by Sudhir Kakar
This greater ‘dividual’13 (in contrast to ‘individual’) or relational orientation is also congruent with the main thematic content of Indian art. In traditional Indian painting and, especially, in temple sculptures, man is not represented as a discrete presence but absorbed in his surroundings; the individual not separate but existing in all his myriad connections. These sculptures, as Thomas Mann observes in his Indian novella The Transposed Heads, are an ‘all encompassing labyrinth flux of animal, human and divine...visions of life in the flesh, all jumbled together...suffering and enjoying in thousand shapes, teeming, devouring, turning into one another.’14
If one thinks of Eros not in its narrow meaning of sex but in its wider connotation of a loving ‘connectedness’ (where the sexual embrace is only the most intimate of all connections), then the relational cast to the Indian mind makes Indians more ‘erotic’ than many other peoples of the world. The relational orientation, however, also easily slips into conformity and conventional behaviour, making many Indians psychologically old even when young. On the other hand, the Western individualistic orientation has a tendency towards self-aggrandizement, ‘the looking out for Number One’, and the belief that the gratification of desires—most of them related to consumption—is the royal road to happiness. In a postmodern accentuation of ‘fluid identities’ and a transitional attitude toward relationships, of ‘moving on’, contemporary Western man (and the modern upper-class Indian) may well embody what the Jungians call puer aeternus—the eternal youth, ever in pursuit of his dreams, full of vitality, but nourishing only to himself while draining those around him.15
We are, of course, not advancing any simplified dichotomy between the Western cultural image of an individual, autonomous self and the relational, transpersonal self of Indian society. These are prototypical patterns that do not exist in their pure form in any society. Psychotherapy with patients of the Western middle-class tells us that autonomy of the self is as precarious in reality as is the notion of an Indian self that is merged in the surround of its family and community. Both visions of human experience are present in all the major cultures, though a particular culture may, over a length of time, highlight and emphasize one at the expense of the other. Historically, man’s connection to the universe, especially his community, has also been an important value in Western tradition, though it may have been submerged at certain periods of history, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. This, a so-called value of counter-enlightenment, is part of the relativist and sceptical tradition that goes back to Western antiquity. It stresses that belonging to a community is a fundamental need of man and asserts that only if a man truly belongs to such a community naturally and unselfconsciously can he enter the living stream and lead a full, creative and spontaneous life. Similarly, the celebration of the pleasures of individuality and of a desire-driven life, though muted, have not been completely absent in India and are indeed enjoying a resurgence among many modern Indians.
MALE AND FEMALE
Another fundamental aspect of the Indian mind where it differs from its Western counterpart is related to the dawning realization in infancy of the difference between genders. It involves the acknowledgement and the profound realization for the child that all living beings and especially his beloved caretakers belong to either one sex or the other; they are either male or female.
This differentiation is of course universal but it is our cultural heritage that further elaborates what it means to be, look, think and behave like a man or a woman. This becomes clearer if one thinks of Greek or Roman sculpture which, we believe, has greatly influenced Western gender representations. Here, male gods are represented by hard muscled bodies and chests without any fat. One only needs to compare Greek and Roman statuary with the sculpted representations of Hindu gods, or the Buddha, where the bodies are softer, suppler and, in their hint of breasts, nearer to the female form. Many Buddhist images of Avalokiteswara (‘the Lord who listens to the cries of the world’) are of a slender boyish figure in the traditional feminine posture—weight resting on the left hip, right knee forward; they are the Indian precursor of the sexually ambiguous Chinese goddess Kuan Yin.16 This minimizing of difference between male and female figures finds its culmination in the ardhanarishvara—‘half-man and half-woman’—form of the great god Shiva who is portrayed with the secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes.
The visually lesser differentiation between male and female representations in Indian culture is further reinforced by its important, perhaps dominant, form of religiosity, which not only provides a sanction for man’s feminine strivings, but raises these strivings to the level of a religious-spiritual quest. In devotional Vaishnavism, Lord Krishna alone is male and all devotees, irrespective of their sex, are female. It is a culture where one of the greatest Sanskrit poets of love, Amaru, a man, is believed to have been the hundred-and-first incarnation of a soul which had previously occupied the bodies of a hundred women; where the voice of the Tamil saint-poet Nammalavar—also a man—who wrote 370 poems on the theme of love, was always that of a woman.17 It is a culture where in superior human beings feminine traits are joined to masculine ones. So a cultural hero like Gandhi can publicly proclaim that he had mentally become a woman, and that (well before the psychoanalyst Karen Horney) there is as much reason for a man to wish that he was born a woman as for women to do otherwise, and take it for granted that he will strike a responsive chord in his audience.
Given the variance in the cultural interpretations of the universal experience of gender differentiation, it is not surprising that the British in the colonial era labelled Indian men (excepting the ‘warrior races’ such as the Sikhs, Rajputs and Jats) as ‘effeminate’. Such judgements are a reflexive outcome of deep-seated and rarely examined convictions on what is masculine and what feminine. Between a minimum of sexual differentiation that is required to function heterosexually with a modicum of pleasure, and a maximum which cuts off any sense of empathy and emotional contact with the other sex which is then experienced as a different species altogether, there is a whole range of positions, each occupied by a culture which insists on calling it the only one that is mature and healthy.
