Society
Kakar off the couch
Aruti Nayar

Meeting Sudhir Kakar, the psychoanalyst and writer who has the distinction of viewing Western Freudian psychoanalyst techniques through the prism of Indian myths and socio-cultural matrix, is a unique experience.

The writer was recently in Chandigarh to deliver a lecture on the psychoanalysis of Tagore's paintings at the Lalit Kala Akademi. He unravelled the multiple layers of Tagore as the man and as an artist.

Kakar succeeded in making the talk engaging even for those uninitiated in both painting and psychoanalysis.

Gently, he lets on that in the process of writing and analysing, he too psychoanalyses himself. Just as in his fiction, he is the writer and in his non-fiction the analyst.

The pioneering work Kakar did was to put culture-specific variants as a vital part of the psychoanalytical process, as opposed to a primarily individualistic Western world view. His riveting autobiography The Book of Memory, has a narrative that is not a linear account but one that meanders just as consciousness does. Even chronology is in terms not of time alone but of psychic time and inner growth. It's almost as if Kakar is confessing before the readers and watching his own processes. What defines him and his work best is the presence of India and Indianness, as he says, "For though my head was filled with the intellectual excitement of the West, India was still an overpowering emotional presence."

If the shadow of Partition violence falls on his childhood years, the Ahmedabad riots lead to his book Colours of Violence, an analysis of the triggers of communal tension. It is in his fiction that Kakar finds expression of creativity. He is diffident about submitting himself "to the tyranny of the footnote."

Indian society is passing through a phase of change as joint families and extended families give way to nuclear units or even single-parent units. As a socio-cultural anthropologist who has a deep insight into the evolution and growth of the Indian society as well as the Indian psyche, his observations are sharp. Excerpts from an interview:

Given that our society is in flux, until such time as the balance or moral compass is restored, will there be all chaos? Will the notion of morality become highly individual?

Individual morality is an invitation to social chaos. If we cannot predict how other people will react to the same moral dilemmas, the basic trust in human interactions gets lost. We need to develop a moral compass, a modern dharma that retains valuable elements from traditional dharma while replacing its unacceptable and regressive aspects, such as the position and role of women (stridharma) or of castes (varnadharma), with modern egalitarian notions.

Can we move from a kinship-based culture to an individualised social set-up, given the fact that ‘many centuries co-exist in India’?

Some movement towards individualisation is inevitable. It is highly undesirable that this movement does not take an extreme form where kinship ties play a very small role. An 'I', ‘me’ and ‘mine’ culture makes for a brutal society, lacking care and compassion. Those are what hold a society together.

As a psychoanalyst, if you were to give the most important markers of the decades after Independence, what would they be?

Acceptance that girls also need to be educated.
Acceptance that girls may work outside home in professions that are not traditionally feminine, such as teaching or nursing.
Acceptance that the needs of a couple and the wider family need to be better balanced.
A gradual decline of prudery.

Has not the governing class let our youth down, as was apparent post-Delhi rape case. Will India be equipped to reap the demographic dividend, given the large component of a youth population?

Very much so. The demographic dividend is a myth if all it produces is a horde of poorly educated and unemployable youth. That is a powder keg waiting to explode and not a dividend.

What do you find gratifying , fiction or non-fiction?

I like writing both since they have different combinations of reason and imagination. The intellectual pleasure of exercising discursive thought is more predominant in non-fiction, while the sensual pleasure of letting imagination, which propels one beyond prosaic reasonableness into a less tangible world of emotions, dreams, suggestions, and impressions where there is no rigid separation between self and ‘not-self,’ is more characteristic of fiction.

Reason and imagination are not opposed but complementary. The English poet John Keats visualised as an ideal a smoothly working partnership between the two, holding that a truly complex mind would be "one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits" and would exist "partly on sensations and partly on thought."

The enemy of imagination is not reason but its overbearing, over-critical form that disparages the illogical and the incongruent, smothers spontaneity and feeling, banishes the poetical, excludes all tendencies toward symbol and metaphor, and acknowledges the primacy of only the statistical and the quantifiable. If the pathological form of imagination is delusion, then that of reason is obsession.

As you mentioned, Shaman, Mystics and Doctors is your favourite (because it gave you an opportunity to meet all those amazing people), as is the memoir The Book of Memory. Which book has evoked the maximum reader response?

The non-fiction books that are still in print and have been translated into many languages are: The Inner World, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Intimate Relations and The Colours of Violence. Of the fiction, the most translated is Mira and The Mahatma and with most response in India, The Crimson Throne.

What is the future of psychoanalysis in India? How do you reconcile the Freudian emphasis on sexuality with the Indian emphasis on religion?

The future of psychoanalysis is linked with the pace of individualisation in our society. Psychoanalysis, we know, is informed by a vision of human experience that emphasises man’s individuality and his self-contained psyche. In the psychoanalytic vision, each of us lives in our own subjective world, pursuing pleasures and private fantasies, constructing a life and a fate that will vanish when our time is over. This view emphasises the desirability of reflective awareness of one’s inner states, an insistence that our psyches harbour deeper secrets than we care to confess, the existence of an objective reality that can be known, and an essential complexity and tragedy of life whereby many wishes are fated to remain unfulfilled. The greater the number of people who adopt this vision of the person, the brighter the future for psychoanalysis.

As for sexuality and religion or, better, sexuality and spirituality, they are not opposed but complementary, just like earth and sky. This complementarity, which we once had in our society, say between the 3rd and 12th centuries, is perhaps most evident in the Sanskrit kavyas or the temples of Konarak. It is this that needs to be reclaimed.

What does the future hold for psychoanalysis?

What the gene was to the 20th century, the brain will be to the 21st. Brain imaging reveals childhood memories to be more crucial than was earlier believed. Because of the recent developments in biology and neurosciences, there are chances of more collaboration between disciplines and of biologists looking at the hypotheses about the mind. There is scope for partnerships between biology, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences.

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