundation. In this passage, to refuse
these domestic categoriesis to refuse the sense of belonging and
shelterofferedby heteropatriarchal
arrangements.
A passage from anothercommonly anthologizedpoem, "Composition"(1967),again demonstrateshow closely Das weaves heterosexualityand homosexuality.These constantsexual (re)orien-

751
tations do not provide identities as much as they provide roles

that intersecteach other:
I asked my husband,
am I hetero
am I lesbian
or am I just plain frigid?
He only laughed.
Forsuch questions
probablythereareno answers
or else
the answersmust emerge
fromwithin. (P.46)
Somewhat exasperated by Das's meandering poesy in this
lengthy poem, feminist criticVrindaNabar comments:"Onecan
hardly blame him [the husband-for laughing]!Thereseems little
excuse for such immatureanalysis, always carriedto excess and
singularly lacking in irony."Nabar goes on to note that Kamala
Das does not get profoundnor provide "adose of introspection...
or some self-criticism"but instead goes into airing her doubts
which, accordingto Nabar,consist of a "longmoan"about "queers
and lesbians."46
In the criticaltexts on Das, the figure of "thehusband,"never
named in the autobiography,but Madhav Das in real life, stands
in for patriarchy.This would make his homosexual tendencies a
stumblingblock but onlyif patriarchywere to be linked to heterosexuality.Male same-sex practices,such as those indulged in on
occasionby the husband,are representedas anotherof his "sexual
corruptions"that Kamalaas his wife is subjectto-irrespectiveof
her degree of pleasurein participation.Basingher opinion on her
reading of My Story, Nabar concludes that Madhav Das was
"crude,insensitive, incapable of even basic human decency. He
emerges as the worst kind of the conventionalIndianmale."This
is of course an assessment that KamalaDas encouragesand embellishes repeatedly in her written work and interviews even as
she provides examples of his interestingdeviance from the "conventional Indian male."For instance,Das comments in her autobiography and interviews that her husband encouragedher infidelities and even offered evaluations of each of her lovers. The
husband in My Storyis queernot simply because of his occasional
same-sex liaisons but also in his disregardof one of the most cru-

752
cial linchpinsof the heteropatriarchal

marriagecontract-theinsistence on wifely sexual fidelity.Commentingon one of the scenes
in the autobiographyin which Das and her husband discuss her
latest lover,Nabarwrites:"Amazingly,her husband was not outraged, only 'irked'because she had encouragedsuch a 'stupidfellow.'Similarstatements,implying a toleranceof her extra-marital
relationshipson her husband'spart, are scatteredthroughmuch
of Kamala'sprose. They seem at odds with the image she comKamalaDas is quite consistentabout the
monly projectsof him."47
of
unconventionality every aspectof her marriage.If this image of
the husband is "atodds" with a "commonlyprojectedimage"of
him, then it is at odds with the image thatemerges
fromextantfeminist criticismwhich has constructedhim as patriarchy'sarchvillain-a necessary complement to the image of Kamala Das as a
woman oppressedby the patriarchalhegemony embodiedby her
fatherand husband.Das in fact repeatedlydemonstrateshow incomplete and inefficient the whole machinery of patriarchal
power canbein operation.4
Most importantly,we need to ponderthe issue of Das'schoiceof
the pseudonym, "MadhaviKutty.""Kutty"is a common suffix in
Keralaacross castes but particularlyamong upper-castewomen.
Kuttyis also used as an affectionatesuffix which is unmarkedby
gender and religion and best translatesas "child"or "smallone."
Hence, when a child is named afterparentor adult, the suffixbecomes a way to distinguishthe adult from the child.49Madhaviis
however,the feminineformof Madhav,her husband'sname. Why
would KamalaDas make this gesture if the motivatingforce behind her writing was to protest her miserablemarriageand her
brute of a husband?Is her choice of pseudonym parodic?Is this
anotherinstanceof Das'sposturingas the ever-obedientwife who
takesher very name fromher husband?KamalaDas's use of her
husband'slast name "Das"forher publicationsin Englishwas possibly an attemptto follow the practicein otherpartsof the country,
especially in the English-languageliterarycircles.If she were to
follow the matrilinealnamingconvention,she would be known as
Nalapat Kamalaor Nalapat MadhaviKutty.However, these versions of her name would reveal her identity to those such as her
reveredgrandmother,who, KamalaDas claims,died without discovering that Madhavi Kutty,the writer of scandalous stories in
Malayalam,was Kamalawritingunder a pseudonym.

