Author Description

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. The 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. These extracts from his several books, which have been translated into all the major languages, include psychoanalytic 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 and the healing secret of the guru, love in Hindu cinema and the psychology of religious fanaticism. Kakar's wide-ranging reflections are indispensable for a psychological understanding of the country as it moves into a new millennium.