The Indian Jungle

In this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships (Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently practicing in Princeton, NJ. He is a clinical associate faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a Supervising Analyst and instructor at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.

Together they engage with Late Sudhir Kakar´s last book the Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations (Karnac, 2024). Shah reflects on Kakar´s contributions to psychoanalysis and on some of the pillars in Kakar´s writing.

Sudhir Kakar was trained in Germany and lived and practiced as a psychoanalyst in Goa. A leading figure in the fields of cultural psychology and the psychology of religion, as well as a novelist, Dr. Kakar’s person and work have been profiled in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur, which listed him as one of the world's 25 major thinkers while the German weekly Die Zeit portrayed Sudhir Kakar as one of the 21 important thinkers for the 21st century. Dr. Kakar's many honors include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany ’s Goethe Medal, Rockefeller Residency, McArthur Fellowship Bhabha, Nehru and ICSSR National Fellowship, Merck-Tagore Award, Lotte Koehler Prize, and Distinguished Service Award of Indo-American Psychiatric Association.

Sudhir Kakar’s twenty books of non-fiction and six of fiction, include The Inner World (now in its 16th printing since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , (with J.M. Ross ) Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, Intimate Relations, The Analyst and the Mystic, The Colors of Violence, Culture and Psyche, (with K. Kakar) The Indians: Portrait of a People, (with Wendy Doniger) a new translation of the Kamasutra for Oxford World Classics, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World and Young Tagore: The makings of a genius. His latest books are the novel The Kipling File (Penguin, 2018) and, as co-editor, Imaginations of Death and Afterlife in India and Europe (Springer, 2018). His books have been translated into 22 languages.

About the Indian Jungle

For more than a century, the cultural imagination of psychoanalysis has been assumed and largely continues to be assumed as Western. Although the terroirs of psychoanalysis in South America, France, Italy, England, the United States, and so on have important differences, they all share a strong family resemblance which distinguishes them clearly from the cultural imaginations of Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other non-Western terroirs.

Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, and gender often remain unexamined and pervade the analytic space as if they are universally valid. Thus, ideas that are historically and culturally only true of and limited to modern Western, specifically European and North American middle-class experience, have been incorporated unquestioningly into psychoanalytic thought.

In the intellectual climate of our times, with the rise of relativism in the human sciences and politically with the advent of decolonization, the cultural and historical transcendence of psychoanalytic thought can no longer be taken for granted. Insights from clinical work embedded in the cultural imaginations of non-Western civilizations could help psychoanalysis rethink some of its theories of the human psyche, extending these to cover a fuller range of human experience. These cultural imaginations are an invaluable resource for the move away from a universal psychoanalysis to a more global one that remains aware of but is not limited by its origins in the modern West. This book of essays aims to be a step in that journey, of altering the self-perception of psychoanalysis from ‘one size fits all’ into a more nuanced enterprise that reflects and is enriched by cultural particularities.

The perfect book for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, cultural psychologists, anthropologists, students of South Asian, cultural, and post-colonial studies, and anyone interested in the current and possible future shape of psychoanalytic thought.