Choosing a Tongue, Choosing a Form: Kamala Das’s Bilingual Algorithms

Abstract

In this essay, bilingualism is considered as one possible locus of the Indian literary landscape. Kumar focuses on Kamala Das’s status as a bilingual writer who at the beginning of her career chose the English language for her poetic writing and Malayalam for her short stories. The author suggests that a close consideration of the economies of expression in Das’s early poetry and short fiction permits us to explore her bilingual compositional method in relation to questions pertaining to the mother tongue, but also relating to location and translation. Paradoxically, while Das’s poetry in English displays a directness and fluency usually associated with prose, her early prose fiction draws on arrangements of language forged in the neighbourhood of the poetic. The essay aims at demonstrating how such a productive deployment of genre instability enables Das’s stories to fabricate an unusual perceptual apparatus which works by generating gaps between narration and description as well as between inner thoughts and external expressions of characters.