SOURCE: Nair, K. R. Ramachandran. “Napalat House.” In The Poetry of Kamala Das, pp. 76-82. New Delhi, India: Reliance Publishing House, 1993.

In the following essay, Nair addresses the significance of the poet's ancestral home, Nalapat House, to several of her important poems.

Kamala Das is at her best as a poet of private sensibility. Her dreams do not overstep her reach. Though she has the modern Indian woman's ambivalence, her consciousness is firmly yoked to the world around her, a world characterised by ecstasy and pain, love and despair. Her poems are the gestures that counter the luridness of the world. She is essentially conventional in her mental makeup and her outbursts are always restrained by the age-old sober proprieties of her Nair lineage. One of the recurring symbols in her poetry is the ancestral house Nalapat with all its inspiring associations. These associations include the nostalgic memories...