Very early in her writing life, Kamala Suraiya (also known as Kamala Das) had made it clear to readers, critics and family that she did not want to be “categorized’ and contained, and that’s just the way it was. All her life, she kept us guessing about what she was going to write, say and do next, while sticking to that early resolution she had made for herself – to say what she felt in the way she wanted to say it.
Completely at ease writing in English as ‘Kamala Das’ and in Malayalam as ‘Madhavikutty’, her writing had a from-the-gut quality in both languages, and this prompted readers to identify her with the language they read her in. For the Malayali, she was quintessentially in the Malayalam tradition of story-telling, attuned similarly to the inflections of that idiom as a line of writers before her had been. Readers in English felt the same about her writing in that language, after all, she was at home in it, having laid claim to it and made it her own.
The language I speak,
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
— ‘An Introduction’ Kamala Das
Kamala Das’s writing in English was remarkable in many ways: it was new, stunning in its self- consciousness and its themes; it seemed able, within its own discourse, to provide answers to the weighty questions of self, identity, language and belonging that it so effortlessly raised. Her poetry described the writer struggling to shape the unruly material of life into the logic of poetry, while she herself was struggling to accommodate writing into the routines expected of her days. All this and the fact that she was writing (at a time when a woman wasn’t considered capable of being a ‘writer’) not as a hobby but as an occupation with the intention of making a living out of it, makes Das’s writing very significant, for as Eunice D’Souza point out, she “…mapped out the terrain for post-colonial women in social and linguist terms.”
Das’s poetry flung open its doors to let in topics that women had kept decorously out: the boredom of marriage, the thrills of love, the pains of being a woman, of being a writer, the loneliness of being unloved, the joy of being in love. She became the subject of her writing, viewing herself with a persistent lens that saw it all, later putting everything onto the page in confessional bursts of poetry or prose. This allegiance to the moment, the urgent need to capture it in words, often gave her writing a first draft, see-through quality that made critics complain of inconsistency. But Kamala Das did not care what others said, she was willing to be swept away by her writing, without stopping to make formal considerations about the composition or to make it reader friendly. She had to write it all out.
Looking at her work, it is impossible not to see that Kamala Das was writing to live; without her writing, she would have died. Whatever trajectory her life was passing through — marriage, career, the relentless search for love, widowhood, conversion to Islam — through it all, she was writing.
Kamala Das lived an intensely uneasy life, and the fact that she neither gassed herself nor jumped off a cliff is proof of the faith she kept in her chosen trade, of her conviction that writing was no charlatan occupation, incapable of giving life. When she poured herself out in poetry, stories and features, Kamala Das was working at life, looking in her own words for reminders of the importance of wanting to be, wanting to write, wanting to live and no writer can pay greater tribute to her trade than to acknowledge it as the reason for living. And as her readers, we too are privileged with this tribute.
She was a wonderful and talented writer of short stories and English poetry. She had an eccentric streak even from childhood.
But during the fag end of her life why she chose to join a religion which extols terrorism is not clear. Must be for the publicity she craved.
Her son married a princess from the Travancore royal family.They were shell shocked when they heard the news of her conversion!
Personalities 
Very early in her writing life, Kamala Suraiya (also known as Kamala Das) had made it clear to readers, critics and family that she did not want to be “categorized’ and contained, and that’s just the way it was. All her life, she kept us guessing about what she was going to write, say and do next, while sticking to that early resolution she had made for herself – to say what she felt in the way she wanted to say it.
Das’s poetry flung open its doors to let in topics that women had kept decorously out: the boredom of marriage, the thrills of love, the pains of being a woman, of being a writer, the loneliness of being unloved, the joy of being in love. She became the subject of her writing, viewing herself with a persistent lens that saw it all, later putting everything onto the page in confessional bursts of poetry or prose. This allegiance to the moment, the urgent need to capture it in words, often gave her writing a first draft, see-through quality that made critics complain of inconsistency. But Kamala Das did not care what others said, she was willing to be swept away by her writing, without stopping to make formal considerations about the composition or to make it reader friendly. She had to write it all out.
