Dr. Ashis Roy (5:11)

Hi, Tracy. Thank you so much for doing this. And I've been looking forward to talking with you on this book for so long. And I'm really happy this is happening. And this is a fabulous network with so many stimulating conversations and. Yeah, let's begin.

Tracy Morgan (5:29)

Okay, let's begin. So, gosh, the first question that I ask everyone is, to what degree? To the degree that you can know what motivated your writing of this book. So can we perhaps just start with that? Just to Give people a sense of why. Did you write a book, a psychoanalytic study, in fact, about Hindu Muslim relationships in intimate relationships?

Dr. Ashis Roy (5:59)

Yeah. In my understanding, this is the first academic work of this kind in India which has looked at intimacy in the Hindu Muslim couple from any academic perspective. And so psychoanalysis was very useful to understand the different layers of intimacy and also to, like, look at how the group and the individual come together in conflict. So this book was a dream of hope. I was dreaming of the hope and the possibility of how Hindus and Muslims can coexist. In fact, someone at a dinner table conversation said that, do you think that India and Pakistan can ever be together? And I said, no. And that person said, but you should always keep that dream alive. And yes, there's a lot of value in that. And why don't I think like that? So the book was born out of trying to imagine a possibility that do the couple bringing something new to the relationship between the two communities, and also to give their own desire for the other community a space which I feel really lacking. It was also born out of a personal experience where I began to see that I had some notions of the other or the Muslim other, which were not very kind, which were. And I was completely surprised by it. And that was the first step towards an inquiry into myself that I have such feelings of which were negative. And so then I wanted to see that if I have these feelings which are negative, does the couple have the capacity to process it? What do they do with it? Or does their life lie outside of these meanings that we, you know, are born with? I would also like to say that the Hindu Muslim dynamic is very different from any other. Perhaps it is a very special kind of love and a special kind of conflict. So recently I was presenting a paper in a conference in Pakistan, and it was very well received. And I don't have friends who are from Pakistan, but I felt this sense of like you are with someone that has been taken away from you without really knowing who that other is. And that that experience of presenting in a psychoanalytic conference, I was presenting over zoom. But the SSR experience in itself was so different from the other experiences that I have had talked about this book or some. Some parts of it. So I think that Hindus and Muslims were brothers, and they were not at mes. And that is a history which is really getting eroded today. But it's also history which is well preserved in many works of literature, in many, many. It's been well preserved by many scholars and historians. So there's a. There is a history of the Hindu Muslim couple which is still yet to be written. And this is perhaps a kind of a beginning of that. But I see that a Hindu Muslim couple today are really. I realized that only later are really an undreamt entity. Society doesn't really know. People don't know how to place them in their mind.

Tracy Morgan (9:49)

Right. In a sense, the couple contains within them. Or we could have the fantasy of thinking that this kind of a couple contains within them the larger sort of cultural, social and political conflict that came to pass with the partition, like the attempt to expel. And here you have these couples that come together under circumstances that are. Are. I think one of. You know, this. This book is a. I experienced it as a book filled with sorrow. And you were interviewing people who had endured. This is a book about parental rejection and its vicissitudes as well, the social and cultural rejection, but also that the families of, you know, the. Often both members of the couple are thrown back and turn away from their own children. And we have a couple that is sort of on their own. And what does it mean? Part of what you explore in your interviewing is what is the impact of not having a community on a couple? The role of where does the aggressivity go? What happens with enduring that kind of hatred and rejection from the outside? And then the couple has to metabolize it somehow to see if they can survive. You bring up a number of concepts and ideas that stayed with me. And you're influenced by Erickson, you're influenced by Andre Green, influenced by Neil Altman. Those were sort of three names that I felt percolating through the book. And you make great use of. I think it's Erickson's idea of sort of a negative identity. Right. I'm wondering if you could just talk to. Because that was a concept I didn't really. I understood it right away. I was like, oh, yeah, everywhere you can see. But I hadn't really spent any time with this concept. And I want to talk about, or ask you to talk about a little bit. What is a negative identity and how does it. In your study, what did you learn about its creation?