753
CONTRADICTINGHETEROPATRIARCHY
In the preface to TheEndlessFemaleHungers:A Studyof Kamala
Das (1994),VrindaNabar writes that the contradictoryseries of
statements and decisions that Das has made over the years of
being intensely written up and interviewed make her an unreliable narratorof her own life." Other scholarshave made similar
assessments-RanjanaDwivedi gives an example that she finds
representativeof Das's contradictoryself-presentationwithin the
pages of My Story:"Thebook as many of her criticshave noted is
full of contradictions .... One may quote several examples to
prove this inconsistency... e.g. an intense awarenessof her ugly

looks is a deep-rooted trait of [her] personality.She discusses it
again and again,and still she presentsherselfas being chased and
desiredby several men!"51
Thereis a discourseabout standardsof
in
that
accounts for Dwivedi's confusion.
beauty operationhere
However, there is absolutelyno contradictionfor the readerwho
is attuned to the intense autoeroticismof Kamala'srelationto her
own body-in adolescence, in illness, in health, in the process of
satisfying and unsatisfactorylovemaking.Das's representationof
her own and other female bodies goes beyond the requisite description of the woman's body in heterosexualsituations.In the
many descriptionsof heterosexualcoupling etched in her poetry
and prose, there is an excessive lingering on the body of the
woman which is matchedby a fading out of the male or a reduction of him into mere observer while the woman stands entrancedby her own womanly flesh.
What also needs to be noted is that it is not just same-sexdesire
that disturbs the heteropatriarchalorder in My Storyand other
works by KamalaDas. Rather,Das's queerness makes visible to
her, and therebyto us, all that occurs at a tangent to the normative-the practices (and not all of them sexual) that have always
existed at a slight angle to the heteropatriarchal.
She observesand
those
of
and
class inequalitywhich
exposes
very aspects gender
social conventionshave decreedinvisible to "decent"women and
to respectablewomen writers.Forexample,her understandingof
the politics of (hetero)sexualpower aregleaned fromher observation of the seduction of servant girls by rich philanderers.Her
childhood knowledge of power relations comes from learning
that a self-administeredabortionis the reasonwhy the maid loses
her job. Kamala'scomplaintsabout the drudgery of her own life

754
are often and deliberately undercut by juxtaposing such complaints with descriptionsof the severely cramped circumstances
in which her servantslive theirlives.
I will also add that when same-sexdesire floods the screenit is
not something that is indulged in because heterosexualoptions
for sex are closed. This is often the course that female sexuality
takes in the South Asian narrativein which lesbian desire is an
explicit feature of the story.52Kamala Das repeatedly takes the
wife outside the maritalhome and into hotel rooms,as well as the
homes and workplaces of lovers of both sexes. And yet homoeroticsituationsare evoked only to be put aside again and again,
in My Storyas much as in her fiction. Why does Das repeatedly
go throughthe pleasuresof such disciplining?And how long can
this strategy-that some may see as ultimately homophobic-be
maintained?Some of Das's recent fiction, such as the short story
"TheSandal Trees,"has only intensified this backtrackingand
crisscrossingover into same-sexrelationshipsand back to heterosexualitywith the possibilityof returnleft open.53
It will be interestingto see how stalwartDas followerswill read
"The Sandal Trees"(Chandana Marangal), written by Das in
Malayalamin 1988 and translatedinto English under her guidance by V. C. Harris and C.K. Mohamed Ummer in 1995. This
story chartsa four-decade-longsexual and emotionalrelationship
between two women which carriesechoes of the relationshipbetween Kamala and the college girlfriend in the autobiography.
And in this short story, Das is not reticent about making direct
comparisonsbetween the husband and the lover.4In this story,it
is impossible to read same-sex desire as a stage in growing up to
be properly heterosexualor to easily mistake it for an insignificant attachment."TheSandalTrees"cannotbe processed through
these theoriesand, instead,makes visible and legible the contours
of Das's work that cannot otherwise be mapped even under the
rubricof feminist criticismunless one is willing to discuss samesex desire. Conversely,the explicit lesbian theme of "TheSandal
Trees"does make same-sex desire in My Storylook incomplete,
incoherent,even embryonic.Although "TheSandal Trees"does
not have the sly, insidious queer charge of My Story, in the current
moment of the internationalizationof homosexualidentity-based
politics, this short story may be more useful to lesbian causes in

the Indian context than My Story.