In conclusion, let us again emphasize that the Hindu world view, the relational orientation, the context-sensitivity and the lesser sexual differentiation that go into the formation of the Indian mind are not abstractions to be more or less hazily comprehended during the adult years. They are constituents of an Indian’s psyche, absorbed by the child in his relationship with his caretakers from the very beginning of life as the underlying truth of the world. Rarely summoned for conscious examination, this cultural part of the mind is neither determinedly universal nor utterly idiosyncratic. The mental representation of our cultural heritage, it remains in constant conversation with the universal and individual aspects of our mind throughout life, each influencing and shaping the other two at every moment of our being.
Notes and References
INTRODUCTION
1 G. Roth, Interview in Die Zeit, 23 February 2006, 36. (Our translation). For a good summary of the neurosciences view see, S. Pinker, The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin Press Science, 2003).
2 J. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Calcutta: Chukkervertty, Chatterjee & Co.,1960), 100.
3 J.L. Nehru, The Discovery of India (Calcutta: Signet Press, 1946), 30.
4 N.C. Chaudhuri, The Continent of Circe (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 86.
5 The outer circle is becoming increasingly important with the progress of globalization. Thus, although there are books on the ‘inner circle’ in Europe, such as L. Barzini, The Italians (New York: Touchstone, 1996), G. Craig, The Germans (New York: Plume, 1991), K. Fox, Watching the English (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003), we predict that there will soon be a book on ‘The Europeans’ as Europe struggles to define a European identity in cultural-psychological terms as distinct from its political, geographica
l boundaries.
THE HIERARCHICAL MAN
1 S.K. Datta-Ray, ‘Where Rank Alone Matters’, The Times of India, July 2005.
2 The various studies have been summarized by Patricia Uberoi in P. Uberoi, ed., Family, Kinship and Marriage in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 387.
3 In a recent survey of young people from the ages of 18 to 35 in 14 Indian cities (India Today, 26 February 2006, 44), 68 per cent of the respondents preferred to live in joint families, the percentage being slightly higher in males than females.
4 Much of the following is based on S. Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 3.
5 See also A. Béteille, ‘The Family and the Reproduction of Inequality’, in P. Uberoi, ed., Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, 435-51.
6 L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, tr. M. Sainsbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
7 M. Lewis, Language, Thought and Personality in Infancy and Childhood (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 33.
8 S. Kakar, ‘The Theme of Authority in Social Relations in India’, Journal of Social Psychology 84, 1971, 93-101. The authority relations in the family are elaborated on in Kakar, Inner World, 119-20.
9 See also, J.S. Chhokar, ‘Leadership and Culture in India’, in J.S. Chhokar et al., eds., Cultures, Leadership and Organizations: The GLOBE Book of Countries (forthcoming); P. Singh & A. Bhandarker, Corporate Success and Transformational Leadership (New Delhi: Wiley Eastern, 1990).
10 J.B.P. Sinha, The Nurturant Task Leader (New Delhi: Concept, 1979).
11 S. Kakar et al., ‘Leadership in Indian Organizations from a Comparative Perspective’, International Journal of Cross Cultural Management 2:2, 2002, 239-50.
12 R.J. House et al., Leadership, Culture and Organizations: The GLOBE Study of 62 Societies (Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, 2004).
13 M. Javidan et al., ‘Cross-Border Transfer of Knowledge: Cultural Lessons from Project GLOBE’, Academy of Management Executive 19:2, 2005, 59-76. The other comparisons are also taken from this article. For an earlier international study confirming the high power distance in Indian organizations see, G. Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences (London: Sage, 1980).
14 Javidan, 63.
15 Older anthropological writings attest to this pattern being central to the father-son relationship; see, D.G. Mandelbaum, Society in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), vol.1, 60; A.C. Mayer, Caste and Kinship in Central India (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1970), 218; A.D. Ross, The Hindu Family in its Urban Setting (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 10.
16 Kakar, The Inner World, 200-1.
17 Parmahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1972), 268.
18 J.L. Roopnarine and P. Suppal, ‘Kakar’s Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Indian Childhood: The Need to Emphasize the Father and Multiple Caregivers in the Socialization Equation’, in D. Sharma, ed., Childhood, Family and Sociocultural Change in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115-37; see also S. Derne, ‘Culture, Family Structure, and Psyche in Hindu India’, in Sharma, 88-114.
THE INNER EXPERIENCE OF CASTE
1 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 43, calls it ‘the opposition of pure and the impure’. Most leading authorities on the caste system have shared Dumont’s view; see, for instance, F.G. Bailey, Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957); M. Mariott, ‘Interactional and Attributional Theories of Caste Ranking’, Man 39, 1959, 92-107; M.N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 150-1. Although some writers on caste have proposed other ordering principles of caste hierarchy, for example, the opposition of auspicious and inauspicious (Raheja; Das and Uberoi), status difference (Milner; Sheth), most scholars subscribe to the purity-pollution criterion.