Dr. Ashis Roy (12:19)

I learned about Erik Erikson from reading Sudhir Kakkar and of course, reading Erickson in Durational. And Erikson was one of the few analysts who really took up the idea of identity. And he also took up the idea of the group. So he was always telling the readers that there is always a social environment that conditions the way you are. And it was a move away from a model of psychology, which was just one person and looking at the environment as restricting your development. And I think Erickson was someone who also said that the environment is also granting conditions for existence. But the idea of the negative identity is a kind of a drive towards becoming everything that your community doesn't want you to become. So I place the idea of the negative identity in contemporary discourse where you have notions of lab jihad, which talk about basically a kind of a hyper masculine Muslim male subject trying to annex or take away this Hindu woman who has no sexual agency, who has no sexual desire. And it also talks about the fact that the woman is driven to desire a Muslim man, which is prohibited by her community. So it kind of gave me a framework to understand some of these things. But my work also uses the negative identity and examines different shades of people's life choices. But it also helps us see that we need to go beyond it. It's not enough in itself. And that happened towards the later part of my work. I think you mentioned Andre Green and Neil Altman. And I was thinking that it's. It would be in some.

Tracy Morgan (14:26)

Sorry, two names we don't often associate together.

Dr. Ashis Roy (14:30)

Exactly.

Tracy Morgan (14:31)

But you bring them together. Yeah.

Dr. Ashis Roy (14:33)

Analytically unsound to put them together. Perhaps most institutes of psychoanalysis would not put them together, but I was fortunate to be taught by teachers who allowed us to engage with a number of psychoanalysts without defining the wars of psychoanalysis which has created many islands in psychoanalysis.

Tracy Morgan (14:59)

That's another part. Another parti. Many partitions.

Dr. Ashis Roy (15:04)

Yes. And so I think, because I was looking at a work which had to also look at understanding intimacy as a method, because in a research you have to design a method. And so I had also include Christopher Wallace and had to include Adam Phillips and Ogden to look at different parts of the work. There's one part which is looking at the social fabric, one which is looking at the interpersonal dynamic. And then there's always the personal history. So the work, actually, if somebody is looking at this work, it's a kind of an unlearning, because the idea, the political idea of the Hindu and the Muslim is so well known that the work actually makes you look at different shades inside that. And that is the difficult part of the work which someone can appreciate. But the work can also be ignored for the same reasons.

Tracy Morgan (16:06)

Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking about your being an analyst and I'm thinking about your being a host here at New Books and Psychoanalysis. And then I'm thinking about you being a psychoanalytic interviewer.

Dr. Ashis Roy (16:19)

And.

Tracy Morgan (16:21)

I think a lot about what is an interview anyway. It's a very, you know, it's something I've done, I've interviewed for years. And I on the side try to think about what is it to be a psychoanalyst and to interview. Is there something different, a different set of sort of parameters internally that we bring to the interview? And so that's what you did. You interviewed these couples. Do we have four couples? Have I counted correctly in the book that are with the cycle, doing what you, what is called the psychobiography. And I wanted to ask you about, you know, sitting in that seat as an interviewer who's a researcher versus sitting in your seat in the consulting room. I mean, all psychoanalysis is research at some level as well, right? I mean, it's, it's a method of research. Every analysis is a research project. You could say, but what, you know, they know you're an analyst, they know you're writing a book. Our patients don't really come in thinking we're going to write. Some of them do. Are you going to write about me? But, but so you're speaking to people, they know you're an analyst, they know that you're, you're doing research and that it will end up published. There's a lot going on. Can you, can you talk about sort of that, being sitting in that seat and doing that, that kind of work, that kind of interviewing.

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Dr. Ashis Roy (18:45)

Yeah, I think that because I was learning psychoanalysis in a institute which was training me clinically and I was learning it in a university and teaching in university, so I had the privilege of operating in both, using both lenses, where in one space psychoanalysis can be used as a method of Research outside the clinic. And Neil Altman was a visiting faculty, and he was really influential in putting that idea into our minds and also with a framework. And that was very important for me, that I could use his framework to understand clinical work and work outside the clinic as well. And I think in a space like India, but also anywhere where social realities are very harsh, the psychoanalyst outside the clinic is very important. And Sudhir, who is one of the most well known psychoanalysts, actually his. One of his first books was Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, which was looking at how community mental health function. And he wrote that book because he said, when I became a psychoanalyst, no one was coming to me, but they were going to them. So I went outside and, you know, and then I studied what was happening with them. And he provides a structure and a frame through models of psychology and psychoanalysis to look at what was happening in those healing practices, what he was doing, the similarities. I think I like this kind of an. I love the richness of psychoanalysis, and I think anybody who dares to read Andre Green is saying that out loud. So. But also like the fact that it can be taken outside. I enjoyed working on my chapter on the research method and went through these couple of authors and conversations. One was Timothy Ashplant, the other was Jacqueline Rose, then there was Adam Phillips. And these were. It was a part of a journal called the History Workshop. And they were talking about Joan Scott. Yes. Yeah, that famous paper. That's that brilliant paper. And they're talking about, how does a psychoanalyst work outside the clinic as a researcher? What is the aim? And Jacqueline Rose actually says something like, is the. Is the point of the interview symptom relief? Is it. You know, because in the clinic, the symptom speaks through the person. And so you're working with the symptom at one level. But I found that even though I went with a certain question and I told them, this is what I'm doing, at that point of time I was doing a doctoral work, and of course I told them about the confidentiality, but they started talking to me as a psychologist, so if I was a historian, maybe they wouldn't have shared all these things. But somehow they had this inkling and there was a wavelength, a different wavelength in with different participants, which I hope comes out in the psychobiographs, where they started talking about parts of themselves which were fragmented, which were. Which were shattered, which were broken. And so it became my work to write about the process of listening to all of that, how it impacted me how I became, just like you become in the clinic, a kind of object who is filled with fantasy, with expectations, but outside you have the choice of either thinking about it or acting it out. Depends on, you know, what, what you're doing. But I think that I can't. It's. A psychologist is a kind of a strange entity in India. But it seems like they all had some understanding of what a psychologist was. So that is something that allowed them to open up their internal world, you know, I think, you know, in a deeper way my task was to. My task was to gather things from them, but my task, I don't think it was to. They didn't become my patients, although I've carried them and their. What they have shared for a very long time. But I don't think they became my patients, you know.

Tracy Morgan (23:29)

And how can I ask, how did you find these couples? I don't have a sense of that. Maybe you mentioned it in the book and I missed it. But where. How did you find them?

Dr. Ashis Roy (23:39)

So it was. It was a difficult process because I think that most of the couples who were married were married at least for a decade. So I think they've belonged to. They were similarly educated, they belong to the same age group, they belong to different parts of India. And I think that they had processed things to some extent on their own because other people that I interviewed or approached for interviews also didn't want to open the question. So. So it wasn't at times it was through word of mouth that I found them and through other colleagues who knew about the fact that I was working in this, you know, on this topic. And they really wanted to speak and they wanted to be heard. And I think it was. I'm very grateful to all of them for sharing all that they did.

Tracy Morgan (24:40)

And I could imagine in some way being heard the hunger to speak to someone who might take their story and do something with it. Which you did. You know what I mean? The way to sort of say, say to the world, you know, to their most immediate environment. I mean, you're. Yoda publishes as far as I know, right? I mean, it's more South. It's more South Asian. Just looking here, queer, affirmative and feminist publication in South Asia. So that you're, you know, you publish this first, right? Not in, not in English or in English.

Dr. Ashis Roy (25:23)

It was in English. Yoda has made a space for itself because the publisher Arpita Das, who's a wonderful, wonderful being, has really made narrative non fiction kind of a niche area where an Yura has Identified itself with that. And they've done remarkable work using that genre.

Tracy Morgan (25:45)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to their website. I was like, wow, very interesting stuff. But the fantasy of speaking to someone, someone who will take your story, your secret story, your story that maybe nobody wants to hear. You know, the story of how, you know, the willingness to unite with someone and the high price, the loss of potentially a community and love and familial love, but coming together anyway. It's sort of like a, you know, in thinking from, you know, my American context, I couldn't help but to think about gay couples marrying. And I'm thinking of patients who come from, like, fundamentalist backgrounds who are gay, who've lost their families, you know, and talk about, like, being forced into, in a sense, a negative identity. It's not necessarily a negative identity, but it certainly becomes one that one has to sort of embrace. And you asked the question in the book somewhere, can this negative identity, looking at my notes here, can it be. How can it be. Can it be transformed and how essential it is that it be transformed? You can feel your interest in, you know, can this go from just being. I'm just an outsider to being something new. The search for, like, a thirdness. Right. What is green? Is it green? Who's this? Two broken selves come to get more or less come together to form a third, something else altogether. So I could imagine that these were couples that were hungry for something to be shared with the larger world about themselves as well as heard by you.

Dr. Ashis Roy (27:49)

Yeah, I think they really needed a kind of a recognition of their struggle. And also, I think that they were being asked questions for which they didn't have answers and they didn't have any cultural resources which would help them find answers. And that's like asking a couple from a mixed faith that what is. What is the religious identity of your child? And it's a very big question that many couples don't have an answer for. And they say that, you know, I'm going to. The child can choose whatever they wanted. But it's not as simple as that. One of my typo biographs of Sunaina and Qasim, a couple from Bihar who had a very, very difficult time. And they show that how the son of the couple actually wants to have an identification with the Muslim father's religion. And it's an important thing for him. And the father is not religious. He. He's not religious. So I think that it's. I think that the couples. The interviews at times show the gaps, the fragments, and also I, as a. As a. I was a much younger analytic researcher then. But I also do pose my own questions. I'm not just listening to them. I'm not just. I'm not completely passive. And I make them think about some of their conflicts. And I hope that it was helpful for them because. Because I think that that was also a part of the process. I do feel that as a psychologist, I did empathize with their pain a lot.

Tracy Morgan (29:38)

Yeah, It's. It's clear that you're in a position like you want. You want to explore what you want to explore. You're also dealing with people who many. And I want to ask about this because it seems, I think three of the. At least three of the eight subjects interviewed have suicide in their history. Is that right? Or suicidal ideation. Sunaina, for sure. There was another woman who had a suicide attempt. And then who was the husband who was very sort of hyperbolic and also suicidal. I forget. But I was interested. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, I don't know where was I going initially? I don't know because I was really struck by suicidality and the search for. And the sort of leaving the fold feeling rejected. I think you described. We have some. Two of the four women studied, I think experienced already a rejection. They were already partitioned in their family. Right. They were already in a sense black sheep, pushed out and then sought solace in the other. Ultimately. And it's kind of a. To think about it, there's the. Do you really love me? Is there a quote here somewhere if I can find it? Do you really love me or do you only love me when I mirror you back? I wondered about that being a question that certainly for Sunayana. You write here about what I think is a particularly female dilemma, perhaps just at base. And my question is, is the negative identity perhaps built into femininity in a patriarchal world? And the quote is, you know, this is the experience of the woman. My body, myself, desires, wishes are not my own. They belong to my family. And when I begin to see them as mine, I'm often rendered homeless.

Dr. Ashis Roy (31:47)

Yeah.

Tracy Morgan (31:47)

And in a sense like the homelessness of. Of. Of the always already homelessness of. Of. Of women. And that we're already. If we have a mind we want to, you know, possess and declare. If we want to take. Take the risk of showing ourselves in ways that might not mirror back what the family wants, what happens to us. This is like. It's like homicide, you know. Yeah.

Dr. Ashis Roy (32:19)

There is a kind of double edged sword here. One is that when women want to be sexual subjects, they don't have role models. Actually, my colleague Amrita Narayanan has written extensively on this writer and. But society a lot of times denies their sexuality. And then when they want to marry somebody who is outside the community, even if the family is very liberal, like I show in Karuna's narrative, where she's introduced to Islam in a very, very formal kind of way, that you have a. You have a Qazi coming and teaching you the Quran, which is. It's a very direct way of allowing you to be open to another faith. And. But when that faith becomes an object of desire, then that cannot be comprehended. So I think it's a. It's. It's been a struggle for the female participants and subjects to find a kind of an outline for themselves. But what was most interesting for me was how maternal their Muslim partners were. And in fact, just before talking to you, I was attending a presentation where a senior analyst from Delhi was talking about the kind of fantasies people don't have about becoming a couple. And one of the points that she was highlighting was the fact that you always have a need for some kind of attunement or something which was unfinished in your life, that. That your partner, your half, is fulfilling for you. The tragedy is like, if you look at Sunain and Kasim story, where Kasim is this deeply maternal man, but the family will never know that this is what she. She never got from us, but she got something she never got from her family. So that's the kind of.

Tracy Morgan (34:23)

Which is. Which is kind of. It's not a repetition. Right? I mean, like, it's. Her story is so interesting because you would expect her to be in a relationship with someone who beats her based on the maternal rejection. Like, she's got a mark on her back. You know, she's pent up from feeling like her mother didn't want. You know, I thought a lot about the work of Diana Lees. Her mother didn't want her daughter's desire for her. And so she's quite aggressive, violent. You know, she.

Dr. Ashis Roy (34:54)

She.

Tracy Morgan (34:54)

She really. You see, you get the sense that she has so much rage she can't contain, and yet she doesn't find a man who. Who beats her. She finds a man who sees her innocence.

Dr. Ashis Roy (35:10)

Her innocence. Exactly. Exactly.

Tracy Morgan (35:13)

It's. It's a. It's a pretty good outcome for her.

Dr. Ashis Roy (35:16)

It's like Queen of God said that aggression is ruthlessness. It's playful. It. It's not just a manifestation of the death instinct or so he was that kind of a transformative object in her life, and it's what she saw in him, and that's what really helped in forming her identity.

Tracy Morgan (35:40)

Yeah, this is the caretaking his. His ability to take care. And in the book, it's all. If I'm not incorrect, it's all the women in these intermarriages are Hindu and all the men are Muslim. Did I mix that up? So what about that? Like, I was like. Well, and just. And just to say Ashes knows this, but my. My own brother was married. You know, he's raised Catholic and married a woman who's. Who's Muslim from. From Pakistan. So I've seen sort of up close and personal, this. This different kind. This different kind of marriage. But yes. Can you say. Say some more about this? Why. Why are the women. Why are the women Hindu and the men Muslim? If you could say the theory.

Dr. Ashis Roy (36:30)

It wasn't something that I chose consciously. In a way, it's good that the parameter remains the same if you look at it from the point of view of research. But it is. I was working with what I could access, and so it happened unwittingly. But for me, it was, I think, a great experience to. It was a very enriching experience to talk to men who were so intellectually sensitive, who were sensitive to their vibes, life struggles and who really respected them. And it was. This is something which is really the opposite of. This is emphasized in the political narrative where Muslim men are always seen as being, you know, I mean, the. The fantasy is that a Muslim man can have many wives. And so the idea of. One of the questions can be that, you know, if you're a Hindu woman, how do you go past this fantasy to be with a Muslim man? But all of these Muslim men, none of them had such thoughts. In fact, they stood against their families when the family was actually telling them that, you know, you can have as many wives as you want. So there's something so distinctive about the Indian Muslim. There's something so distinctive about all of these Muslim men and their maternal sides. I think maybe I could have actually examined more maybe if I had been an older researcher. But it is something that was a big, big learning for me.

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Tracy Morgan (39:27)

I guess there's something really powerful about having a partner who is willing. I mean, you know, I'm just. I'm just thinking about Lowell's work on the Oedipal and that you're being willing to kill your parents in order to live your life at some level is. I think he puts it forth, kind of that way that symbolically kill them in order to go forth. To have both members of the couple be willing to traverse annihilation, to be with each other. Not everybody needs to do that. But I was thinking about the need in these couples for Sunayina, for instance, to really be chosen and to see that somebody is willing to defy their own families. You know, you could reject me, but I'm going to be with her. That is a very powerful communication. You're more important than what I come from. You are. I mean, I'm willing to risk his family.

Dr. Ashis Roy (40:37)

I don't think they were so rejecting of her. Her own family was very rejecting of her. And I think that was the part which was most broken in her life. And the same time, I think it really also that psychobiograph also shows how much she tried to repair things, but. And how much that didn't work out in that phase of her life. But I must also say that in most of the narratives, I also saw that once the child was born, there is a kind of hope that gets reignited between the families. Things become slightly better. But that what you said at the beginning, that there's a lot of sorrow and I do think that there is a kind of homelessness because grandparents and family are a very important part of the Indian cultural psyche. And in one of his earlier books, Sudhir Kakkar has written this, that he's talking about his analysis in Germany, and he says that, how can my German analyst understand what kind of objects my grandparents were? For me, they are not the classical edible objects. So there are some. So the love you get from grandparents is actually at times with a lot more abundance than you get from your own parents. So it's very special. And if that love is kind of contaminated by, you know, political strife, and that also has its own, you know, own problem, creates difficulties for the child.

Tracy Morgan (42:17)

Or the grandparents are only relating to the child, but not relating to their own child, which can be very. I've had several patients say, like, well, you know, the most painful thing has been that my. My mother loves my child more than she ever loved me. The rivalry, the feelings of, like, you know, that the grandmother or the grandfather can be a certain way, that they could never be with their own direct progeny. Yeah, it's a little. It's a little lighter being a grandparent, you know, what you do with your. With your grandchildren. But, you know, these. But again, these Muslim. Muslim men, they were taking a risk. I mean, just because with Sunni, with Kazim, it worked out like his family wasn't so rejecting. There is the risk of. And of course, the risk of alienation from others in the community. Not just his own parents or these men's own parents, but their friends, their neighbors. What do they think? And it poses a question, I mean, these couples pose, I imagine, a question that disturbs. Why are we so separate? What is this? Why? You know, it forces people to think and about their own. The existence of these couples, I imagine, forces their neighbors, their friends, their colleagues to think about what has been rejected inside themselves, you know, and what are they warding off by not wanting to see or to finding. Finding something wrong with. With this particular couple because of what they've united. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Ashis Roy (44:03)

I think that the enjoyment of desire between Hindu and a Muslim is something which perhaps cannot be tolerated. But one of the films which has come out recently and which has got a lot of acclaim, the film is called. Just gonna tell you the name.

Tracy Morgan (44:26)

It's a film set. It's from an Indian director or from.

Dr. Ashis Roy (44:31)

Yeah, it's a film called Albe Imagine is Live.

Tracy Morgan (44:34)

Oh, which. Which I. It was. It was certainly playing here. I think I might have missed it when I was in Rome, but. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm aware of the film for sure.

Dr. Ashis Roy (44:42)

It's a film about three different women characters and they. How they draw from each other. And it's set in the southern part of India. And one of two of the women characters work in a nursing home, but one of them is in love with a Muslim man. And the film goes intimacy in a very loving and natural way without making any fuss about their identity. But I. Such expressions of intimacy are. They really aren't tolerated like in other films have been made which have faced a lot of criticism and attack because of such depiction. So I think that this kind of desire doesn't. Doesn't suit the politics. It doesn't find any acceptance. And that. That is a difficulty. And it can be. I mean, a similar thing can happen between, you know, in a gay couple or, you know, other. Whether it's in India, it could be somebody from two different castes that could also. And they all have their own complexities. But, yeah, there is some kind of. There's a kind of intolerance of the desire that, you know, two people are enjoying, which.

Tracy Morgan (46:06)

Well, you know, in a couple, if you don't have enough of something forbidden, where goes the desire? Anyway, so there could be. I'm just thinking about envy for envy being aroused because the couple exemplifies forbidden desire and all the pleasure that one has from forbidden desire. And it's built right in to the structure of the marriage, of these marriages. Yeah. So a little something extra. Cause in sameness, you know, I just think about Stephen Mitchell's thinking about the couple and, you know, in sameness is torpor, in too much familiarity with. Or goeth desire. But with this potential strangeness or the fantasy that a Muslim and a Hindu have the fantasy that there is a strangeness, there is a something else to find out. There is something that's definitely not me that I can always be searching for. It's kind of an interesting position to have or an interesting way to be in a couple, that your partner is a stranger. Hopefully we don't forget that there's a stranger on the other side. Yeah.

Dr. Ashis Roy (47:28)

I think this is also where I really found Lacan's formulation on love to be very useful, that to love someone is to give them something that you don't possess and if the other one is ready to receive it. And I kind of use that to. I. I inserted Hindu and Muslim in that sentence in that quote. And I started thinking that from where does a Hindu find the love to love a Muslim? And from where does the Muslim find The resources to receive it. And that this question of being Hindu and Muslim often came from outside the universe of the couple. That that's also an important part with his work, that how do they see each other and how do they see each other when the group identity comes in and how does the group see them? They actually perhaps want to be, in the space of not wanting to be Hindu or not wanting to be Muslim, experienced that some of them were having debates about what kind of rituals can be allowed in the house and how are things different. But they were talking about it. So there were different ways in which they were negotiating the conflicts and expressing themselves.

Tracy Morgan (48:47)

Right? That's right. I have a quote from you. I hope that this work can make people rethink that. When the political is personal, when there's a disavowed gap between your politics and your feelings, then something remains incomplete since there is a refusal to recognize what one is choosing to disavow. I like that very much. And that was you responding to your experience early. What motivated the, you know, in part this. This exploration, this research was being in the hospital with your psychotic patient, right, who's making comments about the dirty Muslim women and. And your own thinking. You got curious, like, what is this part, you know, what is this dirty part of myself that I'm attributing to these women? That was very.

Dr. Ashis Roy (49:32)

The paranoia that got created when the schizophrenic patient said that now there will be flies, which is a very, very subtle, but a very deep paranoid moment, that now something is really going to contaminate, you know, this environment. And it made me curious that how do people go beyond this? But I must also say that my research also made me see that different generations have very different understandings of what a Hindu Muslim relationship is. And the authors that I quote, and if I met them personally, they would say that we have never experienced any negative feelings towards a Muslim. Similarly, if you talk to people of, you know, say, somebody who would be like a grandparent and who used to live in Pakistan, they would say that we never experienced any of those feelings because they were like brothers. So I think different generations also have very different understandings and translations. Of what? Of the bitterness and of the love.

Tracy Morgan (50:39)

Right, right. And there's always bitterness. There's always bitterness in. In love. It's. It's sort of a part of it. I was just thinking that how we met was through Neil Altman, who connected us. And we spent time reading the work of Fakhry Davids in a reading group. It Was really great to read your inclusion of his thinking in his book Internal Racism. Yeah. And just all that he kind of puts out there that in fact, I.

Dr. Ashis Roy (51:13)

Mean.

Tracy Morgan (51:15)

These Pakistanis and these two, I mean to like the really ignorant American eye, it's like, aren't they the same people? Right? Like seeing from the outside, it's like. But they are, you know, just like Palestinians and Israelis. Like, aren't they the same, you know? Yeah, and often very much so that we're. I mean my background is in, you know, my family is from Ireland. Part of my family's from Ireland. Like the north and the south, like they're just, you know, they're interimplicated, that they don't exist without each other. But also they need, they need, they need the otherness. So I wanted, before we started the interview, I spoke to Ashes and I said that I'd been to a wedding last night and which was really perfect for setting myself up for this interview because watching people get married is, you know, it's something, it's like I kind of dread weddings. But you never know. Could be fun, you know, could be. It's not an, you know, it's not an Indian, not a four day wedding. This is just a five hours, you know, it's a short thing and it's just, it's over and done with. Just as the, just as the Indian wedding is just getting started. This one.

Dr. Ashis Roy (52:28)

Weddings that end in two minutes, and there are also those, and you can miss them involve only the tying of what is called the Mangal Sutra or the Taliyah, which is like a sacred thread. And you can actually miss it because that is the most significant part of the ceremony. So there are weddings like that also.

Tracy Morgan (52:51)

Do they tie the hand by hand?

Dr. Ashis Roy (52:53)

No, it's like just tying the groom ties a necklace around the bride's neck and that's the most important part. And it's barely two minutes. And so because India has so many parts, but if you attend a north Indian wedding, it's going to be many days.

Tracy Morgan (53:10)

Right? Okay, got it, got it. I'm thinking of the, the Indian weddings that I have heard about, listen to patients plan that are here in America. They are four day events and somebody rents an elephant. Okay. Like I don't know how this happens in the Midwest, but I've seen photographs of it happening. But I wanted to do something I've never done today and I mentioned this in advance. So it's in response to this wedding last night. And this wedding is a wedding of one of our colleagues and he and his husband were married. And there's the dance with the mother. And, you know, each man, you know, each groom dances with his mother. I'm going to play some. A little music, and then we'll reconnect and close up. But so I wrote down a little something. I had a front row seat last night. One of these men is white and from the Midwest, and one is Latino, I believe, raised in the east coast, and I believe they're of different religious backgrounds. So I had a front row seat to the power of familial embrace, which is at the heart, in part, at the heart of your book. What is. How does the family impact the family's reaction, which is, of course, impacted by the social and by the cultural and by the political norms impact the couple. And I saw this familial embrace because it's not inevitable, right, that gay people's families of origins celebrate them. And I watch as our colleague dance with his mother. And I'm going to choke up. I mean, it was so beautiful. He did so, too. A song that weaves together some of the themes in your book about interreligious marriage under not optimal political conditions and your study of these couples and the risk they take to intermarry. Anyway, now, I've never done this before. I hope there's no copyright issue. But the song is God Only Knows by the Beach Boys and written by Brian Wilson, who was a lifelong participant in a. The Talking Cure. He suffered from schizophrenia, actually, and he was kind of a musical genius. But I guess I'm gonna. Let me see if I can. I hope I can get this right. Okay. Ashes, we're gonna. We're gonna do an experiment. We're experimenting here. And I'm not gonna play the whole song. We're just gonna play a little bit, and then I'll fade out, hopefully. And then maybe we'll close out. But it just seems so. Like God only knows. Here are these couples coming together from different gods and so beautiful and painful. Okay, so see? Yeah. Is this gonna work? Is it not gonna work? Come on. Can you hear it? It won't come through to you. No. Really?

