The Love Queen of Malabar

Title: The Love Queen of Malabar – Memoir of a Friendship with Kamala Das
Author: Merrily Weisbord
Publisher: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011 (First published 2010)
ISBN: 9788173142420
Pages: 278
 
Kamala Surayya, who was earlier known as Kamala Das before her conversion to Islam, was the most unconventional writer in Malayalam who shook the establishment to the core with her bold outbursts on female sexuality in her widely read autobiography ‘My Story’. She was the first woman to write frankly about such topics and would not back down when attacked. Das loved to poke society with pinpricks on the collective morality first as an open-minded woman and when the sex appeal faded as she aged, did the same with her conversion to Islam. Merrily Weisbord is an award-winning Canadian author, film-maker and broadcaster. This book is the memoir of her sweet friendship with Kamala Das beginning in 1995 and lasting till her death even though events occurring after 2005 are not recorded. This book is an essential companion to Surayya’s literary works that helps to unravel the artist’s complex mind from the vivid but misleading clues in her narrative.
 
The author has not used much secondary sources to collect the information she divulges through the pages. Consulting Kamala’s friends and literary associates provide a lot of details, but almost the whole of the material is obtained by direct interviews with her icon over the course of ten years. This period of time wrought tremendous changes in Kamala’s personal, social and literary outlook that we see conflicting opinion on some topics. Even a direct question to the protagonist often elicits answers tinged with fantasy and poetic license. They are not to be accepted literally. A question usually starts a cascade of memories, connections, metaphorical allusions and storytelling. One would get submerged in the flow. Weisbord admits that she is unsure of the revelations’ authenticity, that is, whether Kamala simply imagines them out of her fancies and fantasies. But this is a characteristic of her literary oeuvre. Her autobiography bristles with tantalizing references to intimate encounters while keeping the readers guessing whether they are true or not. This seems more like a professional tactic of an entrepreneur who knows how to sell her product. It doesn’t deserve the exalted philosophical moorings this book liberally ascribes on it. The author also observes that Kamala spent a lifetime hiding, dissimulating and spreading disinformation about her real sexual history. It is difficult to separate sexual fact from fiction in her life and the critics still argue whether the men in ‘My Story’ are imagined or real.
 
Readers will be astonished at the trusting nature of Kamala and how quickly she struck an intimate friendship with the author in a matter of days. This verges on gullibility which might be the reason why she could be easily persuaded to change her faith so late in life. In the beginning, the author proposed a professional relationship as Weisbord was attempting to write a book on her. But Kamala soon proclaimed that whether the book gets written or not, something sweet had come out of the interactions which she cherished. Weisbord visited Kerala many times and Kamala visited Canada twice to remain several weeks under the hospitality of her interviewer. She fully empathized with the author which came from being of the same writers’ tribe. These close encounters help display another curious hallmark of Kamala. Orthodoxy and rebellion coexisted within her. The love queen of Malabar’s veneer was simply a shining initial layer of her many selves. She also exhibited a perplexing lack of open-mindedness in her advice to the author on her personal life. Weisbord had had two divorces and was engaged in a live-in relationship with a third that had lasted for many years. Kamala insisted on formalizing the relationship either by marriage or at least a legal agreement that conferred some rights to her on the partner’s property. Here, Kamala acts like a conventional grandmother. Before conversion, she had a fierce pride of India, rejection of foreign loans, denial of dowry deaths and dismissal of expatriate Indians who pronounce on Indian literature without knowing any language other than English.
 
On Dec 16, 1999, Kamala converted to Islam, changing her name to Surayya. This was a bolt from the blue, including the author, who was kept in the dark in spite of their close friendship. Surayya made a clean break with her past claiming to have taken Krishna from the famous shrine at Guruvayur, taken him home and renamed Muhammad. A concerted effort, often termed ‘love jihad’, had taken place in the conversion drama. It is reported that a young politician named Sadiq Ali approached Kamala as if he was besotted to her. He was 38 and she was 65. He was a Muslim League MP from Malabar and already had two wives. Sadiq Ali is a pseudonym used in the book, but everyone in Kerala is aware of the true identity of this sweet-tongued politician. He made sexual advances and promised to marry her as his third wife, as he was permitted up to four wives as per Islamic law. The only condition was that she should convert to Islam. Kamala did so and instantly Sadiq Ali faded out of her life in a classic instance of ‘love jihad’, his passion presumably a part of his religious duty. A Muslim militant organization took control of her life immediately after conversion while she was feted in many middle-eastern countries. Surayya gradually accepted the loss of Sadiq Ali and struck up another intimate relationship with a Muslim doctor who appears in the final chapters of the book.
 
The author marks how Surayya was soon disillusioned with what she had chosen. She was fed up with fundamentalism, culturally sanctioned male superiority and religious interference in her writing and painting. She gradually gravitated to a sufist interpretation of Islam by merging a few tenets of Hinduism but remained neither fish nor fowl. She propagated a morality based on love and mocked mindless convention but she drew on traditionally based standards of purity to maintain her dignity and self-respect. As she noted, “I speak for the cause of female emancipation, attack the hypocrisy of conventional morality but seek fulfillment within the nest of traditional values” (p.200).
 
The book has successfully conveyed Surayya’s thirst for love. She desperately wanted to be loved, shaking off the scales of her former loveless matrimony. All her actions were initiated by this eagerness to find love. Weisbord also includes liberal snippets of Kamala’s poems and quotes from ‘My Story’. It also includes many poor quality photographs from Kamala’s life, but with no captions.
 
The book is recommended.
 
Rating: 3 Star