Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  I have little doubt that one or another or many of the Jungian and Freudian motivations also go into the construction of Janak and Basanti’s dream of the jodi. Yet besides universal archetypes and individual fantasies, I believe there is also a cultural image which comes through sharply in the woman’s yearning for the couple. Iconically, this cultural image is represented by the ardhanarishwara—‘the Lord that is half woman’—from of the God Shiva. Displaying the attributes of both the sexes, with the right side male and the left female, this form of the god shows his body merged with that of his consort, Uma and Parvati.

  The ardhanarishwara then represents the wished-for oneness of the divine couple rather than the twoness of mortal spouses. The husband is not simply a partner, however intimate, for that would still highlight his separate, bounded, individuality. Instead, the cultural ideal visualizes the jodi as a single two-person entity.

  Perhaps the psychological concept that comes closest to representing the woman’s ideal in marriage is what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut has called the ‘selfobject.’5 A seemingly odd apparition, a selfobject neither coincides with the contours of the self nor is unreservedly the other but leads a nomadic existence in the intermediate space between the two. According to Kohut, the selfobjects of early childhood, of which the parental caretakers are the foremost, constitute the stuff of the self through a process of ‘transmuting internalization.’ In adult life, they provide the self with its vital nutrients.

  The jodi, then, is a ‘cultural selfobject’—making a Hindu invoke Sita Ram and not Sita and Ram—Radhakrishna and not Radha and Krishna—which connects the woman to the community of Indian women and thus helps to maintain the vitality and continuity of her identity. Despite the realities of life in the slums, of wife-beating husbands and reluctant lovers, of adulterous liaisons and consensual marriages, it is the contribution of this ideal to maintaining a sense of the self which helps us to understand the tenacity with which Janak and Basanti, as also women from other strata of Indian society, cling to the notion of the indissolubility of the couple. The persistence and importance of the jodi for the woman’s sense of identity helps us comprehend better why many women, in spite of their economic independence, choose to suffer humiliation rather than leave an oppressive husband; why some women, in times of extreme marital stress and a burning rage toward the spouse, exercise the option of suicide rather than separation.

  6

  Gandhi and Women

  Continuing my search for facets of the man-woman relationship in India, I turn to the autobiographical writings of one of the greatest men of the 20th century. Although my task of psychoanalytic deconstruction, the activity of taking a text apart by bringing out its latent meanings, remains the same, Gandhi’s fame and status as a culture hero makes this enterprise both easier and more difficult.

  The task is easier in that the retrospective narrative enrichment engaged in by every autobiographer—who consciously or otherwise selects and orders details of his life so as to create a coherent and satisfying story, explaining and indeed justifying his present situation for the particular audience he has in mind—is capable of correction and modification through the accounts of other actors involved in the hero’s epic.1 The inconsistencies and the omission of vital details which may otherwise mar the symmetry of the hero’s unconscious myth about himself, are easier to detect in the case of a man like Gandhi who has attracted so much biographical attention, both contemporary and posthumous. I may, though, add here that Gandhi’s autobiographical writings, The Story of My Experiments With Truth the foremost among them, are marked by a candour and honesty which, if not unique, are certainly rare in the annals of self-narration. In his quasi-mystical preoccupation with ‘truth,’ the blame for any distortions in the story of his self-revelation can be safely laid at the door of the narrator’s unconscious purposes rather than ascribed to any deliberate efforts at omission or concealment.

  The work of deconstruction is made more difficult as Gandhi is the foremost culture-hero of modern India. For an Indian child, the faces of Gandhi and other heroes like Nehru and Vivekananda are identical, with the masks crafted by the culture in order to provide ideals for emulation and identification. Every child in India has been exposed to stock narratives that celebrate their genius and greatness, the portraits utterly devoid of any normal human blemish such as envy, anger, lust, ordinariness, pettiness, or stupidity. The Indian analyst, also a child of his culture, is thus bound to have a special kind of ‘countertransference’ towards the culture-hero as a biographical subject. In other words, the analytic stance of respectful empathy combined with critical detachment, difficult enough to maintain in normal circumstances, becomes especially so in the case of a man like Gandhi. His image is apt to merge with other idealized figures from the biographer’s own past, who were loved and admired yet secretly rebelled against. The analytic stance must then be charted out between contradictory hagiographic and pathographic impulses that seek constantly to buffet it.

  For the analyst, the story of a man’s relationship with women inevitably begins (‘and also ends,’ sceptics would add) with his mother. Yet we know the mother-son dyad to be the most elusive of all human relationships. Located in the life space before the birth of languge, the effort to recapture the truth of the dyad through words alone can give but teasing intimations of the hallucinatory intensity of a period when the mother, after giving the son life, also gave him the world. With some exceptions, like that of Nabokov, a mother cannot speak to her son through memory alone.2 Her truth lies in the conjunction, indeed confabulation of imagination, symbols and reality through which she was earlier perceived and through which she may be later conjured, the latter being a rare artist’s gift. For others, including Gandhi, the truth of the dyad we once built with our mothers is but fragmentarily glimpsed in various maternal proxies—from inanimate objects (‘part’ or ‘transitional’ objects in analytic parlance) which a child endows with her vital spirit, to the woman who will later attract and hold him. Like all mothers, Putlibai, whose favourite Gandhi was by virtue of his being the youngest child and whose special object of care and concern he remained because of his sickly constitution, is an abiding yet diffuse presence in her son’s inner life, an intensely luminous being albeit lacking definition. We will discover her chimerical presence in Gandhi’s relationships with various other women in whom she was temporarily reincarnated, his wife Kasturbai the foremost among them.

