Interview with Professor Sarah Pinto
In this blog, Shilpi Rajpal talks to Sarah Pinto, Professor of Anthropology in the Tufts University about her new book The Doctor and Mrs. A: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis. Sarah Pinto discusses the fascinating encounter between Mrs A. and Dr. Satya Nand and the novel psychoanalytic approach used to understand sexuality, politics, religion and above all what freedom meant for an educated, married, upper caste twenty-one-year-old woman before India gained its independence.
Q1. Please tell us about your scholarship and your recent book? What made you so interested in writing the history of psychoanalysis in colonial India?
Recently, my scholarship has been focused on questions of how historical conversations seed contemporary ways of asking questions about the world, especially where medicine is concerned. I’m also interested in what it means to ask anthropological questions of the past and its traces, materials, records, etc. I do not consider myself a historian so much as an anthropologist of transits between pasts and presents, and so it is in this way that the history of psychiatry in India has captured my fascination. I came to writing about psychoanalysis through a larger set of questions about psychiatry, notably the question of what it means to trace a South Asian history of the concept of “hysteria,” how this might help us to think beyond a sense of global medicine that sees ideas as moving from Europe and “the West” outward/southward/elsewhere. In fact, The Doctor and Mrs. A. was a kind of off-shoot, or “pause,” in a longer project on hysteria diagnosing and theorizing in South Asia, though a chunk of Mrs. A. does think through that history, especially as it relates to concepts of trauma response.
The Doctor and Mrs. A. is a rangey reading of the psychoanalytic “case” of a woman called Mrs. A., which was published in 1947 by Punjabi psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand, though their encounter had happened at least two years earlier. Mrs. A. was a twenty-one-year old, married, upper-class Hindu woman, whose struggles with marriage, aspiration, and sexuality and whose hopes for the future came to light over the course of her analysis. Among the many striking things about this analysis is the fact that Mrs. A. was not “sick,” she was not seeking treatment but had joined Satya Nand as a friend to help him experiment with his new technique for dream analysis. My book is less interested in Satya Nand (though I continue to think and write about him on his own terms) than in Mrs. A., and reads her case less for what it says about psychoanalysis than for what it shows about female aspiration and sexuality in late colonial India. I was struck by the way Mrs. A. brought heroic women from the Hindu epics into her reflections, mythic figures that Satya Nand then adopted for his own theorizing. These figures allowed me to read “outward” from the case, to look less toward the “context” of the time and place (though I try to do this too) than toward the way these heroines lead us through that context. To me, they – Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya – are less “heroines” than vast repertoires of readings and revisions. Through them, I was able to notice the theme of ethical reversal in Mrs. A.’s reflections, and from this to think with the idea of “counter-ethic.” I don’t offer the counter-ethic as some kind of master theory or key to all ethical action, but as something much smaller – a momentary, possible a way for thinking about ethics as a process of, as Satya Nand would have it, “musing,” and for doing so to the side of notions of cultural or moral fixity. I decided that I did not want to be guided by the usual theory sources or “big names” for this reading, and, at the risk of being under-citational, allowed my thinking about “counter-ethics” to be guided by art, specifically, the work of a contemporary artist, Shahzia Sikander, whose use of form and movement seemed to offer a shape to the kinds of counter-ethical imagining I felt resonating in Mrs. A.’s case. That was an experiment – what would it mean to write a book whose “theory” came from art, or music, or dance?
In terms of psychoanalysis, I arrived at this particular scene less through an interest in psychoanalysis as such than via psychiatry. Psychiatry, as a science and diverse therapeutic field, was conceptualizing selves in their social landscapes diversely at this crucial moment in Indian history. As an instance of this, Satya Nand’s writing was very interesting to me. I don’t consider myself or my work to be oriented toward or by psychoanalysis as much I am interested in biomedicine and the purposes to which it is put. I’m interested in psychoanalysis mostly insofar as it figures in the interstices and at the boundaries of biomedicine, and I am more interested in the stories that psychiatrists (and others) have told about persons and the world, which includes but is not encompassed by psychoanalysis. What is most interesting to me about psychiatry in the late colonial/early postcolonial period is that it looks in many directions at once – like much science of the time it was mobilized to further colonial goals and reject them, to imagine new worlds and possibilities for freedom and to reinforce the conditions of power, mobilized too, and most interestingly!, in ways that were not determined by that “for or against” relationship to power.
Q2. Explain the framework and approaches that helped you to comprehend psychoanalysis in colonial India? Can you elaborate on Dr. Dev Satya Nand approach of the Objective Method, dream smudges and samadhi? Do you think that these techniques proved to be more relevant in the context of India?
