Summary Of Kamala Das's My Story

“My Story” written by Kamala Das in 1973 and translated into English in 1977 depicts not only the author’s life but also most of the Indian women’s lives of her period. This novel, divided into several chapters according to chronological stages of her life, tells the sufferings of Kamala Das as a woman and as a writer. Her main aim was to reveal the truth and the secrets of Indian women’s lives in times of Gandhi.

She deals with the low position of women in a patriarchal society, in which they were despised as women and as writers. Taking into account that women were denied to think about sexual pleasures, and denied to enjoy life, reduced to boredom and to take care of her husband and her family, Kamala Das tries in her novel to search for this lost identity by telling her sexual and physical encounters with other men and rising the power and the identity of the repressed women. Also, by examining the psychological accomplishments that women suffered in those days, Das deals with the deepest part of the human soul, in her search for truth.

The difficult relationship with her husband starts with her relationship with her father since she grew up in an authoritarian family in which her mother had nothing to say and her father made all the decisions. In her try to love and understand her husband, his attitude toward sex –

However, something very telling of her writing is the use of strong words throughout “My Story” to shock the reader and to be very expressive and striking. For example ‘slave’, ‘toy’, ‘bride’, ‘virgin’, ‘prostitute’, ‘doll’, ‘puppet’, ‘convict’ and ‘death blood’ are the most repeated ones. The impact of these words make the story more critic and shows a huge freedom in her writing. ‘Wife’, ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ are also very common in her writings, since the issues of womanhood, marriage and family are the ones in which she deepen