Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  If today psychoanalysis aspires to be scientific at all it is only through keeping alive a questioning, searching attitude that would ideally breakfast every morning on a discredited theory. It is scientific in its continuous struggle, not always successful, to avoid falling prey to dogmas, irrespective of the authority or charisma of their propounders. No longer afraid to be called a hermeneutic enterprise, a Geisteswissenschaft of meaning rather than a natural science of causation, that is, a soul physics, psychoanalysis can contentedly exist in the boundary space between science and art and religion without feeling the need to accede to any one of them. Today, as Bion has observed, ‘it is as absurd to criticize a piece of psychoanalytic work on the ground that it is “not scientific” as it is to criticize it because it is “not religious” or “not artistic”.’32

  The bypassing of the preoedipal mother which perhaps gave Freud’s writings on religion their particular slant has since been amply rectified. In the work of many post-Freudians—such as Klein, Winnicott, Mahler, Kohut, Erikson—the Great Mother looms so large as not only to complement Freud’s awesome father but to almost set up a parallel regime. In the ‘relational’ models of the post-Freudians, it is not the derivatives of instinctual drives but the mental representations of relationships with others which constitute the fundamental building blocks of mental life.33 Fragments of experiences with parents and other adults, images and fantasies of one’s self in relation with others, and inner voices derived from these real and imagined experiences become the stuff of the self.

  The pivotal relationship in the many relational theories, the basic building block of the self, is the infant-mother dyad at the beginning of life. Religion then gets connected to the origins of sentient life and the preoedipal experience. Winnicott, for in stance, links religion to what he calls transitional phenomena in mental life.34 These begin with the infant’s transition from a state of being merged with the mother to a state of being in relation to the mother as something outside and separate. They are located in an intermediate space between inside and outside, between the subjective and what is objectively perceived, between the baby’s inability and growing ability to recognize and accept reality. Winnicott sees transitional space as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.

  Relational theorists who seek to describe the ineffability of our earliest experience before language is born are often poetical—even Melanie Klein with her violent surrealistic images of breasts that persecute or/are filled with urine and feces. Winnicott calls transitional phenomena ‘the substance of illusion,’ the realm which is allowed to the infant and in adult life is inherent in art and religion. ‘The intermediate area of experience,’ Winnicott writes, ‘unchallenged in respect of its belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts, and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.’35 By ‘unchallenged’ Winnicott means that an essential part of the formulation of transitional phenomena is ‘that we agree never to make the challenge to the baby: did you create this object, or did you find it conveniently lying around? That is to say, an essential feature of transitional phenomena and objects is a quality in our attitude when we observe them.’36

  The presence of this particular ‘quality in attitude’ in observation of religious phenomena distinguishes most relational theorists from their more classical predecessors and contemporaries. Eriskon is not being reductionist when he links one face of religion to a dim nostalgia for a hallucinatory sense of unity with the maternal matrix and for a supply of benevolently powerful substances.37 Noting man’s wish for transcendence he does not proceed to reduce transcendence, but elevates the status of the wish. Nor does Kohut subscribe to a deterministic scientism when he would have religion as a cultural selfobject which provides vital nutrients for the maturation and maintenance of the self.38

  Similarly, relational theories would interpret other areas of religion, such as methods of religious healing, quite differently from the classical drive model. For instance, taking an example from Hinduism, let us look at the silent ‘looking’ of darshan, which I have described in the previous chapter as the most important form of interaction between the guru and the disciple, the chief healing technique if you will.39 The classical analytic understanding of the self and an insight into its workings in the analytic situation is through verbalization. Words are the carriers of the knowledge that heals. Silence and quiescence are most often interpreted as resistance, defensive inhibition, or an ego disturbance of shorter or longer duration.

  In the relational models, where the avoidance of a sense of estrangement and abandonment is deemed to be one of the primary motivational thrusts in the individual, the identity-giving powers of the eyes that recognize are at least as crucial as words that explain and integrate diffuse experience. In the silent affirmation of every darshan, the individual experiences in the guru the caretaker of his ‘prehistoric’ era and a brief but regular fulfilment of a profound human need for mutual recognition. Taken in through the eyes, the guru is gradually internalized as a benign figure who is different from the disciple’s bad inner objects and who opens the disciple’s closed world of archaic and destructive object relationships to new possibilities.

  That the silence of darshan works better in India than in the West may have to do with the caretaking patterns of the culture. In most Western societies, a large part of reassurance against the separation anxiety of childhood is provided by the mother’s voice, for instance, at bedtime. Sleep itself means darkness, silence and—in most middleclass sleeping arrangements—separation from the mother so that silence becomes associated with the fear of her absence. In India, on the other hand, the child is almost constantly carried on the mother’s body and sleeps at night with the mother in the same bed. Silence and quiescence may well be associated with the mother’s presence and a union with the deep rhythms of her body. The analyst of relational models will thus admit to a certain affinity with the guru in that they share recognizable features of a common ancestry based on what evolution has created: human development embedded in a web of human connectedness, the self as a locus of relationships.

