# Ashis Roy, "Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-muslim Relationships" (Yoda Press, 2024)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-psychoanalysis-774396/ashis-roy-intimacy-in-alienation-a-psychoanalytic-study-of-hindu-muslim-relationships-yoda-press-2024
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-psychoanalysis-774396/ashis-roy-intimacy-in-alienation-a-psychoanalytic-study-of-hindu-muslim-relationships-yoda-press-2024.md
Podcast: [New Books in Psychoanalysis](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-psychoanalysis-774396)
Published: 2025-10-12T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK7465291114.mp3?updated=1760111040
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK7465291114.mp3?updated=1760111040
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Duration seconds: 3717

## Resource

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes? Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned, having partitioned itself, and the other is a Muslim other in a Hindu majority nation—the author, Ashis Roy, wants to know more about what he calls his “communal mind”, a mind that developed in a country where, “Muslims know the Hindu myths but the reverse is not true,” so a mind that was afforded an instant other to deposit its unwanted contents into. His book, Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships, explicates intimacy and asymmetry, as it delves into cross-religious desire, and in this case the forbidden desire of Hindus for Muslims, and Muslims for Hindus, which, when acknowledged, threatens social, familial, and cultural mores, and also the prerogatives of the state. Who are these people, Roy asks, who take such a step, which is a step that can lead to a kind of social death, akin, in the American context from which I write, to the experience of gay people who come out and are brutally shorn of their families, communities, and sometimes their lives? The power of desire, a power beyond us, in excess of ourselves always, can propel us to this vertiginous place. Perhaps, and only perhaps, it can also push us to live in ways that reject socially and politically enforced liminality as well. One starts to imagine these couples, engaged ongoingl…

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