A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

…

  Mrinal is overconscious of her fine qualities and her money. She can’t live under a dominating husband and a husband who gives way to her whims and fancies can never make her happy. She needs someone very strong, rich and strict with her. I wonder if she can be trained. People like her can never be a success in their lives, I mean in domestic life. They may have a brilliant career so far as social life is concerned.

  …

  We talked about Mrinal and the way she treats boys. It is really not fair on her part to encourage them so much, and leave them in the lurch as soon as she finds another. She cannot restrain herself and for this reason she will never be able to find happiness. The very fact of being tied to one person the whole of her life is dreadful to her. Her aim is to seek fame, and that I think she will have to some end.

  The two young women who shared a room for a few months in Shantiniketan, close friends who did not like some of each other’s ways, could not have imagined that a decade later they would become intimately linked as two sides of a triangle, sharing the same man, one as a husband, the other as lover, for almost twenty years.

  Kamla’s diary entries after her marriage are oddly flat. I am unsure whether the absence of the earlier vibrancy has to do with what most people would regard as the calming effect of marriage. The entries are laboured, half-hearted attempts to describe what is going on around her, as if out of duty rather than from an inner need, and with only rare glimpses into her feelings.

  ‘Things have happened these last fifteen days. I have got married, been to Chakwal and here I am in Kashmir for a short holiday with Khem,’ is followed by a description of places the couple has visited. The only personal note is, ‘I got a cramp in my back which prevented sleep half the night.’ Not that she is unhappy. There is one diary entry that says, ‘I hope not only [are] our holidays blissful like these last two days but our whole life together is thus one long spell of bliss.’ But my general impression is of a creeping lethargy that does not bode well for her married life.

  Chakwal was and continues to be the most rural area of what is now Pakistan Punjab. The town itself was devoid of all cultural activity (unless one was an anthropologist) or social life that would have been of interest to the cosmopolitan young couple. With Khem busy in his work as the highest executive and judicial authority of the district, Kamla was alone in the spacious bungalow except for the shadowy presence of servants who took care of the house but kept out of the memsahib’s way. Kamla was left with little to do except read. The entry of 16 April 1941 reads, ‘Must do something, otherwise the little things I have learnt would seem such a farce, just a polish to attract people . . . I have been doing nothing except dozing off in chair and later in bed.’

  The last lines in the diary are dated 17 May 1941. They talk of Khem feeling depressed and of her futile efforts to get him out of this mood. The next five pages have been torn out and the rest of the diary pages are blank. Around the 20th of May—I do not have the exact date—Khem was murdered. The murderer was the brother of a man whom Khem, as part of his judicial duties, had sentenced to a long term of imprisonment.

  It was summer, the night was warm and the murderer had no difficulty in obtaining access to the courtyard of the house where their beds had been made. When Kamla awoke the next morning she found her husband lying dead, shot in the head, flies buzzing over the brains spilled on his face. She had not heard a sound, the report of the gun transformed into exploding firecrackers in her dream.

  Although the family encouraged her to consider another marriage, she was only nineteen, Kamla never remarried. Returning to the family home in Lahore, she took her master’s degree in Philosophy from Punjab University before leaving for the US, where she lived for five years and acquired a doctorate in psychology from the University of Michigan. By the time she came back, the country was partitioned and there was no longer a home in Lahore to which she could return. And it is here that Kamla’s life again crossed with that of Mrinal who had married and now lived in Ahmedabad.

  Actually, the story begins earlier, in 1944. Mrinal and Vikram were passing through Lahore on their way to Kashmir for a holiday and Mrinal had written to Kamla to meet them at the railway station. The meeting was so engrossing for both Kamla and Vikram that he refused to let Kamla get down when the train began to move. She had to alight at the next station and take another train back to Lahore. Kamla left such a strong impression on Vikram that when she returned to India in 1949 after her PhD from Michigan, he offered her a job in the Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association (ATIRA) as the head of its human relations division to study the psychological and organizational dimensions of work. This was the first institution Vikram had set up and of which he was the founding director. Soon after, in December 1949, they became lovers.

  Vikram Sarabhai, Mrinal’s husband, is today chiefly remembered as the ‘Father of India’s Space Programme’, although in an illustrious career cut tragically short, he was instrumental in setting up many other scientific and research institutions such as the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) and India’s premier institute of management education, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), besides heading the country’s Atomic Energy Commission for a few months after the death of its head, Homi Bhabha, in an airplane crash. Trained as a physicist at Cambridge University, Vikram was also involved in the family’s sprawling businesses. Later, he would give up his business responsibility to concentrate on what he really enjoyed: his research into cosmic rays and building institutions to serve the scientific and administrative requirements of the new country. In these ventures, he had the unstinting support of India’s first prime ministers, notably Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi who was a personal friend.

