Motivation for Studying Hindu‑Muslim Couples

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes?

Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned, having partitioned itself, and the other is a Muslim other in a Hindu majority nation—the author, Ashis Roy, wants to know more about what he calls his “communal mind”, a mind that developed in a country where, “Muslims know the Hindu myths but the reverse is not true,” so a mind that was afforded an instant other to deposit its unwanted contents into.

His book, Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships, explicates intimacy and asymmetry, as it delves into cross-religious desire, and in this case the forbidden desire of Hindus for Muslims, and Muslims for Hindus, which, when acknowledged, threatens social, familial, and cultural mores, and also the prerogatives of the state.

Who are these people, Roy asks, who take such a step, which is a step that can lead to a kind of social death, akin, in the American context from which I write, to the experience of gay people who come out and are brutally shorn of their families, communities, and sometimes their lives? The power of desire, a power beyond us, in excess of ourselves always, can propel us to this vertiginous place. Perhaps, and only perhaps, it can also push us to live in ways that reject socially and politically enforced liminality as well. One starts to imagine these couples, engaged ongoingly by Roy, as healing a malignant split that beats at the heart of contemporary Indian life.

Roy’s thinking draws from the myriad psychoanalytic theories of Kakar, Green, Erikson, Altman, Bollas, and Phillips, (among others), all of them kings of our trade, many of their names never uttered in the same breath—(I am thinking especially of Green and Altman.) Fascinatingly, he also orients himself to his material by engaging the work of two historians (queens of their own domains) and they are the American, Joan Wallach Scott and rather especially (or that is my read) the Italian scholar Luisa Passerini.

Like Roy, Passerini delved deeply into her own milieu, and like Roy she performed interviews with her peers who participated in what is commonly called the anni interessante in Italy (known for its red brigades, the murder of Aldo Moro, wildcat strikes in the auto industry alongside acts of student solidarity) all of which happened while she was in Africa. Her book, Autobiography of a Generation (1983), reads as an effort to be in touch with something fundamental about her homeland that she missed. My impression is that Intimacy in Alienation serves a similar purpose for Roy, who realizes that there is a world nearby that remained visually and affectively sidelined. Both wanted to see what had previously been, for various reasons, scotomized.

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