topics:  | gender | sex | sociology | india

1. Introduction
2. Scenes from Marriages
3. Lovers in the Dark
4. The Sex Wars
5. Husbands and Others
6. Gandhi and Women
7. Masculine/Feminine: A View from the Couch
8. An Ending
Notes
Index

Other Reviews

blurb from
U. Chicago press:

Plumbing the hearts of women and men in India and exploring the relations
they engage in, Sudhir Kakar gives us the first full-length study of Indian
sexuality. His groundbreaking work explores India's sexual fantasies and
ideals, the "unlit stage of desire where so much of our inner theater takes
place."

Kakar's sources are primarily textual, celebrating the primacy of the
story in Indian life. He practices a cultural psychology that distills the
psyches of individuals from the literary products and social institutions of
Indian culture. These include examples of lurid contemporary Hindi novels;
folktales; Sanskrit, Tamil, and Hindi proverbs; hits of the Indian cinema;
Gandhi's autobiography; interviews with women from the slums of Delhi; and
case studies from his own psychoanalytic practice. His attentive readings of
these varied narratives from a vivid portrait of sexual fantasies and
realities, reflecting the universality of sexuality as well as cultural
nuances specific to India.

Moving from genre to genre, Kakar offers a brilliant reading of verses
from the Laws of Manu, the original source of Hindu religious laws, to
uncover their psychological foundations—male terror of the female sexual
appetite that shields itself by idealizing women's maternal role. Kakar also
examines the psychosexual history of Gandhi at length, though his
near-lifelong celibacy makes him an atypical subject. Gandhi's story is
universal, Kakar says, because "we all wage war on our wants."

In India's lore and tradition, complex symbols abound—snakes that take
the shape of sensual women or handsome men, celibates sleep with naked women,
gods rape their daughters, and a goddess fries a king in oil. With the
analyst's "third ear," Kakar listens, decodes, and translates the
psychological longings that find expression in Indian sexual relations.

Sudhir Kakar has a private practice in New Delhi and is a training analyst of
the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and senior fellow of the Centre for
Developing Societies. He has taught at Harvard, McGill, and the University of
Vienna and teaches annually at the University of Chicago. His several
previous books include The Inner World and Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors.

http://www.epinions.com/review/IntimateRelationsExploringIndianSexualitybySudhirKakar/content16084995716

... attempts to explain the lack of overt sexuality and macho posturing
among Indian men. Indian men are readily androgynous, according to the
unabashed Freudian Kakar, because myth and fantasy substitutes for 'mature'
(i.e., heterosexual) sexuality. In marriage, a man battles between mother and
wife, just as phallic Hindu gods battle on the minefield of the superego.

The rich mosaic of life in India is homogenized in this book(let). Only
Hindu heterosexuals are represented by Kakar. In his 'exploration,' there is
no gay life in a sexually segregated and densely-populated society, and there
are no Muslims, Buddhists, or Christians, although India is far from being a
homogeneous Hindu country, and I know from personal experience that, although
generally closeted and rarely discussed there, gay life is not absent.

Kakar starts with a set of explanations and pulls together 'testimony' to
support his views. Rather than exploring Indian sexuality (as proclaimed in
the book's subtitle), this is a book that starts with conclusions, and weaves
in anecdotes around a priori explanations.  Kakar perilously underplays the
role of the extended 'tribal' family in explaining what he considers
infantile Indian sexuality, and its basis in a (borrowed) nuclear family
drama. In my observation, in all Indian families, irrespective of religion or
the sexual orientation of individuals, the protection of izzat (family
respectability) is an overwhelming force, far exceeding individual desire
(heterosexual or homosexual). Oedipal dramas (if such they are) are have much
larger casts in South Asian productions than the trio of son, mother, and
father of Freudian psychodrama.

Within the family context, producing children and providing for them is what
really counts. After that is done, the hero and heroine can perhaps escape to
the movies and surrender a few hours to fantasy, if they chance to like each
other. More likely, the hero is off with his friend, drinking tea and seeking
male solace, and the heroine is more-or-less confined to the home,
complaining bitterly to other women about her disappointments in her
husband's manifold inadequacies. As Kakar points out, marital 'relations seem
impelled more by hostility than tenderness or love...pervaded as much by
hatred and fear as by desire and longing.' Since men and women are
involuntarily stuck with each other for life in arranged marriages, the only
genuine 'love' relationships tend to be between persons of the same sex, even
if this is homosociality more often than homosexuality.

Kakar spends nearly a third of the text discussing Gandhi's sexual
preoccupations (including his sexual obsessions during his celibate period,
his 'shedding of semen' at night, his inclination to sleep with young girls
to test his personal resolve to resist carnal temptation, and his views of
the 'grand function of the sexual organ'), which were clearly perverse to
Western sensibilities, although Kakar adduces parallels from Hindu myth and
tradition. I found this chapter unnecessary and distracting, and the book
('essay') far from convincing in explaining even heterosexual Hindus.