Dr. Ashis Roy (56:24)

I may not always come here. Some healthy. I don't see. Know what I mean?

Tracy Morgan (57:03)

That's a first. You're on new books and psychoanalysis. I just sang what no one will ever be able to see. I just. I just lip synced the whole thing to Ashes. And he was, like, smiling, and I just had to do that. Ashes, I just. Because God only knows, like God only knows what we'd be without each other in. In, you know, in most difficult circumstances that you. It's sort of just, thanks for letting me do that. I guess. I mean, I really just did it. I just was so filled up with the. Watching this couple marry and watching. And this was a song that my. This colleague was dancing with his mother. And it begins with, I may not always love you. And they just dance through the whole song. God only knows what I'd be without you. And the beauty of the mother embracing her gay son, who's wearing a leather harness, like, from, like the leather world, the kink world, and embracing her son and dancing. And I thought, this is. This is as good as it gets. And this is what these couples in your book didn't get overall. And it's something that you gave to them, I think, in spending time with them and giving voice to their lives.

Dr. Ashis Roy (58:40)

Yeah, that's a very beautiful way of carving the work. And I'm so. It's very touching that watching this wedding pulled you into it in this way.

Tracy Morgan (58:53)

Oh, yeah. I just. Everyone wept because of the knowing if the mother wasn't there, how painful would that wedding be? The mother would refuse to come to the wedding because her son is marrying a man. The pain that would ensue would be enormous. And this. And the mother just loves her son, loves her son in law. You could feel it. You know, she's not a woman. You know, she's a woman from a generation where that's not inevitable that she's embracing her son. And I, I thought this makes this love between these two men so much stronger. And, and, and your book describes the. The pain of, you know, what is. What's it like when you go without that?

Dr. Ashis Roy (59:41)

So I think you said at some point that sexuality has to be forbidden. And here forbiddenness finds some kind of personnel.

Tracy Morgan (59:52)

Yes.

Dr. Ashis Roy (59:55)

And sexuality also celebrated if it's just forbidden, that it can keep a negative identity or become something else. But I think the joy and the celebration is so important.

Tracy Morgan (60:07)

That's right. That's right. And in fact, they did a hand binding at the beginning of the ceremony with a leather. Because they're into leather. They had their hands bound in leather. And I thought, this is happening and the mother's here. And I was like, wow, you know, it was just. It was. It was really just gorgeous. So. All right, listen, my love. It was been. I just called it my love. I love ashes. He's very. To me, Ash is a very lovable guy. And we've been very fortunate that we've met and had the chance to be in each other's lives. And I think you're going to interview me eventually. Is that correct? So we just tell we're all about turning the tables. Okay. As best we can, which will be.

Dr. Ashis Roy (60:56)

Fine song for that interview.

Tracy Morgan (60:58)

I think you're gonna need a good second song or two. Cry me a river, I don't know. Oh, yeah. So, okay. So everybody, I am just delighted that you've all been here to listen and to take in this interview. Go get a copy of the book. It's actually being, it's I. There's a number of reviews of it at this point, which is great. You want to say where the reviews are. Do you know?

Dr. Ashis Roy (61:29)

One of them is in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, some in Indian media. One is upcoming in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. And there is an interview on IPA off the Couch by Harvey Schwartz.

Tracy Morgan (61:44)

Right.

Dr. Ashis Roy (61:45)

That's going to be this interview. So.

Tracy Morgan (61:47)

Yeah. Yeah. Good.

Dr. Ashis Roy (61:49)

I hope.

Tracy Morgan (61:49)

I'm hopeful that you'll get more reviews and, and that people will go out and get the book and, and learn from it, experience it. Okay. All right. Dear listeners, till next time, this is Tracy Morgan, your host for today, signing off after an interview with Dr. Ashas Roy.