Speaker: Ananya Vajpeyi (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi)
One of the modern disciplines where Sanskrit finds fertile ground is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis gets established in India by the early 1920s, thanks to Girindrasekhar Bose and Romain Rolland, both of whom are closely connected to Freud in the final years of his life, and try to get him interested in Indian philosophy, psychology and spirituality. While Freudian psychoanalysis as a clinical practice peters out for the most part after independence, it enjoys a renaissance in Indology, through the work of A.K. Ramanujan, Robert Goldman and Wendy Doniger, among others. I try to understand why certain genres of Sanskrit texts lend themselves to psychoanalytic reading, and what the limits are of psychoanalysis as a text-critical practice in Indology. I focus particularly on the role of the maverick scholar Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (b. 1941), a student of Daniel Ingalls and collaborator of D.D. Kosambi, almost the keeper of the Freud Archive, who for a time appears to bridge the Indological and Freudian worlds, before breaking decisively with both.
Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow and Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, working at the intersection of intellectual history, political theory and critical philology. She is also a Research Consultant with the Nilgiri Archaeological Project at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and a Visiting Professor at Ashoka University, where she teaches a Foundation Course on Great Books.
She is the author of the award winning book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India published by Harvard University Press (2012), as well as the co-editor of Minorities and Populism: Critical Perspectives from South Asia and Europe (Springer, 2020) and Ashis Nandy: A Life in Dissent (OUP, 2018).
She writes widely about ideas, politics, history, art and culture for newspapers and magazines in India and abroad. Her writing has been published in Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Bloomberg, LA Review of Books, New Statesman and The New Republic among other venues. She has taught in India, the US and Europe, and lectured at over 100 institutions across the world. She recently delivered a TEDx talk for International Women’s Day 2025.
All are welcome
Enquiries: asian@sant.ox.ac.uk or 01865-274559
