The Doctor And Mrs A.: Ethics And Counter-Ethics In An Indian Dream Analysis (Paperback)

This fortnight, we focus on a seminal and “boldly creative” book, The Doctor and Mrs A by the Massachusetts-based anthropologist, Sarah Pinto. This story of an upper-class, highly educated, Hindu woman whose marriage did not live up to its promise, is animated by the circle of socialists, Gandhian nationalists, Sikh paramours, friends, and the sexualities of servants and servant maids, past and present, as well as with mythological figures from the Hindu epics. It is the capacity of the Doctor and Mrs A to speak together of three female mythological figures, Draupadi, Ahlaya, and Shakuntala, across the registers of fantasy and reality without interruption, that is perhaps most original. In 1940/41 a young Punjabi woman, ‘Mrs A.’, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist, Dev Satya Nand, for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. Her analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and mythology. She turned to archetypal female figures from Hindu myth—Shakuntala, Draupadi, Ahalya—to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. In a brilliant reading of Mrs A.’s conversations with Dr Satya Nand, the author opens a window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways in which Mrs A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. Through a fascinating exposition, Pinto proposes the possibility of thinking with a concept of ‘counter-ethics’, and asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic, and its orientation towards mobility and change.