Book Reviews : RAJAT KANTA RAY, Exploring Emotional History: Gender, Mentality and Literature in the Indian Awakening, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 333

Abstract

drive which drowns any social system in chaos if not regulated-has been made before by psychoanalytical history. Ray unfortunately relies primarily on Freud when he conflates the social regulation of the human sexual urges and the subsequent transubstantiation of this basic drive into expressed and unexpressed emotions that may be enunciated, involuntarily spilled, or explosively ejected in private or public domains. Ray’s exposition on the way in which emotions undergird the two constituting factors at the base of all social systems-gender and class-is thought-provoking. He rightly holds that status and power, not just simplistic economic determinism, define class as a fundamental category. From the complex variations of class interlocking with caste across the Indian subcontinent, Ray detaches the region-specific social hierarchy prevalent in Bengal and attempts to locate emotions within this matrix. This conjoining of the manner of emotional locution in both public and private spaces to the caste structure with its unique ordering of sexual relations, its negotiations with hierarchical power structures, and the creation of space for the sexual exploitation of the lower castes by the higher castes, has not been attempted as a serious intellectual exercise before this.