755
CONCLUSION
Read solely on the nationalliteraryregister,Das's 1976 autobiography would seem to have had its moment of attentionand notoriety. Perhaps Das's December 1999 announcement that she is
going to convert to Islam, change her name to Suraiya,and take
to "purdah"(wearing the veil in public) will provoke a reassessment of the sexual politics of Das'searlierworks in Indianliterary
and feminist discourses.55Or, as queer activists in India become
increasinglyvocal about legitimating alternatesexualities, Das's
empatheticportrayalof "freaks,""eunuchs,""sinners,"and other
outcastesmay merit reconsideration.However,from a strictlynational literaryframework,the seeming randomnessof my choice
of My Story,along with the cross-culturalcitation style, and the
partialreadings,might seem to provide evidence of a dilettantish,
FirstWorld-based,diasporic dabbling in the queer and unusual.
What cannotbe wished away is the gap between queer temporalities and the temporalityof nationalliteraryhistories.
It seems as if the female sexuality that Indian-and most otherfeminism is comfortablewith is that which is construedas "problematic"as in the awful early days of Kamala'smarriage.Writing
on AfricanAmericanwomen's sexuality,Evelynn M. Hammond
has recently noted the impossibility of speaking it except in the
context of violation or oppression (as in rape, lynching, incest, or
a lack of reproductivecontrol).56In the Indian context as in the
African American (albeit for differenthistoricalreasons), female
sexualityhas for too long been the topic that entersdiscourseonly
as the locus of potential or full-fledgedproblems.Thus, what we
have is a literary-criticalmainstreamthat in its most benevolent
patriarchaltraditionreads Das's dynamic representationsof desire in purely aestheticterms-that is, as literarytheme (see n. 9).
This stance is challengedby feministswho focus on the material,
the autobiographical,and the symbolic political challenge to patriarchyencoded in Das's work. Less impressed critics have labeled Das a nymphomaniac or as suffering from a "sex
A queer reading of Das works with what is discardaddiction.""57
ed in patriarchaland feministreadings,namely,the contradictory,
the duplicitous,the parodic,the perverse,the incomplete,and interruptive.
Despite the politics of location that usefully interrupt a seamless
application of theory to text, I do believe that queering Kamala

756
Das is an extremely rewarding project.I have tried to demonstratethat readingDas as a feminist,antipatriarchalwriter,while

respectful of the local feminist projectsthat envelop this work,
does not answer many of the enigmas raised by the dynamics of
sexuality in her texts. Readingher texts as queer,however multiply defined that termmay be, forcesa discussionof sexualityand
subjecthoodthat goes beyond the conventions of the unconventional and into less stable interpretationsof her work. As Berlant
and Warnerhave noted, queer commentaryresults in "unsettleI have focused in this articleon
ment ratherthan systemization."58
the gaps between differentdiscussions on Das that are produced
in different locations.59 I believe that each of these gaps illuminates the currentsituationin which English-languageliterarycriticism is being producedaroundthe globe with differentsociocultural and academic foci but for audiences that overlap in ways
not envisioned in earlierdecades. This examinationof My Story
then, bares the pitfalls as well as the necessity of negotiatingbetween locations as diverse as those of different academic disciplines, differentliterarylists, geographiclocations,queer and national temporalities,languages, understandingsof "queer,"feminisms, and sexual practices.
NOTES
Earlier versions of different sections of this article were presented at the twenty-sixth
annual South Asian Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1997, and at the
Queer Globalization/Local Homosexualities Conference at the Center for Lesbian and
Gay Studies, CUNY, in New York, April 1998. I would like to thank Gayatri Gopinath,
Judith Halberstam, Lisa Lowe, David Ludden, Chandan Reddy, Aparajita Sagar, and
Lisa Yoneyama for helping me work through this material. I would also like to thank
Houston Baker and the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, for enabling my research in the South Asian Collection at the Van Pelt Library (University of
Pennsylvania) in the spring of 1998. I am grateful to the anonymous readers and editors
at Feminist Studies whose comments greatly improved the final version of this paper.
Epigraphs: See S.C. Harrex and Vincent O'Sullivan, eds., KamalaDas: A Selection with
Essays on Her Work(Adelaide, Australia: Center for Research in the New Literatures in
English, CRNLE Writers Series, 1986), 7-9. All cited poems are from this source and will
be referred to by page numbers in parentheses in the text. Also see Kamala Das, My
Story (New Delhi: Sterling, 1976). All further citations will be from this edition and will
be referred to by page numbers in parentheses in the text.
1. Nairs were a military class (in Kerala, southern India) who had been granted land by
grateful kings over the centuries. By the twentieth century, Nairs were a powerful feudal class of landowners. Although Nairs enjoy certain distinct caste privileges, they are