  With greater awareness of the meaning and function of its own rituals, psychoanalysis can now appreciate religious ritual in a way more differentiated than was possible in Freud’s early formulations. Every analyst is keenly cognizant of the importance of keeping the analytic atmosphere and setting constant. He or she is aware of the feeling of fragmentation in the patient, even if mild and fleeting, when the rituals of greeting and leave-taking are varied or the regularity of the sessions disturbed. Analytic ritual, when good, repeatedly confirms the personal bond between the patient and the analyst. It thus allows the patient to approach conflict and contradiction within an environment whose familiar interdependency has been stressed again and again. Like Thomas Mann’s sartorial advice to the imaginative writer to dress like a bank clerk, the outer formalization of the analytic session fosters inner spontaneity. Of course, when the ritual, analytic or religious, is ‘bad’, that is, when its repetiveness has become forced, rigid, and bereft of all spontaneity, it is then that Freud’s analysis of ritual regains a certain validity.

  Besides suggestive parallels and interesting convergences between religious ritual, spiritual techniques of self-interrogation, and psychoanalysis, what can push psychoanalysis away from its current habitat in the boundary space between science, art, and religion and toward declaring its alliance with religion is its mythic core. By this I do not mean that myths, such as that of Oedipus, which for most people now is more a Freudian than a Greek myth, build the core of psychoanalytic theory. Nor do I wish to highlight the concerns with origins, transformations, shifting realities—basically with meaning—that psychoanalysis shares with mythology. By mythic, of course, I do no
t mean fictional, the common meaning of myth in every European language since Plato pronounced it to be so. Mythic refers more to a certain structure of thought and reflection which serves to organize inner and outer experience. This particular structure, both at the heart of mythology and psychoanalysis, has fantasy as its foundation. Fantasy is again not used in the ordinary sense of the word with its popular connotations of whimsy, eccentricity, or triviality, but as another name for that world of imagination which seeks to give meaning to experience. Fantasy, ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ is to different extents and in different forms also the stuff out of which works of art, scholarly discourses, and scientific theories are constructed.

  The intricate encasement of fantasy by symbolism, metaphor and analogy—the mythic structure of thought—is the source of the power of psychoanalytic theories as also its practice where it pervades the interweaving of the patient’s productions with the analyst’s responses, his interpretations. Ava Siegler has suggested that Freud’s extensive use of metaphor and analogy in the development and expression of his ideas is not incidental but necessary to the explanatory power of his theories.40 ‘Metaphor and analogy enable possibilities for complex orderings of knowledge. They can be used to help explain perception that would be difficult to explain otherwise…. Additionally, metaphor and analogy share an attribute of ambiguity. It is in their very nature to participate in and transfer excess or surplus meaning from one perception to another, enriching our understanding of subtle and intricate human experiences.’41

  Metaphor and analogy are not only integral to psychoanalytic theory but also to its practice. Even the conveying of analytic insight through interpretation, I believe, must not be crystal clear but to some extent overlapping and overinclusive. Like myths, the truly transmuting analytic insights exceed the language used to convey them, setting up resonances that reveal ever more hidden depths. Contrary to Freud’s expectations, it is not the scientific worldview with its language of denotation, but the mythological Weltanschauung with connotation marking its language, which is a better path into the depths of emotion and imagination—the subject of psychoanalysis. Corresponding more to that which Oliver Sacks suggests is the iconical and ‘artistic’ organization of the final form of the brain’s record of experience and action, the mythic is truer to the melodic and scenic nature of inner life, to the Proustian nature of memory and mind.42

  In summary, then, my own stance acknowledges the many significant similarities between psychoanalysis and religious healing and ordains the adoption of a different ‘quality in attitude’ in the observation of religious phenomena. It certainly does not go as far as Wilfred Bion, a cult figure for many analysts, especially in Latin America, for whom the goals of psychoanalysis are mystical goals, and who deliberately takes recourse to religious terminology to describe what happens in a psychoanalysis. Bion would not rest content with the analysand’s knowing of the phenomena of his real self but would ideally have him or her pass from knowing to being the real self.43 This gap, Bion would say, can only be bridged by the ‘godhead’ of the analysand consenting to be incarnated in his or her person. He would ideally suspend memory and desire to promote the exercise of the aspects of psyche that have no background in sensuous experience.

