The Poetics of Mystical Desire: A Lacanian Reading of Kamala Das’s Early love Poems

Kamala Das’s early poetry has been a topic of discussion, debate and dissension since the publication of her first collection of poems in 1965.  Although there has been a significant amount of critical works on Das’ early poetry in the last few decades, most of these works have limited themselves to a narrow range of perspectives that tend to polarize Das’s poetry as either degenerating in its moral values or potentially progressive because of its political and social concerns.  But both of these views are, in themselves, too single-faceted to encompass the religious and mystical implications in Das’s early love poetry.  The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to steer clear from such a reductive style by offering a more nuanced reading of Das’s early love poetry through the psychoanalytical perspectives of Jacques Lacan. Emphasized throughout the paper is the means by which Lacan’s insights and notions on “feminine sexuality’, mysticism and hysteria can help establish a new critical path for the understanding of how Das’s early poetry is enmeshed in a sensibility that leans towards the perennial question of the interconnection between mysticism and hysteria.  Reading Das’s early love poetry in the light of Lacan’s psychoanalytic insights in his Encore underscores the ways in which Das portrays herself in the guise of her persona as a Bhakti whose desire for the divine is perceived and apprehended in terms of the ineffable union after which the Bhakti seeks with ardent intent.  The paper also refers at its end to Luce Irigaray’s revisionist reading of Lacan’s insights on mysticism and hysteria, and suggests that Irigaray’s notion of “La Mysterique” can be found running as leitmotif through much of Kamala Das’s early love poetry.