757
second in Kerala's Hindu caste hierarchy to the Namboodiris or the priestly caste. According to the matrilineal conventions of the Nair community, Kamala Das belongs to
the Nalapat family, well known in Kerala for their contributions to Malayalam literature
and culture.
2. For a detailed account of the many prizes and honors given to Das, see the chronology provided by Iqbal Kaur, Feminist Revolution and Kamala Das' "My Story" (Patiala,
India: Century Twenty-One, 1992), ii-vi.
3. A comprehensive list of South Asian scholars producing such work would be
lengthy-but to mention just a few names, consider the globally cited work of Bina Aggarwal, Urvashi Butalia, Kamala Bhasin, Uma Chakravarti, Veena Das, Mary John, Kumari Jayawardena, Madhu Kishwar, Ratna Kapur, Vina Mazumdar, Ritu Menon, Janaki
Nair, Tejaswini Niranjana, Kumkum Sangari, Tanika Sarkar, Susie Tharu, and Sudesh
Vaid. Then there are many diasporic South Asian scholars whose work on gender and
the state have made solid contributions in setting the terms for these discussions-Inderpal Grewal, Ania Loomba, Lata Mani, Chandra Mohanty, Rajeshwari SunderRajan, and
Gayatri Spivak. Please note that these lists are incomplete and that the distinction that I
make between "South Asian" and "diasporic South Asian" is very unstable because several of the above named scholars might inhabit either category at different points in
their careers.
4. Mary John and Janaki Nair, eds., A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economicsof Modern India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), 1-51, 1. In their preface to the collection,
Nair and John report that despite their best efforts they were ultimately unable to solicit
contributions on homosexuality or on the sexualization of Kerala (viii). However, their
excellent introduction to the collection discusses alternate sexuality and other aspects of
the sexual economics of modem India in some detail.
5. Jacqui Alexander, "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of
State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy," Feminist Genealogies,Colonial Legacies,
Democratic Futures, ed. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 63-100, 65.
6. In this essay, for instance, given the customary space constraints of journal articles, I
have had to restrict my citations in several instances to "representative" scholarship
rather than be able to catalog the entire body of work on Das, on postcolonial feminism(s), queer commentary, and other related issues.
7. Note that Das was awarded the PEN Asian Poetry Prize in 1963 and had a national
and international reputation as a poet writing in English well before My Story was published.
8. Vincent O'Sullivan, "Whose Voice Is Where? On Listening to Kamala Das," in Kamala
Das, 179-94, 180.
9. Readers should note that Kamala Das's work can be placed within several literary
contexts: Third World women's writing, South Asian postcolonial/feminist writing (in
the subcontinent and the diaspora), the Indian national literary tradition, and Malayalam literature. These literary fields are not to be understood as concentric circles: they
do not mimic geography but instead need to be envisioned as overlapping worlds. In
India, literary critics routinely compare Das's poetic themes and style to the work of
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Simone de Beauvoir. Also, Das occupies different positions in these three or four literary histories: her reputation in Australia, for example,
rests on the interest in "new literatures in English" and more specifically on the volume
KamalaDas. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar include Das's poem, "An Introduction,"
in their Norton Anthology of Literatureby Women:A Traditionin English (New York: Norton, 1985), 2247-49.
Among subcontinental critics of Indian women's writing in English, Kamala Das occupies a curious position. Her exceptional literary talent, especially as a poet, has usually been acknowledged by literary critics, even by those who despair at her choice of top-

758
ics. Recently, in "Kamala Das-Need for Re-Assessment," in Feminist English Literature,

ed. Manmohan K. Bhatnagar (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1999), 4-9, 8, Sharad Rajimwale has argued that Das "inaugurates a new age for women poets [in India]." Such
acknowledgment of Das's talent is not always forthcoming. In The Waffleof the Toffs:A
Socio-literaryReading of Indian Literaturein English (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2000), M. Prabha does not mince words as she reduces Das's work to '"bedroombardistry" in which "all her outpourings pertain to the pelvic region" (224).
Interestingly, in literary histories of Malayalam literature, Das is usually represented
as a lightweight. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, and her maternal uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, are the more respected writers whose poetry and translations are
given serious consideration, even in English-language literary histories of Malayalam.
Her mother has been awarded the "Padma Bhusan," one of independent India's high official cultural awards, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1966. (Kamala Das herself
won the latter prize in 1985.) Das's maternal uncle has been included in the highest literary canons of Malayalam literature. See K.R.R. Nair, The Poetry of Kamala Das (New
Delhi: Reliance, 1993), and literary histories such as Krishna Chaitanya, A History of
MalayalamLiterature(Poona, India: Orient Longman, 1971); and Ayyappa K. Panniker, A
Short History of Malayalam Literature (Trivandrum, India: Department of Public Relations, Government of Kerala, 1977).
Still, Kamala Das's autobiography immediately won the patronage of the established
(mostly male) literary critics who, although not particularly inspired by feminism, were
graciously willing to accommodate "feminine writing." The father of English-language
literary criticism in post-independence India, as the late K.S.R. Iyengar was often called,
summarized his opinion of Das as follows: "Kamala Das is a fiercely feminine sensibility
that dares without inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive
largely man-made world" (Indian Writing in English [New York: Asia Publishing House,
1973], 680). K.R.R. Nair insists that Kamala Das's confessional poetry and My Story are
not to be read as autobiographical "in the conventional sense" but as "an imaginative
and fanciful rendering of certain autobiographical experiences" (Nair, 103). Needless to
say, feminist critics in the subcontinent and outside have read Kamala Das's life into her
work and have done so, in part, to counter such masculinist reduction of her work to
discussions of form and theme.
From the late 1970s onward Kamala Das has become for feminists a symbol of the oppressed lives that women live in traditional patriarchal societies and, more importantly,
a symbol of the feminist protest of such oppression. For instance, Iqbal Kaur distinguished her own reading of My Story from other scholarly approaches by noting that
"My Story is full of sensationalism only to those who read in it the story of a single lustobsessed feminine woman seeking a life of physical pleasure, while ... Kamala Das is a
feminist woman trying to reject male lust which turns a woman into an object." The
writer of many books and editor of anthologies on Das, Kaur argues in her 1992 study
that My Story is a serious social critique. Kaur lists over twenty such "social problems"
that Das grapples with in the autobiography-problems such as "the power-imbalance in
sexual relationships, animal-like existence of women, male treachery, infidelity in marriage, society's double standards especially of morality, purdah system," and so on
(Feminist Revolutions and Kamala Das' "My Story," 4-5). Later in her study, when Kaur
goes on to discuss the issues that were central to Indian feminism in the 1970s, her list
looks very much like the earlier presented one citing Das's concerns in My Story (Feminist Revolutionsand KamalaDas' "My Story," 22).
10. Ketu Katrak, "Post-Colonial Women's Colonised States: Mothering and M-othering
in Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Kamala Das' My Story,"Journalof GenderStudies 5, no. 3 (1996): 273-91; Harveen Sachdeva Mann, "'Cracking India': Minority Women
Writers and the Contentious Margins of Indian Nationalist Discourse," Journal of Commonwealth Literature29, no. 2, (1994): 71-94; Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Terms of Empower-