Method for Satya Nand was twofold (at least) in Objective Method, comprising both the way the analysand’s words would be elicited and the way the analyst would “read” them. Reading may not be the right term here, but it might be – which is interesting! – and in any case is a decent placeholder. In the sense of the latter – the reading – what is especially important is the fact that analysis was dialogical, both in the scene of the analysis and in the process of draftking it as a written case. Satya Nand and Mrs. A. were mutual readers. He gave her his analysis to read; her response (“the analysand’s rebuttal”) is a crucial part of the case and was presented to the reading public. He allowed her sense that he had missed certain crucial elements to remain in the text, and he did this without correcting or “fixing” his own analysis (which would have at once absorbed and erased her presence/voice).
Samadhi is a fascinating – and elusive – concept here. On the one hand it signifies a basic technique akin to deep relaxation or meditative state (not quite hypnosis). On the other hand, it allowed Satya Nand to, at least discursively, connect his practice and goals to create a more “objective” analysis from “oriental” materials to a wide repertoire of exercises in consciousness, such as the sudden blissful states of trance-like communion described by the Bengali saint Ramakrishna, or cultivated disciplines attention or repose - mediation practices familiar in Buddhism and Hinduism. Moreover, the term samadhi designated the practice as “Indian,” not necessarily for its content but for being connected to an identifiable repertoire of concepts, texts, and practices.
I don’t think this practice was necessarily more relevant in the context of India, precisely because I think Satya Nand was aiming for a better universal science, not an appropriately Indian one. He seems to be less interested in “context” than in rejecting cultural or civilizational lines that might be drawn around literatures or locales. Indian sources, for Satya Nand, are to be recognized as part of a library of human ideas. As I describe in the book, his work resounds with not only dense elaborations on Euro-American psychological concepts but with references to a wide literature – he used Jane Austen to illustrate his ideas about personality, referred to Shakespeare, Iqbal, Thoreau, and the romantic poets to develop ideas about the mind he would later find in the Bhagavad Gita. I think it is important for us to understand this aspect of his project – and to see Mrs. A.’s imaginings of Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahalya (and Sita, who appears, but who I do not write much about here) – in a similar light, as defiantly anticolonial, oriented toward thinking freedom in its wide meanings and possibilities, and as staking claim within a sense of human ideas, offered as at once “ours” and part of a vast body of resources that were open to all, seen as valuable to both the idea of the Indian nation and to all of humanity, not just one part of it.
Q3. Can you describe ‘Hindu Socialism’ for us? What did it mean in the setting of anti-colonial struggles and ideas about the nascent nation-state and nationalism for both Dr. Dev Satya Nand and Mrs. A.
I’ve never been able to adequately articulate what Mrs. A. meant by Hindu socialism. She was deeply Nehruvian in her thinking about the future of the nation (according to Nehru’s thinking at this point in time, of course), and saw the rural areas and the peasantry as the future of the nation, but also felt that a quality of justice, fairness, creation, and expression that was their heritage needed to be restored – by educated flag bearers such as herself. While we know from Satya Nand that she was skilled at discussing politics and the intricacies of socialism, we get little of that from the analysis. Instead is used as a kind of carrying bag for many things – desires, processes, politics, geographies, goals, ideals. This is true for Satya Nand as well, who named the case “The Daydream of Hindu Socialism.” These elements include ideas about who makes up the nation. In a sense, the socialism here does not seem to reference state practice or forms of governance or economy so much as a it is a statement about who the nation is and is for. Much of the earlier parts of the case involves Mrs. A. grappling with her conflicted feelings about “villages”; this is a kind of gateway to reflections on sexuality (including queer desires) and never fully-discussed suggestions of trauma, but the idea that the nation is not only made up of farmers, laborers, village women, roving navtanki troupes, but made in all that is beyond the city – “forests” as well as villages and farms. The sense that the spark of the independent nation happens in the “away” space allowed Mrs. A. to conceptualize the nation as an imagination in ways that reorient us from the dichotomy of public v private and toward a sense of movement across landscapes that were always, equally if differently, charged with sexual possibilities and gender conditions.
Q4. Do you think that Mrs. A was a ‘unique’ woman for her times? How do place her ideas about gender, sexuality and politics in the framework of emerging feminism. What do you think must have happened to her?
