Considered one of India's leading intellectuals, Sudhir Kakar is also an accomplished novelist, scholar and translator. His multi-disciplinary background is reflected in his writings which capture the imagination of readers and those interested in the world
of ideas.
Excerpts from an interview:
Q. You were trained as an engineer and then an economist before taking up psychoanalysis. You have said that it was the psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, who motivated the change. Can you tell us about this meeting and how it affected you?
In 1964, I returned to India from Germany after a five-year stay in which I completed my Master's degree in economics, a subject I disliked as much as I had disliked my earlier studies in mechanical engineering in Gujarat. Back in India as a Research Fellow at the newly set up IIM, Ahmedabad, I could not settle down to what appeared to others as the start of a promising career. Put simply, I was having an 'identity crisis' and I was lucky to meet the person who had coined the term - the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, then a professor of human development at Harvard who was in Ahmedabad for a few months to work on his book on Gandhi. He agreed to take me on as his assistant at Harvard and I began my journey for becoming a psychoanalyst.
I like to believe that across the gulf in our ages, cultures and ethnicities, Erikson sensed in me a kindred spirit whose travel through life was not destined to be in a straight line but to take a zigzag course that would often deviate from the main road to explore by lanes even when some of these ultimately turned out to be dead ends. I am glad that I took the risk of giving up established career paths to pursue my heart's desire even if I did not know where I would end up. Perhaps one never goes as far as when one doesn't know where one is going.
Q. The concept of psychoanalysis is not clear to everyone. How would you define and simplify it?
Psychoanalysis is at the same time a theory of the mind and a method of psychotherapy, the 'talking cure'. Psychoanalysis is based on three basic assumptions, which have lately received considerable support from the neurosciences.
1. The crucial role our unconscious, the hidden part of our minds, plays in our lives and its relationship, often conflicted, with the conscious part of the mind.
2. The decisive influence of early childhood on our personality and adult behavior.
3. The importance of sexual desire-Kama, and of aggression, in human motivation.
Essential to psychoanalysis is the view that the process of self-understanding, of insight, of coming to know oneself or even of attempting to do so, is essential to the restoration of our well being. Painful emotions can be best eliminated if they
are understood.
Q. How is Indian psychoanalysis different from the classical/ Freudian
psychoanalysis?
Although the foundations of psychoanalysis are universal, its superstructure is affected by culture. In other words, psychoanalysis, like all other modern psychotherapies, contains many Western cultural ideas and ideals that permeate its theories and practice. Fundamental ideas about human relationships, family, marriage, male and female and so on, which are essentially cultural in origin often remain unexamined and are regarded as universally valid.
Let us take only one important example: relationships.
The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones, and the distress aroused by their unavailability in times of need is much stronger in India than in Western societies. (I am primarily talking of North European and North American societies). To borrow a metaphor from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: human beings are like hedgehogs on a cold night. They approach each other for warmth, get pricked by the quills of the other, and move away until, feeling cold, they again come closer. This to-and-fro movement keeps being repeated until an optimum position is reached wherein the body temperature is above the freezing point yet the pain inflicted by the quills-the nearness of the other-is still bearable. The balancing point not only varies with individuals but also varies with different cultures. In India, for example, as compared to modern European and North American cultures, the optimum position entails the acceptance of more pain in the family and other relationships in order to get greater emotional warmth.
Q. Would you recommend psychoanalysis as a career to others? Why?
Given the amount of effort and length of time it takes to become a psychoanalyst, anything from five to 10 years, I would recommend the profession only to those who are passionately interested in understanding the deeper parts of themselves, the unconscious drivers of their lives. This increase in self understanding is not only a matter of studying texts but ?occurs in the years of personal analysis of three to four one-hour sessions per week that every intending analyst must go through to enter
the profession.
Q. What is the nature of Indianness? What was it earlier and where does it stand now?
Many of my writings have been on Indian identity or Indian-ness. Some of the key building blocks of Indian-ness or more specifically a Hindu-Indian identity are: an ideology around personal and especially family relationships that derives from the institution of the joint family, a view of social relations profoundly influenced by the institution of caste, an image of the human body and bodily processes that is based on the medical system of Ayurveda, an imagination teeming with shared myths and legends, especially from the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, and a special cast to the mind that prefers a relativistic, contextual way of thinking, ie a thinking not in terms of universals, in clear cut 'yes' or 'no' but in terms of 'It depends.' To different extents, this Indianness is also shared by other religious communities. An Indian Christian or Muslim has psychologically more in common with a Hindu than his or her religious compatriots in Europe.
Q. How has your experience as a psychoanalyst contributed to your fiction writing?
It was relatively late in life that I began to write novels. This move allowed a long cut-off part of myself to re-emerge and claim its rightful place. I had written and published short stories in German in my twenties as a student in Germany (not very good stories, I might add) and had even received a fellowship for young writers to spend three months in the south
of France.
It was a heady voyage, then, when at the age of sixty I began writing my first novel, 'The Ascetic of Desire', a fictionalised biography of Vatsyayana, the author of 'The Kama Sutra'. Fictionalised biography is perhaps too august a phrase for a novel where the only information about its chief protagonist is contained in a sentence in 'The Kama Sutra' which says that its author "composed it in chastity and in the highest meditation."
All the other novels that followed can be said to belong to the genre of historical fiction or fictionalised biography: Ramakrishna and Vivekananda in 'Ecstasy', Gandhi and Mirabehn in 'Mira and the Mahatma', Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb in 'The Crimson Throne', the Sanskrit poet Bharatrihari in 'The Devil Take Love' and Rudyard Kipling in 'The Kipling File'. I love doing research into life and letters of different historical periods, an enterprise that provides a comforting sense of familiarity, while I embark on the adventure of giving a free rein to the imagination that seeks to transform this material into fiction.
I don't know the role the psychoanalyst in me has played in the writings of the novelist. Certainly both seek to capture the inner life - of the patient in the analyst's case and the character in case of the novelist. But they do this in very different ways and in very different languages.
Q. From all the characters you have written which other character besides Ramakrishna do you like or connect with?
The other character I deeply connect with is Gandhi. A passionate man with an overweening conscience that magnified each departure from an unattainable ideal of purity as a momentous lapse, a sensualist who felt his sensuality distorted his inner purpose, I admire Gandhi's heroic, life long struggle with Kama, the god of desire. One cannot but be moved by Gandhi's periods of despair, when the integration of his sensuality and spirituality would be threatened and we find him obsessively agonising over the problem of his sexual desire, looking within to find where he had slipped from his ideal of celibacy.
Q. What in your opinion is the difference between religion and spirituality?
Religion enjoins a believer to have faith in a set of dogmas that may not be questioned. Spirituality is more of an intuitive experience or feeling unconnected to beliefs, holy books or religious institutions. Spirituality has no rituals, no dogmas and does not even require a belief in God. For me, the spiritual is a continuum of loving connectedness-to nature, art, visions of philosophy or science and, above all, to other human beings. We normally fail to acknowledge the presence of the spiritual in everyday life, moments of self transcending feelings of connectedness, since we are accustomed to think of the spiritual in terms of its highest manifestation: the mystical union where there is no distinction between "I" and "You". Spirituality, though, is not a mystical moment but a continuum. One can compare it to a mountain climb with many base camps marking its progress on the way. The first camp from which one cannot see the summit, covered as it is by clouds, though we know it is there, is tolerance, defined minimally as giving the benefit of the doubt to the other. The second camp, a little higher, can be said to be compassion, while the third and the last camp from where one climbs to the summit is empathy, the 'feeling into' another person, although of course, empathy can also encompass a 'feeling into' nature. The point is that the spiritual climb fosters deeper and deeper feelings of loving connectedness although only a few, rare saints can reach the summit of what has been called 'unio mystica'. Most of us can consider ourselves fortunate if we can catch a glimpse of the peak from the base camps of tolerance, compassion
and empathy.
Q. What are your impressions of the current political and social scenario?
To me the most worrying part of the current scenario is not any new problem but an old still festering issue which Gandhi diagnosed in 1924 when he wrote: "I see no way of achieving anything in this afflicted country without a lasting heart unity between Hindus and Mussalmans. There is no question more important and more pressing than this. In my opinion, it blocks all progress."
Almost a hundred years later, we are still stuck in the same communal quagmire. Compared to the Hindu-Muslim issue, the venality of many unprincipled politicians, especially in our beautiful Goa, is almost a minor concern and one for which, in any case, we should accept the blame for repeatedly electing them. I still have hope in the younger generation to bring about at least some sorely needed changes. In all societies it is primarily the youth that sends fresh impulses of renewal into a moribund social and
political order.