759
ment in Kamala Das' My Story"in Perspectiveson KamalaDas' Prose, ed. Iqbal Kaur (New
Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House, 1995), 87-111. Also see Lim, "Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into the Subject of the Contemporary Woman
Writer," WomenStudies 18 (summer 1990): 153-75.
11. Katrak, 288.
12. Mann, 71.
13. See, for instance, the oft-cited essay, "French Feminism in an International Frame,"
in In Other Worlds:Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), in which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes of the need to work toward escaping "the inbuilt colonialism of first world feminism toward the third" in order to "promote a sense of our
common yet history-specific lot" (134-53, 153). Chandra Talpade Mohanty has also written persuasively of the need for Western feminism to problematize its "discursive colonialism" in the now classic "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses," in Third World Womenand the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (New York: Routledge, 1992), 51-80. Here and
elsewhere we are urged to pay due attention to what is considered political in a feminist
sense in the specific Third World location/text under investigation rather than impose a
Euro-American, essentially colonialist, viewpoint.
14. Marilyn Friedman, "Multicultural Education and Feminist Ethics," Hypatia 10
(spring 1995): 56-68, 65.
15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "The Burden of English," The Lie of the Land:English Literary Studies in India, ed. Rajeshwari SunderRajan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1992), 275-99, 276.
16. If there was/is a section of the "implied readership" among whom Das's autobiography was well-received for the very features of the text that I highlight in this essay, there
were/are no public accounts of this reception. This is not to argue that there is no lesbian and gay readership or such communities in India. For an overview of Indian gay
and lesbian groups and their activities, see Sherry Joseph's "Gay and Lesbian Movement
in India," Economicand Political Weekly,17 Aug. 1996, 2228-32. For a more up-to-date account, see Bina Fernandez, ed., Humjinsi: A Resource Bookfor Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual
Rights in India (New Delhi: India Centre for Human Rights and Law, 1999).
17. See Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-SexLove in India:Readingsfrom Literature and History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Also see Shakuntala Devi's The
Worldof Homosexuals (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977), an interview-based study that is roughly
contemporaneous with My Story. Sudhir Kakar's important psychoanalytical study, The
Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (1978; rpt., New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), contains some discussion of homosexuality. Also
see the patronizing and voyeuristic account of gay male life-styles in contemporary
India written by Arvind Kala, Invisible Minority: The Unknown Worldof the Indian Homosexual (New Delhi: Dynamic Books, 1992). Giti Thadani's Sakhiyani:LesbianDesire in Ancient and Modern India (London: Cassell, 1996) attempts to bring lesbians in India into
visibility through interpretations of "the hidden realm of women's traditions" (viii), archaeological artifacts, paintings, sculptures, and accounts of same-sex coupling. Homosexuality and queerness inform numerous academic and other publications and cultural
texts produced by South Asians in South Asia and in the diaspora. See, for example, the
films of Pratima Parmar, Hanif Khureshi, Deepa Mehta, and fiction by Sohaila Abdulali,
Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, Ginu Kamani, Vikram Chandra, Shani Motoo, Suniti
Namjoshi, Shyam Selvadurai, and Vikram Seth. Also see Rakesh Ratti's edited collection
of writing by queer, gay, and lesbian South Asians, titled, A Lotus of Another Color:An
Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (Boston: Alyson Publications,
1993). For queer readings of South Asian diasporic situations, see the work of Gayatri
Gopinath, Geeta Patel, Jasbir Puar, Sandip Roy, and Nayan Shah.
18. Ashwini Sutthankar, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writingfrom India (New Delhi: Pen-