  In his autobiography, written over a five-year period during his mid-50s, Gandhi begins the account of his sexual preoccupations and struggles with his marriage at the age of thirteen. He had been betrothed to Kasturbai Nakanji, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant in his hometown of Porbandar, since they were both seven years old. Now, with the two children entering puberty, the families decided that the time for the nuptials had finally arrived.

  In Kathiawar, on the west coast of India, the region where Gandhi grew up and where his father was the prime minister of a small princely state, such child marriages were the norm rather than the exception. Writing 43 years after the event, Gandhi could still recall the details of the marriage festivities. His elder brother and a cousin were to be married at the same time in one big ceremony and young Mohandas was excited by the prospect of new clothes, sumptuous wedding feasts, and the evenings and nights full of music and dance. During the ceremony itself, whenever the couple was required to hold hands for a particular rite, Mohandas would secretly give Kasturbai’s hand a squeeze which she, in turn, eagerly reciprocated.

  The excitement of the wedding was marred by one jarring incident. On his way to the celebrations, Mohandas’s father had a serious accident when the horse-carriage he was travelling in overturned, and he arrived late for the ceremony, with bandages covering his arms and back. The young boy was much too excited by what was happening to him to pay attention to the injured father, a fact that the older man notes with shame. ‘I was devoted to my father but I was equally devoted to sen
suality. Here by sensuality I do not mean one organ but the whole realm of sensual enjoyment.’3

  Looking back at his younger self, Gandhi feels that sex became an obsession with the adolescent Mohandas. At school, his thoughts were constantly with his wife, as he impatiently waited for the night to decend when he could go to her. He was also consumed by a raging jealousy. He wanted to know of every move his wife made in his absence and would forbid her to go out alone to the temple, on household errands or to meet girlfriends. Kasturbai was not the sort of girl to accept such unreasonable restrictions and accusations based on unfounded jealousy with any degree of equanimity. Small in staure, she was an attractive girl with glossy black hair, large dark eyes set deep in an oval face, a well-formed mouth, and a determined chin. She was by no means a female creature subservient to male whims and could easily be self-willed and impatient with her young husband. They had violent quarrels, dissolved in the love-making of the night, only to reemerge with the light of day.

  Later in life, Gandhi, regretting his treatment of Kasturbai during the first 15 years of their married life, gave two causes for his jealousy, The first was the projection of his own turbulent sexual wishes and fantasies onto his wife—‘I took out my anger at her for my own weakness’—while the second was the influence of Sheikh Mehtab, the intimate friend of his youth. Physically strong, fearless, and rakishly handsome, while Mohandas was none of these, Sheikh Mehtab has been portrayed by Gandhi as his evil genius, the tempter whose blandishments Mohandas was incapable of resisting. The breacher of taboos and values Mohandas held dear, Sheikh Mehtab introduced the vegetarian lad to the guilt-ridden pleasures of eating meat, and was the organizer of their joint visit to a brothel. Mehtab constantly fueled Gandhi’s suspicions with regard to Kasturbai’s fidelity. Reading about their youthful transgressions a hundred years later, to us Mehtab does not appear especially evil. He is neither more nor less than an average representative of the world of male adolescence, with its phallic displays and the ethic of a devil-may-care bravery. For a 13-year-old (and from all accounts, including his own) ‘mama’s boy,’ dealing with the sexual upsurge of adolescence at the same time as the demand for establishing an emotional intimacy with a strange girl, Sheikh Mehtab must have been a godsend. He provided Mohandas with the adolescent haven where young men can be both dismissive and fearful of women and heterosexual love, where in the vague homoeroticism of masculine banter and ceaseless activity a youth can gradually come to terms with the femininity within and without him. Little wonder that, in spite of the family’s strong disapproval and Mohandas’s own conscious view of their relationship as one between a reformer and a rake, their friendship remained close and lasted for almost 20 years. During his sojourn in England Gandhi sent Mehtab money from his meagre allowance, voluntarily sought him out again after his return to India and later took his friend with him when he sailed for South Africa.

  Two circumstances, Gandhi writes, saved him from becoming an emotional and physical wreck during the initial phase of his marriage. The first was the custom among the Hindus, wisely aware of the consuming nature of adolescent passion, of separating the husband and wife for long periods during the first years of marriage. Kasturbai was often away on extended visits to her family and Gandhi estimates that in the first six years of their married life they could not have lived together for more than half of this period.

