Overview

In the years leading up to 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. Mrs A.'s analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She 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 is an exploration of their conversation, 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 concept of counter-ethics . Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives, and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing ethics, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.

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Reviews

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 A richly layered, rigorous, often surprising, delightful romp of a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers. --Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University

A richly layered, rigorous, often surprising, delightful romp of a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers.---Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University, 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.--Medical Anthropology Quarterly

A richly layered, rigorous, often surprising, delightful romp of a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers. --Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University 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

Author Information

Sarah Pinto is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India: Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014, winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).

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