760
guin, 1999); Deepa Mehta, dir., Fire (Trial by Fire Films, 1996). Also see Hoshang Merchant, ed., Yarana:Gay Writingfrom India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999). Over the last five
years, almost every popular Indian magazine has had a special issue or cover story on
homosexuality. For example, see the special issues of Sunday magazines: "Glad to Be
Gay: Indian Homosexuals come out of the Closet," 16-22 Aug. 1992, and "Women in
Love: Indian Lesbians Talk about Themselves," 17-23 May 1998. For a comprehensive
list of newspaper and magazine discussions on homosexuality in the Indian media
(from 1984 to 1999), see Humjinsi. I would like to thank Shohini Ghosh for bringing
some of these materials to my attention.
19. See, for instance, Lisa Rofel's "Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in
China," GLQ 5, no. 4 (1999): 451-74, for a discussion of the opening up of a semipublic,
internet-supported, transnational gay space in Beijing.
20. Note, for instance, the increased number of queer venues-parties, magazines, journals, conferences, and chat rooms that speak to cross-continental audiences. Also see the
forthcoming collection of essays titled Queering India:Same-SexLoveand Eroticismin Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2001), which showcases
queer readings of Indian cinema, Indian legal discourses, literary texts, popular media,
and advertising. Contributors are based in India and outside.
21. See the opening pages of Susan Seizer's "Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of
Queer Passage," Public Culture, 8, no. 1 (1995): 73-100, which provide a representative
example of such a scholarly strategy. Also see Gayatri Gopinath's astute analysis of
Seizer's work in "Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame," Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder:
Perseus/ Westview, 1998), 133-50.
22. Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational
Reception," Feminist Review 35 (summer 1990): 24-41, 25, 27.
23. Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
24. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?"
PMLA 110 (1995): 343-49, 345.
25. Needless to say, current discussions around "queerness" do go beyond the domain
of sex and sexual orientation. See, for example, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, ed. Alice
Y. Hom and David L. Eng (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
26. John and Nair, 6.
27. Judith Halberstam, FemaleMasculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 13.
28. Karen Liitzen, "Lamise en discours and Silences in the Research on the History of
Sexuality," Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, ed.
Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagon (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19-32.
29. See Dennis Altman, "Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities," Social Text 14, no. 3 (1996): 77-94; and the anthology, Coming Out: An Anthology of
In-ternationalGay and LesbianWritings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
For thoughtful reassessments of different aspects of this very internationalization, see
Rofel; Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, eds., Same-Sex Relations and Female Desires: TransgenderPractices across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999);
Martin Manalansan, "Inthe Shadow of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics
and the Diasporic Dilemma," GLQ 2 (1995): 425-38; and Gopinath.
30. P.P. Raveendran, "Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das," Indian
Literature 155 (May-June 1993): 145-61. After this response by Das, the interviewer,
Raveendran, shifts direction to focus on religion. It would have been useful to have had
Das elaborate on the rather enigmatic last sentence. Understandably, however, in
Raveendran's context, the question of religion was more urgently in need of elaboration
(and potentially more provocative) given the highly inflamed religious/communal
mood in India at the time.

