An Introduction

I don’t know politics but I know the names of those

in power, and can repeat them like days of week or 

names of months, beginning with Nehru. I am Indian,

brown, born in Malabar. I speak three languages, write

in two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said, English

is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics,

friends, visiting cousins, every one of you? Let me speak

in any language I like. The language I speak becomes

mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone.

It is half English, half Indian, funny perhaps, but it’s 

honest, it is as human as I am human, you know…

It voices my longings, my hopes, and is useful to me 

as cawing Is to crows or roaring to the lions, 

it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not there, 

a mind that sees and hears and is aware. Not the deaf, 

blind speech of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain 

or the incoherent mutterings of the blazing

funeral pyre. I was child, and later they said I grew, 

for, I became tall, my limbs swelled and one or two places 

sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else 

to ask for, he drew a youth of sixteen into his 

bedroom and shut the door, He did not beat me but my sad 

woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts 

and womb crushed me. I shrank pitifully. Then I wore a shirt 

and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of 

this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife, 

they cried. Be embroiderer, cook, or a quarreller 

with servants. Fit in belong, said the categorizers.

Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or, better still, be just 

Madhavikutty. It is time to choose a name, a role. 

Don’t play pretending games. Don’t play at schizophrenia 

or be a Nympho. Don’t cry embarrassingly loud when

jilted in love…Later, I met a man. Loved him. Call him

not by any name, he is every man who wants his 

woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love. 

In him the hungry haste of rivers, in me the oceans’ 

tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and all. The answer is, it is I.

Anywhere and everywhere I see him who calls himself I.

In this world, he is tightly packed like the sword in its sheath. 

It is I who drink a lonely drink near midnight at hotels 

of strange towns, it is I who make love and then feel shame, 

it is I who lie dying with a rattle in my throat, 

I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover 

and the beloved. I have no joys that are not yours, 

no aches which are not yours 

we share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams…

—Kamala Das, from ‘Signatures - One Hundred Indian Poets’ published by the National Book Trust, India.