Kamala, Proust and Knausgaard

Ever since I began reading Knausgaard—whose work is often categorized as autofiction—I’ve been looking for parallels in other literary traditions, including Malayalam. In my language, few writers come close, but Kamala Das stands out as a possible exception. Her three autobiographical works—Balyakalasmaranakal, Neermathalam Pootha Kalam, and Varshangalkku Munpu—are, of course, semi-fictionalized accounts of her upper-middle-class childhood. Yet Kamala is quite unlike Knausgaard. The scope of her narrative is more limited, often confined to the domestic sphere—her family, her immediate surroundings—without the expansive philosophical and social canvas Knausgaard brings to his work.

It was only after I began reading Proust that I sensed where Kamala might have drawn her inspiration from. Proust painstakingly records long, often restricted conversations (restricted, he believes, by his own presence), yet they’re elaborate, sharp, and full of wit. He creates strikingly three-dimensional characters—powerful matriarchs, iron-willed servants, and the shifting complexities of social hierarchy. Of course, Kamala’s context—steeped in caste rather than class—offers a very different lens, but the structural echoes are hard to miss.

Reading Edmund White’s  Marcel Proust : A Life, one encounters vivid descriptions of Paris being redesigned, and how elite families like Proust’s came to occupy large apartments with all the modern comforts of the time. Only someone like Kamala—rooted in a similarly influential background—could have written memoirs as steeped in atmosphere and personal history as hers. In this light, her childhood memoirs remain among her most significant works.

Knausgaard, of course, is altogether different. He is a modern man in a modern society, where class differences are filtered through contemporary ideologies—particularly feminist critique. He portrays himself as vulnerable, often emotionally overwhelmed, even absurd in his own self-awareness. Yet, like Proust, he pays obsessive attention to the mundane: long, seemingly trivial conversations, everyday moments charged with introspection.

In comparison, Kamala Das’s world feels less layered—there’s little of the structural or philosophical sophistication one finds in Proust or Knausgaard. But what she does evoke powerfully is the melancholy of her elders, and the resignation of the lower castes who surround her life(She is sympathetic but not aware). These undercurrents of sadness and stillness give her work its particular emotional weight.

Any such comparison is bound to be unfair. And yet, this week’s reading left me noticing these echoes, however faint.