Google Celebrates Kamala Das Work And Life With A Doodle in 2018

Search engine giant Google honored Kamala Das with one of its Google Doodles, for her work & life.

February 1, 1976, is the publication date of her autobiography, “My Story”, which remains her most celebrated work.

Kamala Surayya (31 March 1934 – 31 May 2009), popularly known as Madhavikutty and Kamala Das, was an Indian English poetess and a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, India.

She was quite popular in Kerala due to her short stories and autobiography. Her oeuvre in English, written under the name Kamala Das, is noted for the poems and explicit autobiography.

She was marked as an iconoclast in her generation due to open, boldness and honest treatment of female sexuality, free from any sense of guilt, which infused her writing with power.

She wrote her autobiography, in English, but translated it to Malayalam along the way. Her autobiography captures her life from childhood to marriage and beyond, describing the rich inner world of a creative soul in which she expressed herself.

Some found the book to be controversial, including relatives who tried to block it from being published, many readers were enchanted by the lyricism and honesty of her writing.

She lived life on her own terms, resisting labels such as “feminist” and choosing different names for herself over the course of her life.

She was also known as Ami and Suraiyya, and the name she gave herself upon her conversion to Islam.

Das continued to write poetry and prose that was unflinching and passionate, through all her transitions and personal reinventions. Doodle by an artist Manjit Thapp celebrates the work she left behind, which provides a window into the world of an engrossing woman.

She was honored with Sahitya Academy Award in 1984, Asian World Prize in 1985, Asian Poetry Prize in 1998, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries in 1999 and many more awards she received in her lifetime.

Google Celebrating Kamala Das Work And Life With A Doodle