Intimacy in Alienation : A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationship – Ashis Roy

Description

In India, Hindu-Muslim relationships have had a history of coexistence and conflict. At various moments, particular histories have emerged while others have remained in the shadows. Intimacy in Alienation explores the delicate relationship between the two communities through the lens of the intimate Hindu-Muslim couple. The author takes readers on an exploration of the psychological interiority of the couple, compelling them to rethink the social and cultural phenomena implicit in words such as ‘otherness’, ‘identity’ and ‘desire’. Cloistered in the unconscious are the unspoken conflicts that exist between the two communities in these times. By creating psychobiographs based on extensive interviews and supported by literary sources and psychoanalytic theory, Roy investigates what keeps a couple going, and whether love is enough. In doing so, the book creates a space for the meaning(s) the couple would like to give to their identity, with or without religion.

‘At this time of confusion and conflict around identity, Ashis Roy takes the conversation to the intimate level of marriage. As a psychoanalyst he has a unique window into the emotional level of identity beyond academia, in the real world of family life. This book provides an invaluable perspective for those who try to help couples in conflict, and for all of us.’

Neil Altman (Ph.D)
Relational Psychoanalyst
Faculty, Massachussets Institute of Psychoanalysis
Author of White Privilege: Psychoanalytic Perspectives

‘Ashis Roy’s, finely nuanced, psychoanalytic stories, about how deeply the communal virus has infected contemporary India’s moral soul, are a timely warning for everyone who is worried about identity politics and its pathologies. Many of us naively assume that our secular beliefs and constitutionally guaranteed rights to love and worship insulate us from religious bigotry and traditions of misogyny. But there really are, as this study shows, armed and insolent players who are so terrified by the freedom of sexual passion and moral beliefs that they do not hesitate to mock, corrode and corrupt the psyche of young lovers in search of sensuous fulfilment.’

Professor Alok Bhalla
Author of Stories about the Partition of India (4 volumes) and Partition Dialogues