The Politics of the Female Body in Kamala Das’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper re-evaluates the poems of Kamala Das as a prolonged questioning of how female body is produced, controlled, and re-identified in postcolonial modernity. Rather than treating embodiment as a stable ground of resistance, the paper argues that Das renders the body a volatile epistemological and linguistic field—one shaped by nationalist ideology, heterosexual institutions, domestic enclosure, and colonial language politics. Through sustained close readings of poems from Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, and The Old Playhouse and Other Poems, the essay demonstrates how Das converts lyric confession into a mode of theoretical inquiry. Engaging dialogically with Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, and Partha Chatterjee, the study shows that Das both anticipates and complicates feminist accounts of gender as construction, heterosexuality as institution, and nationalism as gendered domain. Her poetry does not merely voice personal experience; it dramatizes the unstable processes through which female subjectivity is constituted and contested. In doing so, Das establishes a poetics in which the body becomes the medium through which knowledge, language, and authority are renegotiated.