For anyone who has visited the marketplaces of Indian towns or the suburbs of cities, there is a potpourri of produce of all variety, colors, and shapes amidst the organized chaos of teeming street life. Similarly, this book has tasty morsels to savor from a multiplicity of psychoanalytic renderings of Indians and Indian culture. The book is driven by Salman Akhtar's passion for both India and psychoanalysis, and is scholarly and informative but nonacademic.

The opening chapter by Akhtar and Tummala-Narra on “Psychoanalysis in India” gives a comprehensive historical rendering of psychoanalysis in India, and of the various Indian psychoanalysts there and abroad. Few Westerners are aware that psychoanalysis was in part independently formulated around 1920 by a gifted Bengali psychiatrist, Girindresaker