Vol. 8, Issue 1, Part B (2026)

Kamala Das occupies a singular position in Indian English literature for her uncompromising confessional voice that unsettles culturally sanctioned ideals of femininity, sexuality, and selfhood. While her work has been widely read as bold, autobiographical, and feminist, critical discourse has often foregrounded its thematic audacity at the expense of examining the deeper psychic structures that animate her writing. This paper addresses that gap by offering a psychoanalytic feminist reading of Kamala Das’s poetry and autobiographical prose, focusing on how trauma, repression, and desire shape the formation of female subjectivity in her oeuvre. Drawing upon psychoanalytic frameworks articulated by Freud, Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and object-relations theorists, the study analyses selected poems from Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, and The Old Playhouse, alongside passages from My Story. Through close textual analysis, the paper engages key psychoanalytic concepts such as lack, repetition, abjection, the symbolic order, and the divided self to explore how Das’s poetic speaker negotiates emotional abandonment, erotic yearning, and patriarchal constraint. Rather than presenting a coherent or unified identity, Das’s writing reveals subjectivity as fragmented, unstable, and continuously reconstituted through language and desire. The paper argues that Kamala Das articulates female selfhood as a conflicted psychic space where intimacy and injury coexist, exposing the psychological costs of normative gender roles within a postcolonial context. In doing so, her confessional mode emerges not merely as personal revelation but as a form of psychic resistance that challenges cultural silencing and reclaims female desire as a site of meaning. Ultimately, the study repositions Kamala Das as a profound chronicler of interior life whose work enables a critical rethinking of desire, trauma, and female agency in Indian women’s writing.