761
31. For more on this distinction between "Indian feminism" and same-sex desire in the
context of Das's work, see my discussion of the critical responses to Das's short story
"Iqbal,"in "'Queernesses All Mine': Same-Sex Desire in Kamala Das' Fiction and Poetry," in Queering India. This sentiment that there is only a thin strip of shared ground between feminists and lesbians was recently espoused by some Indian feminists and feminist groups who publicly and deliberately distanced their own project from that of Indian lesbians in the discussions and protests following the December 1998 vandalism organized by the Shiv Sena (a fundamentalist right-wing Hindu group) against the
screening of Deepa Mehta's film Fire in Bombay. From 1998 to the present, a series of exchanges (Madhu Kishwar in Manushi and the letters to the editor in response to her negative reading of Fire, as well as articles by others, reveal the complex and hardly comfortable relationship between feminist and lesbian activism in India at present. The intense discussion on female sexuality and its place in Indian feminism that Fire has generated is much too complex to be captured in a note. See Madhu Kishwar, "Naive Outpourings of a Self-Hating Indian: Deepa Mehta's Fire,"Manushi 109 (November-December 1999): 3-14; and "Responses to Manushi [re. review of Deepa Mehta's film Fire],"
Manushi 112 (May-June 1999): 2-11. Also see C.M. Naim, "A Dissent on 'Fire,'" Economic
and Political Weekly, 17-24 Apr. 1999, 955-57; Mary E. John and Tejaswini Niranjana,
"MirrorPolitics: 'Fire,'Hindutva, and Indian Culture," Economicand Political Weekly,6-13
Mar. 1999, 581-84.
32. See interviews with Raveendran and Shobha Warrier, "Interview with Kamala Das,"
www.redifindia.com/1996/.
Ranjana Harish cites two other interviews in which Das
makes this claim and suggests that Das's retreat from her earlier "boldness" stemmed
from her reaction to a Time magazine article that described Das as "the queen of Erotica." See Ranjana Harish, "My Story: An Attempt to Tell Female Body's Truth," in Perspectives on KamalaDas' Prose, 44-53, 52.
33. This was perhaps intended to draw the reader into each episode of the story as and
when it appeared in serialized form in 1974 in the popular, weekly, Mumbai-based
magazine, the Current.
34. For example, in Vrinda Nabar's eighteen-page summary of the autobiography, this
relationship with the college girl is described thus: "She [Kamala Das] also developed a
crush on her art tutor [male], a Bengali lady who taught her English, and even on an
older girl who had an unsavory reputation as a lesbian!" (7). See Vrinda Nabar, The Endless FemaleHungers: A Study of KamalaDas (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994). There
is no further analysis of the significance of this relationship between the two women.
Also indicative of the dismissive treatment given to such attachments is the repeated
use of the exclamation mark as punctuation in sentences that refer to same-sex eroticism.
35. Here, as elsewhere in this text, it is extremely hard to quickly gloss the complexities
of the class/caste/family pride that inflects much of Das's view of the world. In this
passage, her derision for the details of a middle-class life stems from the suspicion that
this may well be the world that awaits her after marriage, despite the royal connections
and the high literary/cultural standing of the Nalapat family.
36. Alexander, 64.
37. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships between
Womenfrom the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981). Faderman's
scholarship, produced to explicate an entirely different scenario, offers some insight
into Das's manipulation of innocence and eroticism. Commenting on the sexual relationships between European women in the eighteenth century, Faderman claims that "a
narrower interpretation of what constitutes eroticism permitted a broader expression of
erotic behavior since it was not considered inconsistent with virtue" (39).
38. See Sudhir Karkar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (1989; rpt., New
Delhi: Penguin, 1990), and The Inner World.Kakar has argued very forcefully for a theo-

762
ry of male sexual development in which same-sex desire, fantasy, and activities are not
validated as manifestations of sexual preference or orientation but viewed as symptomatic of power dynamics in a hierarchical society (134-35). There is less discussion in
Kakar's work of same-sex erotics for women.
39. Kakar, Inner World,64, 56.
40. The reference here is to the Kathakali dance-drama performance that Kamala's father had arranged as part of the festivities around her ostentatious wedding. In his eagerness to consummate their marriage, Kamala's husband decides that they, bride and
groom, will not stay up to watch the performance with the wedding guests. For discussion of the marital sex in the early years of Das's marriage, see Harish, Nabar, Katrak,
and Kaur.
41. Harish, 46.
42. Iqbal Kaur, "Sexual Politics and Kamala Das," in Perspectiveson KamalaDas's Poetry,
162.
43. See, for example, Prabhat Kumar Pandeya's interpretation of this passage: "Men
may enjoy it ["mere carnality"] but not women and in such a situation, and it is a plenty,
the woman may feel used, like a lavatory as the young typist girl of The Waste Land, and
she is shocked and humiliated, her whole womanhood trampled by the hasty aggressiveness of the male. The defloration is always a traumatic experience for the woman."
See Prabhat Kumar Pandeya, "The Pink Pulsating Words: The Woman's Voice in Kamala Das's Poetry," in Perspectiveson KamalaDas's Poetry, 33-43, 34. In his explanation of
the poem, A.N. Dwivedi suggests that these lines imply that "she is married to a youth
of sixteen." See A.N. Dwivedi, Kamala Das and Her Poetry (Delhi: Doaba House, 1983),
114. Nabar (10) is the only critic who makes a link between this passage in the poem
and the homosexual relationship between the husband and his friend described in My
Story.
44. Iqbal Kaur's analysis of "An Introduction" provides a representative example of selective citation from the autobiography and poems that result in a tightly woven narrative about unremitting patriarchal oppression that culminates in outrage at the "beaten"
woman's body. See "Sexual Politics and Kamala Das" (154-56). Also see Nair (17) and
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, "TheLoud Posters of Kamala Das," in KamalaDas, 217-24, 218.
45. For a full explication of the ways in which heterosexualization works in collaboration with patriarchy, see Jacqui Alexander who builds on Lynda Hart's theory of heteropatriarchy in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
46. Nabar, 51, 52. Also see "The Doubt" (1967), a poem in which Das ruminates at
length about the very gendering of individuals into the categories of female and male.
For detailed queer readings of "Composition," "The Doubt," and other poems and short
stories by Das, see my "'Queernesses All Mine'".
47. Nabar, 10, 11.
48. For example, her father might have efficiently arranged his daughter's marriage
with the active collaboration of his wife and mother-in-law, but he is absolutely helpless
when it comes to alleviating her unhappiness after marriage.
49. Note that Hindu women in Kerala rarely use caste names after their given name.
The form used by Nair women was the name of the Tharavadu(family house) followed
by the given name. For example, Das's mother's published under "Nalapat Balamani
Amma"-Amma is another generic suffix attached to women's names in Kerala. I am
grateful to Dilip Menon for discussing this matter of naming in the Nair community
with me.
50. Nabar, vi.
51. Ranjana Dwivedi, "Autobiography: A Metaphor for the Self," in Between Spaces of Silence: Women Creative Writers, ed. Kamini Dinesh (New Delhi: Sterling, 1994), 115-25,
123.

