by Sudhir Kakar
If truth is relative, something you are never destined to know, then there is no choice but to be tolerant of the truth of others. The story of the six blind men who argued over the nature of an elephant, based on which part of the beast each man had explored with his hands, is a cautionary tale that could only be Hindu in its inspiration. The roots of the vaunted Hindu tolerance, then, may well lie in this context-dependent way of thinking. Yet because of its intimate connection with matters of religious faith, to a person’s deepest values, this particular civilizational heritage of ethical action being inseparable from its context does show some variation across religious communities.
We see this when we look at the moral judgements of Hindus and Muslims on their interactions with each other, both in times of peace and conflict.9 There are many such interactions in normal times: eating with a member of the opposite community, working with him, punishing a member of the other community who is making fun of your religious symbols or insulting a woman of your community. And then there are the interactions during a riot: killing, arson and rape. As compared to the Muslims, the Hindus were much more relativistic and contextual in judging a behaviour as a transgression and more easy-going in proposing punishment for actions judged as wrong. Irrespective of age and gender, ‘It all depends’ was an almost reflexive response. When it came to cases of interaction with the Muslims, the answers were almost always framed in terms of a context, temporal or spatial. The linkage of morality with time would be typically expressed thus: ‘[Killing] was wrong when times were different but it is not wrong now.’ The individual can thus convincingly state that an action is wrong in right times but right in wrong times. Similarly, space is also involved in moral judgements. Hindus often said that actions such as beating up a Muslim or arson or looting of Muslim shops during a riot were wrong if you lived in a Muslim-majority area but all right if you were living in a Hindu-majority neighbourhood. As a result of this contextual stance, wrong actions by the members of one’s own community evoked far less emotion and righteousness than the corresponding actions among the Muslims. In this particular instance Muslims were more definite and unambiguous about which actions were right and which were clearly wrong, even during a riot.
The moral relativism of the Hindu mind is not an absence of moral code but only a more context-sensitive way of looking at and dealing with its violation. In many ways, Hindus are extremely strict in their definition of what constitutes a deviation from morality. Consider a popular story from the Mahabharata, the epic whose centerpiece is the great war between the forces of good and evil, represented by the Pandavas and the Kauravas, respectively. (Of course, given the Hindu penchant for relativity, good and evil are not polar opposites: Yuddhishtira, the most virtuous of the Pandava brothers, who had never told an untruth in his life, was a compulsive gambler; the mighty Bhima could not control his temper; another brother had a roving eye for women.) At one point in the war the Pandava army was being decimated by Drona’s arrows. Drona, the great archer and teacher of both the Pandava and Kaurava princes, was one of the several good men who were fighting on the side of evil in this war, on account of their dharma, their moral duty. The Pandava brothers rushed to Lord Krishna who had agreed to advise them, and asked how they could stop Drona before he destroyed them.
‘There is only one way,’ Lord Krishna said. ‘Drona loves his son Ashwathama more than his life. If he hears that Ashwathama is no more, he will lay down his bow and die.’
‘But why should he believe us?’ the Pandavas asked.
‘The only one he will believe is Yuddhishtira, for every one knows that Yuddhishtira never lies,’ Lord Krishna suggested.
Yuddhishtira, however, refused. ‘I can never tell an untruth, even if it means we will lose this war.’
The Pandava princes again sought Krishna’s counsel.
‘Well,’ said Krishna, ‘You have in your forces an elephant with the same name as Drona’s son. If you kill the elephant, then Yuddhishtira just has to say “Ashwathama is dead” and it will not be a lie.’
Yuddhishtira, however, was stubborn, maintaining that he would be stating a fact, not the truth. After much persuasion and warnings that evil would triumph on earth if he did not help, Yuddhishtira agreed that he would shout out across enemy lines, ‘Ashwathama is dead...’ then add in a normal tone of voice, ‘...but the elephant.’
The elephant was duly killed. Yuddhishtira shouted out the news of Ashwathama’s death; when he came to ‘but the elephant’, the Pandavas began beating the war drums, so that Drona only heard the first part of the sentence. The foremost of archers laid down his bow and died of grief.
Many years after the great war was over and all the protagonists were dead, their souls began the journey to the next world, dropping out one by one on the long way to heaven. Only Yuddhishtira and his dog could come right up to heaven’s gates, even Lord Krishna having to spend a little time in the netherworld for his part in the deceit that led to Drona’s death. At heaven’s gates, Yuddhishtira was told that he would have to spend one day in hell before he could enter.
‘But why?’ the virtuous Yuddhishtira protested. ‘I have never told a lie in my life.’
‘Perhaps,’ he was informed, ‘but on one occasion you did not tell the truth loudly enough.’
It is noteworthy that the virtuous Yuddhishtira had to atone for an almost nonexistent lapse because his context was that of integrity, of the ‘man who never lies’, while Krishna, the Lord of the Universe and thus of its moral order, got away with a slap on the wrist—considering his role in the lie—since his context here was not that of god but of a political and strategic adviser, where deception is de rigeur.
