Review of Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family, and Childhood: by Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag Mishra (Eds.). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. 248 pp.

For the Indophiles among psychoanalysts, for those who have an interest in the development of psychoanalysis in other cultures and lands, and for psychoanalysts of the South Asian diaspora, this book is a natural “must read” because it provides a rare window into the stirrings of psychoanalytic thinking in a far, far away and far, far different landscape. For those who are neither interested in India nor in the general topic of culture and psychoanalysis, there are some jewels and pearls worth discovering in this volume because they bring a freshness and twist to analytic thinking that is certain to open new “thought doors,” and provoke new questions, e.g., the mother as “trapped in a compulsive relationality with her child” (Chapter 1); a link “between the mother’s depression and the daughter’s sexuality” (Chapter 3); the “renunciatory principle” in feminine psychology (Chapter 5).

The book is written in English, a colonially imposed language. One can pause and consider that fact in light of the themes of the book. What is Indian terroir? The English word, “Indian,” is the most polymorphously perverse, polygonal, polytheistic proper noun possible! And there is this strange dynamic we Indians (of a certain class) have with the English language. We love to be proficient in it, because of the prestige signifier it came to be, and we love playing with it, appropriating it, and mangling it, conveying the many mixed feelings we carry about our colonizers. One encounters a lot of such word play in this book. In that sense, the attempt to define, write from, and de- and reconstruct an Indian terroir is also an attempt towards both imagining and reaching for an almost impossible liberation. And to do that within the framework of psychoanalysis, yet another potentially colonizing Western power, carries deep meaning for the Indian psyche. Will the psychoanalysis of the West trade its way, like the East India Company, into the principalities and states of Indian psychological t