  At the time of which I write, the Sarabhais were not only one of India’s leading business families, but they also occupied a unique niche in the Indian imagination as a clan comprising gifted individuals who used their wealth to set up socially and artistically innovative ventures that served the common weal. In British and American media, they were routinely referred to as the Rockefellers or Medicis of India. Vikram’s father Ambalal Sarabhai finds mention in Gandhi’s autobiography as the anonymous donor who saved Gandhi’s ashram from closing down because of a lack of funds by the timely gift of a large sum of money. Ambalal’s sister was Gandhi’s close co-worker in the 1918 strike of Ahmedabad’s textile millworkers in which Gandhi tried out his non-violent weapon of satyagraha against the mill-owners led by Ambalal. Vikram’s sister Mridula Sarabhai was Nehru’s close friend and did invaluable work in rescuing Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women kidnapped during the partition violence and restoring them to their, at times reluctant, families. Later, she became a fervent partisan of the Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah. Along with Abdullah, who was suspected of separatist ambitions, Mridula too was briefly imprisoned by Nehru. Vikram’s elder brother Gautam and his wife Kamalini were instrumental in establishing the National Institute of Design as also the first institute for the training of child psychologists, the B.M. Institute, in Ahmedabad. Another sister, Gira, was responsible for setting up India’s first, and perhaps still the most, outstanding museum of textiles.

  Vikram’s letters to Kamla while he was away from Ahmedabad—he travelled a good deal in connection with his varied activities—or when she was away for two long stays in the US, number in hundreds and span a period of twenty years from 1951 to 1971. They are a treasure trove for an insight into their complex relationship and into the person of a brilliant and sensitive man. At one remove, they also give us a glimpse of the mind of a talented and independent woman who is in love and in a relationship which one part of her abhors as demeaning. The letters are also cautionary for any historian who still believes that decision-making in institutions, whether private or those of the state, is independent of the personality and the emotional needs of the actors, that the public record is sufficient to fully explain the course of a historical event. As we shall see later, the locat
ion of the IIM at Ahmedabad rather than in Bombay and its collaboration with the Harvard Business School rather than the University of California at Berkeley as originally planned, had as much to do with the demands of the relationship between Vikram and Kamla (if not more) as with the rational deliberations captured by the public record.

  Vikram’s letters also give fascinating glimpses, laced with humour, into the personalities of the first generation of India’s leaders with whom Vikram was on terms of easy familiarity; indeed, he was one of them. He quotes John Matthai, independent India’s first finance minister, on C.R. Rajagopalachari, who succeeded Sardar Patel as the home minister in Nehru’s first cabinet, as having ‘the gift of believing that what is good for him is also good for the country’, an observation that is true of many political leaders around the world. We see Nehru’s impatience with religious rituals when the devout Gujarati textile mill-owners insist on having a Hindu priest perform the opening ritual for the inauguration of the new ATIRA building. ‘Panditji tolerated him to start with, but when he [Nehru] was asked to rub his shoulder to the door, he exploded!! I was so glad.’

  Vikram is a clear-eyed observer of people and institutions with which he comes into contact and his comments on both are insightful.

  I always get a curious feeling whenever I come across UNESCO people and their work. They represent what is perhaps the cream of every country . . . and they are primarily engaged in one of the most futile jobs on earth—preparing a lot of high sounding documents which no one ever wants to implement or even read. Could you stand it?

  Or on foreign collaborations after his negotiations with Merck, who had set up a pharmaceuticals plant in Baroda together with Sarabhai Chemicals:

  I have found in all collaborations that after the initial honeymoon, there is a period of testing each other. A crisis comes in about three years when one of the parties goes a bit too far. After that if a new understanding is reached it is alright—because after that the interests of the two parties are so mixed up that a separation can hardly be contemplated. The important thing appears to be to clearly express one’s feelings and intentions without trying to appease.

  There are comments on India’s economic and political development, which are as fresh today as they were fifty years ago. After a conversation with the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, he writes of Galbraith’s observation that

  people’s satisfaction or discontent is not as much a result of inequality in society at a particular instant of time, but the outcome of the rate of positive change of individual groups and units. Thus a society which progresses towards a goal at a steady but measurable rate has elements of stability in it, even though one might still be quite far from the goal.

  And,

  There was in the Christian Science Monitor an exciting report about Jaiprakash Narain’s views on planning and local initiatives and leadership—also that Nehru was taking these ideas seriously and agreeing that perhaps we have been pushing around people too much.

  On the issue of having more women in the Indian parliament, an issue still very much alive after the passage of fifty years:

  I was amused to see the outburst of Laxmi Menon—Panditji’s deputy minister, about women getting tickets from the Congress. She is quite right and I am glad she is speaking her mind. As for me I bend backwards to professional women and love to work with them, often with the correct sublimation of ‘it’.

  The ‘it’, a translation of the German Es is, of course, the Id of psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious repository (among others) of the sexual drives.

  On the holding of large national conferences in Delhi:

  3 days of a National Integration Conference at Delhi is quite an experience. All the problems that we see at the University are present on a larger scale. There is the desire to reach a common measure—and one has to go on diluting till what is left can be interpreted as one wishes. What would happen if the word ‘generally’ did not exist? As usual language produced maximum heat. Jawaharlalji presided.

