The Stripping of Self: Kamala Das’ Autobiographical Book, My Story
This week in Daak:
1. The Stripping of Self: Kamala Das’ Autobiographical Book, My Story
2. Launching the Daak x Champaca Box on Fearless Women
3. Daak Recommends
1. The Stripping of Self: Kamala Das’ Autobiographical Book, My Story
While we all undergo radical transformations in our lifetime, few of us dare to publicly narrate it with Kamala Das’ searing honesty. This is probably why her autobiographical masterpiece, My Story, has remained the best-selling woman's autobiography in India to date.
While the book chronicles Das’ journey from girlhood to womanhood, it is ultimately a meditation on identity, the power of expression, and the right to be fully oneself in a world that is dead set on conformity. Against the backdrop of colonial rule, a turbulent marriage, motherhood, and a rising literary career, we see Das emerge as a deeply contemplative, self-aware, and imperfectly brilliant woman.
For Das, this confessional work is not just a stripping of her social self, but the baring of her innermost soul. In her preface, she says:
Some people told me that writing an autobiography like this, with absolute honesty, keeping nothing to oneself, is like doing a striptease. True, maybe. I, will, firstly, strip myself of clothes and ornaments. Then I intend to peel off this light brown skin and shatter my bones. At last, I hope you will be able to see my homeless, orphan, intensely beautiful soul, deep within the bone, deep down under, beneath even the marrow, in a fourth dimension.
This compulsion to write her truth comes from a mysterious source – according to Das, something that all poets experience.
Poets, even the most insignificant of them, are different from other people. They cannot close their shops like shop men and return home. Their shop is their mind and as long as they carry it with them, they feel the pressures and the torments.
Anticipating some of the criticism that would eventually come her way, she credits Literature for opening her mind and empowering her to come into her own, perhaps inviting others to read her story.
Society can well ask me how I could become what I became, although born to parents as high-principled as mine were. Ask the books that I read why I changed. Ask the authors dead and alive who communicated with me and gave me the courage to be myself. The books like a mother-cow licked the calf of my thought into shape and left me to lie at the altar of the world as a sacrificial gift.
2. Launching the Daak x Champaca Box on Fearless Women
For our second box with Champaca Bookstore, we’ve gathered books, poetry and art celebrating fearless women who have dared to chronicle their lives, loves and times - including Kamala Das’ book, My Story. Get it now!
3. Daak Recommends
Watch Kamala Das narrate her poems “Blood,” “Shirly and the British Kisses” and “Morning in Apollo” as she weaves memory, nostalgia and heartache together in her characteristic style.