by Sudhir Kakar
In his observations, Erikson identifies unity as the pre-eminent theme in Tagore’s inner world and in his poetry. Here, I cannot go into all the data in support of this interpretation: biographical, reported dreams, literary productions, but will only say that in identifying the dominant theme in a great man’s inner life all the available material needs to be carefully weighed, sometimes against each other, to arrive at a conclusion. For instance, Tagore’s claim that his mother’s death did not make a conscious and immediate impression on the youngster does not tell us anything about the meaning of her death to him but perhaps this poem does:
I cannot remember my mother,
only sometimes in the midst of my play
a tune seems to hover over my playthings,
the tune of some song that she used to hum while
rocking my cradle.
I cannot remember my mother,
but when in the early autumn morning
the smell of the siuli flowers floats in the air
the scent of the morning service in the temple comes
to me as the scent of my mother.
I cannot remember my mother,
only when from my bedroom window
I send my eyes into the blue of the distant sky
I feel that the stillness of my mother’s gazing on my
face has spread all over the sky.
But returning to the unity theme in Tagore’s inner life, it is a search for bringing together what are normally regarded as opposites: human–divine, male–female, home–world. Let me only take his gradual integration of the masculine and the feminine in himself, perhaps necessary for all poets, as an example. Erikson writes:
None of us, who cannot speak Bengali, will ever know the real appeal of his poetry. In fact, let it be said that some of his recurring themes (all the variations of ‘the heart’, for example), in English translation, assume a stereotyped sentimentality, at times causing at least in me, a slightly nauseous reaction. (Tagore himself felt this at times). And particularly, the identification with the (dying) female figures, or the salvation through them, often becomes almost ‘corny’. But besides some traditional ‘softness’ in Bengali song, we must consider all this along two lines. A poet can only be born through a gradual integration of the masculine and feminine in him. Some express this only in their poetry, some in their appearance as well. And Tagore’s whole appearance, at the end seemed to be above the sexes, even as in young years, he combined feminine shyness with a tall, masculine body. His beard was patriarchal but his robes veiled some mysteriously pregnant body. Ascetic Gandhi was tolerant of this flamboyant appearance: he understood that it marked Tagore’s role in India and the world: for in a country, smitten by the necessity to stand up against a conqueror’s idol (namely, the masculinity of the British beefeaters) and in a world about to surrender to a combination of technological superman and nationalist bullies, Tagore reasserted the traditional inclusion in the Indian identity of the feminine and the maternal, the sensual and the experiential, the receptive and the transcendental in human life.
The unity theme, with its two basic moods of melancholy, that is, death before consummation and rapture when the Oneness is consummated, is pervasive in Tagore and can be traced back to the ‘geography’ of his childhood. Here, ‘imprisoned on the fringe of the big house, the fringe where “the people”—the servants, the sister-in-law Kadambri, the teachers—dwell, the child longs for the mysterious inner sanctum (his mother’s quarters, her “scent”, an immersion in the maternal) as also for the great outer world—of the returning father, the inspiration of nature, the merger with the Great Spirit.’ At least some of Tagore’s genius—not all—can be understood as the playing out of a vital childhood theme in complex and mature ways in his poems and plays.
I was unaware of Erikson’s stature when I met him in 1964 and in fact confused his name with that of Erich Fromm who was better known to the lay reading public. I could therefore approach him naturally, without an inhibiting awe. Whenever I was back in Ahmedabad from my travels, I loved to go across to his house at sunset after he had finished his own work. We would sit outside, on the balcony overlooking the Sabarmati. In companionable silence, we would sip at a gin and tonic and contemplate the vista of an age-old life unfolding on the riverbed: strings of small grey-white Kathiawari donkeys, as mild and not bigger than sheep, carefully climb up the riverbank carrying bags of sand for the city’s construction projects; wiry washermen clad in loincloth and burnt black by the sun, beating cloth on flat-topped stones with loud rhythmic grunts; dyers with their steaming cauldrons on wood fires practising an ancient craft, the freshly dyed five-yard-long saris strung between bamboo stakes to dry in a riot of changing colours as the sun gradually sank below the horizon and a vermilion dusk deepened to grey.
We watched and talked of Gandhi and of the men and women whose lives he had transformed. Like Gandhi, Erikson was no mean transformer himself. His sparse observations were full of insights and gentle humour that captivated me. What struck me most about him was a benevolence singularly free from all traces of condescension—whether of the old towards the young, the learned towards the ignorant, the established scholar towards the novice or the famous towards the unknown. He had that rarest of gifts, a possession of the truly generous in spirit, of paying complete and total attention to the person he was with—even when what the person was saying was neither particularly original nor especially interesting.