  It is sobering to observe how we are still grappling with many of the same issues today, and in the same manner, as we were then as a young nation. C’est plus a change, c’est la memchose—The more it changes, the more it remains the same, indeed!

  His letters reveal Vikram to be a shrewd but compassionate judge of people in social and professional relationships. Even in love, where he is highly emotional, as any passionate person must be, he still manages to keep his reflective capacity intact. While I was staying with Kamla, I remember Vikram as someone with a great deal of charm although looking back I will now insert the adjective ‘boyish’ before the noun. The boyish charm, a Krishna-like playfulness, pervades many of his letters to Kamla where Vikram is in turn appeasing, cajoling or complaining (which is frequent) about her not writing as often as he would like her to when they are separated.

  Depending on the situation, Vikram and Kamla have many names for each other. They are Kumar and Malati when seized by the sentiment or memory of being lovers in their most innocent state where they constitute a two-person universe that shuts out the rest of the world. She is Snow White and he is Dopey, her bumbling dwarf, when he is trying to appease her anger or annoyance. There are the Japanese names for each other, commemorating the time they had spent in that country at the beginning of their relationship, names coloured by the hue of that initial passion. There are also some other names whose secrets have disappeared along with the lovers who carried them.

  A real human triangle, one that is not distorted by large power differences among its constituents, is a notoriously unstable construction, no matter how brilliant, gifted and sophisticated the three individuals who constitute its nodal points. It is thus remarkable that the triangle of Vikram, Mrinal and Kamla lasted for over twenty years even if each must have gone through phases of inner turmoil composed of recriminations, accusations, apologies and tearful reconciliations. As the ‘other woman’ in Vikram’s life, Kamla was acutely sensitive to her humiliating position, especially galling for a woman who prided herself on her independence and who later became a well-known champion of the rights of Indian women. To his credit, Vikram never tried to conceal their relationship from public gaze. He openly demonstrated his commitment to her by insisting on her presence at even the most private of family occasions. Given his social status, though, no one except perhaps a member of his family would have openly confronted him or even alluded to the adulterous affair. Kamla, however, was less protected from snide looks or ambiguous comments at which open umbrage could be taken. I remember being outraged when she once came back from a party, almost crying because she had overheard one of the mill-owners pass a crude remark on her relationship with Vikram.

  Looking back, I can now see that my feelings towards Vikram were not simply those of awe and a puppy-like gratefulness that this famous man, a confidant of prime ministers and on terms of easy familiarity with the greatest of the land, always had a pleasant word for a gawky and provincial eighteen-year-old. I was also dimly aware of an occasional upsurge of resentment, which I attributed at the time to his refusal to do the ‘right thing’ by my beloved aunt by marrying her. It was many years later, during my years of apprenticeship on the psychoanalytic couch, that I realized that my resentment of Vikram who had always been kind to me was more occasioned by my unconscious jealousy of his place in Kamla’s affections than by my moralistic posturing. In the sexual flux of late adolescence, the reactivated oedipal feelings, that is, the jealousy and resentment of the little boy at his father’s sexual access to the mother, were inflamed—on the few occasions I returned home early from college in the afternoon—by the evidence of crumpled pillows and bedsheets in Kamla’s bedroom, or the lingering glow of gratified desire on her face after Vikram had just left.

  From his letters to Kamla, it is my impression that Vikram tried to glide over the problems of the triangular relationship as much as he could. Like many other men, he often retreated into a hurt silence when c
onfronted by Kamla’s emotional pain couched in the form of recriminations. At these times, his letters to her are from Dopey, or the ‘poor fellow’, who feels sorry for himself at the same time as he acknowledges that their relationship may not be entirely fair to Kamla. In one of the letters, four years after their liaison began, he writes:

  I have reached the stage when I can feel every little ripple of emotion and thought in you. That is perhaps why I get so funny at times—and it is difficult to control my mood then. There is little to speak about, but I carry on an intense conversation by myself. When I feel sad, I have only to say ‘So what?’ At that moment it almost seems that sadness is better than the effort to look for persons near one. Selfish, I guess.

  In a few letters, prodded by Kamla’s unhappiness, he does reflect on his own feelings about the triangle in which the three are entangled.

  Frequently in the past I have tried to discuss openly and frankly the problem of relationships—with you and Mrinal. In recent months it has been much oftener with you—and at a deeper level. It is true that I physically spend much less time with you than at home, but home has not been Mrinal—there are guests, children, engagements. The discussions or understanding of the relationships has been unsatisfactory in every way, with you from whom I am always going away, with Mrinal since I am never really there. Add to this my special character which you know so well—of not wanting to hurt anyone explicitly—but hurting much more without wanting to. And then I find myself quite naturally on the top of a volcano. Ambivalence is a state which must have an inherent instability about it . . . this does not sound like seeing daylight—but I know that I have to be very much clearer in my head if I have to stop hurting everyone at all times.

  Three years later, in another letter: