[In the following essay, George reads My Story as a “queer” text.]

… When
I asked for love, not knowing what else to ask
For, he drew a youth of sixteen into the
Bedroom and closed the door. He did not beat me
But my sad woman-body felt so beaten.
The weight of my breast and womb crushed me. I
shrank
Pitifully.

—Kamala Das, from “An Introduction,” 1965

At this time my husband turned to his old friend for comfort. They behaved like lovers in my presence. To celebrate my birthday, they shoved me out of the bedroom and locked themselves in. I stood for a while, wondering what two men could possibly do together to get some physical rapture, but after some time, my pride made me move away. I went to my son and lay near him. I felt then a revulsion for my womanliness. The weight of my breasts seemed to be crushing me. My private part was only a wound, the soul's wound showing through.

—Kamala Das, My Story, 1976

Today, literary, critical, and feminist territorial boundaries are not as clearcut as they were imagined to be even a decade ago when modes of communication between scholars (often working on the very same texts) and between audiences in the First and Third Worlds were much slower. Speed has not created equality among all critical voices, but nevertheless, we are at a new site, one that approaches what we might call “global literary studies in English”—a situation that requires a radical rethinking of the claims we have become accustomed to making when we produce literary scholarship. We can no longer claim knowledge of how literary texts function as cultural artifacts and as political tools without thinking hard about how such texts might play out in other locations; we cannot proceed with our scholarly projects oblivious to how our work speaks to scholarship or readerships produced from different locations.

Much of my interest in the challenges and excitement of this new phase of global literary studies was occasioned by my recent rereading of My Story, the 1976 autobiographical text written by Kamala Das, one of India's foremost women writers. Reading this autobiography in the late 1990s, I found that Das's account of her eventful and uneven blossoming, through childhood, youth, and adulthood into a writer, wife, mother, and sexually active adult, amounted to a wonderfully queer text. I was not surprised to find that my assessment of Das's autobiography had changed some twenty years after I first read it as a teenager in India. However, my late-1990s assessment of My Story as a “queer” text was clearly produced and complicated by several shifts—in time, in location, in the different trajectories of local literary criticisms, in feminisms, in popular and academic understandings of sexual practices and sexual preferences, to name a few among several variables. In the concept of “queerness” as I understood it from my United States academia-based location, I had finally found an interpretive frame that was adequate to the prodigious body of work by this exceptional Indian author. However, calling Kamala Das queer, in itself provides no grand resolution to the myriad challenges posed by her work; rather, it serves as an initial vantage point from which one can glimpse the changing English-language literary terrain of this new century.

Born in 1934 into an aristocratic, Nair¹ Hindu family in Kerala, India, Kamala Das has the distinction of being one of the best known Indian women writers in the twentieth century. Writing in two Indian languages, English and Malayalan, Das is the author of many autobiographical works and novels in both languages, several highly regarded collections of poetry in English, numerous collections of short stories, as well as essays on a wide range of topics. Her work in English has been widely anthologized in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and the West; and she has won numerous awards for her writing, including the Sahitya Akademi Award (the highest Indian literary/cultural honor) in 1985 and the nomination for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1984.² From the 1970s when her career was at its peak, to the late 1990s, India-based, English-language literary critics have written extensively on Kamala Das. Yet, in this criticism, all the non-heteronormative protests and pleasures in My Story were (and continue to be) straightened out. This state of affairs emerges in part because, as elsewhere, many India-based, English-language literary feminists have a highly developed sense of patriarchal oppression but do not feel any compulsion or urgency to work through the links between heterosexism and the oppressive weight of patriarchal systems: their work on Das has tended to make her metonymic of their larger feminist project. Hence, although mainstream literary and literary feminist criticism in India (as well as in postcolonial feminist criticism produced from outside India) offers considerable discussion of sexuality in Das's work, such discussion continues to be almost exclusively on heterosexual relationships in these texts. In particular, the material in My Story that concerns same-sex desire or is otherwise too disruptive or contradictory to be of use to literary feminism is simply dismissed in the criticism as manifestations of Das's stylistic or personal eccentricities that border on artistic weakness.

In India, as in most locations today, there are multiple feminisms whose founding ideologies, practices, and foci differ dramatically. Thus, outside of literary readings of women's writing in English, feminist commentary from the Indian subcontinent has produced groundbreaking work on the ways in which the colonial and/or nationalist state has used gender and sexuality to its advantage and concurrently to the disadvantage of women whose lives are subject to such authority.³ In their introduction to A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economics of Modern India, India-based feminists Mary John and Janaki Nair have cautioned that “a focus on the conspiracy of silence regarding sexuality in India, whether within political and social movements or in scholarship,” must not “blind us to the multiple sites where ‘sexuality’ has long been embedded. In the spheres of the law, demography or medicine, for instance, sexuality enjoys a massive and indisputable presence that is far from prohibited.”⁴ Indian feminists have worked extensively on sexuality in these contexts, and this scholarship is at the forefront of globally cited feminist theorizing that works to reach a decolonized understanding of the relations of power and gender. Yet, as Jacqui Alexander has succinctly noted, even in feminist critiques that are cognizant of the importance of sexuality to institutional apparati, much work remains to be done “on elaborating the processes of heterosexualization at work within the state apparatus.”⁵ More specifically, literary feminism that champions Indian women's writing in English operates within and against the parameters of a middle-class notion of women's worth. From the 1970s to the present, feminist critics writing on Das have been willing to celebrate and second her critique of the institution of marriage, and of marital rape, of the obligation to wifely fidelity in marriage at all costs but not her critique of heterosexuality itself. Following Alexander, one could argue that such feminist projects unintentionally fall into the service of the state by striving to make heterosexual and reproductive roles (that are so necessary to the state and to citizenship) more amenable to women.

In this article, I examine some of the contradictions, challenges, and resolutions that emerge when we read My Story, written in English in India in the 1970s, in light of current feminist/postcolonial/queer theoretical interests. Given that the Indian subcontinental discussion on Kamala Das over the last thirty years has centered around very different and urgent feminist issues in her work, I turn first to the implications of discussing same-sex desire in Kamala Das's work in a United States-based journal like Feminist Studies. Despite its point of origin, this journal does travel outside the United States, and this special issue on India will circulate in Indian academic venues. Writing to this enlarged audience calls for the kind of theoretical and practical negotiation that will soon be required as a matter of course in this new era of global literary studies.⁶

KAMALA DAS AND LOCAL FEMINISMS

Already well known in literary circles for her poetry in English, it was the publication of My Story that earned Kamala Das national notoriety among the English-speaking elite in India.⁷My Story is to date the best-selling woman's autobiography in post-independence India. Vincent O'Sullivan notes that when My Story appeared in book form in 1976, it went through six impressions and thirty-six thousand copies in eleven months.⁸My Story is a chronologically ordered, linear narrative written in a realist style. It follows Kamala's life from age four through British colonial and missionary schools favored by the colonial Indian elite; through her sexual awakening; an early and seemingly disastrous marriage; her growing literary career; extramarital affairs; the birth of her three sons; and, finally, a slow but steady coming to terms with her spouse, writing, and sexuality. My Story set the terms in which Das's entire body of work has been evaluated by feminists and other scholars in the subcontinent and in the West. The standard Indian literary feminist reading of Das's work commends her for her determined protest against patriarchal norms and practices that oppress women and for her courage in continuously mining her own life experiences for material. Thus, much of this feminist championing of Das was intended as a corrective to the mainstream, masculinist reading of My Story as titillating trash.⁹

Outside the subcontinent, feminist literary critics who have written on Das have taken their cue from the local feminism which Das's work is shaped by and shapes in turn. For instance, United States-based scholars Ketu Katrak, Harveen Sachdeva Mann, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim have variously pulled Das into discussions on gendered resistance in the writing by Third World women.¹⁰ Katrak reads Das alongside Bessie Head and works through the themes of “mothering and m-othering” in their work. On sexuality in My Story, Katrak writes: “In Das, the sexuality is often so completely self-absorbed, so navel-gazing as to become both narrowly personal and problematically sensationalised and voyeuristic.”¹¹ Mann reads Das's work and three other texts in English by South Asian women through a feminist framework that is attentive to the stakes of minority communities in Indian nationalist discourses. Mann reads these women writers in order “not only to underscore their contestations of the dominant patriarchal national discourse but also to articulate the heterogeneity and plurality operative within subcontinental women's resistance.”¹² Lim's essays elaborate on the theme of self-empowerment in Das's writing by reading her within the context of Asian women writers and the larger context provided by a materialist analysis of Asian women. These scholars do not disturb the heterosexist logic of the usual considerations of sexuality in Das's work. Although this reveals the usual biases of literary criticism, more importantly, it also demonstrates their scholarly allegiance to one of postcolonial feminism's most important injunctions. What feminist postcolonial theory advocates to feminists located in the First World is as follows: First, we are urged to read outside the Western traditional canon; second, we are, as far as possible, to read Third World women writers with due emphasis given to the local context of their reception; third, in the best-case scenario we are to read these texts alongside the local feminist interpretations of their feminist value.¹³ Marilyn Friedman sets forth feminist guidelines for postcolonial studies in the 1990s, which is mostly accepted (in theory if not always in practice) by Euro-America-based feminist scholars:

It is most respectful to women in cultures and subcultures other than my own to remind myself repeatedly that they know, as I seldom do, what it is like to live as a woman in their cultures. Unless very strong reasons suggest otherwise, I should, thus, avoid activities and teaching styles that challenge the practices of their lives unless invited and welcomed by them to do so.¹⁴

Also, in an essay titled “The Burden of English” published in a collection on English Literary Studies in India, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak urges that we pay due attention to the “implied reader” of any text. Spivak writes: “The figure of the implied reader is constructed within a consolidated system of cultural representation. The appropriate culture in this context is the one supposedly indigenous to the literature under consideration.”¹⁵ However, this concern for the context that is “supposedly indigenous” (to use Spivak's term) to Kamala Das leads scholars to pay little attention either to same-sex desire in Das's work or to heterosexuality from the vantage point of the non-heteronormative.¹⁶ Given this situation, my attempt at a queer reading of Das's work, originating as it does from the South Asian diaspora, has no option but to accept the implications of going against the interpretive direction set by local feminist readings of Das's work. This encounter of one local feminism with another local feminism under the sign of diaspora is a scenario that is worth examining, not just for the purposes of this rereading of Kamala Das but also because diaspora studies provide a productive albeit tight discursive space that has been carved out in a rapidly changing world. And yet, as I hope this article will demonstrate, a queer reading of Kamala Das need not necessarily originate from or circulate only among the diaspora. As the anthology Same-Sex Love in India: Reading from Literature and History makes clear, there has been a long history of India-based writing on same-sex desire.¹⁷ This anthology, edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, showcases Indian writings on same-sex “love,” in various genres, over a period of more than 2,000 years, translated from more than a dozen languages. In recent years there has been an increased volume of discussion on same-sex desire and homosexuality produced in Indian cultural/academic/literary contexts. Ashwini Sutthankar's groundbreaking edited collection of autobiographical “coming-out” narratives, fiction, poetry by Indian lesbians, titled Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India, along with the controversies surrounding Deepa Mehta's 1996 film Fire in which two Indian sisters-in-law embark on a sexual relationship with each other, has brought homosexuality to the attention of the Indian popular and academic press.¹⁸ Given the current proliferation of new media and modes of communication, access to queer networks is not the exclusive privilege of those located in the geographic West.¹⁹ And in the last few years there is a growing cross-continental queer discourse that has gained in visibility and assurance with every new cultural production.²⁰ This article then could be read as yet another product of this cross-continental discussion.

It is now de rigueur to begin such essays written from the First World with the rituals of a kind of “locational hand-wringing.” My reference is to preliminary statements and disclaimers offered by critics as they venture into texts or spaces where they feel only partially authorized to speak and yet compelled to speak.²¹ In an essay titled “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,” Lata Mani makes several thoughtful connections between the “question of positionality and location and their relation to the production of knowledge as well as its reception.” Mani writes of presenting her groundbreaking work on sati to audiences in the United States, Britain, and India and of her surprise in learning that these different audiences saw completely different aspects of her work as “politically significant.”²² Following Mani, I am aware that Indian literary feminists see the protest against patriarchal oppression as the most politically significant feature of Das's work. Within such feminist plotting, it is Das's extramarital (hetero) sexual adventures that mount this protest against patriarchy. The same-sex encounters and erotics that abound within these pages, if noted at all, are immediately dismissed as distractions or as further proof of the distortions that patriarchal oppression forces on women.

In some ways, Das is the perfect “queer writer.” Her work is centrally preoccupied with sexuality and female pleasure that breaks out of a heteronormative matrix. Her work exemplifies the “resistance to the regimes of the normal” that Michael Warner has identified as the hallmark of queer.²³ From the 1990s onward, queer theory has offered a terminology and a set of interpretive tools that can explicate deviations from both heterosexual and homosexual conventions. And unlike more disciplinarily anchored interpretive models, “no particular project is metonymic of queer commentary” as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have noted.²⁴ Of course, Das herself utilizes the term “queer” for its sexual and, on occasion, nonsexual, purchase. For example, in her most widely anthologized poem, “An Introduction,” first published in 1965, Das uses “queerness” in the plural to indicate her multiple deviance from multiple norms. She writes of her choice to write in English and Malayam as follows:

                                                                                … Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.

(p. 7)

In “Composition” (1967), another often anthologized poem, she concludes a section with the flat declaration:

I have lost my best friend
to a middle-aged queer,
the lesbians hiss their love at me.

(p. 46)

Das's use of queer marks both a continuity and a break with the term's presexual connotations. Clearly, her understanding of “queer” does not neatly overlap with the current usage of the term by queer theorists, even though both usages share a common late nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century history of the association of the term with homosexuality. For Das “queer” signifies sexually and otherwise—thus, at times exceeding the term's dimensions in queer theory.²⁵

Yet, can one use a queer reading practice as currently espoused in literary/cultural studies to explain the work of an author who is quite solidly entrenched in an Indian context? One might argue that although the category of “queer” might provide a precise understanding of the complex texture of Das's texts, such export of Western-oriented theory reveals its “locality” when transported. A more complicated and, I believe, more accurate assessment is offered in John and Nair's introduction to A Question of Silence? in which they thoughtfully contest the very distinction between the “West” and “non-West” in the course of articulating their unwillingness to proffer “Indian” theories of sexuality. In response to the hypothetical question “Why bring up western theories [of sexuality] at all?” They write that

our response would be that “the West” is at once a particular geographical place, and a relation. From where we are, this relation is one of domination, and about as complicated as they come; to all intents and purposes, we are effectively located in the West. It is to the credit of feminists in India that they have refused to be silenced by accusations of being western-identified, and so unable to deal with the real India. Ironically enough, the very conception of the other of the West as being something to which western concepts do not apply (or only as an act of violation from which one must be redeemed) is itself a western legacy. Such constructions of cultural difference leave the West firmly in command.²⁶

Here John and Nair's insistence on the global circulation of “the West” is congruent with my understanding of this new site of “global literary studies in English.” At the risk of belaboring the point, I wish to repeat that one of my goals here is to alert us to the ways in which literary-critical ideas and terms already circulate in a global framework albeit with different inflections in different locations. Consider, for instance, the use of the term “queer.”

My usage of the term “queer” in this article is mindful of both Das's usage and ongoing reformulations produced by queer commentary. Das's work queers our understanding of queer. Most importantly, it enlarges (in both chronological and spatial dimensions) the very notion of “queer” which is usually imagined as a purely First World phenomenon from the 1990s. Given that “queer” is constantly reformulated in usage, rather than attempt to work out a viable, global definition of the term, a more productive approach would be to focus on the issue of queer methodology as set forth by Judith Halberstam in Female Masculinity. According to Halberstam, a queer methodology is a “scavenger methodology” that focuses on what has been “deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies.” Further, Halberstam notes that a queer methodology “attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion to work toward disciplinary coherence.”²⁷ To this I would add that a queer reading, such as the one in process here, has to refuse the academic compulsions to follow a set literary guide map for venturing into Third World texts—even maps drawn by progressive feminist, postcolonial cartographers.

I hope to achieve a reading of My Story that is attentive to the shape and objectives of the feminist literary criticism on Das; and yet, in being equally attentive to queerness, I hope also to be able to explain the elision of same-sex desire in the reception of this text. At the same time, I am quite deliberately calling sexual what was not hitherto seen as sexual—a stance that carries its own set of problematic considerations as Karen Lützen has so carefully demonstrated.²⁸ However, I am not claiming that Kamala Das is a closeted lesbian waiting to be “outed” or resisting the same. She is not representative of the international phenomenon that Dennis Altman and others have drawn our attention to—namely, the internationalization of a certain form of social and cultural identity based on homosexuality that is one of the signs of a rapid globalization of culture.²⁹ Same-sex desire in the work of Kamala Das does not operate along a hetero-homo divide, nor does it confer an identity as lesbian (a word used often enough in the autobiography) on the protagonist. Thus even while Das consistently encodes the homoerotic into her work, she just as consistently devalues its purchase. For instance, in a 1993 interview Das insists on certain distinctions and differences:

Feminism as the Westerns see it is different from the feminism I sense within myself. Western feminism is an anti-male stance. … Most of the feminists I met outside the country were lesbians—out and out lesbians. I do not think I'm lesbian. I tried to find out. I experiment with everything. I tried to find out if I were a lesbian, if I could respond to a woman. I failed. I must speak the truth. I believe we must abandon a thing if it has no moral foundation whether it be a belief, a political system or a religious system.³⁰

Should such a statement from the author lay to rest an investigation of same-sex desire in her work? Putting aside the usual postmodernist disdain for authorial intentions and declarations, we must look at and beyond this statement if we are to capture all of its resonance. At the same time, we need not hold back on deconstructing this statement because of some chivalric notion of excessive solicitude for the Third World woman writer's authorial intentions. And what is surely characteristic about Das's statement is the assumption that “Indian-style” feminism and lesbianism (coded here as Western) have no shared ground.³¹ More importantly, the statement displays Das's characteristic reluctance to settle into and comfortably as well as consistently inhabit any one category of subjecthood.

READING SEX IN KAMALA DAS'S WORK

Over the years Das has proffered several contradictory accounts of the genesis of My Story. In her preface to the autobiography, Das claims that she began to write this text in the mid-1970s from her hospital bed as she grappled with a potentially fatal heart condition. She wrote the autobiography, she states, “to empty myself of all the secrets so that I could depart when the time came, with a scrubbed-out conscience” and in order to pay mounting hospital bills (p. vi). Since the 1976 publication of this autobiography, Das has repeatedly changed her stance on this topic in interviews and essays.³² She has presented herself as either too bohemian to care about revealing her sexual adventures and her periods of mental breakdown or, conversely, as the submissive wife following the dictates of her husband who was apparently more eager than herself to cash in on a spiced-up and heavily fictionalized account of her life. And yet, at every opportunity Das reverts to the convention that she is India's most unconventional woman writer with no regrets about her work or her foci. Das's calculated unreliability as a narrator of autobiography, of “confessional” poetry, and of fiction has exasperated critics. This slipperiness in her writing, resulting from a perennially unstable set of referential contexts, heightens the queer charge of the autobiography. In this section I provide a close reading of selected sections of My Story using a “scavenger” methodology to demonstrate how much in tandem heterosexual and homosexual desires circulate in these pages as well as to explain the very partial nature of the vociferous critical discussion of sexual pleasure in My Story.

Same-sex desire in My Story is always intimately bound to heterosexual relationships. Even at the level of structure there is no neat dichotomy between such sexual practices. For instance, Das chose quite explicit and titillating titles for most of the fifty short chapters that make up the autobiography.³³ Chapter headings for thirty-eight of the fifty chapters are quite clearly sexual or at least hold the promise of some sexual content-ranging from Chapter 18: “Was every married adult a clown in bed, a circus performer?” to chapter 19: “Her voice was strange … it was easy for me to fall in love with her” to chapter 42: “The last of my lovers: handsome dark one with a tattoo between his eyes.” And yet there are no assurances that a chapter covers only those sex attractions and activities alluded to in the title. Furthermore, the sexual activities hinted at in the chapter title may not even be her own. For example, in chapter 10, titled “She was half-crazed with love and hardly noticed me,” Das describes her experiences as a nine-year-old in an all-girl boarding school where she shares a room with three other girls. The eldest and prettiest of her roommates is fifteen-year-old Sharada who has many admirers among the young schoolgirls. The chapter ends with the following passage that also provides the title: “The lesbian admirer came into our room once when Sharada was away taking a bath and kissed her pillowcases and her undies hanging out to dry in the dressing room. I lay on my bed watching this performance but she was half-crazed with love, and hardly noticed me.” (p. 47)

By the nineteenth chapter, Kamala, now fifteen, is herself enthralled by a series of older women—unmarried aunts, teachers, women who are family friends. Chapter 20 begins with Kamala being warned against associating with an eighteen-year-old college student (p. 90). Of course Kamala goes on to describe how in spite of (or because of) the warnings, she felt “instantly drawn to her. … She was tall and sturdy with a tense masculine grace. … When her eyes held mine captive in a trance, for a reason that I could not fathom, then I felt excited” (p. 89). In the summer of her sixteenth year, Kamala's father arranges for her to make an overnight journey by train to her grandmother's house, in the company of a group of professors and students. “As luck would have it,” Das writes, the “girl who was different from others” is part of the group. Das describes the seduction on the train:

I hate the upper berth, she said. She looked around first to see if anyone was awake. Then she lay near me holding my body close to hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of my mouth with a gentleness that I had never dreamt of finding. She kissed my lips then, and whispered, you are so sweet, so very sweet, I have never met anyone so sweet, my darling, my little darling. …

It was the first kiss of its kind in my life. Perhaps my mother may have kissed me while I was an infant but after that no one, not even my grandmother, had bothered to kiss me. I was unnerved. I could hardly breathe. She kept stroking my hair and kissing my face and my throat all through that night while sleep came to me in snatches and with fever. You are feverish, she said, before dawn, your mouth is hot.

(p. 90)

A friend of Kamala's family meets the group at the station where they have to change trains, and another family friend invites the whole group to lunch. The college student coaxes Kamala to bathe with her and to allow herself to be powdered and dressed by her. “Both of us,” Kamala writes, “felt rather giddy with joy like honeymooners.” By the time they join their group, the meal is well underway, and their host, Major Menon, Das wryly reports, “seemed grateful to me for having brought into his home a bunch of charming ladies, all unmarried” (p. 91). As always, Das employs a quiet humor to undercut heteromasculine ambitions.

Das continues in the same passage to blend this romance with the girlfriend into the romance with her husband-to-be. Here, as elsewhere in this text, there is no setting up of a binary between opposing sexualities: in the very next paragraph of the same chapter, Kamala begins describing her courtship with a male relative. She learns from her grandmother that the family wants them to marry. This chapter ends a page later with this description of their first kiss: “Before I left for Calcutta, my relative pushed me into a dark corner behind a door and kissed me sloppily near my mouth. He crushed my breasts with his thick fingers. Don't you love me he asked me, don't you like my touching you. … I felt hurt and humiliated. All I said was ‘goodbye'” (p. 93). That Das intends the reader to compare these two sexual experiences seems obvious. The narrative clearly indicates which of the two furtive encounters is more pleasurable to Kamala. It is significant that this chapter in which Das meets and is courted by her future husband (events so important to the heterosexual plot and to the feminist reading) is titled: “She lay near me holding my body close to hers.” In the very next chapter (titled “His hands bruised my body and left blue and red marks on the skin”), Das writes of the visit of Madhav Das, her cousin and now her fiancé, to her home in Calcutta, during their engagement:

My cousin asked me why I was cold and frigid. I did not know what sexual desire meant, not having experienced it even once. Don't you feel any passion for me, he asked me. I don't know, I said simply and honestly. It was a disappointing week for him and for me. I had expected him to take me in his arms and stroke my face, my hair, my hands, and whisper loving words. I had expected him to be all that I wanted my father to be, and my mother. I wanted conversations, companionship and warmth. Sex was far from my thoughts.

(p. 95, emphasis mine.)

Having just read her long and elaborate account of her tryst with the girlfriend with whom she was “giddy with joy” like a honeymooner, how does the reader process this passage in which Kamala denies any experience of sexual desire even as her expectations of her fiancé are shaped by her pleasurable experiences with her girlfriend?

My Story has often been dismissed as sensationalist and melodramatic fiction, yet these very features of Das's writing allow her to interrupt the narration of everyday events with speculations that transgress the conventions of the autobiography genre. Right after the passage quoted above, Das writes:

I did not know whom to turn to for consolation. On a sudden impulse, I phoned my girl-friend. She was surprised to hear my voice. I thought you had forgotten me, she said. I invited her to my house. She came to spend a Sunday with me and together we cleaned out our bookcases and dusted the books. Only once she kissed me. Our eyes were watering and the dust had swollen our lips. Can't you take me away from here, I asked her. Not for another four years, she said. I must complete my studies she said. Then holding me close to her, she rubbed her cheek against mine.

When I put her out of my mind I put aside my self-pity too. It would not do to dream of a different kind of life. My life had been planned and its course charted by my parents and relatives. … I would be a middle-class housewife, and walk along the vegetable shops carrying a string bag and wearing faded chappals on my feet. I would beat my thin children … and make them scream out for mercy. I would wash my husband's cheap underwear and hang it out to dry in the balcony like some kind of national flag, with wifely pride. …

(p. 96)

Like many of the passages in which Das leaves so much unsaid, this passage also ends with ellipses. We never hear of this girlfriend again—either in the autobiography or in any meaningful way in the many critical responses to this text.³⁴ The watering eyes and swollen lips, we are led to understand, are the result of the heat and dust stirred up by their spring cleaning. Das's use of hyperbole and the melodramatic is extremely effective in registering the weight of the unspoken pain and pleasures of this afternoon. There is an undeniable subtext of longing that runs through this description of their Sunday together and which accounts for the virulence of the sudden outburst in which Kamala Das imagines her future as a “middle-class housewife.”³⁵ What we also get here is a brief but clear glimpse of Das's awareness of the link between wifely duties and national pride—the very dynamic that Alexander describes succinctly in her discussion of the role of heterosexuality and reproduction in advancing national interests in the neocolonial Bahamas: “[L]oyalty to the nation as citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely, a possible charge of irresponsible citizenship or no citizenship at all.”³⁶

Despite their contemplation of an “elopement,” these young women know that they cannot chose this option of living with and supporting each other as a same-sex couple. But what is also made clear through this episode is that young Kamala does not have the option of choosing marriage and motherhood either. Both the big and small details of this conventional heterosexuality are chosen for her. For instance, the narrative obliquely suggests that Kamala's marriage is arranged as early as in her sixteenth year and to this particular cousin, because at the time her parents' marriage was under great stress and at the verge of dissolution. Young Kamala's consent to this marriage is manufactured by her father through a postengagement courtship of a week during which he buys the couple tickets for shows and meals at expensive hotels (p. 95). Despite many misgivings, Kamala doesn't contradict her father when he declares that he is happy that she has “found her mate” (p. 96). Sexual choice is not an operative concept in this arena. And yet, Das goes on to chronicle the many instances in which she chooses to have affairs with men and, on occasion, fall in love with women.

Given these restrictions, it is significant that Das smuggles in a discussion of female sexual pleasure even as she protested patriarchal oppression. Much of this world of female sexual pleasure is created through Kamala's narration of her experiences with other women. Kamala Das is impressive in her ability to convey at once, a girl/woman who takes great pride in her sexual innocence even as she laments her crude awakening into heterosexuality. But this maintenance of the aura of sexual innocence requires that a whole range of pleasurable experiences be recast as innocent of sexual charge.³⁷ Ultimately, however, one of the consequences of Das's deliberate weaving of these sensual moments of same-sex pleasure into her catalog of pleasurable and distasteful encounters with the opposite sex is to constantly make the heteronormative visible by interrupting it consistently.

The concept of same-sex desire and heterosexuality “interrupting” each other over the course of an individual's lifetime is not as conventional as is the theory that homosexual activity is a “stage” toward mature heterosexuality. Thus, one might argue that these events, such as the romance with the girlfriend, are no more than unremarkable markers of the passage from childhood to adulthood, especially in terms of sexual development. Over the course of several books and articles, Sudhir Kakar, contemporary India's foremost psychologist, has fashioned just such an “Indian” understanding of the sexual development of children and youth in India.³⁸ Kakar notes that young Indian girls experience sexuality early in their lives through their interactions with children and adults of both genders. According to Kakar, Indian women feel the tension between the “memory of intense and pleasurable childhood sexuality” and “the later womanly ideal which demands restraint and renunciation.” The Indian woman, who is for Kakar synonymous with the Hindu woman, resolves this tension after marriage by weaving an identity for herself that evolves out of the “particulars of her life cycle and childhood” and “the universals of the traditional ideals of womanhood.”³⁹ Clearly, much of Kamala Das's narrative about the pleasures she receives from (and gives) to both women and men, both before and after her marriage, disturbs Kakar's dichotomy between “Indian” childhood and adult sexuality with its strict “before” and “after” logic. It would be difficult to deny the sensual texture of Kamala's accounts of childhood visits with unmarried aunts whose beauty, amorous songs, asceticism, and poetry teach her “that love was a beautiful anguish and a thapasya (a fast/penance/quest)” (p. 21). Another young married woman, a family friend, the “exquisitely lovely and very fashion-conscious” Mrs. Kunhappa, shares beauty secrets and information on “the great orgasm” with the young teenager (p. 80). According to Kakar's precepts, although what Kamala, like other young girls, learns through such association with women is indeed sexual and sensual pleasures, such knowledge is given (and learned) exclusively as preparation for the heterosexual monogamous sexual life that awaits Indian girls after marriage. In Das's narrative however, these episodes circulate in such an evocative and meandering fashion that their impact on the protagonist cannot be curtailed when she exchanges her childhood for her marital bed.

One of the ways in which Das interrupts both the heteronormative and the homonormative is in her choice of love objects—women, men, and herself. After marriage, Kamala continues to “fall in love” with women and with men, and we are told that she embarks on several torrid affairs. One of these “carelessly mixed pleasures,” as she calls them, that is not given serious consideration by Das, her husband, or the critics, involves Das's love for her doctor. In chapter 32, Das writes of her trouble with a “women's problem” for which she requires hospitalization. Here she is tended to by a woman doctor who saves her from bleeding to death when she hemorrhages after surgery. Kamala falls in love with her and keeps going to see her in the clinic—kissing her, watching her, smelling her. She writes: “I kept telling my husband that I was in love with the doctor and he said, it is all right, she is a woman, she will not exploit you” (p. 152). Once again, this is exactly how most critics have read this relationship—so “safe” in terms of patriarchal exploitation that it does not warrant serious consideration. In the rest of the autobiography, Das writes at length about the sexual pleasures that husband and wife enjoyed together and separately.

And yet, almost all feminist interpretations of My Story reach their crescendo in the analysis of chapter 22, titled “Wedding night: Again and again he hurt me and all the while the Kathakali drums throbbed dully.”⁴⁰ What Kamala records in this chapter is her initiation into heterosexual intercourse via marital rape—unsuccessful attempts at first and then, after a fortnight of attempts, successful. She becomes pregnant almost immediately and by the time her first son is born, Kamala Das has few illusions about her relationship with her husband. The consequence is that now, aged seventeen or eighteen, she decides “to be unfaithful to him, at least physically” (p. 107). Das's life story provides the perfect case study of the sexual violence that husbands can and do subject their wives to. Furthermore, in this case, the wife enters the marriage as a child bridge matched with a much older man and is soon a teenage mother. And much of Das's work examines, in unflinching and graphic detail, the sexual, emotional, and psychological violence that women may suffer in heterosexual domestic settings. In “The Old Playhouse” (1973, p. 54) she writes in the persona of “wife”:

… You dribbled spittle into my mouth, you poured
Yourself into every nook and cranny, you embalmed
My poor lust with your bitter-sweet juices. You called me wife,
I was taught to break saccharine into your tea

In another splendid poem titled “The Stone Age” (1973), a wife describes her sexual infidelity but only after establishing that the husband is a “fat old spider” who has turned her into a “bird of stone, a granite / dove.” Again, in the persona of the wife, Das writes: “You stick a finger into my dreaming eye” (p. 69).

Das's feminist readers, regardless of their location, proffer justifications for only those sexual activities that occur after marriage and repeatedly stress that she is driven to such behavior by a cruel husband and by his numerous infidelities. Hence, because the affair with the college student (as well as other minor crushes on other women and young men) happen prior to her marriage, they are elided by the literary criticism. At the end of the autobiography, Das describes how, after she was well established as a writer, she was constantly propositioned by strangers and even by male friends who had read her work and had concluded that she would sleep with anyone. At this point in the narrative, she declares: “Sex did not interest me except as a gift I could grant my husband to make him happy” (p. 213). Feminist critic Ranjana Harish uses this statement as proof that Das's sexual adventures had never been pleasurable for her. Harish insists that this authorial admission “ironically” confirms that Das's “transgressions” of the “sacred orbit of marriage” are embarked upon “out of sheer disgust and a burning sense of revenge [against her unfaithful husband].”⁴¹ Similarly, in “Sexual Politics and Kamala Das,” Iqbal Kaur sets out “to prove Kamala Das' distaste for sex.” Using Das's poetry and prose to prove her point, Kaur writes: “I would like to repeat that it is not lust or sex or carnal hunger but rather an escape from all this that drags her [Das] from man to man.”⁴² Furthermore, although almost every critic comments on the unpleasant sex of the early days of the marriage, there is no commentary on the joyous lovemaking of the later years when Kamala participates in and enjoys the husband's homoerotic sexual scenarios in which she is his “darling little boy.” Chapter 27 begins:

During my nervous breakdown there developed between myself and my husband an intimacy which was purely physical … after bathing me in warm water and dressing me in men's clothes, my husband bade me sit on his lap, fondling me and calling me his little darling boy. … I was by nature shy … but during my illness, I shed my shyness and for the first time in my life learned to surrender totally in bed with my pride intact and blazing.”

(p. 126)

Here Kamala Das calmly discloses two “unmentionable” aspects of her life—her period of precarious mental health and her participation in perverse marital sex. What becomes difficult to integrate into an antipatriarchal reading is Das's candid account of how much sexual pleasure she found in these circumstances. Here Das disrupts the normative feminist narrative about “wifely suffering” at the hands of a sexually voracious husband. In this and other instances, Das's narrative queers the very institution of marriage by making marital sex appear perverse and enjoyable precisely for that reason.

HUSBANDS AND LOVERS

Another way in which Kamala Das interrupts the heteronormative is through the figure of “the husband” in her autobiography, fiction, and poetry. As recounted in the autobiography, one of the few conversations that Kamala and her fiancé have before their wedding is about Oscar Wilde. She writes: “He [the fiancé] talked about homosexuality with frankness. Many of us pass through that stage, he said” (p. 92). Despite his theory of stages, same-sex practice is not such a singular stage that the husband grows beyond. His obviously pleasurable relationships with other men continue past the wedding.

As narrated in the passage that serves as the second epigraph to this essay, even as Kamala determines to be unfaithful to her husband, she learns of his “friend” and “constant companion” (p. 118). The last three lines in this paragraph are among the most quoted sentences from this autobiography. Read, as is the usual critical practice, outside the context of Das's excruciating consideration of what sexual pleasures might lie beyond the heterosexual option (for men in this instance), these last three lines have been interpreted as that all-too-familiar tirade about the burden of being “a woman”—with one's breasts and genitals serving as the source and location of one's suffering. Interestingly, Das's most anthologized poem, the autobiographical “An Introduction,” contains a passage that seems to recount this exact incident—the passage that serves as the first epigraph for this article. Yet, in most close readings of this poem, critics do not dispel the illusion that the “youth of sixteen” whom the husband draws into the bedroom is necessarily the “I” (the sixteen-year-old bride that we all know Kamala was), and not a young boy—a “youth” as she so plainly tells us.⁴³ The syntax works against the line breaks in this section of the poem. Thus the poem makes possible either a syntactically awkward heterosexual reading, or conversely, a fluent statement about same-sex desire that competes with the young bride's heterosexual ineptness. Critics appear to prefer the syntactically awkward interpretation. Similarly, in most critical readings of this poem, the lines about the “beaten” woman's body are read, despite her insistence that “he did not beat me,” as proof of the man's physical and sexual violence.⁴⁴ In the lines that follow the passage cited in the epigraph, Das writes:

Then … I wore a shirt and my
Brother's trousers, cut my hair short and ignored
My womanliness. Dress in saris, be girl,
Be wife, they said. Be embroiderer, be cook,
Be a quarreller with servants. Fit in. Oh,
Belong, cried the categorisers.

(p. 7)

In critical readings of this poem, these lines that express her dissatisfaction with her woman's body are read as the familiar “woman's complaint” under the yoke of patriarchy rather than a rejection of the hetero-gendered reproductive female body. The lines that describe her adoption of male clothes and short hair have not encouraged critics to consider whether the gendered roles assigned to both wife and husband under a heteropatriarchal⁴⁵ order are being destabilized. Instead these lines are read as the beating down of her “natural” inclinations as a woman—distortions forced upon her by a sexually devouring husband. Das's listing of the categories available to the middle-class woman (girl, wife, embroiderer, cook, quarreler with servants) all assume a heterosexual and domestic foundation. In this passage, to refuse these domestic categories is to refuse the sense of belonging and shelter offered by heteropatriarchal arrangements.

A passage from another commonly anthologized poem, “Composition” (1967), again demonstrates how closely Das weaves heterosexuality and homosexuality. These constant sexual (re)orientations do not provide identities as much as they provide roles that intersect each other:

I asked my husband,
am I hetero
am I lesbian
or am I just plain frigid?
He only laughed.
For such questions
probably there are no answers
or else
the answers must emerge
from within.

(p. 46)

Somewhat exasperated by Das's meandering poesy in this lengthy poem, feminist critic Vrinda Nabar comments: “One can hardly blame him [the husband—for laughing]! There seems little excuse for such immature analysis, always carried to excess and singularly lacking in irony.” Nabar goes on to note that Kamala Das does not get profound nor provide “a dose of introspection … or some self-criticism” but instead goes into airing her doubts which, according to Nabar, consist of a “long moan” about “queers and lesbians.”⁴⁶

In the critical texts on Das, the figure of “the husband,” never named in the autobiography, but Madhav Das in real life, stands in for patriarchy. This would make his homosexual tendencies a stumbling block but only if patriarchy were to be linked to heterosexuality. Male same-sex practices, such as those indulged in on occasion by the husband, are represented as another of his “sexual corruptions” that Kamala as his wife is subject to—irrespective of her degree of pleasure in participation. Basing her opinion on her reading of My Story, Nabar concludes that Madhav Das was “crude, insensitive, incapable of even basic human decency. He emerges as the worst kind of the conventional Indian male.” This is of course an assessment that Kamala Das encourages and embellishes repeatedly in her written work and interviews even as she provides examples of his interesting deviance from the “conventional Indian male.” For instance, Das comments in her autobiography and interviews that her husband encouraged her infidelities and even offered evaluations of each of her lovers. The husband in My Story is queer not simply because of his occasional same-sex liaisons but also in his disregard of one of the most crucial linchpins of the heteropatriarchal marriage contract—the insistence on wifely sexual fidelity. Commenting on one of the scenes in the autobiography in which Das and her husband discuss her latest lover, Nabar writes: “Amazingly, her husband was not outraged, only ‘irked’ because she had encouraged such a ‘stupid fellow.’ Similar statements, implying a tolerance of her extra-marital relationships on her husband's part, are scattered through much of Kamala's prose. They seem at odds with the image she commonly projects of him.”⁴⁷ Kamala Das is quite consistent about the unconventionality of every aspect of her marriage. If this image of the husband is “at odds” with a “commonly projected image” of him, then it is at odds with the image that emerges from extant feminist criticism which has constructed him as patriarchy's archvillain—a necessary complement to the image of Kamala Das as a woman oppressed by the patriarchal hegemony embodied by her father and husband. Das in fact repeatedly demonstrates how incomplete and inefficient the whole machinery of patriarchal power can be in operation.⁴⁸

Most importantly, we need to ponder the issue of Das's choice of the pseudonym, “Madhavi Kutty.” “Kutty” is a common suffix in Kerala across castes but particularly among upper-caste women. Kutty is also used as an affectionate suffix which is unmarked by gender and religion and best translates as “child” or “small one.” Hence, when a child is named after parent or adult, the suffix becomes a way to distinguish the adult from the child.⁴⁹ Madhavi is however, the feminine form of Madhav, her husband's name. Why would Kamala Das make this gesture if the motivating force behind her writing was to protest her miserable marriage and her brute of a husband? Is her choice of pseudonym parodic? Is this another instance of Das's posturing as the ever-obedient wife who takes her very name from her husband? Kamala Das's use of her husband's last name “Das” for her publications in English was possibly an attempt to follow the practice in other parts of the country, especially in the English-language literary circles. If she were to follow the matrilineal naming convention, she would be known as Nalapat Kamala or Nalapat Madhavi Kutty. However, these versions of her name would reveal her identity to those such as her revered grandmother, who, Kamala Das claims, died without discovering that Madhavi Kutty, the writer of scandalous stories in Malayalam, was Kamala writing under a pseudonym.

CONTRADICTING HETEROPATRIARCHY

In the preface to The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das (1994), Vrinda Nabar writes that the contradictory series of statements and decisions that Das has made over the years of being intensely written up and interviewed make her an unreliable narrator of her own life.⁵⁰ Other scholars have made similar assessments—Ranjana Dwivedi gives an example that she finds representative of Das's contradictory self-presentation within the pages of My Story: “The book as many of her critics have noted is full of contradictions. … One may quote several examples to prove this inconsistency … e.g. an intense awareness of her ugly looks is a deep-rooted trait of [her] personality. She discusses it again and again, and still she presents herself as being chased and desired by several men!”⁵¹ There is a discourse about standards of beauty in operation here that accounts for Dwivedi's confusion. However, there is absolutely no contradiction for the reader who is attuned to the intense autoeroticism of Kamala's relation to her own body—in adolescence, in illness, in health, in the process of satisfying and unsatisfactory lovemaking. Das's representation of her own and other female bodies goes beyond the requisite description of the woman's body in heterosexual situations. In the many descriptions of heterosexual coupling etched in her poetry and prose, there is an excessive lingering on the body of the woman which is matched by a fading out of the male or a reduction of him into mere observer while the woman stands entranced by her own womanly flesh.

What also needs to be noted is that it is not just same-sex desire that disturbs the heteropatriarchal order in My Story and other works by Kamala Das. Rather, Das's queerness makes visible to her, and thereby to us, all that occurs at a tangent to the normative—the practices (and not all of them sexual) that have always existed at a slight angle to the heteropatriarchal. She observes and exposes those very aspects of gender and class inequality which social conventions have decreed invisible to “decent” women and to respectable women writers. For example, her understanding of the politics of (hetero)sexual power are gleaned from her observation of the seduction of servant girls by rich philanderers. Her childhood knowledge of power relations comes from learning that a self-administered abortion is the reason why the maid loses her job. Kamala's complaints about the drudgery of her own life are often and deliberately undercut by juxtaposing such complaints with descriptions of the severely cramped circumstances in which her servants live their lives.

I will also add that when same-sex desire floods the screen it is not something that is indulged in because heterosexual options for sex are closed. This is often the course that female sexuality takes in the South Asian narrative in which lesbian desire is an explicit feature of the story.⁵² Kamala Das repeatedly takes the wife outside the marital home and into hotel rooms, as well as the homes and workplaces of lovers of both sexes. And yet homoerotic situations are evoked only to be put aside again and again, in My Story as much as in her fiction. Why does Das repeatedly go through the pleasures of such disciplining? And how long can this strategy—that some may see as ultimately homophobic—be maintained? Some of Das's recent fiction, such as the short story “The Sandal Trees,” has only intensified this backtracking and crisscrossing over into same-sex relationships and back to heterosexuality with the possibility of return left open.⁵³

It will be interesting to see how stalwart Das followers will read “The Sandal Trees” (Chandana Marangal), written by Das in Malayalam in 1988 and translated into English under her guidance by V. C. Harris and C. K. Mohamed Ummer in 1995. This story charts a four-decade-long sexual and emotional relationship between two women which carries echoes of the relationship between Kamala and the college girlfriend in the autobiography. And in this short story, Das is not reticent about making direct comparisons between the husband and the lover.⁵⁴ In this story, it is impossible to read same-sex desire as a stage in growing up to be properly heterosexual or to easily mistake it for an insignificant attachment. “The Sandal Trees” cannot be processed through these theories and, instead, makes visible and legible the contours of Das's work that cannot otherwise be mapped even under the rubric of feminist criticism unless one is willing to discuss same-sex desire. Conversely, the explicit lesbian theme of “The Sandal Trees” does make same-sex desire in My Story look incomplete, incoherent, even embryonic. Although “The Sandal Trees” does not have the sly, insidious queer charge of My Story, in the current moment of the internationalization of homosexual identity-based politics, this short story may be more useful to lesbian causes in the Indian context than My Story.

CONCLUSION

Read solely on the national literary register, Das's 1976 autobiography would seem to have had its moment of attention and notoriety. Perhaps Das's December 1999 announcement that she is going to convert to Islam, change her name to Suraiya, and take to “purdah” (wearing the veil in public) will provoke a reassessment of the sexual politics of Das's earlier works in Indian literary and feminist discourses.⁵⁵ Or, as queer activists in India become increasingly vocal about legitimating alternate sexualities, Das's empathetic portrayal of “freaks,” “eunuchs,” “sinners,” and other outcastes may merit reconsideration. However, from a strictly national literary framework, the seeming randomness of my choice of My Story, along with the cross-cultural citation style, and the partial readings, might seem to provide evidence of a dilettantish, First World-based, diasporic dabbling in the queer and unusual. What cannot be wished away is the gap between queer temporalities and the temporality of national literary histories.

It seems as if the female sexuality that Indian—and most other—feminism is comfortable with is that which is construed as “problematic” as in the awful early days of Kamala's marriage. Writing on African American women's sexuality, Evelynn M. Hammond has recently noted the impossibility of speaking it except in the context of violation or oppression (as in rape, lynching, incest, or a lack of reproductive control).⁵⁶ In the Indian context as in the African American (albeit for different historical reasons), female sexuality has for too long been the topic that enters discourse only as the locus of potential or full-fledged problems. Thus, what we have is a literary-critical mainstream that in its most benevolent patriarchal tradition reads Das's dynamic representations of desire in purely aesthetic terms—that is, as literary theme (see n. 9). This stance is challenged by feminists who focus on the material, the autobiographical, and the symbolic political challenge to patriarchy encoded in Das's work. Less impressed critics have labeled Das a nymphomaniac or as suffering from a “sex addiction.”⁵⁷ A queer reading of Das works with what is discarded in patriarchal and feminist readings, namely, the contradictory, the duplicitous, the parodic, the perverse, the incomplete, and interruptive.

Despite the politics of location that usefully interrupt a seamless application of theory to text, I do believe that queering Kamala Das is an extremely rewarding project. I have tried to demonstrate that reading Das as a feminist, antipatriarchal writer, while respectful of the local feminist projects that envelop this work, does not answer many of the enigmas raised by the dynamics of sexuality in her texts. Reading her texts as queer, however multiply defined that term may be, forces a discussion of sexuality and subjecthood that goes beyond the conventions of the unconventional and into less stable interpretations of her work. As Berlant and Warner have noted, queer commentary results in “unsettlement rather than systemization.”⁵⁸ I have focused in this article on the gaps between different discussions on Das that are produced in different locations.⁵⁹ I believe that each of these gaps illuminates the current situation in which English-language literary criticism is being produced around the globe with different sociocultural and academic foci but for audiences that overlap in ways not envisioned in earlier decades. This examination of My Story then, bares the pitfalls as well as the necessity of negotiating between locations as diverse as those of different academic disciplines, different literary lists, geographic locations, queer and national temporalities, languages, understandings of “queer,” feminisms, and sexual practices.

Notes

1. Nairs were a military class (in Kerala, southern India) who had been granted land by grateful kings over the centuries. By the twentieth century, Nairs were a powerful feudal class of landowners. Although Nairs enjoy certain distinct caste privileges, they are second in Kerala's Hindu caste hierarchy to the Namboodiris or the priestly caste. According to the matrilineal conventions of the Nair community, Kamala Das belongs to the Nalapat family, well known in Kerala for their contributions to Malayalam literature and culture.

2. For a detailed account of the many prizes and honors given to Das, see the chronology provided by Iqbal Kaur, Feminist Revolution and Kamala Das' “My Story” (Patiala, India: Century Twenty-One, 1992), ii-vi.

3. A comprehensive list of South Asian scholars producing such work would be lengthy-but to mention just a few names, consider the globally cited work of Bina Aggarwal, Urvashi Butalia, Kamala Bhasin, Uma Chakravarti, Veena Das, Mary John, Kumari Jayawardena, Madhu Kishwar, Ratna Kapur, Vina Mazumdar, Ritu Menon, Janaki Nair, Tejaswini Niranjana, Kumkum Sangari, Tanika Sarkar, Susie Tharu, and Sudesh Vaid. Then there are many diasporic South Asian scholars whose work on gender and the state have made solid contributions in setting the terms for these discussions—Inderpal Grewal, Ania Loomba, Lata Mani, Chandra Mohanty, Rajeshwari SunderRajan, and Gayatri Spivak. Please note that these lists are incomplete and that the distinction that I make between “South Asian” and “diasporic South Asian” is very unstable because several of the above named scholars might inhabit either category at different points in their careers.

4. Mary John and Janaki Nair, eds., A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economics of Modern India (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), 1-51, 1. In their preface to the collection, Nair and John report that despite their best efforts they were ultimately unable to solicit contributions on homosexuality or on the sexualization of Kerala (viii). However, their excellent introduction to the collection discusses alternate sexuality and other aspects of the sexual economics of modern India in some detail.

5. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy,” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63-100, 65.

6. In this essay, for instance, given the customary space constraints of journal articles, I have had to restrict my citations in several instances to “representative” scholarship rather than be able to catalog the entire body of work on Das, on postcolonial feminism(s), queer commentary, and other related issues.

7. Note that Das was awarded the PEN Asian Poetry Prize in 1963 and had a national and international reputation as a poet writing in English well before My Story was published.

8. Vincent O'Sullivan, “Whose Voice Is Where? On Listening to Kamala Das,” in Kamala Das, 179-94, 180.

9. Readers should note that Kamala Das's work can be placed within several literary contexts: Third World women's writing, South Asian postcolonial/feminist writing (in the subcontinent and the diaspora), the Indian national literary tradition, and Malayalam literature. These literary fields are not to be understood as concentric circles: they do not mimic geography but instead need to be envisioned as overlapping worlds. In Indian, literary critics routinely compare Das's poetic themes and style to the work of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Simone de Beauvoir. Also, Das occupies different positions in these three or four literary histories: her reputation in Australia, for example, rests on the interest in “new literatures in English” and more specifically on the volume Kamala Das. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar include Das's poem, “An Introduction,” in their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: A Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 1985), 2247-49.

   Among subcontinental critics of Indian women's writing in English, Kamala Das occupies a curious position. Her exceptional literary talent, especially as a poet, has usually been acknowledged by literary critics, even by those who despair at her choice of topics. Recently, in “Kamala Das—Need for Re-Assessment,” in Feminist English Literature, ed. Manmohan K. Bhatnagar (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1999), 4-9, 8, Sharad Rajimwale has argued that Das “inaugurates a new age for women poets [in India].” Such acknowledgment of Das's talent is not always forthcoming. In The Waffle of the Toffs: A Socio-literary Reading of Indian Literature in English (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), M. Prabha does not mince words as she reduces Das's work to “bedroom bardistry” in which “all her outpourings pertain to the pelvic region” (224).

   Interestingly, in literary histories of Malayalam literature, Das is usually represented as a lightweight. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani Amma, and her maternal uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, are the more respected writers whose poetry and translations are given serious consideration, even in English-language literary histories of Malayalam. Her mother has been awarded the “Padma Bhusan,” one of independent India's high official cultural awards, and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1966. (Kamala Das herself won the latter prize in 1985.) Das's maternal uncle has been included in the highest literary canons of Malayalam literature. See K. R. R. Nair, The Poetry of Kamala Das (New Delhi: Reliance, 1993), and literary histories such as Krishna Chaitanya, A History of Malayalam Literature (Poona, India: Orient Longman, 1971); and Ayyappa K. Panniker, A Short History of Malayalam Literature (Trivandrum, India: Department of Public Relations, Government of Kerala, 1977).

   Still, Kamala Das's autobiography immediately won the patronage of the established (mostly male) literary critics who, although not particularly inspired by feminism, were graciously willing to accommodate “feminine writing.” The father of English-language literary criticism in post-independence India, as the late K. S. R. Iyengar was often called, summarized his opinion of Das as follows: “Kamala Das is a fiercely feminine sensibility that dares without inhibitions to articulate the hurts it has received in an insensitive largely man-made world” (Indian Writing in English [New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973], 680). K. R. R. Nair insists that Kamala Das's confessional poetry and My Story are not to be read as autobiographical “in the conventional sense” but as “an imaginative and fanciful rendering of certain autobiographical experiences” (Nair, 103). Needless to say, feminist critics in the subcontinent and outside have read Kamala Das's life into her work and have done so, in part, to counter such masculinist reduction of her work to discussions of form and theme.

   From the late 1970s onward Kamala Das has become for feminists a symbol of the oppressed lives that women live in traditional patriarchal societies and, more importantly, a symbol of the feminist protest of such oppression. For instance, Iqbal Kaur distinguished her own reading of My Story from other scholarly approaches by noting that “My Story is full of sensationalism only to those who read in it the story of a single lust-obsessed feminine woman seeking a life of physical pleasure, while … Kamala Das is a feminist woman trying to reject male lust which turns a woman into an object.” The writer of many books and editor of anthologies on Das, Kaur argues in her 1992 study that My Story is a serious social critique. Kaur lists over twenty such “social problems” that Das grapples with in the autobiography—problems such as “the power-imbalance in sexual relationships, animal-like existence of women, male treachery, infidelity in marriage, society's double standards especially of morality, purdah system,” and so on (Feminist Revolutions and Kamala Das' “My Story,” 4-5). Later in her study, when Kaur goes on to discuss the issues that were central to Indian feminism in the 1970s, her list looks very much like the earlier presented one citing Das's concerns in My Story (Feminist Revolutions and Kamala Das' “My Story,” 22).

10. Ketu Katrak, “Post-Colonial Women's Colonised States: Mothering and M-othering in Bessie Head's A Question of Power and Kamala Das' My Story,” Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 3 (1996): 273-91; Harveen Sachdeva Mann, “‘Cracking India’: Minority Women Writers and the Contentious Margins of Indian Nationalist Discourse,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29, no. 2, (1994): 71-94; Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Terms of Empowerment in Kamala Das' My Story” in Perspectives on Kamala Das' Prose, ed. Iqbal Kaur (New Delhi: Intellectual Publishing House, 1995), 87-111. Also see Lim, “Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into the Subject of the Contemporary Woman Writer,” Women Studies 18 (summer 1990): 153-75.

11. Katrak, 288.

12. Mann, 71.

13. See, for instance, the oft-cited essay, “French Feminism in an International Frame,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), in which Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes of the need to work toward escaping “the inbuilt colonialism of first world feminism toward the third” in order to “promote a sense of our common yet history-specific lot” (134-53, 153). Chandra Talpade Mohanty has also written persuasively of the need for Western feminism to problematize its “discursive colonialism” in the now classic “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (New York: Routledge, 1992), 51-80. Here and elsewhere we are urged to pay due attention to what is considered political in a feminist sense in the specific Third World location/text under investigation rather than impose a Euro-American, essentially colonialist, viewpoint.

14. Marilyn Friedman, “Multicultural Education and Feminist Ethics,” Hypatia 10 (spring 1995): 56-68, 65.

15. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Burden of English,” The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, ed. Rajeshwari SunderRajan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 275-99, 276.

16. If there was/is a section of the “implied readership” among whom Das's autobiography was well-received for the very features of the text that I highlight in this essay, there were/are no public accounts of this reception. This is not to argue that there is no lesbian and gay readership or such communities in India. For an overview of Indian gay and lesbian groups and their activities, see Sherry Joseph's “Gay and Lesbian Movement in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, 17 Aug. 1996, 2228-32. For a more up-to-date account, see Bina Fernandez, ed., Humjinsi: A Resource Book for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights in India (New Delhi: India Centre for Human Rights and Law, 1999).

17. See Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Also see Shakuntala Devi's The World of Homosexuals (New Delhi: Vikas, 1977), an interview-based study that is roughly contemporaneous with My Story. Sudhir Kakar's important psychoanalytical study, The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (1978; rpt., New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), contains some discussion of homosexuality. Also see the patronizing and voyeuristic account of gay male life-styles in contemporary India written by Arvind Kala, Invisible Minority: The Unknown World of the Indian Homosexual (New Delhi: Dynamic Books, 1992). Giti Thadani's Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (London: Cassell, 1996) attempts to bring lesbians in India into visibility through interpretations of “the hidden realm of women's traditions” (viii), archaeological artifacts, paintings, sculptures, and accounts of same-sex coupling. Homosexuality and queerness inform numerous academic and other publications and cultural texts produced by South Asians in South Asia and in the diaspora. See, for example, the films of Pratima Parmar, Hanif Khureshi, Deepa Mehta, and fiction by Sohaila Abdulali, Nalinaksha Bhattacharya, Ginu Kamani, Vikram Chandra, Shani Motoo, Suniti Namjoshi, Shyam Selvadurai, and Vikram Seth. Also see Rakesh Ratti's edited collection of writing by queer, gay, and lesbian South Asians, titled, A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1993). For queer readings of South Asian diasporic situations, see the work of Gayatri Gopinath, Geeta Patel, Jasbir Puar, Sandip Roy, and Nayan Shah.

18. Ashwini Sutthankar, Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999); Deepa Mehta, dir., Fire (Trial by Fire Films, 1996). Also see Hoshang Merchant, ed., Yarana: Gay Writing from India (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999). Over the last five years, almost every popular Indian magazine has had a special issue or cover story on homosexuality. For example, see the special issues of Sunday magazines: “Glad to Be Gay: Indian Homosexuals come out of the Closet,” 16-22 Aug. 1992, and “Women in Love: Indian Lesbians Talk about Themselves,” 17-23 May 1998. For a comprehensive list of newspaper and magazine discussions on homosexuality in the Indian media (from 1984 to 1999), see Humjinsi. I would like to thank Shohini Ghosh for bringing some of these materials to my attention.

19. See, for instance, Lisa Rofel's “Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China,” GLQ 5, no. 4 (1999): 451-74, for a discussion of the opening up of a semipublic, internet-supported, transnational gay space in Beijing.

20. Note, for instance, the increased number of queer venues—parties, magazines, journals, conferences, and chat rooms that speak to cross-continental audiences. Also see the forthcoming collection of essays titled Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society, ed. Ruth Vanita (New York: Routledge, 2001), which showcases queer readings of Indian cinema, Indian legal discourses, literary texts, popular media, and advertising. Contributors are based in India and outside.

21. See the opening pages of Susan Seizer's “Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of Queer Passage,” Public Culture, 8, no. 1 (1995): 73-100, which provide a representative example of such a scholarly strategy. Also see Gayatri Gopinath's astute analysis of Seizer's work in “Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame,” Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder: Perseus/Westview, 1998), 133-50.

22. Lata Mani, “Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception,” Feminist Review 35 (summer 1990): 24-41, 25, 27.

23. Michael Warner, ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

24. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110 (1995): 343-49, 345.

25. Needless to say, current discussions around “queerness” do go beyond the domain of sex and sexual orientation. See, for example, Q & A: Queer in Asian America, ed. Alice Y. Hom and David L. Eng (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

26. John and Nair, 6.

27. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 13.

28. Karen Lützen, “La mise en discours and Silences in the Research on the History of Sexuality,” Conceiving Sexuality: Approaches to Sex Research in a Postmodern World, ed. Richard G. Parker and John H. Gagon (New York: Routledge, 1995), 19-32.

29. See Dennis Altman, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” Social Text 14, no. 3 (1996): 77-94; and the anthology, Coming Out: An Anthology of International Gay and Lesbian Writings, ed. Stephan Likosky (New York: Pantheon, 1992). For thoughtful reassessments of different aspects of this very internationalization, see Rofel; Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, eds., Same-Sex Relations and Female Desires: Transgender Practices across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Martin Manalansan, “In the Shadow of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma,” GLQ 2 (1995): 425-38; and Gopinath.

30. P. P. Raveendran, “Of Masks and Memories: An Interview with Kamala Das,” Indian Literature 155 (May-June 1993): 145-61. After this response by Das, the interviewer, Raveendran, shifts direction to focus on religion. It would have been useful to have had Das elaborate on the rather enigmatic last sentence. Understandably, however, in Raveendran's context, the question of religion was more urgently in need of elaboration (and potentially more provocative) given the highly inflamed religious/communal mood in India at the time.

31. For more on this distinction between “Indian feminism” and same-sex desire in the context of Das's work, see my discussion of the critical responses to Das's short story “Iqbal,” in “‘Queernesses All Mine’: Same-Sex Desire in Kamala Das' Fiction and Poetry,” in Queering India. This sentiment that there is only a thin strip of shared ground between feminists and lesbians was recently espoused by some Indian feminists and feminist groups who publicly and deliberately distanced their own project from that of Indian lesbians in the discussions and protests following the December 1998 vandalism organized by the Shiv Sena (a fundamentalist right-wing Hindu group) against the screening of Deepa Mehta's film Fire in Bombay. From 1998 to the present, a series of exchanges (Madhu Kishwar in Manushi and the letters to the editor in response to her negative reading of Fire, as well as articles by others, reveal the complex and hardly comfortable relationship between feminist and lesbian activism in India at present. The intense discussion on female sexuality and its place in Indian feminism that Fire has generated is much too complex to be captured in a note. See Madhu Kishwar, “Naïve Outpourings of a Self-Hating Indian: Deepa Mehta's Fire,” Manushi 109 (November-December 1999): 3-14; and “Responses to Manushi [re. review of Deepa Mehta's film Fire],” Manushi 112 (May-June 1999): 2-11. Also see C. M. Naim, “A Dissent on ‘Fire,’” Economic and Political Weekly, 17-24 Apr. 1999, 955-57; Mary E. John and Tejaswini Niranjana, “Mirror Politics: ‘Fire,’ Hindutva, and Indian Culture,” Economic and Political Weekly, 6-13 Mar. 1999, 581-84.

32. See interviews with Raveendran and Shobha Warrier, “Interview with Kamala Das,” www.redifindia.com/1996/. Ranjana Harish cites two other interviews in which Das makes this claim and suggests that Das's retreat from her earlier “boldness” stemmed from her reaction to a Time magazine article that described Das as “the queen of Erotica.” See Ranjana Harish, “My Story: An Attempt to Tell Female Body's Truth,” in Perspectives on Kamala Das' Prose, 44-53, 52.

33. This was perhaps intended to draw the reader into each episode of the story as and when it appeared in serialized form in 1974 in the popular, weekly, Mumbai-based magazine, the Current.

34. For example, in Vrinda Nabar's eighteen-page summary of the autobiography, this relationship with the college girl is described thus: “She [Kamala Das] also developed a crush on her art tutor [male], a Bengali lady who taught her English, and even on an older girl who had an unsavory reputation as a lesbian!” (7). See Vrinda Nabar, The Endless Female Hungers: A Study of Kamala Das (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1994). There is no further analysis of the significance of this relationship between the two women. Also indicative of the dismissive treatment given to such attachments is the repeated use of the exclamation mark as punctuation in sentences that refer to same-sex eroticism.

35. Here, as elsewhere in this text, it is extremely hard to quickly gloss the complexities of the class/caste/family pride that inflects much of Das's view of the world. In this passage, her derision for the details of a middle-class life stems from the suspicion that this may well be the world that awaits her after marriage, despite the royal connections and the high literary/cultural standing of the Nalapat family.

36. Alexander, 64.

37. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction Books, 1981). Faderman's scholarship, produced to explicate an entirely different scenario, offers some insight into Das's manipulation of innocence and eroticism. Commenting on the sexual relationships between European women in the eighteenth century, Faderman claims that “a narrower interpretation of what constitutes eroticism permitted a broader expression of erotic behavior since it was not considered inconsistent with virtue” (39).

38. See Sudhir Karkar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (1989; rpt., New Delhi: Penguin, 1990), and The Inner World. Kakar has argued very forcefully for a theory of male sexual development in which same-sex desire, fantasy, and activities are not validated as manifestations of sexual preference or orientation but viewed as symptomatic of power dynamics in a hierarchical society (134-35). There is less discussion in Kakar's work of same-sex erotics for women.

39. Kakar, Inner World, 64, 56.

40. The reference here is to the Kathakali dance-drama performance that Kamala's father had arranged as part of the festivities around her ostentatious wedding. In his eagerness to consummate their marriage, Kamala's husband decides that they, bride and groom, will not stay up to watch the performance with the wedding guests. For discussion of the marital sex in the early years of Das's marriage, see Harish, Nabar, Katrak, and Kaur.

41. Harish, 46.

42. Iqbal Kaur, “Sexual Politics and Kamala Das,” in Perspectives on Kamala Das's Poetry, 162.

43. See, for example, Prabhat Kumar Pandeya's interpretation of this passage: “Men may enjoy it [“mere carnality”] but not women and in such a situation, and it is a plenty, the woman may feel used, like a lavatory as the young typist girl of The Waste Land, and she is shocked and humiliated, her whole womanhood trampled by the hasty aggressiveness of the male. The defloration is always a traumatic experience for the woman.” See Prabhat Kumar Pandeya, “The Pink Pulsating Words: The Woman's Voice in Kamala Das's Poetry,” in Perspectives on Kamala Das's Poetry, 33-43, 34. In his explanation of the poem, A. N. Dwivedi suggests that these lines imply that “she is married to a youth of sixteen.” See A. N. Dwivedi, Kamala Das and Her Poetry (Delhi: Doaba House, 1983), 114. Nabar (10) is the only critic who makes a link between this passage in the poem and the homosexual relationship between the husband and his friend described in My Story.

44. Iqbal Kaur's analysis of “An Introduction” provides a representative example of selective citation from the autobiography and poems that result in a tightly woven narrative about unremitting patriarchal oppression that culminates in outrage at the “beaten” woman's body. See “Sexual Politics and Kamala Das” (154-56). Also see Nair (17) and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, “The Loud Posters of Kamala Das,” in Kamala Das, 217-24, 218.

45. For a full explication of the ways in which heterosexualization works in collaboration with patriarchy, see Jacqui Alexander who builds on Lynda Hart's theory of heteropatriarchy in Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

46. Nabar, 51, 52. Also see “The Doubt' (1967), a poem in which Das ruminates at length about the very gendering of individuals into the categories of female and male. For detailed queer readings of “Composition,” “The Doubt,” and other poems and short stories by Das, see my “‘Queernesses All Mine’”.

47. Nabar, 10, 11.

48. For example, her father might have efficiently arranged his daughter's marriage with the active collaboration of his wife and mother-in-law, but he is absolutely helpless when it comes to alleviating her unhappiness after marriage.

49. Note that Hindu women in Kerala rarely use caste names after their given name. The form used by Nair women was the name of the Tharavandu (family house) followed by the given name. For example, Das's mother's published under “Nalapat Balamani Amma”—Amma is another generic suffix attached to women's names in Kerala. I am grateful to Dilip Menon for discussing this matter of naming in the Nair community with me.

50. Nabar, vi.

51. Ranjana Dwivedi, “Autobiography: A Metaphor for the Self,” in Between Spaces of Silence: Women Creative Writers, ed. Kamini Dinesh (New Delhi: Sterling, 1994), 115-25, 123.

52. See, for instance, Ismat Chugtai's wonderful 1942 short story, “The Quilt,” in The Quilt and Other Stories, trans. Tahira Naqvi and Syeda Hameed (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1992); and Deepa Mehta's Fire.

53. Kamala Das, “The Sandal Trees,” in The Sandal Trees and Other Stories, trans. V. C. Harris and C. K. Mohamed Ummer (Hyderabad: Disha/Orient Longman, 1995), 1-27. For a detailed analysis of the kinds of acknowledgment of same-sex desire in Das's work that the conscientious critic will have to make when she/he reads “The Sandal Trees,” see my contribution to Queering India.

54. See “The Sandal Trees,” 5, 10, 13, 16, 26. Toward the end of the story, the husband concedes to the main protagonist, his wife, that he has always known that he “was a mere drizzle arriving hesitantly, timidly, after a full storm” (26).

55. For more on Das's conversion to Islam, see “I like Islam's Orthodox Lifestyle: Kamala Das” [Interview with Kamala Das], The Times of India, 15 Dec. 1999. [www.timesofindia.com]. The political and feminist implications of this announcement, which comes at a time when communal tensions around conversions (from the dominant Hindu religion to Islam and Christianity) are high, need to be studied at length and cannot be examined in a note. Also see www.rediff.com/news/1999/dec/13kamala.htm.

56. Evelynn M. Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality,” Feminist Genealogies, 170-82.

57. See the much-cited essay by fellow Indian poet Eunice de Souza, titled “Kamala Das,” in Indian Poetry in English: A Critical Assessment, ed. V. A. Shahane and M. Shivaramakrishna (New Delhi: Macmillan, 1980), 43.

58. Berlant and Warner, 348.

59. One of the silences in this article concerns Das's writing in Malayalam. Although this article makes evident that there is a substantial global discussion about Das's prodigious work in English that is conducted in English, there is no sidestepping the fact that neither myself nor most of the critics I have cited have the language skills requisite for a discussion of Kamala Das's entire oeuvre. There seems to be, as yet, no serious discussion of same-sex dynamics in Kamala Das's work in Malayalam literary criticism. My Malayalam reading skills are too recently acquired to allow me to read literary criticism in the language, but I base my assertion on extensive reading of work written in and translated into English and on consultation with scholars working in the literature. I would especially like to thank T. Muralidharan and Vanamala Viswanathan for generously sharing information on this issue with me.

Earlier versions of different sections of this article were presented at the twenty-sixth annual South Asian Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1997, and at the Queer Globalization/Local Homosexualities Conference at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, CUNY, in New York, April 1998. I would like to thank Gayatri Gopinath, Judith Halberstam, Lisa Lowe, David Ludden, Chandan Reddy, Aparajita Sagar, and Lisa Yoneyama for helping me work through this material. I would also like to thank Houston Baker and the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, for enabling my research in the South Asian Collection at the Van Pelt Library (University of Pennsylvania) in the spring of 1998. I am grateful to the anonymous readers and editors at Feminist Studies whose comments greatly improved the final version of this paper.

Epigraphs: See S. C. Harrex and Vincent O'Sullivan, eds., Kamala Das: A Selection with Essays on Her Work (Adelaide, Australia: Center for Research in the New Literatures in English, CRNLE Writers Series, 1986), 7-9. All cited poems are from this source and will be referred to by page numbers in parentheses in the text. Also see Kamala Das, My Story (New Delhi: Sterling, 1976). All further citations will be from this edition and will be referred to by page numbers in parentheses in the text.