763
52. See, for instance, Ismat Chugtai's wonderful 1942 short story, "The Quilt," in The
Quilt and Other Stories, trans. Tahira Naqvi and Syeda Hameed (New Delhi: Kali for
Women Press, 1992); and Deepa Mehta's Fire.
53. Kamala Das, "The Sandal Trees," in The Sandal Trees and Other Stories, trans. V.C.
Harris and C.K. Mohamed Ummer (Hyderabad: Disha/Orient Longman, 1995), 1-27.
For a detailed analysis of the kinds of acknowledgment of same-sex desire in Das's
work that the conscientious critic will have to make when she/he reads "The Sandal
Trees," see my contribution to Queering India.
54. See "The Sandal Trees," 5, 10, 13, 16, 26. Toward the end of the story, the husband
concedes to the main protagonist, his wife, that he has always known that he "was a
mere drizzle arriving hesitantly, timidly, after a full storm" (26).
55. For more on Das's conversion to Islam, see "I like Islam's Orthodox Lifestyle: Kamala Das" [Interview with Kamala Das], The Times of India, 15 Dec. 1999. [www.timesofindia.com]. The political and feminist implications of this announcement, which
comes at a time when communal tensions around conversions (from the dominant
Hindu religion to Islam and Christianity) are high, need to be studied at length and cannot be examined in a note. Also see www.rediff.com/news/1999/dec/
13kamala.htm.
56. Evelynn M. Hammonds, "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality," Feminist
Genealogies,170-82.
57. See the much-cited essay by fellow Indian poet Eunice de Souza, titled "Kamala
Das," in Indian Poetry in English: A CriticalAssessment, ed. V.A. Shahane and M. Shivaramakrishna (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1980), 43.
58. Berlant and Warner, 348.
59. One of the silences in this article concerns Das's writing in Malayalam. Although
this article makes evident that there is a substantial global discussion about Das's prodigious work in English that is conducted in English, there is no sidestepping the fact that
neither myself nor most of the critics I have cited have the language skills requisite for a
discussion of Kamala Das's entire oeuvre. There seems to be, as yet, no serious discussion of same-sex dynamics in Kamala Das's work in Malayalam literary criticism. My
Malayalam reading skills are too recently acquired to allow me to read literary criticism
in the language, but I base my assertion on extensive reading of work written in and
translated into English and on consultation with scholars working in the literature. I
would especially like to thank T. Muralidharan and Vanamala Viswanathan for generously sharing information on this issue with me.


Calling Kamala Das Queer Rereading My Story

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Calling Kamala Das Queer: Rereading "My Story"

Author(s): Rosemary Marangoly George

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I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask

Today, literary, critical, and feminist territorial boundaries are not

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Rosemary Marangoly George

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Akademi Award (the highest Indian literary/culturalhonor) in

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Rosemary Marangoly George

works to reach a decolonized understandingof the relations of

Alreadywell known in literarycirclesfor her poetry in English,it

peared in book form in 1976,it went throughsix impressionsand

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thirty-six thousand copies in eleven months.8 My Story is a

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Rosemary Marangoly George

work. Although this reveals the usual biases of literarycriticism,

Also, in an essay titled "TheBurdenof English"published in a

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among the diaspora. As the anthology Same-SexLovein India:

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Rosemary Marangoly George

counters and erotics that abound within these pages, if noted at

Me alone, critics,friends,visiting cousins,

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Rosemary Marangoly George

in literary/culturalstudies to explain the work of an authorwho

Here John and Nair's insistence on the global circulationof "the

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Rosemary Marangoly George

methodology" that focuses on what has been "deliberatelyor

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This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

sweet, I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling....

A friend of Kamala'sfamily meets the group at the stationwhere

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

Like many of the passages in which Das leaves so much unsaid,

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

What we also get

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

same-sex pleasureinto her catalog of pleasurableand distasteful

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

such an evocative and meandering fashion that their impact on

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

tings. In "TheOld Playhouse"(1973,p. 54) she writes in the persona of "wife":

Yourselfinto every nook and cranny,you embalmed

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

Here KamalaDas calmly discloses two "unmentionable"

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

tations do not provide identities as much as they provide roles

This content downloaded from 115.248.45.78 on Thu, 17 Jul 2014 12:25:33 PM

Rosemary Marangoly George

cial linchpinsof the heteropatriarchal