In this episode of Synergia, Neha speaks with Professor Amrita, psychoanalyst and author of the groundbreaking book Women’s Sexuality and Modern India. Trained at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology–Stanford University and a member of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, Professor Amrita brings a rare blend of interdisciplinary depth from History and French to clinical and psychoanalytic psychology.
This conversation takes listeners inside the core arguments, stories, and provocations of her book. Moving between psychoanalytic insight, literary imagination, and feminist critique, we explore how memory, desire, patriarchy, and agency shape the intimate lives of women in contemporary India.
Together, we discuss:
Why she writes women’s memories of sexuality under patriarchy, and how this act of writing becomes a language of selfhood and feminist re-invention.
The story behind her early pen name Aranyani and what this identity made possible in writing erotic narratives.
How mainstream media’s emotional flattening of its “emotionless English” and sensational polarities fails to hold tenderness, complexity, or ambiguity.
Her critique of internalized feminism as an ego ideal, and why this form of feminism can limit rather than liberate women’s agency.
Why she refuses the simplistic oppression plot, choosing instead to illuminate the layered, contradictory, and often surprising ways women negotiate their desire.
The tension she identifies between sympathy and sexual agency: how the pleasure of witnessing or sharing suffering can paradoxically compete with the pursuit of autonomy.
Her challenge to global psychological theories like Twenge and Baumeister’s “highly legible sexuality,” and why such models fail to capture Indian women’s negotiations with desire, restraint, and social legibility.
Her compelling argument that dismantling patriarchy requires not only resistance but developing a collective capacity to hold difference , a skill that does not emerge automatically but must be consciously cultivated.
How women with agency often present “symptoms” formed through involuntary self-policing, and how these symptoms encode both oppression and desire.
The fascinating role of mourning and misogynistic repetition in women’s sexual lives: how performances of mourning can conceal, protect, and even sponsor hidden forms of agency.
This episode is an intimate and intellectually rich exploration of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India. It asks difficult questions about modernity, memory, desire, and the psychic life of patriarchy and opens space for new ways of thinking about women’s agency today.
Learn more about Amrita’s work:
