Kamala Das, a prominent Indian poet, memoirist and short-story writer whose work was known for its open discussion of women’s sexual lives, a daring subject when she began publishing in midcentury, died on May 31 in Pune, India. She was 75.
The cause was respiratory failure, her doctor told the news service United News of India.
A prolific writer, Ms. Das composed most of her poetry in English. Most of her fiction, which appeared under the pen name Madhavikutty, was written in her native Malayalam, a non-Indo-European language spoken primarily in the South Indian state of Kerala.
She wrote several memoirs, the most famous of them, “My Story,” written in English and published in 1976. In it, Ms. Das recounts her childhood in an artistic but emotionally distant family; her unfulfilling arranged marriage to an older man shortly before her 16th birthday; the emotional breakdowns and suicidal thoughts that punctuated her years as a young wife and mother; her husband’s apparent homosexuality; and the deep undercurrent of sexual and romantic yearning that ran through most of her married life.
Originally serialized in an Indian journal, “My Story” is organized into 50 fragmentary chapters. In a detached, dreamlike voice, Ms. Das tells of her husband’s brutish sexual

02 inadequacy and her own lifetime of desire, often unrequited but