The Shared Language of Unmaking

Long before psychoanalytic language existed, voices from the Indian subcontinent sang of surrender in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Kabir, a fifteenth-century poet-saint, along with other Sufi-Bhakti mystics, moved through streets, riversides, and marketplaces, composing verses that challenged authority, hierarchy, and rigid forms of identity. Their practice was embodied in song, rhythm, and dance, moving toward freedom, encounter, and transformation and away from doctrinal certainty.

I did not expect Kabir to arrive in the middle of a psychoanalytic reading group. Yet that is where I found him, slipping between Ghent's sentences, urging me toward that unstruck sound (anhadd baja). Our small circle of therapists, largely South Asian or adjacent to the subcontinent's fractal of spiritual inheritances, was reading Emmanuel Ghent's classic paper, “Masochism, submission, surrender: Masochism as a perversion of surrender.”

As others spoke, Kabir's voice rose beneath the clinical discourse:

Milō re milō kō'ī mhārā des rā, do-bātān karāṅgā jī

(Oh come meet me, someone from my land; let us share a few words together)

In that moment, the paper settled into a familiar knowing within me. Ghent's clinical clarity revealed itself not as a singular insight but as one tributary of a much older river.

In this half-reverie, half–scholarly space, the meaning of surrender thickened as two lineages, long held apart by geography, training, and colonial histories of knowledge, turned to face one another.

This essay is an attempt to stay with that moment of recognition, to place Emmanuel Ghent and Jessica Benjamin beside Kabir, and Fanon beside the Sufi understanding of fanā, braiding resonance without flattening difference. This is not a comparative project so much as a recognitional one. It is my search, as an Indian clinician, for a shared language of unmaking across seemingly distant terrains—psychic, political, spiritual—that have shaped my academic and inherited modes of knowing.