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‘You will not survive here. You are not a wolf, and this is a land of wolves now’. This chilling declaration, delivered by Benicio Del Toro in Denis Villeneuve's ‘Sicario’ , resonates uncomfortably in our current global climate. We live in a world increasingly defined by hardening boundaries between communities, with a disturbing rise of nationalism, communalism and blatant prejudice and violence towards our fellow humans. Witnessing this increasingly bleak reality, I was heartened to discover a book about how we can find ways of relating and loving across these divides, specifically in the context of intimacy and desire in Hindu–Muslim relationships. Ashis Roy's ‘Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu–Muslim Relationships’ offers a path forward in relating to and daring to love ‘the other’ that does not succumb to either cynicism or idealization. While tensions and violence between Hindu and Muslim communities continue to escalate in South Asia and beyond, Roy's work courageously examines the psychological underpinnings of romantic intimacy that persists across these divides. Rather than accepting the ‘land of wolves’ as inevitable, Roy explores the contours of the psyche of interreligious romantic couples, offering a rich landscape of psychoanalytic theorizations to understand the complex conflicts, dilemmas and attractions these couples experience.
In his introduction, Roy notes that there has been an erasure of the complexity and mutual influences of Hindu–Muslim relationships. As this complexity of cultural influence is lost, ‘the history of the two communities has become entangled with paranoia and aggression: Hindus and Muslims are being made into true Others of each other’ (Roy, p. 10). Roy courageously asks us to find the ‘Hindu inside the Muslim’ and the ‘Muslim within the Hindu’. Sadly, he notes that in Indian popular imagination today, ‘a Hindu and a Muslim simply cannot be in love’. Multiple layers of mistrust, hatred, and prejudice tra