Kamala Das

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Kamala Das Indian writer and poet who inspired women struggling to be free of domestic oppression:

Kamala Das

Kamala Das, who has died aged 75, was a renowned Indian poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and memoirist. She was also known as Madhavikutty, the pseudonym she used when writing in the Malayalam language. Then there was Ami, the pet name with which she referred to herself in her memoirs. Much later in life, she gave herself yet another name, Suraiyya, to mark her conversion to Islam. Straddling many names was one way in which Das straddled multiple identities.

She was born into a literary family. Her mother, Balamani Amma, was a well-known Malayalam poet and her great-uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, was a writer and translator. Das was home-schooled and most of her education came through extensive reading. Her childhood was divided between Punnayurkulam, her ancestral village in Kerala, in the south-west, and the north-eastern city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), where her parents lived. This early lesson in dislocation may have inspired many of her literary themes - the vulnerable child-woman trying to create meaning in an inconstant world; nostalgia for a serene, rural past; the unfair privileges of caste and wealth; and the contradictions of motherhood.

In 1949, when she was 15, she married Madhava Das, a bank official. While still in her teens, she started writing and publishing. Along with other poets of her generation, Das was at the forefront of a new movement in Indian English poetry, a shift in focus from the colonial experience to the personal. However, unlike most of her contemporaries, she was actively writing fiction in her mother tongue at the same time. Throughout her writing career, Das would move adroitly between genres (poetry, fiction, memoir) and languages (English and Malayalam). "I speak three languages, write in two, dream in one," she wrote in An Introduction, a poem from her first collection, Summer in Calcutta (1965).

She began to break taboos with her early poetry, in which she celebrated her sexuality and advised women to "Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of/ Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,/ The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your/ Endless female hungers ..." (The Looking Glass, from The Descendants, 1967).

In My Story (1976), she recounted the trials of her marriage and her painful self-awakening as a woman and writer. She became an icon for women, in India and elsewhere, struggling to liberate themselves from sexual and domestic oppression. Though it was supposed to be an autobiography (and indeed was provocatively subtitled "the compelling autobiography of the most controversial Indian writer") Das later admitted that there was plenty of fiction in My Story. Perhaps "biomythography" would have been a fairer description of the book.

Das's rebellions were more multidimensional than she was given credit for. Her female protagonists were not simply in pursuit of sexual freedom, they were in search of poetry, intimacy and divinity. Characters such as Padmavathi the harlot, who drags her bruised body to a holy shrine, personify the unworldly wisdom with which Das endowed her best female protagonists. She also created several nuanced male characters, for example, the hapless father in the 1991 short story Neypayasam, who shelters his children from their mother's death.

A prolific writer, Das wrote more than 20 books. These include several collections of short stories and poems as well as six novels and three memoirs. In her later years, she also wrote a syndicated newspaper column, in which she held forth with typical unguardedness. Her topics ranged from religion to politics to the beauty secrets of Nair women. She did not feel compelled to stay on the topic and never shied away from announcing a change of mind or heart. Das's spontaneity often translated into whimsicality and earned the ire of critics, but it allowed her to explore the paradoxes of life and relationships with emotional honesty.

In the 1980s she dabbled in painting and politics. While she attained some acclaim as an artist, her political career did not take off. She stood unsuccessfully for the Indian parliament in 1984 and later launched a short-lived political party, Lok Seva (public service). One of her final acts of reinvention was her conversion to Islam in 1999, a move especially bold because of her aristocratic Nair lineage. Ten years later, she was laid to rest in the mosque where she had taken her vows.

Her husband predeceased her; she is survived by three sons.

• Kamala Das, poet and writer, born 31 March 1934; died 31 May 2009