She was also a widely read columnist and wrote on diverse topics including women's issues, child care, politics, etc.

[2] Kamala Das was born in Punnayurkulam, Ponnani taluk, Malabar District, British India (present-day Thrissur district, Kerala) on 31 March 1934, to V. M. Nair, a managing editor of the widely circulated Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi, and Nalapat Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali family.

[3][2] She spent her childhood in Calcutta, where her father was employed as a senior officer in the Walford Transport Company that sold Bentley and Rolls-Royce automobiles, and the Nalapat ancestral home in Punnayurkulam.

Her love of poetry began at an early age through the influence of her great uncle, Nalapat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer.

The 1960s in Calcutta witnessed an era of artistic turbulence, during which Kamala Das emerged as one of numerous voices featured in esteemed anthologies along with a generation of Indian English poets.

She once claimed that "poetry does not sell in this country [India]", but her forthright columns, which sounded off on everything from women's issues and child care to politics, were popular.

Kamala Das was a confessional poet whose poems have often been considered at par with those of Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

Kamala Das abandoned the certainties offered by an archaic, and somewhat sterile, aestheticism for an independence of mind and body at a time when Indian poets were still governed by "19th-century diction, sentiment and romanticised love.

"[8] Her second book of poetry, The Descendants was even more explicit, urging women to: Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts, The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your Endless female hungers ...

[8] At the age of 42, she published a daring autobiography, My Story; it was originally written in Malayalam (titled Ente Katha) and later she translated it into English.

In "My Mother at Sixty-Six," Das explores the irony in a mother-daughter relationship, and it also includes the themes of aging, growing-up, separation and love.

She wrote on a diverse range of topics, often disparate - from the story of a poor old servant, about the sexual disposition of upper-middle-class women living near a metropolitan city or in the middle of the ghetto.

She wrote a few novels, out of which Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, which was received favourably by the general readers, as well as, the critics, stands out.

[17] Madhav Das Nalapat, her eldest son, is married to Princess Thiruvathira Thirunal Lakshmi Bayi from the Travancore Royal House.

Kamala Surayya converted to Islam in 1999 and fell victim to allegations for changing religion just for marrying someone she Loved, even though all boasted about her strive for freedom (especially women )and fearless nature and genius brain once, about which she sarcastically criticized in her later speeches, but she never remarried.

She wrote over twenty poems in this series, but only eleven have been published: eight of them in Indian Literature journal by the Sahitya Akademi (1985) and an additional three of them in the book The Best of Kamala Das (1991).