Karma, rebirth and the Indian mind
The third essential idea of the Hindu world view is karma. The popular understanding of karma is expressed by a villager thus: ‘Even at the time of death man should wish to do good deeds and wish to be reborn in a place where he can do good deeds again. After many lives of good deeds [living in dharma] a man will attain mukti (another word for moksha). If he does evil deeds, his form changes till he falls lower, till he becomes a jar [an inanimate thing].’10 Other Hindus, when pressed for their sense of karma, are likely to express the same twin ideas—namely, the cycles of birth and death in which an individual soul progresses (or regresses) through various levels of existence; and the control of this movement by the karma of the individual soul, the balance of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ actions that accompany the individual from one birth to another.
Psychologically, what interests us most in the karma theory is its idea of innate dispositions (samskaras), a heritage of previous life, with which a newborn is believed to come into the world and which imposes certain limits on the socialization of the child. In other words, Indians do not consider infant nature as a tabula rasa which is infinitely malleable and can be moulded in any direction desired by the parents. With the cultural belief in the notion of samskaras, there is little social pressure to foster the belief that if only the caretakers were good enough and constantly on their toes, the child would fulfil all his potential. With the Indian emphasis on man’s inner limits, there is not that sense of urgency and the struggle against the outside world that often seem to propel Western lives. Let us tell another story.
On the bank of the Ganga, there once lived a holy man called Yajnavalkya together with his wife. One day, as he was meditating, he felt something small and soft fall into the nest of his hands. He opened his eyes and saw that it was a small female mouse which must have fallen down from the claws of an eagle circling above. The holy man took pity on the mouse, and using his occult powers, transformed it into a small girl and took her home. The girl grew up as the daughter of the house, and when she reached marriageable age, Yajnavalkya’s wife reproached him one day, saying, ‘Don’t you see your daughter is mature now and needs a husband?’ Yajnavalkya answered, ‘You are right. I have decided that she should have the best possible husband in all the worlds.’ He th
en called the sun-god and when he appeared Yajnavalkya said, ‘I have chosen you as my son-in-law.’ He then turned to the girl and asked her, ‘Would you like the light of three worlds as your husband?’ But she answered, ‘Ah father, he is much too plump and red-faced. Find me another husband.’ The holy man smiled and asked the sun whether he knew of anyone who was better than him. The sun answered, ‘O, holy man! The cloud is even stronger than I am, for it can cover me.’ Yajnavalkya called the god of clouds, but once again when he asked his daughter’s consent she replied, ‘Oh, father, he looks much too morose. Find me a better husband.’ Yajnavalkya asked the cloud whether there was someone in the world better than he. The cloud answered, ‘The mountain is certainly better, for it can stop me.’ The holy man called the mountain god, but the moment he appeared the girl cried out, ‘Oh, Father, he is too massive and clumsy! Find me a better husband.’ Yajnavalkya’s patience was nearly exhausted, but since he loved his daughter, he asked the mountain whether he knew of someone who was even better. The mountain answered, ‘The mouse can bore as many holes in me as it wants to. Considering that, it must be stronger than I am.’ Yajnavalkya called the mouse, and as soon as the girl saw him, she exclaimed, ‘Father! This is the only husband I can be happy with. Ah, can’t you change me into a mouse?’ The holy man fulfilled her wish. And as the two mice disappeared into the bushes, he walked back home, smiling to himself and saying, ‘Although the sun, the cloud and the mountain stood before her as suitors, the mouse-girl needed to become a mouse again. Her innate nature could not be denied.’
The karmic balance from a previous life and thus the innate dispositions with which one enters the present one serve to make a Hindu more accepting of the inevitable disappointments that afflict even the most fortunate of lives. Yet whereas the notion of inherited dispositions can console and help to heal, it can also serve the purpose of denial of individual responsibility. Thus a thirty-year-old woman patient in psychotherapy, becoming aware of her aggressive impulses towards her husband as revealed in a dream, spontaneously exclaimed, ‘Ah, these are due to my bad samskaras. However hard I try to be a good wife, my bad samskaras prevent me.’11
I AND THE OTHER: SEPARATION AND CONNECTION
If each one of us begins life as a mystic, awash in a feeling of pervasive unity where there is no distance between ourselves and the outer world, then the process of sorting out a ‘me’ from ‘not-me’ is one of the primary tasks of our earliest years. The task involves the recognition, later taken for granted (at least in most of our waking hours and in a state of relative sanity), that I am separate from all that is not-I, that my ‘Self’ is not merged with but detached from the ‘Other.’ The experience of separation has its origins in our beginnings, although its echoes continue to haunt us till the end of life, agitating the mind, at times violently, in times of psychological or spiritual crisis.
