by Sudhir Kakar
The psychoanalytic understanding of any phenomenon begins with the narrative, with the echoes and reverberations of individual history. The individual I have selected for my own explorations is the 19th-century Bengali mystic Sri Ramakrishna. Together with Ramana Maharishi, Ramakrishna is widely regarded as the preeminent figure of Hindu mysticism of the last 300 years, whatever preeminence may mean in the mystical context. He is a particularly apt choice for a psychoanalytic study of ecstatic mysticism since Freud’s observations on the mystical experience, on what he called the ‘oceanic feeling’, an omnibus label for all forms of extreme mystical experience, were indirectly occasioned by Ramakrishna’s ecstasies.
It was the biography of Ramakrishna which Romain Rolland was working on at the time when he wrote of Freud in 1927, saying the though he found Freud’s analysis of religion (in The Future of an Illusion) just, he would ideally have liked Freud to ‘make an analysis of spontaneous religious feelings, or more exactly, religious sensations which are entirely different from religion proper and much more enduring.’13 Rolland went to call this sensation oceanic, without perceptible limits, and mentioned two Indians who had such feelings and ‘who have manifested a genius for thought and action powerfully regenerative for their country and for the world.’14 Rolland added that he himself had all his life found the oceanic feeling to be a source of vital revival. Freud’s response to Rolland, his analysis of the ‘oceanic feeling,’ was then spelled out in Civilization and its Discontents. It is highly probable that the term ‘oceanic feeling’ itself is taken from Ramakrishna’s imagery to describe the ineffable. For instance, one of Ramakrishna’s oft-repeated metaphors is of the salt doll which went to measure the depth of the ocean. ‘As it entered the ocean it melted. Then who is there to come back and say how deep is the ocean?’15
Of course, ocean as a symbol for boundless oneness and unity in which multiplicities dissolve and opposites fuse not only goes back to the Upanishads in the Hindu tradition, but is one of the preferred metaphors of devotional mystics for the melting of ego boundaries in the Buddhist, Christian and Muslim traditions as well.16 Christian mystics, for instance, have been greatly fond of the metaphor. ‘I live in the ocean of God as a fish in the sea.’
Freud’s response to Ramakrishna, as generally to ‘Mother India,’ was of unease. Although of some professional interest, Ramakrishna’s florid ecstasies were as distant, if not distasteful, to his sensibility as the jumbled vision of flesh, the labyrinth flux of the animal, human, and divine in Indian art. In his acknowledgement of Rolland’s book about Ramakrishna, Freud writes, ‘I shall now try with your guidance to penetrate into the Indian jungle from which until now an uncertain blending of Hellenic love of proportion, Jewish sobriety, and Philistine timidity have kept me away. I really ought to have tackled it earlier, for the plants of this soil shouldn’t be alien to me; I have dug to certain depths for their roots. But it isn’t easy to pass beyond the limits of one’s nature.’17
We are, of course, fortunate that the last four years of Ramakrishna’s life, from 1882 to 1886, were recorded with minute fidelity by a disciple, Mahendranath Gupta, or M as he called himself with modest self-effacement.18 In the cases of most mystics throughout history, we have either had to rely on doctrinal writing that is formal and impersonal, or on autobiographical accounts from which intimate detail, considered trifling from transcendental heights, has been excised. M, on the other hand, with the obsessive fidelity of a Bengali Boswell, has left an enormously detailed chronicle of the daily life and conversations of Ramakrishna—his uninhibited breaking out in song and dance, his frequent and repeated ecstasies, his metaphysical discourses full of wisdom and penetrating insight, his parables, jokes, views, anxieties, and pleasures, the times he slept and ate and what he ate—which is rare in hagiographical literature. Let me then begin with the outer scaffolding of the story, a brief narration of events of Ramakrishna’s early life. And though we can never know what really happened in his or anyone else’s infancy and childhood, the former forever beyond the reach of memory, I have no hesitation in extending a qualified belief to Ramakrishna’s own version of his life story. Yet, of course, it is not solely his version. As a reteller of his tale, I cannot help but also bring to bear a psychoanalytic sensibility in the choice of events I emphasize and others that I must have underplayed. The biographies by his direct disciples, on the other hand, are shaped by the traditional Hindu religious idiom, while the narration by Romain Rolland is moulded by his more universalistic, spiritual concerns, in the sense of what Adlous Huxley called the ‘perennial philosophy.’
