Since the last quarter of a century, Sudhir Kakar’s work on Indian culture and society has found large appreciative audiences both in India and abroad. This selection by the author covers a wide spectrum from classical love poetry to modern mysticism, from Hindu childhood to India’s healing traditions, from male-female relations to Hindu-Muslim violence. With a significant introduction by T.G. Vaidyanathan, this Sudhir Kakar reader contains extracts from several of his books, which have been translated into all the major languages. Included are psychoanalytical reflections on dominant themes in the emotional life of Hindu men, psycho-biographical essays on such cultural heroes as Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Gandhi, the unveiling of the erotic secret in the Radha and Krishna legend, the healing secret of the guru, love in Hindi cinema, and the psychology of religious fanaticism. This book, which focuses for the first time on a living writer, as part of the essential writings series, is indispensable for a psychological understanding of the country as it establishes itself in this millennium. It is meant for students of psychology, South Asian culture and sociology, as well as the general reader.
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