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In September 2023, in an email to me, Kakar described himself as working on, “the role of cultural imagination in the psyche and limitations of psychoanalysis because the cultural imagination underlying its models and theories is almost solely Western” (personal communication). His final book, The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations, a compilation of five of his papers, all updated from previous publications, is a result of this preoccupation – an examination of the “terroir” in which Indian psychology, as well as the work of Indian psychoanalysts, grows.
Kakar’s psychoanalytic career and personal interests moved increasingly from looking at culture and behavior through an understanding of the Unconscious, to understanding the Unconscious by looking at the products of cultural imagination. This is evident in his gradual move from non-fictional psychoanalytic scholarship to works of fiction addressing everything from art to desire, ecstasy, love, mysticism, as well as colonial history, the last in a novel titled The Kipling File. That is a novel about a fictional Rudyard Kipling and it explains the cover of this book, The Indian Jungle (depicting a snarling Bengal tiger). It is also relevant to understanding Kakar’s approach to psychoanalysis via cultural imagination.
To understand the link between these two books, and why Kakar chose the cover he did, one has to step two generations back into Indian history during the time of India as a colony of the British Empire. Without that context one also cannot properly appreciate Freud’s letter to Rolland (which appears as a quote headlining the front matter of Kakar’s book) in which Freud talks about his difficulty in penetrating “the Indian jungle,” and from which the title of this book seems to be taken. It is as if Kakar is asking us to ponder, which culture’s imagination is reflected in the cover and title of this book? These, as well as the imagery of Freud’s letter, are actually a product of the