Ramakrishna was born in 1836 in a Brahmin family in the village of Kamarpukur in Bengal. The parents were pious and very poor, but what I find exceptional about them in the context of 19th-century village India is their ages at the time of Ramakrishna’s birth. At a time when the average longevity was less than 30 years, maternal death during childbirth fairly common, and the sexually reproductive years of the woman over by her early 30s, Ramakrishna’s father was 61 and his mother 45 years old when he was bom. In the family there was a brother 31 years older, a sister 27 years older, and another brother 11 years older. Yet another sister was born when Gadhadhar, that was his given name, was four years old.
Ramakrishna later remembered his mother Chandra as a simple soul without a trace of worldliness who could not even count money. She said whatever came to her mind, without obfuscation or concealment, and people even called her a ‘simpleton.’ Devoted to her youngest son, the fruit of old loins, she was nevertheless, as elderly parents often tend to be, inordinately anxious about any harm befalling him when he was not within her ken. A curious and lively child, intent on exploring the world, Ramakrishna did not exactly help in allaying his mother’s anxieties. She sought to master these by daily prayers to the family deity wherein she besought the continued welfare of her little boy. Perhaps Ramakrishna’s later anxiousness whenever he was physically incapacitated, his almost hypochondriacal concerns at such times, can be directly traced to the elderly mother’s anxieties about her youngest son.
The incident given as an example of the boy’s wilfulness, which sometimes ignored the conventional rules of conduct, concerns his hiding behind a tree and peeping out at women while they washed clothes and bathed at the village tank. One of the women complained to Chandra who then admonished the boy that all women were the same as his mother Shaming them was shaming her, insulting their honour was insulting hers. We are told that the mortified boy never again repeated his behaviour. To us post-Freudians, the incident embodies a child’s natural sexual curiosity which the mother dampens by associating it with incestuous anxiety. Interestingly, in later life, Ramakrishna would use a mythological version of this personal experience, wherein the incestuous urgings and fears are much more explicit, to explain a part of his attitude toward women. One day, during his childhood, the god Ganesha saw a cat which, as some boys are apt to do, he proceeded to torture in various ways till the cat finally made its escape. When Ganesha came back home he saw to his surprise the bruises and marks of torture on his mother’s, the goddess Parvati’s body. The mother revealed to her son that all living beings in female form were part of her and whatever he did to any female he did unto his mother. On reaching marriageable age, Ganesha, lest he marry his mother, decided to remain a celibate forever. ‘My attitude to women is the same,’ was Ramakrishna’s final comment.19
Khudiram, Ramakrishna’s father, was a gentle man who is reported to have never scolded his son. He took a quiet pride in the boy’s evident intelligence and phenomenal memory, which were further displayed to advantage when he started attending the village school at the age of five. However, though good at school (but bad at arithmetic), what the boy most enjoyed was painting pictures and spending time with the village potters learning how to make clay images of gods and goddesses. The artistic streak in Ramakrishna was strongly developed, and it seems appropriate that his first ecstasy was evoked by the welling up of aestheti
c emotion; an episode of ‘nature’ mysticism, it was the consequence of an aesthetically transcendent feeling: ‘I was following a narrow path between the rice fields. I raised my eyes to the sky as I munched my rice. I saw a great black cloud spreading rapidly until it covered the heavens. Suddenly at the edge of the cloud a flight of snow white cranes passed over my head. The contrast was so beautiful that my spirit wandered far away. I lost consciousness and fell to the ground. The puffed rice was scattered. Somebody picked me up and carried me home in his arms. An excess of joy and emotion overcame me…. This was the first time that I was seized with ecstasy.’20
Ramakrishna’s father, who had been ill for awhile, died when the boy was around eight years of age. The effect of the father’s death was to make Ramakrishna withdrawn and fond of solitude. His attendance at school became fitful. He drew closer to his mother and spent much time in helping her with her household duties and her daily prayers to the gods. He became very fond of listening to discourses on spiritual matters and spent hours at a pilgrimage house where wandering ascetics found a bed for a night or two before they resumed their wanderings. The latter activity alarmed his mother who feared that her son might decide to leave home and embrace the renunciant’s life.