The Indian gloss on the dilemmas and pain of banishment from the original feeling of oneness, the exile from the universe, has been to emphasize a person’s enduring connection to nature, the Divine, and all living beings. This unitary vision, of soma and psyche, individual and community, self and world, is present in most forms of popular culture even today. From religious rites to folk festivals, from the pious devotion of communal singing in temples to the orgiastic excesses of holi, the festival of colours, there is a negation of separation and a celebration of connection.
The high cultural value placed on connection is, of course, most evident in the individual’s relationships with others. The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones and the psychological oxygen they provide, is the dominant modality of social relations in India, especially within the extended family. Individuality and independence are not values that are cherished. It is not uncommon for family members who often accompany a patient for a first psychotherapeutic interview to complain about the patient’s autonomy as one of the symptoms of his disorder. Thus the father and elder sister of a twenty-eight-year-old engineer who had a psychotic episode described their understanding of his chief problem as one of unnatural autonomy: ‘He is very stubborn in pursuing what he wants, without taking our wishes into account. He thinks he knows what is best for him and does not listen to us. He thinks his own life and career are more important than the concerns of the rest of the family.’12
The high value placed on connection does not mean that an Indian is incapable of functioning when he is by himself or that he does not have a sense of his own agency. What it does imply is his greater need for ongoing mentorship, guidance and help from others in getting through life and a greater vulnerability to feelings of helplessness when these ties are strained.
The yearning for relationships, for the confirming presence of loved ones and the distress aroused by their unavailability in time of need, are more hidden in Western societies. There the dominant value system prizes autonomy, privacy and self-actualization, and holds that individual independence and initiative are ‘better’ than mutual dependence and community. But it depends, of course, on the culture’s vision of a ‘good society’ and ‘individual merit’ whether a person’s behaviour on the scale between fusion and isolation is nearer the pole of merger and fusion with others or the pole of complete isolation. In other words, the universal polarities of individual versus relational, nearness versus distance in human relationships are prey to culturally fashioned beliefs and expectations. To borrow from Schopenhauer’s imagery, 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 till, feeling cold, they again come closer. This to and fro movement keeps on being repeated till an optimum position is reached where 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 is different in various cultures. In India, as compared to modern European and North American cultures, the optimum position entails the acceptance of more pain in order to get greater warmth.
The emphasis on connection is also reflected in the Indian image of the body, a core element in the development of the mind. As we saw earlier, in the traditional medical system of Ayurveda, everything in the universe, animate or inanimate is believed to be made of five forms of matter. Living beings are only a certain kind of organization of matter. Their bodies constantly absorb the five elements of environmental matter. For Ayurveda, the human body is intimately connected with nature and the cosmos and there is nothing in nature without relevance for medicine. The Indian body image, then, stresses an unremitting interchange taking place with the environment, simultaneously accompanied by a ceaseless change within the body. Moreover, in the Indian view, there is no essential difference between body and mind. The body is merely the gross form of matter (sthulasharira), just as the mind is a more subtle form of the same matter (sukshmasharira); both are different forms of the same body-mind matter—sharira.
In contrast, the Western image is of a clearly etched body, sharply differentiated from the rest of the objects in the universe. This vision of the body as a safe stronghold with a limited number of drawbridges that maintain a tenuous contact with the outside world has its own cultural consequences. It seems to us that in Western discourse, both scientific and artistic, there is considerable preoccupation with what is going on within the fortress of the individual body. Pre-eminently, one seeks to explain behaviour through psychologies that derive from biology—to the relative exclusion of the natural and meta-natural environment. The contemporary search for a genetic basis to all psychological phenomena, irrespective of its scientific merit, is thus a natural consequence of the Western body image. The natural aspects of the environment—the quality of air, the quantity of sunlight, the presence of birds and animals, the plants and the trees—are a priori viewed, when they are considered at all, as irrelevant to intellectual and emotional development. Given the Western image of the body, it is understandable that the more ‘far-out’ Indian beliefs on
the effects on the sharira of planetary constellations, cosmic energies, the earth’s magnetic fields, seasonal and daily rhythms and precious stones and metals are summarily consigned to the realm of fantasy, where they are of interest solely to a ‘lunatic fringe’ of Western society.
It is not only the body but also the emotions that have come to be differently viewed because of the Indian emphasis on connection. As cultural psychologists have pointed out, such emotions as sympathy and feelings of interpersonal communion and shame that have to do with other persons become primary, while the more individualistic emotions such as anger and guilt are secondary. The Indian mind has a harder time experiencing and expressing anger and guilt but is more comfortable than the Western individualistic psyche in dealing with feelings of sympathy and shame. If pride is overtly expressed, it is often directed to a collective of whom the self is a part. Working very hard to win a promotion at work is only secondarily connected to the individual need for achievement, which is the primary driving motivation in the West. The first conscious or pre-conscious thought in the Indian mind is, ‘How happy and proud my family will be!’ This is why Indians tend to idealize their families and ancestral background, why there is such a prevalence of family myths and of family pride, and why the role models for the young are almost exclusively members of the family, very frequently a parent, rather than the movie stars, sporting heroes, or other public figures favoured by Western youth.
