Psychoanalysis has often been found wanting in its capacity to take into account cultural and colonial difference when it comes to third-world sites such as India. Its focus on individual subjectivity, family romances and unconscious fantasy have sparked controversies about essentialism and exclusion: who is the subject of psychoanalysis? This application-based approach considers psychoanalysis to be a readymade set of theoretical propositions that can only be imposed externally on already consolidated “other” objects. In this regard, Gayatri Spivak’s critique of psychoanalysis being too culture-bound and impossible to universalise is absolutely exemplary (“Echo,” 1993). Others like Sudhir Kakar (Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India, 2012) have attempted to use psychoanalytic theory precisely for its putative claim to universalism: aren’t we all riven by sexual difference? They seem to suggest that while the question of sexual difference can be universal, the answer may be historically particular. Thus, this second approach is also application-based; here it is the object that is “applied” to psychoanalysis: how does this particular community embody that general concept.

This panel will ask what psychoanalysis can open up for South Asia because of difference. Our interventions sidestep applications of all kinds by cultivating a reading approach to both theory and object. Taking inspiration from Shoshana Felman’s continually relevant invitation to allow psychoanalysis and literature to read each other (“To open the question,” 1977), this panel demonstrates the ways in which psychoanalysis can lend texture to questions of sexuality and violence in South Asia, even as South Asia seems to both invite and resist psychoanalytic readings. In Felman’s original formulation, it is the resistance of a textual object that makes a psychoanalytic reading possible. In other words, what remains unreadable to psychoanalysis is precisely where psychoanalytic thinking and theory can be most useful and constructive. For psychoanalysis, resistance is always a question of the sexual: something just too close(d) to the subject; so specific that it cannot be accessed without years of work, so obscure that it escapes as soon as it is deemed to be within reach; something just too open. Perhaps, allowing psychoanalysis and South Asia to read each other is both difficult and productive because nothing quite lines up.

Professor Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi will address this generative divergence by revisiting singular aspects of the collective imaginary that informed the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 in the city of Ahmedabad in India. His paper investigates the several interwoven conspiratorial themes, such as accusations of Islamic terrorism and female abduction, national betrayal and worship/dietary differences, accusations of slaughter and reactions of visceral disgust, that played out in 2002. Some of these themes are well-known in the literature and have played a role fomenting communal violence in India before. They were invoked in the context of the Gujarat pogrom through vernacular newspapers, political speeches, rumors, and chatter on the street. Professor Ghassem-Fachandi argues that such materials are effective because of their ability to signify a content that remains latent. He deploys an ethnographic approach to track the ways in which this latent content is internalised psychically.

Next, Samia Vasa reads the figure of castration in the “Nirbhaya” rape case, alongside Jacques Lacan’s delineation of the centrality of castration in thinking sexual difference. In December 2012, a young woman in Delhi was brutally gang-raped by six men in a moving bus. She died of her injuries, sparking a massive public and activist mobilisation against existing rape laws across the country. Feminist activists found themselves debating if castration was a fair punishment, whether it will serve the purposes of consciousness-raising and deterring other violent men from committing rape. Many mistook chemical castration for physical castration. Vasa explores the analytic contours of this feminist fantasy of castrating the rapist. All of the responsible men (except one underage convict) were placed on death row. While one of them was gang-raped in prison, another convict was either murdered or committed suicide by hanging himself after having boasted about the rape on camera. He claimed that he would do it again. The retelling of this story of repetition and rape emphasises the bewildering conjunctions and disjunctions of psychoanalysis and feminism in India.

Finally, Professor Ranjana Khanna’s paper takes us to an earlier moment in the history of both psychoanalysis and South Asia. Psychoanalysis imagined itself from its inception at the turn of the twentieth century as an international force. Psychoanalytic institutes emerged all over the world in the early years of Freud’s work. His correspondence with those setting up institutes or grappling with local conditions and psyches marks psychoanalysis as a particular internationalist modernist enterprise. This paper will be coming to grips with the world, or perhaps more appropriately, the worlds of psychoanalysis, how it came into formation at a particular moment of empire and of state formation, how it spread, became distinct in its formation, how it erred from its original path but was informed by it, and how we understand those questions through a lens of sexual difference. Against this history of psychoanalysis, Professor Khanna offers a reading of the literature of partition and considers both the potentialities and foreclosures of psychoanalysis for thinking the literary, sexual difference, and the time of the nation. Her paper considers the world-making capacities of literature and psychoanalysis and the way in which the literary and legal texts work with the category of the non-verifiable in the South Asian context and the event of sexual difference.

Together, all three papers rearticulate the conceptual stakes of psychoanalysis for reading South Asia. Each presentation will be fifteen minutes long, leaving ample time for discussion and audience engagement.