2 Cited in Irawati Karwe, ‘What is Caste?’, Economic Weekly 11, 1959, 157.
3 Stephen Fuchs, At the Bottom of Indian Society: The Harijans and Other Low Castes (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1981), 238. A newspaper story from South India reports the degradation heaped by the Dalits on a community which ranks even lower in the hierarchy. These are the Vannars who are forced to beg for food as a sign of their inferiority and degradation. ‘Those defying the ancient hierarchy are repressed ruthlessly. There have been instances when Vannars in some villages have refused to beg for food. But they have either been forced to fall in line or driven out of the village’; cf. P.C. Vinoj Kumar, ‘Wretched of the Earth’, Tehelka, 13 August 2005.
4 L. Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India (The Hague: Hague Press, 1970).
5 M.K. Gandhi, ‘Untouchability and Swaraj’, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India), vol. 28, 137. Hereafter referred to as CWMG.
6 Alan Dundes, Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
7 Vamik Volkan, ‘An Overview of Psychological Concepts’, in V.Volkan et al., eds., The Psychodynamics of International Relationships (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990), 31-46.
8 M.K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Suppressed Classes Conference April 13, 1921’, CWMG, vol. 23.
9 L. Kubie, ‘The Fantasy of Dirt’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 6, 1937, 391.
10 Sheila Dhar, ‘Siddheswari Devi: A Bird of Paradise’, in Here’s Someone I’d Like You to Meet: Tales of Innocents, Musicians and Bureaucrats (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 129-54.
11 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, 54. In relating dirt to caste hierarchy, the sociologist Milner also looks at dirt as something social rather than physical; cf. Murray Milner, Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
12 D.W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (London: Taristock Publications, 1958), 34.
13 Durga Bhagvat, ‘The Sparrow and the Crow’, Indian Folklore 2, 1959, 213-5; cited in Dundes, op.cit., 32-3.
14 In Uttara Ramayana there is a story that once Yama, the god of death, was frightened by Ravana the king of demons and escaped in the form of a crow.
15 Béteille in P. Uberoi, ed., Family, Kinship and Marriage in India, 448-9.
INDIAN WOMEN: TRADITIONAL AND MODERN
1 To take another example, the Indologist William Sax has shown that representations of characters in Hindu myths are more determined by caste than gender; see his ‘Gender and the Representation of Violence in Pandava Lila’, in J. Leslie & M. McGee, eds., Invented Identities: The Interplay of Gender, Religion and Politics in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 252-64.
2 M. Pande, Daughter’s Daughter (Delhi: Penguin, 1993), 85-6. The descriptions of growing up a girl in traditional India in this chapter are based on Kakar, The Inner World, 56-73, while some of the material on modern Indian women is from Kakar, ‘Modernity and Female Childhood’, in Culture and Psyche: Selected Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60-73.
3 A.A. MacDonell, Vedic Religion, 165; cited in R.M. Das, Women in Manu and His Seven Commentators (Varanasi: Kanchana Publications, 1962).
4 J.L. Roopnarine et al., ‘Characteristic of Holding, Pattern of Play and Social Behaviors between Parents and Infants in New Delhi, India’, Developmental Psychology 26(4), 1990, 667-73.
5 Pande, 45.
6 See for instance, L. Bennett et al., Gender and Poverty in India: A World Bank Country Study (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1991). The discrimination against the girl child holds true even for progressive states such as Tamil Nadu which has high levels of female literacy and work participation; see, T.K. Sundari Ravindran, ‘Female Autonomy in Tamil Nadu’, Economic and Political Weekly, April 17-24, 1999, WS34-44.
7 S. Anandalakshmy, ed., The Girl Child and the Family (Delhi: Dept. of Women and Child Development, Ministry of HRD, Government o
f India, 1994).
8 See Kakar, The Inner World, 60-1.
9 Pande, 45.
10 Kakar, The Inner World, 62.
11 ‘The Laws of Manu’, trans. G. Buhler, in M. Mueller, ed., Sacred Books of the East, vol. 25 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 56. Hereafter referred to as Manu.
12 R.K. Verma and R. Ghadially, ‘Mother’s Sex-Role Attitudes and Demands’, Indian Journal of Social Work 46(1), 1985, 105-11.
13 S.S. Luthar and D. Quinlan, ‘Parental Images in Two Cultures: A Study of Women in India and America’, Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology 24(2), 1993, 186-202.
14 In the India Today (20 February 2006) survey of urban youth, 71 per cent agree that divorce is better than a bad marriage.
15 L. Dube, Anthropological Explorations in Gender: Intersecting Fields (New Delhi: Sage, 2001).
16 Anandalakshmy, 66.
17 See M. Eapen and P. Kodoth, ‘Family Structure, Women’s Education and Work: Re-examining the High Status of Women in Kerala’, in S. Mukhopadhyay and R.M. Sudarshan, eds., Tracking Gender Equity and Economic Reform: Continuity and Change in South Asia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2003),227–67.