There were other fainting spells, as on the way to the temple of a goddess or when acting the part of Shiva in a play he lost all external consciousness. He later attributed these states to spiritual stirrings although his family suspected a physical malady and refrained from forcing him to go to school which by now he quite disliked.
The gradually deteriorating condition of the family after Khudiram’s death worsened with the marriage of Ramakrishna’s second brother. With the advent of the new daughter-in-law, quarrels and bickerings in the household increased markedly, a situation which the family’s worsening economic circumstances, driving it to the edge of subsistence, did not help improve. The daily clamour and strife, I imagine, perhaps added its own impetus in pushing the sensitive and artistic boy more and more away from the distasteful discord of everyday reality and toward transcendental, spiritual matters and religious life. The latter too coursed through the village, as it does to great extent even today in rural India, in a powerful stream. There were the many rituals in which everyday life was embedded, frequent recitals from the Puranas, and the religious plays and festivals in which Ramakrishna participated by singing and dancing with fervid abandon. And, above all, there were the sudden inward, abstracted states, brought on at the oddest of times by outer stimuli such as listening to a song in praise of a god or to snatches of devotional music.
The young daughter-in-law died in childbirth when Ramakrishna was 13 years old, and the burden of running the household once again fell on the aging shoulders of Ramakrishna’s mother. To help alleviate the poverty, his eldest brother left for Calcutta to run a small Sanskrit school. His position as the head of the family now devolved on Ramakrishna’s second brother who was temperamentally disinclined to take over responsibilities for his siblings and was in any case much too busy scrounging around for work.
Thus at the beginning of adolescence, Ramakrishna was left to his own devices, without the paternal guiding voice of his father or eldest brother. School became even more occasional. When he was not an enthusiastic participant in the village’s religious life, he was at home with his mother, helping her with household tasks and sharing with her the rhythm of her woman’s days. The village women who dropped in on his mother for a visit during the day seem to have adopted him as one of their own. They would ask him to sing—he had a very sweet singing voice—or to tell stories from the Puranas, of which he had an enormous stock. He performed scenes from popular plays for their amusement, playing all the parts himself. He listened to their secrets and woes and would attempt to lift the spirits of a dejected woman by acting out a rustic farce.
He loved putting on women’s clothes and ornaments. Dressed thus, with a pitcher under his arm to fetch water from the tank like other village women, he would pass in front of the men and felt proud that no one suspected he was not a woman. Once, disguised as a poor weaver girl, he spent a whole evening in the closely guarded women’s quarters of the village shopkeeper’s house taking part in their conversation, without being discovered. In his mature years, talking to his disciples, there was a certain wry pride with which he related, and occasionally enacted to their surprised delight, incidents from his youth which showed his ability to mimic women’s gestures and movements to perfection.
A fantasy from this period has Ramakrishna imagining that were he to be born again he would become a beautiful child widow with long black hair who would not know anyone else except Lord Krishna as a husband. The girl widow would live in a hut with an elderly woman as a guardian, a spinning wheel, and a cow which she would milk herself. During the day, after finishing household work, she would spin yarn, sing songs about Krishna, and after dusk ardently weep for the god, longing to feed him sweets made from the cow’s milk. Krishna would come in secret, be fed by her and go away, his daily visits taking place without the knowledge of others.21
In the meantime, Ramakrishna’s eldest brother Ramkumar was doing well in Calcutta, running his small school and performing religious services for some rich families. He called the 17-year-old Ramakrishna over to the city to assist him in his priestly duties. Soon after, a new opportunity opened up when a rich woman built and consecrated a temple to the goddess Kali outside Calcutta and employed Ramkumar as its full-time priest. Ramkumar, who had been ailing for some time, found the task arduous and handed over his duties to Ramakrishna, the younger brother. He died a year later.
Ramkumar’s death was to have a profound effect on Ramakrishna. Thirty-one years older, he had looked after Ramakrishna like a father after Khudiram’s death. ‘Who can say,’ Ramakrishna’s disciple-biographer asks, ‘how far his brother’s death contributed to the kindling up of the fire of renunciation in the Master’s pure mind, by producing in him a firm conviction about the transitoriness of the world?’22 In any case his behaviour changed markedly as he became more and more engrossed in the worship of the Mother Goddess. As her priest he had to wake her up early in the morning, bathe and dress her, make garlands of flowers for her adornment. At nine he had to perform her worship, offer her food, and escort her to her silver bed at noon where she rested for the afternoon. Then came the evening worship. For Ramakrishna, these were no longer duties but heartfelt services. He became so absorbed in each one of them that he had to be reminded when it was time to go on to the next ritual.
