The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves
Ashis Nandy

Paper | 1995 | $30.95
284 pp. | 6 x 9

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One of India's leading public intellectuals, Ashis Nandy is a highly influential critic of modernity, science, nationalism, and secularism. In this, his most important collection of essays so far, he seeks to locate cultural forms and languages of being and thinking that defy the logic and hegemony of the modern West. The core of the volume consists of two ambitious, deeply probing essays, one on the early success of psychoanalysis in India, the other on the justice meted out by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the defeated Japanese. Both issues are viewed in the context of the psychology of dominance over a subservient or defeated culture.

This theme is explored further in essays on mass culture and the media, political terrorism, the hold of modern medicine, and, notably, the conflict or split between the creative work of writers like Kipling, Rushdie, and H. G. Wells, and the political and social values they publicly and rationally present. Also included is a controversial essay by Nandy on the issue of sati, or widow's suicide.

Review:

"It is always a pleasure to read Ashis Nandy, who combines an astonishing range of interests with a profound imagination and an unerring eye for whimsy. The essays in this collection cover terrorism, window immolation, war crimes, psychoanalysis ... medicine, and cinema."--Psychohistory Review

Table of Contents:

	Preface
	The Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism	1
	Sati in Kali Yuga: The Public Debate on Roop Kanwar's Death	32
	The Other Within: The Strange Case of Radhabinod Pal's Judgment on Culpability	53
	The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India	81
	Modern Medicine and its Nonmodern Critics: A Study in Discourse	145
	An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema	196
	Satyajit Ray's Secret Guide to Exquisite Murders: Creativity, Social Criticism, and the Partitioning of the Self	237
	Index	267

Series:

• Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History
  Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, and Geoffrey Eley, Editors

Subject Areas:

• Asian and Asian American Studies
• Political Science and International Relations
• Anthropology

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Paper: For sale only in the United States, Canada, and Australia

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Paper: $30.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-04410-1

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