Kerala - Kochi   

A bard of love, in her life and work

Kochi: At the risk of sounding clichéd, it can be said that Kamala Suraiya defied stereotypes of all variety. Her subtle portrayal of women’s sensibilities and repudiation of feudal patriarchy never made her a sword-brandishing feminist; she was mistaken for one nonetheless.

As one who revelled in the polysemy of existence, she surrendered herself to unalloyed love, the iridescent brilliance of which shone in her life and works.

As a woman, she was the embodiment of love, feels writer Sethu. She lived life craving for it. Her premature marriage and resultant incompatibility may have thrown up problems in her life. But she never wanted to be a libertine feminist; not one of her female characters is a ‘liberated’ woman.

She sketched bare the nuances of female mind and body, and firmly realised the importance of positively sharing the world with the opposite gender.

Oscillating between the realm of imagination nurtured by her wishful thinking of finding ‘ideal love’ and that of stark reality, she conjured up a world of her own in her writings, but that led to her being hounded, Sethu says.

When she began writing in Malayalam under the name Madhavikutty, her vocabulary was limited. She overcame the hurdle by creating amazing poetic images and her literature found a language to carry the profound yet spontaneous world of emotions.

She was very conscious of her physicality and delighted in its features as a woman. Only someone with sublime innocence could do that, he says.

According to Jnanpith awardee M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Madhavikutty, with her immense range and ability to prune her style to suit the milieu of the story, almost always rendered him jealous of her.

“She has captured in her writings the different hues of rustic life, to which she had very little exposure, with the same ease with which she has written about communities such as Hijras (eunuchs) living on the fringes of life. Stories like Mahimile Veedu, Pakshiyude Manam and Napumsakam are a class apart on account of this,” says Mr. Nair.

For poet K.G. Sankara Pillai, Suraiya’s friendly banter itself would invariably spin a web of stories around the things she experienced and the people she encountered. “Most of her stories are set after twilight or just before dawn, adding immense depth and dimensions to the narrative. She was equally at home in urban and rural settings. A born rebel, she did away with the patriarchal depiction of women, only to replace it with her unique rendering of ‘female gaze’,” says Mr. Pillai.

Poet Sugathakumari believes that Kamala Suraiya has left an unbridgeable vacuum as a writer and as a person. “She was a childlike, affectionate person delighting in friendships and the riches of life, enjoying everything from the sparkle of a jewel to the splendour of sunset. She always had a yearning for some magical love which was never realised. Her soul was thirsty for some great adoration,” she says.

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