I do not remember the details of the conversations we carried out in German, a language that was his mother tongue but which he rarely got to speak, but their spirit is still alive within me. The way he looked at people and events, with that indefinable quality called wisdom, was opening up my mind—and my spirit—in a way I had never experienced before. It was not as if he talked a great deal. He was not one of those people who infest public life and our television screens, who hold forth at length, afflicting our ears and violating our sensibility with banalities. Erikson was quite capable of listening to my callow views on Gandhi and on life with a grave courtesy and responding in a way which never made me feel that he did not take them, or me, seriously. Many years later, I saw this quality again and again in his seminars. Even if according to my lights someone was spouting forth nonsense, Erikson would paraphrase the person in a way that made the contribution seem valuable, a value he added himself. Time and again, I saw the delighted surprise on the face of a student—‘Did I say this?’ Everyone who attended a seminar with Erikson or talked to him, went away with a sense of enhancement, never of being diminished. I believe it was this innate generosity of spirit which made him pay attention to me. I was twenty-six years old, lonely, desperately longing to return to Europe and to stay in India, full of the most outrageous plans for my life, wanting to do so many things because I did not know the one thing I really wanted to do.
I read his writings—Childhood and Society, Young Man Luther, Insight and Responsibility—initially with curiosity and later with mounting excitement. I discovered that my own inner confusion was perhaps not a symptom of a mental disorder (as I had secretly feared) but something many people have gone through in their lives. My ‘identity problems’, though perhaps unduly prolonged, belonged to a normative crisis of adolescence and young adulthood, where my idiosyncratic gifts demanded but had not found a corresponding occupational setting. My identity confusion, in addition, was not only personal but was also located in the culture of my community—in the sense that it reflected the contemporary crisis in the historical development of the Indian middle class, torn between East and West, conflicted between European and Indian world views.
Put simply, I was having an ‘identity crisis’. (Erikson’s concept of ‘identity crisis’ was poised to enter the language and ethical climate of our times.) It was my good fortune I could spend so many hours with the person who had coined the term. What happened to me at the age of twenty-six had many elements of a conversion experience. I discovered that what I rea
lly wanted was that special kind of life of the mind that I believed psychoanalysis could give me. I wanted to be like him, a ‘writing psychoanalyst’.
The day Erikson and his wife left for Delhi, on their way back to the US, was also the day I discovered that what I wanted more than anything else was to work with him as an apprentice. It became clear to me, as if in a revelation, that he was the guru my Indian self was searching for. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way of reaching him in time to give him the good news of his selection as my guru. The train journey to Delhi took twenty-three hours, by which time he would have already left India, and I could not afford to fly. Here, another piece of luck came my way. The chief representative of the Ford Foundation, who had played a large role in the setting up of IIM, was in Ahmedabad for the day and was returning to Delhi the same evening in the foundation’s private aircraft. All I had to do was hitchhike a ride on the plane, a request which he obligingly granted. We reached Delhi’s Safdarjang airport around ten at night. I took a taxi straight to the India International Centre (IIC) where the Eriksons were staying. After having said goodbye to me only the previous day, Erikson must have been surprised to see me standing at the door of his room. His face, however, did not betray surprise as he listened to me pour out the news of my discovery. Courteously, and with his characteristic attention, he listened to what I wanted of him.
It was to his credit that he did not laugh out aloud when I told him of his adoption as my mentor and my intention to work with him when he returned to his job as Professor of Human Development at Harvard. My degrees in engineering and economics were my only formal qualifications; but, as he knew, I had published short stories in German. Gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, he pointed out the vital flaw in my plans to work with him in his course on the human life cycle.
‘You have never studied psychology,’ he said.
I could only nod my assent to this intrusion of reality.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘Neither have I.’
For although later in life he was to be showered with honorary doctorates from universities all over the world, his only formal educational qualifications were graduation from high school and a Montessori diploma. He had never studied at a university and had spent his Wanderjahre—the wandering years—in Europe as what he called ‘a non-functioning artist’, sketching and wood engraving, before he came to Vienna as an art teacher for children in a private school run by Freud’s daughter Anna Freud and her friend Dorothy Burlingham. It was at Anna Freud’s instance that he began his psychoanalytic training with her and entered Freud’s circle. I like to believe that across the gulf in our ages, cultures and ethnicities, he sensed in me a kindred spirit whose travel through life was not destined to be in a straight line but to take a zigzag course that would often deviate from the main road to explore bylanes with marvellous, unexpected vistas even when some of these ultimately turned out to be dead ends.
‘I liked your stories, though. They show a psychological mindedness that is sufficient for me,’ he said.
Here, Erikson was acting in the spirit of Freud whose selection of men and women who became the first generation of psychoanalysts was dictated by the criteria that all they needed was to be prepared by a general erudition and gifted with a certain perceptiveness for the non-rational, ‘which means that they had to be both sane enough to survive such dangerous dealings with the uncharted inner world and just “odd” enough to want to study it’.3 I remember that some three decades later, I quoted this statement to a good friend, the poet-scholar A.K. Ramanujan, who had been in a depressed state for a couple of years before his tragic death, when he asked me whether he could formally study psychoanalysis without having a medical or psychological background.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ Erikson went on to say. ‘If you get your doctorate in the next two to three years, I’ll try my best to get you to Harvard to work with me.’
We shook hands as I once again bade him goodbye.
The Resolution
1965–68
Vienna – Harvard
The only way to do a fast track PhD was to stick to economics and in the spring of 1964, I left for Vienna to enrol myself in the doctoral programme of the Wirtschaftsuniversitaet—the University of Economics. Like all German universities, it was divided into various institutes, with each institute being the domain of an all-powerful professor who, depending on the size of the institute, carried out the teaching, research and administrative duties with the help of a number of assistant professors and research assistants. At the recommendation of Michel Hofmann, an assistant professor in Mannheim who had become a close personal friend during my student days in that city, I was admitted as a doctoral student in the Institute of Macroeconomics.
I learnt no more economics than I already knew and the little I did learn—a highly idiosyncratic and politically reactionary mixture of ethics, sociology and social philosophy—I could have done without. The institute represented a school of economic thought which, I later discovered, was unfamiliar to even some of the best scholars in the discipline. The professor, Walter Heinrich, had been a disciple of Othmar Spann, who taught economics and sociology at Vienna in the period between the two world wars. This was the time when the Austrian School of Economics, of which Eugene Boehm-Bawerk and Friedrich Wiser were the leading figures, with Friedrich Hayek at its margins, was well known in economic circles. Othmar Spann was bitterly opposed to his Viennese colleagues. In the tradition of Adam Mueller, the most important of German romantic economists, Spann’s economics derived from his Ganzheitslehre, a corporatist theory, a version of which was later sought to be put in practice in Mussolini’s fascist Italy.
Ganzheitslehre held that every society is a distinctive ‘whole’—ein Ganzes, and that it is essentially a spiritual community. Social groups or ‘social estates’ are differentiated and ranked by their relationship to the central spiritual values of this whole. Economic activities have a similar hierarchical structure; education, for instance, nearer to a person’s ‘spiritual core’, occupies a higher place in the hierarchy than commerce. For the spiritual well-being of a society to be realized, resource allocation was not a question of pragmatic decision-making but needed to reflect this hierarchy. Leadership in this theory of ‘wholes’ is exercised by the group whose way of life most clearly expresses society’s shared values. In Europe, this ‘social estate’ was that of the aristocrats whose dominance was the basis of all cultural achievements, now threatened with destruction by the rise of industrial classes.
Highly conservative, anti-socialist and anti-individualist, the economic thought arising from the Ganzheitslehre was contemptuous of analytical or mathematical models and dismissed all contemporary economic theory as ethically impoverished and philosophically mistaken. Walter Heinrich, my Viennese professor who I met only once before the oral examinations—all questions relating to my doctoral dissertation on leadership in Indian cooperatives were addressed by one of the assistant professors—was thus a great admirer of the Indian caste system and regretted that it was being undermined by modern materialist philosophies and ideas of equality. In a sense, this conservative professor stood so far to the political right that the Nazis had dismissed him from the university after their takeover of Austria.
Since the University of Economics was a wayside stop to my destination, I did not unduly bother about the ideological orientation of my institute or whether it was the right place for initiation into the guild of macroeconomists, a membership I did not particularly value. The assistant professor in charge of guiding me, a plump, easygoing man from Graz, did not make any demands on me. I used the materials I had collected in India to write case studies on cooperatives for my dissertation and sat through the few required courses only so that the professor would register my presence. Most of the week I worked full-time at the Institute of European Studies to earn money to be able to live in Vienna. This institute was a private venture that arranged a study semester
in Vienna for American students and, given the dollar to Austrian schilling exchange rate, made a handsome profit from the activity. During summer vacations, the institute organized tours of three to four weeks, of concerts, together with sightseeing, for American student choirs. My work involved the preparations for these tours—cost calculations, hotel and travel arrangements, and when summer arrived, travelling with one of the groups through Europe as a tour leader. No one found it odd that an Indian was guiding Americans on a tour of Europe.
In the evening, I would go to my favourite Viennese café, the Café Hawelka in Dorotheergasses, a 5-minute walk from my workplace in Tegetthofstrasse behind the opera house. Here, I usually sat with a group of friends till midnight except for short excursions to one of the half-dozen wine cellars in the vicinity for a quick meal. Hawelka was already well known as an ‘artists’ café’ although it was not yet as famous as it became later. Located in a narrow alley just off the Graben, opposite a hotel which carried a plaque above the entrance with the inscription ‘Franz Kafka and Max Brod stayed here in 1911’, Hawelka was a watering hole for artists, would-be artists, actors, published and unpublished writers, students and retirees.
On entering the café, the first thing one noticed were posters of Viennese art galleries, announcements of literary readings and concerts of jazz and avant-garde music that covered the whole wall on the left. Small oils, aquarelles and line drawings, which Herr and Frau Hawelka who owned and ran the place had acquired from their regular artist patrons—either bought or more often given to them to settle long-pending liquor bills—hung on the other walls. A large marble-top table just after the entrance was littered with newspapers and magazines. Most of these were German but Hawelka had begun to attract enough foreign residents of Vienna for it to subscribe to the International Herald Tribune, as also the Sunday editions of the Observer and the Times, and the Figaro and Le Monde. There were plush sofas covered in fraying crimson velour in the corners and along the side of the café that overlooked the alley, straight-backed wooden chairs around tables with marble tops, and a counter at the back that led into the kitchen. The smell of cigarettes and pipe tobacco hung heavy in the air but the café, though not well ventilated, was never really smelly.