One thing is certain – it is hard not to read Mrs. A.’s case as exceptional. This is especially true of its frank and open reflections on love, desire, and sexual relations between women. And yet, when I began presenting this work in talks and at conferences, people often came up to me afterwards to say that one part of the case or other reminded them of other things they had seen in this period – letters to magazines, for example, or in one case, which I describe in the book, a friend, who is roughly the same age as Mrs A would now be, saying she knew many women of Mrs. A.’s social class who, in the 1950s and 60s, built lives as single women following divorce or lived independently, in the way Mrs. A. imagined, separate from the constraints of conventional marriage and family. She reminded me to question the ways my ideas about the meaning of this case might be driven by assumptions about what may or may not have been possible or imaginable.
In terms of feminism, as I note in the book, certain of Mrs. A.’s ideas are immediately locatable in bourgeois Indian feminist discourses of this period, especially ideas that relate to health, education, and the “uplift” of rural women. I write with a spirit of genuine wonder about the ways she reversed and reimagined familiar narratives, especially that of the heroine Shakuntala, to establish a kind of feminism oriented toward the possibilities of singularity (as both a social/marital status and a conceptual orientation) and a distrust of emancipatory concepts of recognition. And yet I know from my long delight in reading/viewing/hearing diverse iterations of both classical/epic and regional “folk” narratives that these resources are, as A.K. Ramanujan, Wendy Doniger, Ann Grodzins Gold, Gloria Raheja, Smitha Tewari Jassal, and many others tell us, always available to revision. That is how they are alive. Mrs. A. was just one among infinitely many whose dreamy reflections were guided by remaking ethical narratives as much as by following them.
I couldn’t say what happened to her, and while I wonder, and worry, in real ways about the next part of her story, I also think there is something important about the space of nonrecognition, the anonymity, that was afforded by the conventions of case writing, and that affords us a capacity of seeing and knowing that might not otherwise be available. With named authorship would come a text that reads like any autobiography or public piece of writing, whose performativity for one or another public must be kept in mind. With anonymity, with the inability to recognize her, we can look through the window of the case onto things we might not otherwise be able to ethically witness. This is not to say the case is without performance or pretense; of course, these are everywhere. But with them comes an explicit effort to make sense of those pretenses, as well as to create space for things that cannot otherwise be spoken of. To my mind, the anonymity of the case is a gift. If Mrs. A. is alive and reads my book and would like to identify herself, that would be one thing, but for her or her family to be identified by someone else would feel to me like an intrusion. Moreover, there are figures in the book who are even more anonymous than Mrs A – especially the person she calls her “servant girl,” whose own story of violence and love runs through Mrs. A.’s own, bearing, perhaps things Mrs. A. did not want to discuss. Her anonymity is perhaps even more important because she did not ask to be here – not just in my book but in Mrs. A.’s analysis and case. Mrs. A. is not one person, she is many, and sometimes there is something to be said for letting things be.
Q5. What do you feel about the growing field of the history of psychiatry and psy-disciplines? What impact does the convergence of anthropology and history as disciplines have on the field? Please discuss your future projects?
I am delighted by the possibility for thinking about the mind – as an anthropologist – alongside the history of sciences of it; there are extraordinary possibilities for reckoning (as I’ve discussed in some of my other writing) the relationship between selves (and societies) and sciences of self (and society). To me, the history of psychiatry is both a history of practice and power and a history of thought – the kinds of thought (and thus forms of power) that already live in most of our heads, not just as what is taken for granted about who we think we are, but in the ways we ask questions about ourselves and the world. To me, this quality of circuitry, of enfolded relations, in Marilyn Strathern’s sense of things, or of what I’m increasingly thinking of in terms of “readership,” involves points of contact bodied forth in ways that may defy identification. This is more interesting to me, and maybe more relevant for our contemporary conditions, than thinking in terms of differences in how people “do” “have” or “think about” minds. This sense of contact and multi-directional influence contains difference, but as a moving quality that is as discursive as it is existential. So the question of what it means to be an anthropologist who “does” history is the same as the question of what it means to be a person who, in one or a million ways, carries a certain tracing of the world’s pasts around in her body, language, emotions, choices, and ideas. What are those pasts and how do they matter? What are they and how don’t they matter? Is what we think they are the same as what they might be? These are equally important questions.
My future projects: I continue to write about the history of hysteria and its adjacent diagnostic concepts, focusing increasingly on the relationship between concepts of biology, the organic, the material as they relates to psyches and experience. I am interested in the ways materiality and the organic body come to be reckoned (especially in and diagnoses related to trauma) as anti- and postcolonial orientations. I hope this will produce a book one day. I have also been reorienting myself ethnographically from Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal and am developing a project on concepts of ”good death” as they appear in and beyond bioethical and medicolegal formulations in India. A central part of this project will involve developing a research model that is widely collaborative and widely accessible, with the goal of orienting work and scholarly production for this project away from the model of the lone ethnographer.