  The second saving circumstance was Gandhi’s highly developed sense of duty, both as a member of a large extended family, with an assigned role and definite tasks, and as a son who was especially conscientious and conscious of his obligation to an ageing and ailing father. After coming home from school, Gandhi would first spend time with his father, massaging his legs and attending to his other needs. Even when he was thus engaged, his mind wandered as he impatiently waited for the filial service to come to an end, his fantasies absorbed by the images of his girl-wife in another room of the house. As all readers of his autobiography know, the conflict between sexual desire and his sense of duty and devotion to the father was to load the marriage, especially its physical side, with an enormous burden of guilt. We shall briefly recapitualate the incident that has often been reproduced either as a cautionary moral tale or as a choice text for psychoanalytical exegesis.

  Gandhi’s father had been seriously ill and his younger brother had come to look after him, a task he shared with the son. One night around 10-30 or 11, while Gandhi was massaging his father’s legs, his uncle told him to rest. Happily, Gandhi rushed off to the bedroom to wake up his pregnant wife for sexual intercourse. After a few minutes, a servant knocked at the bedroom door and informed the couple that the father had expired. Gandhi talks of his lifelong feeling of remorse that blind lust had deprived him of the chance of rendering some last service to his father and thus missing the patriarch’s ‘blessing’ which was instead received by the uncle. ‘This is the shame I hinted at in the last chapter,’ he writes,

  my sexual obsession even at the time of service to my father. Till today I have not been able to wash away this dark stain. I cannot forget that though my devotion to my parents was boundless and I could have given up everything for them, my mind was not free of lust even at that critical moment. This was an unforgivable lack in my service to my father. This is why in spite of my faithfulness to one woman I have viewed myself as someone blinded by sexuality. It took me a long time to free myself of lust and I have had to undergo many ordeals before I could attain this freedom.

  Before I close this chapter of my double shame I also want to say that the child bom to my wife did not survive for more than a couple of days. What other outcome could there have been?4

  Sexual passion endangers all the generations, Gandhi seems to say, not only the parents to whom one is morally and filially obliged, but the children conceived in sexual union.

  At the age of 18, Mohandas left his wife and family behind (a son had been recently born) as he sailed for England to study law. He faced a good deal of opposition to his plans from his family and his community, which propounded the orthodox view that a man could not remain a good Hindu if he went abroad. Gandhi could leave for England with his family’s consent (the community was not so easily mollfied and declared him an outcaste) only after he made a solemn vow to his mother to avoid scrupulously the three inflamers of passion, ‘wine, women, and meat’—the anxious Hindu counterpart of the more cheerful ‘wine, women, and song’—during his sojourn in that distant island.

  Gandhi’s account of his three-year stay in England is striking in many ways. V.S. Naipaul has pointed out Gandhi’s intense self-absorption, which made him oblivious to all the externals of his surroundings.5 Gandhi does not mention the climate or the seasons. He does not describe London’s buildings and streets, nor touch upon its social, intellectual, and political life.

  What he immerses himself in and passionately discovers are fringe groups and causes which the mainstream English society would have unhesitatingly labeled ‘eccentric.’ An active member of the London Vegetarian Societry and the ‘Esoteric Christian Union’ (many years later in South Africa he would proudly identify himself as the agent for these Societies on his letterhead), he was also a fervent admirer of Annie Besant, the heir of the Russian mystic Madame Bavatsky, and a self-declared ‘bride of Christ.’

  Knowing that till very recently (and again in the future) the crore of Gandhi’s self-absorption was his concern with his sexuality, the meagre space he devotes to the stirring of sexual desire is even more striking. In the full flush of youth, learning such English graces as dancing, and becoming somewhat of a dandy, this passionate young man—a (however reluctant) sensualist—tells us very little about how he dealt with his desires and their inevitable stimulation in a society where the sexes mingled much more freely that in his native Kathiawar. The only exception to this silence is an incident near the end of his stay, when Gandhi was attending a conference of vegetarians in Portsmouth and stayed with a friend at the house of a woman, ‘not a prostit
ute but of easy virtue.’ At night, while the three of them were playing cards, there was much sexual banter in which Gandhi enthusiastically participated. Gandhi was ready, as he says, ‘to descend from speech into action,’ when his friend reminded him of his vows.

  I was embarrassed, I came to my senses. In my heart I was grateful to the friend. I remembered my vow to my mother I was trembling when I reached my room. My heart was racing. My condition was that of a wild animal who has just escaped the hunter. I think this was the first occasion I was ‘possessed by passion’ for a woman not my wife and desired to ‘make merry’ with her.6

  This is the only explicit event in which higher duty opposed and conquered sexual temptation that is reported in this part of Gandhi’s autobiography. The earlier sexual preoccupation, I would surmise, went underground, to reemerge in two different streams which on the surface seem quite unrelated to genital sexuality. One of these streams is Gandhi’s increasing preoccupation with religious and spiritual matters. He tells us of his visit to theosophists, conversations with Christian clergymen, the reading of inspirational and religious literature. At times, Gandhi seems to be quite aware of the connection betwen his sexual struggles and his spiritual interests. Thus he notes down the following verses from the Bhagavad Gita: