While examining the Bose-Freud correspondence — letters that the latter exchanged with Girindrasekhar Bose, the founder of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, between 1921 and, possibly, 1937 — one is struck by its felicitous tone. On more than one occasion, Bose expressed his gratitude to Freud for taking an interest in his work. Occasionally, Freud responded in a manner that was uncharacteristic of his usual cool self. For instance, on receiving the gift of an ivory statue from Bose and others in the IPS, he writes on December 13,1931, “I feel gratefully elated and accept these presents, as a kind of compensation for the sad fact that I have no chance of ever meeting you or any other member of your society.”

It is tempting to argue that this felicity camouflaged an intellectual closeness — structurally unequal — that was characteristic of the colonial times. Another letter, written in January 1933, reveals Freud’s disapproval of Bose’s reconceptualization of the Oedipus complex. Discussing Bose’s theory of “opposite wishes” — the desire to be male being accompanied by a desire to be female, thereby mitigating the fear of castration, which, the Freudian school emphasized, was a universal phenomenon — Freud stated that Bose’s theory lacked empirical evidence and was also inadequate in explaining anxiety and repression. On the other side, the resistance Freudian thought encountered in India among the early practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as among such literary icons as Rabindranath Tagore was layered, but not irreversible. This resistance, as is demonstrated in Santanu Biswas’s paper titled “Rabindranath Tagore and Freudian Thought”, has been complicated by the fact that Tagore in the years before his death developed a keen interest in psychoanalysis as a tool to examine literature.

Tagore’s initial dismissal of the psychoanalytical tradition can be gauged from his adverse reaction to a paper presented by Sarasi Lal Sarkar, who argued that structural peculiarities in the poet’s verse were a reflection of his unconscious. In a letter to Kadambini Datta on May 29, 1927, Tagore wrote, “A poem is admired for the enjoyment it imparts: we derive enjoyment by savouring it and not by analyzing it.” But by 1940, encouraged by Amiya Chakravarty who was more receptive to Freudian theory, Tagore began to explore the role of psychoanalysis in modern Bengali poetry in his essay “Nabajuger Kabya”. When he wrote the preface for Nouka Dubi, he chose to describe the narrative technique as manobikalanmulak, translating it as psychoanalytical. His emphasis on the inwardness of his characters and on experimentation in the preface to the novel, Chokher Bali, is an earlier aspect of the same exploration. In the short story, “Laboretori” (1940), a professor states, “It is in our nature to see things in their totality. We are scientists.” This is another instance of the revision within Tagore’s own thought since that note to Datta in 1927. He seems to have shed his ambivalence towards ‘analysis’ as a tool of enquiry.

Looking back at Tagore in relation to Freud and the Bose-Freud correspondence is instructive in two ways. First, Tagore’s inner transformation as well as Freud’s belated acknowledgment of the possibilities within Bose’s theory reveal their capacity to restructure their own thought in the light of new discoveries. Second, at a time when many Freudian ideas have been brought under strain, it is the analysis of India’s culture of resistance that, ironically, exposes the excitement that greeted the discovery of psychoanalysis in what Freud had called a “far-off country”.