Manisha Roy recounts stories from her life, gathered around each of her four “homes.” The first two reflect her early life, visiting her grandparents in villages in what was then the eastern part of Bengal. She recalls the traditions, rituals, and mores of a well-to-do Indian family as she experienced them during her formative years. Her intelligence and curiosity set her on a path to academia, and she broke away, at great personal cost, thwarting the expectations of her family and culture and setting out to work, to love, and to see the world. In this memoir of a Bengali woman, she eventually finds her own inner home and herself in Carl Jung’s psychology and in the process of becoming a Jungian analyst.
Manisha Roy, PhD, is a geographer, anthropologist, and Jungian psychotherapist in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been a training analyst and on the faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of Boston for thirty years. She has taught at universities in the United States, India, and Switzerland and lectured all over the world. She is the author of several books and many articles. Bengali Women, first published in 1976 and frequently used in women’s studies courses, is in its second edition and still in print.