Indian Identity: Intimate Relations, The Analyst And The Mystic, The Colours Of Violence

As a ‘commentator on the worlds of love and hate’, India’s foremost psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar has isolated the ambivalence, peculiarly Indian, to matters as various—and connected—as sex, spirituality and communal passions.

In Intimate Relations, the first of the well-known books in this edition, he explores the nature of sexuality in India, its politics and its language of emotions. The Analyst and the Mystic points out the similarities between psychoanalysis and religious healing, and The Colours of Violence is his erudite enquiry into the mixed emotions of rage and desire that inflame communalism.