Sunday, June 10, 2001		Article

ANY whodunit pales in comparison to the recent mystery surrounding the monkey man. Much in line with other events that have generated a mass hysteria across the world—right from the incidents wherein the idols of Lord Ganesha are supposed to have drunk milk from the hands of devotees to the sheer schizophrenia which had engulfed the minds of Malaysians that their genitals were shrinking—the human mind has been prone to an illogical belief in certain irrational and inexplicable happenings. Such incidents may remain unaccounted for and unexplained by science but could be open to certain riveting psychoanalytic conclusions.

One incident which has fired the imagination of the entire nation and has gripped the psyche of thousands of people in our national capital is the alleged appearance of a monkey man, half animal and half human, a nocturnal creature who is believed to have attacked a number of people at night.

Here comes the monkey man, the very epitome of fear, anxiety and horror unlimited, descending out of the blue to disrupt the lives of those who are already racked by the specter of poverty and deprivation, squalor and despair. Newspaper barons, television pundits and media moguls go berserk in the race to unearth the genealogical roots of a creature who defies all attempts at definition and appears to be a curio – a cross-breed of human, animal, cosmic and demonic species. The witness accounts vary, as human intelligence holds parleys with the fuzzy world of fantasy and hallucination.

A frightening unanimity emerges in the description of his appearance—he is as dark as the night, as hairy as a jungle and as shadowy as the mind of man. Add to this the steel grip of pointed claws and you’ll arrive at the jagged edge of an arena where reason succumbs to irrationality, sanity is smothered by insomnia and civility is overtaken by the sheer strength of muscle power. He is straight out of our comic scrapbooks—as agile as a leopard, as flexible as the Spiderman and as omnipotent as the phantom, just appearing from nowhere and jumping from one house to another with elan to attack people when they are asleep. He remains elusive and escapes the clutches of information science and law-enforcement bodies.

Responses begin to converge on one point: the monkey man is the byproduct of a scientific technology conjoined with the machinations of a devilish Mephistopheles—the classical literary figure who had bartered his soul to the devil in lieu of knowledge and power. The creature is supposed to be fitted with a remote-control device, all his misdemeanors generated by the workings of a computer. Those who have remained untouched by the magical vibrations of the silicon chip now designate the same with ominous proportions. The smithy of the human mind churns out a reactionary alloy of resentment and wrath aimed at those who have denuded them access to the fruit of development and globalization. The stride ahead in economic growth and technological progress has failed to pierce the gloom of lives unrelieved by the light of joy and upliftment, of expansion and liberation. On the other hand, the megalomania generated by the Monkey Man could be a manifestation of what has been termed in psychiatric terms as a "Cognitive Dissonance" proposed by Zillmann and other psychoanalysts which attempts to account for the complex interplay between emotional arousal, frustration, insecurity and anger. It is not very difficult to co-relate such a behavioral aberration on our part in every day conduct and the extent to which this is supposed to find expression in aggressive reactions which may be partly in the nature of a catharsis which rids you of fear and anxiety. So here comes the Monkey Man appearing as the personification of a civilization gone awry and of mechanization gone haywire, displaying the virulent face of a sub-human species masquerading as the human form.

A resolution appears to be near at hand, even as the anthropological antecedents of the Monkey Man retain no further need of justifiable explications. And this happens when ‘Man’ realizes that the ‘Monkey’ is holding up a mirror to him and the assertion of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst begins to ring anew that there comes a mirror-phase in man’s life when self-identification ensues from misrecognition, discovering in the repulsive attributes of ‘the Other’, irrevocable components of ‘the Self’. And so, perhaps, the Monkey Man lies within us, like the silhouette of a shadow that is to be exorcised but cannot be wished away. It’s to be reverted from the course of its regressive indulgence in injustice and discrimination, violence and hostility, corruption and avarice, in order to usher in an egalitarian parity in the distribution of our human, natural and technological resources, as well as the sweet fruit of labor and aspiration.

And yes, the search continues, perhaps endlessly, now well beyond the borders of Delhi, striving to find the root cause of all our maladies, both of the body and mind and of that twilight zone of imagination.