An Introduction

For better or for worse I share with India, a birthday. Everytime it comes around, a wrenching feeling makes itself known in my soul. Like India I have difficulty describing who I am, like her I have to dig into the past to find excuses for my existence. I suspect, that when she turns 60 and I 26, the wrenching feeling will return.

I don't know politics but I know the names
Of those in power, and can repeat them like
Days of week, or names of months, beginning with
Nehru. I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they said,
English is not your mother tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Wy not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don't
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing,
Is to crows or roaring to lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware. Not the deaf, blind speech
Of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain or the
Incoherent mutterings of the blazing
Funeral pyre...
[from Kamala Das' An Introduction in "Summer in Calcutta"]