Sarah Pinto is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India: Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014, winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).
A richly layered, rigorous, often surprising, delightful romp of a book that will appeal to a wide range of readers.---Lucinda Ramberg, Cornell University, Sarah Pinto's brilliant third volume on women's lives in India sets three time horizons in conversation with one another: the tense 1940s just before Partition; the mythic figures of Draupadi, Shakuntala, and Ahayla; and today's women, including the author and a wonderful meditation using artist Shahzia Shikander's imagery of gopi hair. Dev Satya Nand, a psychoanalyst, and Mrs. A., a twenty-one-year-old regretting her marriage and the foreclosure of college ambitions, and in thrall to Nehru and Hindu socialism, together reinvent Freud's methods and set the volume in motion.---Michael M. J. Fischer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Doctor and Mrs. A ventures to show us not only the relevance of intimate thoughts and emotions for the development of social and ethical theory, but also what a more liberated and creative form of social analysis might look like. It is a book that should be of interest not only to South Asianists, but to anyone who is interested in how culture and history gets under the skin and or how people are capable of reimagining the worlds into which they have been thrown.--Medical Anthropology Quarterly