by Sudhir Kakar
The violence was confined to the old walled city and from across the river, we could see plumes of smoke rising from arsonists’ fire and hear the faint roar of rampaging mobs. I was transported back to the partition riots in Rohtak and took a decision that in keeping with my personal brand of activism, a quiet affair of the mind, I would some day try to better understand the psychological wellsprings of Hindu–Muslim violence. This was a pledge to myself that I redeemed twenty-five years later in The Colours of Violence.
Even at that time I had the feeling that for all their contextual peculiarities and differences in immediate causes, violence between Hindus and Muslims had some common underlying themes that were recurrent. For instance, the rumours that were circulating in Ahmedabad in 1969 were essentially the same as I had heard as a child in Rohtak in 1947, and would hear again in the Gujarat violence of 2002. One of these is the perennial rumour about poisoned food: ‘The Muslims have poisoned all the milk,’ ‘The Hindus broke into grocery shops and have mixed ground glass in bags of wheat flour,’ and so on. Rumours that unlock our potential for paranoia and release its persecutory anxiety.
Another perennial favourite has to do with sexual violence, about the rape of one community’s women by men of the other community. Besides being the vehicle for expressing the heights of moral outrage, rape rumours may well also be used by men as an unwanted but wished-for vicarious satisfaction of their sadistic impulses.
The ‘basic’ rumours about poisoned food and rape are common to both communities. Other recurrent rumours are group specific and betray the distinct and long-standing fears of each community that surface during bouts of religious violence. In the case of Muslims, these rumours relate to a perceived threat to their religious identity: ‘Copies of the Quran are being burnt, Islam is in danger.’ ‘They are breaking our mosques.’ ‘Now they will try to convert us to Hinduism.’ Such rumours play into a long-standing fear of Indian Muslims of being swamped by a preponderant and numerous Hindu host. Such calls to the battle stations of faith reflect the primal fear of Indian Muslims of somehow lapsing from the faith and becoming reabsorbed into the insidious Hindu society surrounding them.
The community-specific Hindu fear is encapsulated by such rumours as, ‘Large amounts of arms and ammunitions have been sent to the Muslims from Pakistan,’ and, in the 2002 Gujarat riots, ‘Terrorists have infiltrated from across the Kutch border (with Pakistan) and have spread all over Gujarat.’ The latter is but a contemporary version of the rumour I heard during the 1969 Ahmedabad violence—of armed Pakistani agents seen parachuting into the city at night. Here, by being linked with an armed and dangerous enemy, the Muslim minority becomes a psychological threat that is otherwise not justified by its numbers. These rumours conjure up images of Islamic hordes poised at the country’s borders, of medieval Muslim marauders like Mahmud, the sultan of Ghazni, one of the most cruel and rapacious of Muslim invaders, who swept over north India every year like a monsoon of fire and was famed far and wide as the great destroyer of temples and a scourge of the Hindus.
At the height of the 1969 Ahmedabad violence, together with C.R. Rangarajan, a recent addition to the IIM faculty as an assistant professor of economics (he has gone on to chair the prime minister’s Economic Advisory Council), who shared my concern at the happenings, I worked on an interdisciplinary proposal for a study of the murderous conflict. With the return of normalcy and the press of our academic commitments, we never pursued the funding of the project. As a witness to many other such events over the years, the last one being the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, I wonder if liberal outrage is condemned to be a sorry affair, as ephemeral as smoke, ‘Too like the lightning which doth cease to be / Ere one can say “It lightens.”’2
My engagement with Indian society, which led to the publication of a mediocre book on Indian youth, co-authored with Kamla, was conflicted in the sense that I also wanted to leave India to pursue my dream of becoming a psychoanalyst. I was still hopeful of persuading a psychoanalytic institute in the US to accept me as a candidate for training. This possibility looked more and more remote since even in case I was admitted as a student, I would still need a well-paying job to afford the expensive training required to become an analyst. The country itself, my friends wrote, was no longer as attractive as it had been when I left it three years ago. With the election of Richard Nixon as president, the liberals were in a state of both fury and despair.
‘Nixon’s election,’ John wrote, ‘might signal a new lid on thinking and feeling, a return to the fifties and an adolescence I remember that wouldn’t acknowledge my having a mind or a penis.’
Universities, where I would seek employment, were also changing. ‘The students are not what they were three years ago,’ Pamela wrote from Boston. ‘There is vastly more overt militancy, demand for control at any and every decision affecting them, and indeed, a lot of temper tantrums and laziness parading as moral outrage.’
It seemed likely that my professional dreams would go up in smoke and as this extract from a letter written to a friend during this period shows, there were occasions when I had begun to project my unhappiness on to the outer world and into my relationships:
I have been to a conference, on minorities, and had stopped over in Jaipur to see my parents and returned to Ahmedabad to a fight with A. In Delhi, I had behaved like an emotional prostitute who wants to be liked by people she doesn’t care about, in Jaipur to face the demands and hopes of loving parents whose very exclusive love is sometimes so suffocating, and in Ahmedabad to the reproaches of a child-wife that A. sometimes becomes . . . I wish I was as ‘cool’ as I once thought I was.
It was again Erikson who threw me a lifeline; the man must have been repaying huge karmic debts from our past lives! One day, I received a letter from Alexander Mitscherlich, the famed German psychoanalyst, director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt and author of the influential Die vaterlose Gesellschaft—Society without Fathers, which had made him a folk hero in Germany. Mitscherlich wrote that on the recommendation of his good friend Professor Erik Erikson, the Freud Institute would be pleased to have me as a candidate for training. They were aware of my financial constraints and had arranged a job for me in Contest, an institute for qualitative market research. The very next day, I received the offer of employment from Contest. They were branching out in a new area, Zukunftsforschung—futures research, and would be happy to have me help get it off the ground. All the three partners as also its senior employees had gone through a personal psychoanalysis and they would enthusiastically support my own training, both financially and by giving me time off from work for my analytic hours on the couch. I resigned my full professorship at IIM to which I had been recently promoted, sold my Fiat coupe to my friend Suhrid and, with the money realized from the sale, bought our flight tickets for Frankfurt.
Knut Hebert, the head of Contest, was a remarkable man, charismatic and creative, who was now in his forties and wanted to do something more with his life than help his corporate clients make money. While the main part of Contest would continue with the same kind of market research which had made the company so successful, he planned to devote most of his time to futures research. He believed that his vision would also meet with acceptance in the boardrooms of corporate Germany which shared the country’s general disquiet with the current social turbulence and was apprehensive about the future shape of German society.
Germany in 1971, as indeed much of Europe after the 1968 student protests and widespread strikes in France that nearly led to the fall of President de Gaulle, was a country wracked by fear, uncertainty and social unrest. The polarization between the older generation and the younger was far along the road to mutual incomprehension. The young denigrated their parents as Spiessburger—petty bourgeois, despised them as materialistic, resented them as authoritarian, and blamed them for never confronting the issue of Germany’s Nazi past. The differences between the generations were most marked in their lifestyles and aspira
tions. In setting up youth centres and communes, a substantial minority of German youth was seeking alternatives to the traditional nuclear family and a greater role for sensuality in their lives. In my frequent visits to communes of young people where I made close friends, I was struck by an aspect of national character which the educated young shared with their parents. In Germany, in contrast to the US it seemed you could not have the sensual without an intrusion of the theoretical; even spontaneity needed theoretical underpinnings. The most heated discussions that took place in the communes in the evening were not related to deficiencies or omissions in cooking, or who was (and should not be) fucking whom, but on the critiques, and critiques of critiques, of such abstruse matters as the nature of Spaetkapitalismus—late capitalism.
The protests of youth were not limited to non-violent sit-ins and disruption of lectures in universities or the setting up of communes. They had also begun to take on violent overtones although the terrorist acts of the Red Army Faction (RAF) that involved bank robberies, kidnapping and murder of well-known businessmen and high government officials were still a couple of years in the future. On my way from our apartment in Westend’s Beethoven Strasse to Eschenheimer Landstrasse where the Contest offices were located, I passed buildings that had been marked for demolition and which were now occupied by young squatters who had hung out large red banners with painted slogans defying the police to evict them. A couple of years back, two department stores in Frankfurt had been firebombed in what was termed as an ‘attack on the symbols of capitalism’. Futures research would provide client companies analysis of societal trends in their areas of operation for the next five to ten years and thus help them formulate long-term strategies. What Knut Hebert offered was not a neutral listing of trends but a depth analysis that employed what he believed were the two most powerful explanatory theories of human behaviour—Freudian psychoanalysis and neo-Marxism. Whereas I would provide the psychoanalytic inputs, a young sociologist who had recently graduated from the Institute of Social Research, the famed Frankfurt School, would be responsible for the analysis of social trends. In the next three years, we produced reports such as The Future of Money for the Dresdner Bank, one of Germany’s largest banks, The Future of Communications for the media conglomerate Axel Springer and, my personal favourite, The Future of Dirt for Henkel, Germany’s largest manufacturer of soaps and detergents.
Frankfurt, of course, had a tradition in this kind of collaborative effort between Freud and Marx. From its very inception in 1926, the Institute of Social Research, associated with the illustrious names of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, had sought to link psychoanalysis with ‘historical-material’ social research. Horkheimer had called Freud’s thought one of the foundation stones for their own Frankfurt School of philosophy. In 1929, the Institute of Social Research had provided office space to the newly established Institute of Psychoanalysis, associated with the names of Erich Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichman. Fromm, following the lead of ‘leftist’ analysts such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, had tried to combine Freudian theory of instinctual drives with Marx’s class theory and held joint appointments in both institutions. Mitscherlich, with the help of the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the leading light of the Frankfurt School, was reviving a tradition that had come to an abrupt end with Hitler’s rise to power. Mitscherlich had set up a department of sociology at the Sigmund Freud Institute which employed three sociologists from the Institute of Social Research who worked closely with psychoanalysts and even participated in clinical case conferences. This was in stark contrast to the Anglo-Saxon conception of a highly individualistic psychoanalysis in which the wider society played a minor role in the development of the human psyche. Besides the dismissal implicit in their characterization as ‘later’ as opposed to ‘early’ influences, culture and society in the version of psychoanalytic theory favoured by the institutes in the Anglophone countries suffered from the label of ‘surface’ phenomena and hence being ‘superficial’, rather than constituting a part of the ‘depth’ and hence being more ‘fundamental’ in the individual’s psychic life. Together with Erikson’s notion of identity being neither purely psychological nor purely social but a psychosocial construct, Freud Institute’s particular psychoanalytical orientation wherein the social Umwelt (surroundings) of the person was integral to psychoanalytic reflections on the human psyche, provided an impetus to my own future work on the role of society—conceptualized in my case in cultural-historical rather than in Marxist-universal terms—in the constitution of the individual psyche and its discontents.
My interest in the role of culture in psychoanalysis did not begin as an abstract intellectual exercise but received its critical impetus from my own personal analysis, a crucial element in the training of a candidate aspiring to become an analyst. My training analyst, who I went to see five times a week for a 50-minute analytic hour, was Clemens de Boor, a specialist in psychosomatic medicine who was the Freud Institute’s deputy director and who succeeded Mitscherlich after the latter’s retirement in 1976. De Boor was a very different man from his mentor. The few times I met Mitscherlich he seemed formal, even a little cold. He wore a doctor’s white coat when seeing patients, an odd choice of garb for an analyst, and generally walked around the institute with an unapproachable, forbidding air around him. De Boor was warm, soft-spoken and welcoming.
I began my first session on the couch by relating a dream of the previous night. I was turning into De Boor’s driveway in my car when I suddenly braked and was hit by the car behind me. It was de Boor’s car. He got out, inspected the damage and reassured me with a friendly smile that no damage was done. We then walked up to his house. Since this was my first session, where the normal mixture of fear and hope with which a person begins psychotherapy is amplified to incendiary levels, De Boor, an experienced analyst, concentrated on the dream’s reassuring aspect. He highlighted the scene of us walking together with no damage done, postponing the interpretation of my unconscious homosexual anxiety of his car ‘ramming mine from the behind’ to a later date when I would be able to deal with it better.
As the analysis progressed, as it held up my dim memories to light, wove random yet key incidents of my life into a coherent story, I also became aware of a series of niggling feelings of discomfort whose source remained incomprehensible for many years. These moments of estrangement when my analyst and I became strangers to each other were in stark contrast to the ‘moments of meaning’ wherein we were perfectly attuned, conscious that a step towards a higher understanding had been taken even if we did not know the cause of this advance in reclaiming a bit of land from the unconscious swamp. The moments of estrangement, I later realized, came with the intrusion of our cultural differences. Not in forms of politeness, manners of speech, attitudes towards time, or even differences in aesthetic sensibilities. (To me, at that time, Beethoven was just so much noise, while I doubt if my analyst even knew of the existence of Hindustani classical music, which so moved me.) The differences involved deeper cultural layers of the self, for instance, the culturally determined views of our specific relationship and of human relationships in general.
To begin with the specific relationship: in the universe of teacher-healers, I had slotted de Boor into a place normally reserved for a personal guru. From the beginning of the training analysis, it seems, I had pre-consciously envisioned our relationship in terms of a guru-disciple bond, a much more intimate affair than the contractual doctor-patient relationship governing my analyst’s professional orientation. In my cultural model, the analyst was the personification of the wise old sage benevolently directing a sincere and hard-working disciple who had abdicated the responsibility for his own welfare to the guru. My guru model also demanded that the analyst demonstrate his compassion, interest, warmth and responsiveness much more openly than is usual or even possible in the psychoanalytic model guiding his therapeutic interventions. A handshake with a ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Kakar’ at the beginning of the session an
d a handshake with an ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Kakar’ at the end of the session, even if accompanied by the beginnings of a smile, were not even starvation rations for someone who had adopted the analyst as his guru.
Our cultural orientations also attached varying degrees of importance to family relationships. For instance, as I have narrated earlier, in my childhood I had spent long periods of my young life in the extended families of my parents. Various uncles, aunts and cousins—Sohanlal, Krishan, Darshana, Kamla—had played leading roles in my inner theatre and constituted a vital part of my growing-up experience. To pay them desultory attention as insignificant minor characters or to reduce them to parental figures in the analytic interpretations felt like a serious impoverishment of my inner world.
On a more general level, I realized later, many of our diverging conceptions were a consequence of a more fundamental divide in our world views. The psychoanalytic view is informed by a vision of human experience that is essentially a combination of the tragic and the ironic.3 It is tragic in so far as it sees human experience as pervaded by ambiguities, uncertainties and absurdities where a person has little choice but to bear the burden of unanswerable questions, inescapable conflicts and incomprehensible afflictions of fate. Life in this vision is a linear movement in which the past cannot be undone, many wishes are fated to remain unfulfilled and desires ungratified. Fittingly enough, Oedipus, Hamlet and Lear are its heroes. The psychoanalytic vision is ironic in so far as it brings a self-deprecating and detached perspective to bear on the tragic: the momentous aspects of tragedy are negated and so many gods are discovered to have clay feet. The tragic vision and its ironic amelioration are aptly condensed in Freud’s offer to the sufferer to exchange his neurotic misery for ordinary human unhappiness. The Hindu vision, on the other hand, is essentially romantic. It sees in fate’s vagaries and what appears as life’s tragedies, masks hiding the essential core of the person that is sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss. The highest goal of human life is the quest to realize this essence. The Hindu vision offers a romantic quest where the seeker, if he withstands all the perils of the road, will be rewarded by exaltation beyond normal human experience. The heroes of this vision are not the Oedipuses and the Hamlets but Nachiketas and Meeras. For all my exposure to the West, I was not quite free of the Hindu cultural heritage that sees life not as tragic but as a romantic quest that can extend over many births, with the goal and possibility of apprehending another, ‘higher’, level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies and our emotions. Consciously, I fully subscribed to the psychoanalytic vision of truth about a person lying in the ‘mud’ of his psyche; unconsciously, I was still not free of traces of my cultural vision of truth as the ‘lotus’ that grows out of the mud. Without being aware of it at the time, I had already occupied my intellectual space in the metaphor as the stem between the mud and the flower.
