“Call
her Kamala Das, Madhavikutti or Surayya, but the woman by any name” whose
introduction is given by herself in the poem “An Introduction”:
“I
am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar,
I speak three languages, write in
two,
dream in one”.
Kamala
Surayya (the name means Saptarishi or the Ursa Major, in Persian) took the
literary world by storm in the mid-sixties, has created a permanent place for
herself in the contemporary Indo-Anglian poetry; who was awarded P.E.N.’S Asian
Poetry Prize (1963); Kerala’s Sahitya Akadami Award (1969)