  Though attracted and intrigued, I would prefer to remain with sensuous experience and the body, the only container we have of our souls. I would agree that the goal of analysis is setting free and greatly increasing the capacity for ‘experiencing experience’ but would not ignore the sensual nature of experience, of having consciousness suffuse every part of one’s body. To adapt one of Bion’s own metaphors, I would be content to grow, dig out, and eat potatoes, intensely and sensuously, while admiring from afar, without doubting it, the mystic’s ability to sing potatoes.

  The Colours Of Violence

  Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 The Setting

  2 The Riot

  3 The Warriors

  4 Victims and Others: I. The Hindus

  5 Victims and Others: II. The Muslims

  6 A New Hindu Identity

  7 The Muslim Fundamentalist Identity

  8 Conclusion: Religious Conflict in the Modern World

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Acknowledgements

  For my daughter Shveta, also because she asked.

  Preface

  This book is a psychoanalyst’s exploration of what is commonly known as religious conflict. The hesitations—‘psychoanalyst’s’ instead of ‘psychoanalytic’, the qualifier ‘commonly known as’—are due to an awareness that such conflicts are complex phenomena, involving the interaction of political, economic, cultural and psychological forces. To reduce their complexity exclusively to psychoanalytic notions is to engage in a psychological imperialism which has been deeply offensive to practitioners of other disciplines—history, political science, and sociology among others—who have traditionally engaged in the study of social conflict.

  My own aspirations in this book are modest. They are to provide a way of looking at conflict—the psychoanalyst’s way—so as to deepen the understanding provided by other disciplines. To their insights, I wish to add my own discipline’s characteristic way of reflecting on issues involved in religious conflict. Taking the Hindu-Muslim violence of 1990 in the south Indian city of Hyderabad as my case-study, I have tried to bring out the subjective, experiential aspects of conflict between religious groups, to capture the psychological experience of being a Hindu or Muslim when one’s community seems to be ranged against the other in a deadly confrontation. This means working with a notion of the group aspect of identity which is constituted of a person’s feelings and attitudes toward the self as a member of an ethnic/religious/cultural collectivity. This particular self-image is transmitted from one generation to the next through the group’s mythology, history, ideals and values, and shared cultural symbols. Group identity is an extended part of individual self-experience, although the intensity of this experience varies across individuals and with time. It can range from feelings of nominal affiliation with the group to a deep identification or even to feelings of fusion, where any perceived harm to the group’s interests or threats to its ‘honour’ are reacted to as strongly as damage to one’s own self. I have then tried to describe the ways in which social-psychological forces in a particular period of history bring out latent group identities and turn them to violent ends. With evidence drawn from interviews with men, women, and children, psychological tests and speech transcripts of Hindu and Muslim ‘fundamentalists’, I have sought to analyse the fantasies, social representations, and modes of moral reasoning about the out-groups—‘them’—that motivate and rationalize arson, looting, rape, and killing.

  Chapter 1 describes the context of Hindu-Muslim violence: personal, social, and historical. After trying to understand the emotional reverberations of the Hyderabad riot of 1990, the central event of my study, I give a brief account of its setting—a social and historical portrait of the city of Hyderabad—before going on to trace the contested and contentious history of Hindu-Muslim relations.

  Chapter 2 begins with my own memories of the violence between Hindus and Muslims on the eve of the partition of the country in 1947. It examines the nature of such memories and the ways they are transmitted from one generation to another. It discusses the morphology of religious group violence, the sequence of steps leading to the formation of riotous mobs, the psychology of such mobs, and then briefly summarizes events leading to the 1990 riot.

  Chapter 3 turns our attention to the ‘activists’ of violence. These are the ‘strong men’, the pehlwans and-the dadas who take over the direction and organization of violence once the riot begins. The chapter views religious violence through their eyes and tries to identify some common themes in their psychological make-up and professional socialization.

  Chapter 4 looks closely at one set of victims of the riot—the Pardis
of Shakkergunj, a small Hindu community in an old part of the city who have been repeated victims of religious violence. Through interviews with members of one extended Pardi family, we see the different ways in which men and women experience this violence and understand how the Hindu image of Muslims is constructed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of children’s representation of Hindu-Muslim violence.

  Chapter 5 describe Hindu-Muslim relations and violence from the viewpoint of a poor Muslim family from Karwan in the old part of the city. The chapter analyses the different ‘victim’ responses of Indian Muslims and concludes with a discussion of the morality of violence, that is, with the ways Muslims and Hindus evaluate their various interactions with members of the other community, including such riot-time ‘interactions’ as arson, rape, and murder.

  Chapter 6 discusses the social-cultural impact of modernization and globalization in fostering fundamentalist and revivalist group identities. Its centrepiece consists of the analysis of a speech by a Hindu demagogue which shows the psychological steps through which such an identity is sought to be constructed.