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Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints.
This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.
Sarah Pinto’s brilliant third volume on women’s lives in India sets three time horizons in conversation with one another: the tense 1940s just before Partition; the mythic figures of Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahayla; and today's women, including the author and a wonderful meditation using artist Shahzia Shikander's imagery of gopi hair. Dev Satya Nand, a psychoanalyst, and Mrs. A., a twenty-one-year-old regretting her marriage and the foreclosure of college ambitions, and in thrall to Nehru and Hindu socialism, together reinvent Freud’s methods and set the volume in motion.---Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Doctor and Mrs. A ventures to show us not only the relevance of intimate thoughts and emotions for the development of social and ethical theory, but also what a more liberated and creative form of social analysis might look like. It is a book that should be of interest not only to South Asianists, but to anyone who is interested in how culture and history gets under the skin and or how people are capable of reimagining the worlds into which they have been thrown.
An engrossing and poignant work regardless of its moment of arrival, The Doctor and Mrs. A. happens to be a perfect offering now, when our social and ethical worlds—including worlds of research—are crumbling. How, and in what shape, will they be rebuilt?
Sarah Pinto’s The Doctor and Mrs. A is at once a strikingly patient and a boldly motile monograph... Anyone with interests in anthropology, history, the medical humanities, gender and sexuality studies, ethics, and South Asian studies will benefit from accompanying Pinto through this creative journey of thought.---Talia Katz, Ethos
Introduction: Mrs. A. and Dev Satya Nand | 1
1. Singularity and Uncertainty: Draupadi | 41
2. Beyond Recognition: Shakuntala | 84
3. Unconsciousness and Voice: Ahalya | 125
Postscript: The Shape of the Counter-Ethic | 173
Acknowledgments | 195
Notes | 199
Bibliography | 221
Index | 233