After the closing of temple at midday and midnight, Ramakrishna shunned all company and disconsolately roamed around in the jungle at the edge of which the temple was located. All he yearned for with all his soul, he was to later tell us, was a vision, the personal darshan of the Mother. The spiritual thirst, the clinician would observe, was embedded in all the signs of a full-fledged depression. There was a great restlessness of the body, sleepless nights, loss of appetite in which eating was reduced to the bare minimum, eyes that filled up often and suddenly with tears. The nephew who looked after him became alarmed for his sanity when at night he saw Ramakrishna sitting under a tree naked, having flung off his clothes and even the sacred thread of a Brahmin, or, when he saw him put the leavings from leaf plates from which beggars had eaten to his mouth and to his head.
But now, as we come to a culmination of his ‘dark night of the soul,’ we need Ramakrishna’s own words. ‘There was then an intolerable anguish in my heart because I could not have Her vision. Just as a man wrings a towel forcibly to squeeze out all the water from it, I felt as if somebody caught hold of my heart and mind and was wringing them likewise. Greatly afflicted by the thought that I might not have Mother’s vision, I was in great agony. I thought that there was no use in living such a life. My eyes suddenly fell upon the sword that was in the Mother’s temple. I made up my mind to put an end to my life with it that very moment. Like one mad, I ran and caught hold of it, when suddenly I had
the wonderful vision of the Mother, and fell down unconscious. I did not know what happened then in the external world—how that day and the next slipped away. But in my heart of hearts, there was flowing a current of intense bliss, never experienced before…. It was as if the house, doors, temples, and all other things vanished altogether, as if there was nothing anywhere! And what I saw was a boundless infinite conscious sea of light! However far and in whatever direction I looked, I found a continuous succession of effulgent waves coming forward, raging and storming from all sides with great speed. Very soon they fell on me and made me sink to the abysmal depths of infinity.’23
Those familiar with mystical literature will recognize many elements in Ramakrishna’s vision which are known to us from similar descriptions from all over the world, especially the feeling of being flooded by light. In the still controversial studies of near-death experience, ‘seeing the light’ and ‘entering the light’ are said to be the deepest and most positive parts of that particular experience. The incident has not only universal but also cultural aspects. It is a very Hindu story of a man forcing the Goddess to appear by threatening to decapitate himself. This is an old theme, found both in religious and secular literature, for instance in the well-known story which has been so brilliantly retold for Western readers by Thomas Mann in his The Transposed Heads.
Unlike similar accounts of the first vision in the lives of most mystics, this particular vision, to which we will come back later and to which all his boyhood experiences seem like forerunners, was not sufficient to take him out of the ‘valley of the shadow of death.’ Its aftertaste but whetted an appetite for repeated blissful salvings. Even for the pious visitors to the temple, accustomed to a wide range in manifestation of religious fervour, Ramakrishna’s behavior appeared bizarre. He would decorate his own person with the flowers and sandalwood paste brought for the worship of the goddess. He would feel the statue of the goddess breathing, try to feed her stony mouth, and carry on playful conversations as to who, the goddess or her priest, should eat first. Any diminution in the sense of her presence made him throw himself and roll violently on the ground, filling the temple with loud wailings at her absence. At such times his breath would almost stop, and he appeared to struggle for his very life. When he again received a vision of the goddess, he would beam with joy and become a different person altogether. The consensus of his employers and others was that he had become insane. Romain Rolland calls this a necessary period of hallucination, and even Ramakrishna referred to it as a passing phase of unmada (insanity), leaving it unambiguous—something he was not wont to do in respect of the visions in his later life—that the ‘madness’ was less divine intoxication than human disintegration, however necessary it may have been as a prelude to the former. Later in life, he would wonder at some of his behaviour during this phase—worshipping his own phallus as that of Shiva, being seized by ecstatic visions while he defecated, and so on.
