A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Educational institutions did not remain immune to this virus. More familiar with the expression of hierarchical power and status differences being obscured, by politeness in Germany and informality in the US, I resented being made to wait in the anteroom of the IIT director for long periods for previously scheduled appointments with no other explanation from his personal assistant except a curt ‘Sahib is busy.’ After entering his office I would be greeted by ‘How are you, Kakar?’ to which I was expected to say ‘Fine, sir,’ or ‘Fine, Professor Apte’ (name changed). But the day I deviated from the script by replying in kind, ‘Fine, Apte, and you?’, our relationship became distinctly colder.

  What the Emergency revealed to me was that no one is totally immune from the fascist mindset that lies buried deep in all of us. It is a mindset that causes us to love power, or as Foucault puts it, ‘to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’.1 An individual’s latent fascism surfaces in times when totalitarian winds are buffeting a society and can overwhelm even those who have otherwise held the most liberal convictions all their lives. I sensed its lure myself when I wrote to a friend: ‘I wrote to you about my new job in my last letter. At the moment, I dislike it thoroughly—the need to exercise power, the guarded, cringing expressions on the faces of those with whom I have to work together. I didn’t know I had so many sadistic fantasies too.’

  The Emergency ended in 1977 and new elections to parliament were called in which Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party suffered a massive defeat. The atmosphere in Delhi on the evening and throughout the night as the results were being announced was charged with an anticipation that I have never again witnessed during any subsequent election. Crowds milled around the electronic billboards put up by the major newspapers outside their offices on Asaf Ali Road. The crowds cheered at the announcement of each new result when a candidate of the combined opposition, the Janata Party, was declared a winner. We watched the election results on television, staying up till dawn, with a group of our friends. The state-run Doordarshan, the only television channel at the time, was showing old Hindi movies, which it would interrupt to flash the latest result. We, too, would loudly cheer, carried away by the same exhilaration that grips many Indians who, in election after election, never cease to be beguiled by a false dawn on the day the results are declared. To Pamela, I wrote:

  Yes, the election results have been euphoric. And whatever happens—whether this government lasts or not—this affirmation of (I have no other word for it) human dignity was one of the most heartening things to have taken place. I, and many of my other friends, were really proud to be Indians on the day of the election results. Childhood fables with the tenor, ‘Good does triumph over evil’ were certainly true this time. (underlined in original)

  There were other areas of my life with which I felt content. The manuscript of my book The Inner World was almost ready, suffusing me with that particular glow of satisfaction which comes from the completion of a task that had engaged all of one’s capacities, a task that has been generous in its provision of ‘flow’ experiences, the periods of time when the absorption in a task is so total that time seems to come to a stop. Within six months after the manuscript had gone to press, though, I was hit by the post-partum depression that plagues many writers after they have delivered a book after years of gestation and have yet to conceive a new one. Luckily, in January1977, Erikson and his wife came to Delhi for a seminar on identity and adulthood which I organized on behalf of ICSSR. After the seminar I travelled with them to Agra, Jaipur and Ahmedabad. ‘It has been marvellous to spend time with them. It has almost, but not quite, taken my mind off my loveless, moneyless, idealess life of the moment,’ I read in a letter written to a friend at the time, the bid for her sympathy exaggerating all three conditions.

  At his request, I had sent Erikson the manuscript of my book as a preparation for the seminar. He was highly complimentary and sent the manuscript to the University of California Press that expressed its desire to publish the book. The only problem was that they wanted its worldwide rights while I wanted to publish its Indian edition with an Indian publisher and had chosen Oxford University Press in Delhi for the purpose. I was in a quasi-nationalistic phase at this time, a puerile reaction to an unselfconscious assumption of superiority by Western scholars which, worse, irrespective of the individual merit of the European or American contribution, was unquestioningly subscribed to by most Indian academics as well. They were at the centre of the intellectual world while we populated the periphery. They wrote books and journal articles whose titles never betrayed that the contents were limited to their own societies. A book with the title Psychology of Youth, for instance, based on an empirical study of a sample of American college students took for granted that its findings were applicable to young people all over the world. The Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere observes on the Western arrogance in the study of other cultures: ‘It defies ordinary common sense that a young person with imperfect language skills could go into the field and study another culture to present the native’s point of view during the period of a year or, at most, two.’2

  Obeyesekere is writing of young Western anthropologists in the 1980s, but with few exceptions his remarks applied to most Western academic writings on India in the 1960s and 1970s as well. These scholars wrote on the country’s social problems, religions, education, administration, politics and so on, which were then regarded as authoritative in Indian university teaching and quoted with deference in Indian intellectual discourse. In my field of psychology, for instance, it was the cultural self-confidence derived from the political world order of the last two centuries that allowed a Western psychiatrist or psychologist to authoritatively pronounce on Indian or, for that matter, on any non-Western psychological issue whereas an Indian would have required much more courage, even chutzpah to write on the psychological development of, say, French or American children. Indian academic writings in the humanities and social sciences and even doctoral theses in American or British universities were scrupulous in limiting themselves to Indian themes. And this in spite of the fact that in contrast to the West where being an ‘orientalist’ was an academic speciality with just a handful of practitioners, many highly educated men and women in former Western colonies were (and are) natural ‘occidentalists’, possessing a deep and extensive knowledge imbibed since early childhood, of the language, history, literature and society of their erstwhile colonial overlords.

  The situation was even worse in Western writings, whether psychoanalytic or literary, that engaged themselves with the inner life of Indians. Intimacy with one’s subject is perhaps the most important vehicle for conveying the authority of a piece of writing and though these writings, again with few brilliant exceptions, may have been without gross misrepresentation of fact, they were often marked by a nuance—a false note there, a missing beat here—which undermined their rhetorical authority. Western psychoanalytic observations on India and Indians, for instance, generally lacked an intimate understanding of Indian cultural imagination, of its fantasy as encoded in its symbolic products. They were also unfamiliar with the universe of the patient’s language, especially the language of childhood. Perhaps the most common and the best way a psychoanalyst gets to know the cultural imagination of his patient is by being born into it, absorbing it pre-consciously through one’s very bones. Alternatively, one obtains it through a very long immersion in the particular culture—its everydayness and its myths, its folklore and literature, its music and drama—an absorption not through the bones but through the head, and the heart. These conditions were rarely met in Western writings on India. My gestures of writing the biography of an American, Frederick Taylor, and publishing the book on Indian identity in Delhi rather than in Berkeley, were a colonized consciousness’s quixotic attempt at emancipation. The situation has improved in the last two decades with the rise of a more self-confident generation that does not carry the same chip in the shoulder I did for some years, bu
t psychological freedom requires considerably more time and mental effort than political independence.

  In the summer of 1977, I resigned from IIT to take up a visiting professorship for an academic year at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. My motive for going to McGill was purely—if there is such a thing as a ‘pure’ motive—financial. I needed to have some savings if I was to realize my dream of being a ‘writing psychoanalyst’ and not get lost in the teaching and administrative mazes of the university system. On my return in 1978, I converted the guest bedroom of our house into my office where I began to see patients. In the same year, The Inner World, the first in a series of books on the cultural psychology of India, was published. It had had the invaluable editorial attention of Pamela who taught me to curb my tendency towards speculation, which is perhaps more suited to the enterprise of fiction. In itself, speculation, which literally means ‘reconnaissance’, is a valuable gift that is too easily dismissed in intellectual discourse. We forget that to speculate, speculari, is to descry something that is not immediately open to view.

  The book received wide attention in India and other countries, which had the effect of increasing the earlier trickle of patients into a small stream. It allowed me to pick and choose those I felt were best suited for psychoanalytic work on the couch. I also increased my fee to fifty rupees for the hour. Almost one-third of those seeking analysis were wives of members of diplomatic corps and Western expatriates living in Delhi, mainly German and American. I guess at one-tenth the cost of what they would have paid for undergoing psychoanalysis at home, this was a pretty good bargain. For me, the combination of Western and Indian clientele—a depressive German woman following an Indian man struggling with multiple phobias, followed by an American diplomat wracked with doubts about his sexual identity, followed by an Indian woman traumatized in her teens by sexual abuse by her father—was not only a deep engagement with individual human beings but also a ringside view of the workings of culture in the human psyche.

  In 1980, I joined the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), a unique institution for social science research created in 1963 by misfits and refugees from the Indian university system. Its founder, Rajni Kothari, was an eminent political scientist and author of such influential books as Politics in India and Caste in Indian Politics. He was the undisputed leader of a group of brilliant (and a few not so brilliant) individuals who wanted to understand Indian society, especially its politics, on its own terms and not as refracted through a Western lens, including (and particularly) the Marxist one that enjoyed great favour among Indian academics of the era.

  My entry into the circle of senior fellows which besides Kothari included two other political scientists, Ramashray Roy and Bashiruddin Ahmed, the sociologist D.L. Sheth, the China specialist Giri Deshingkar, the historian Vijai Pillai and the writer Ali Baquer, was facilitated by the most original mind of the group, the political psychologist Ashis Nandy. Nandy was familiar with Freudian thought, especially as it related to society, and we had jointly authored a chapter for ICSSR’s 5-yearly review volume on the state of psychology in India. There were a few other, younger members, such as the sociologist Shiv Visvanathan who later became a well-known commentator on social developments in India, but the decisions regarding the centre were taken by the senior fellows—Sheth, Nandy, Roy, Ahmed and Deshingkar—who often sat together in one of the offices in the evening for convivial conversation over whisky and rum. Kothari, whose concurrence for any decision affecting the CSDS, also known as ‘Kothari’s Centre’, was essential, would often join them when he was free from his political activities.

  The centre believed in giving a fellow complete freedom to work on whichever research projects he wanted to engage in and in whatever manner he liked as long as he did not expect financial support from it. The CSDS was run on a shoestring budget based on an annual grant from the ICSSR which was barely enough to meet its salary bills. Fellows were expected to seek funds for research from elsewhere and CSDS was glad if a fellow went out of the country on a visiting assignment. The money saved on his salary could then be used for other purposes. Much of the research money came in through Kothari’s contacts: a report for the UN University, a collaborative venture with a Swedish institute, and so on, and till Nandy gained an international reputation, Kothari was the major source of research patronage.

  For six of the ten years I was at CSDS, I did not cost it any money at all since my salary was covered by fellowships I received from other institutions: the Homi Bhabha Fellowship for two years during which I wrote Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, the Nehru Fellowship for three years which allowed me to complete Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, and a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, where I co-authored Tales of Love, Sex and Danger with my friend John Ross. It was only in the late 1980s, when CSDS decided to take on a more politically activist stance, not only as ‘understanders’ but also as promoters of Indian democracy, not only as recorders but also as facilitators of social movements, that funds began to flow in from European and American institutions such as the Ford Foundation, Asia Foundation, Adenauer Foundation, and others. It was less a change in orientation and more a forcefully articulated expectation that all its members now march under the same banner and to the same drumbeat that led to my unpleasant parting from the centre.

  Irrespective of how our association ended, I look back upon my years in CSDS with fondness. I did not need the centre for my economic survival. What the CSDS affiliation allowed me was to take some time off from my clinical practice and devote myself to reading and writing. It also provided the stimulation of discussing my ongoing work with the perceptive minds of Ashis Nandy and D.L. Sheth, and the company of two kindred spirits, Vijai Pillai and Ali Baquer, who became close friends and resigned from CSDS at the same time as I did.

  Vijai Pillai was a true original, one of the most brilliant persons I have met. After a short stint in the Indian Foreign Service, which he left in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China where he was posted as a junior attaché at the time and where he was beaten up by the Red Guards, Vijai went on to do his doctorate in history at Michigan before joining CSDS in the late 1970s. He published little but studied and reflected a great deal during his lifetime before he died of cancer in September 2007. In 2009, his posthumous book Where Nothing Happens, part memoir, part philosophical reflections, was published. It introduced to a wider audience a man who had combined the heart of a poet with the mind of a philosopher and the spirit of a mystic. What the memoir does not reveal is his impish, at times sardonic humour that was especially funny when he took on all forms of political correctness. Commenting on Sanjay Gandhi’s partiality for population control and the skyrocketing petrol prices during the Emergency, Vijai quipped, ‘Sanjay has said that India’s problems will be solved the day we learn how to turn babies into oil.’ Like Ali, a first-rate Urdu writer, Vijai was uncomfortable with the ‘committed, participatory’ stance that CSDS had begun to take in the mid-1980s. Where Nothing Happens contains the following sentence ‘Space, silence, time, balance, bareness, these are the fonts at which I drink. Experience, sensation, excitement, I can only imbibe a little at a time. A squirrel, I take my modest nut and scamper into the uppermost branches of a tree; there, in shaded peace, I let the flavours expand on my attentive palate.’3 As this typical sentence and even the title of the book would indicate, Vijai was not cut out to be an activist. He would have made a reluctant warrior in the battle, however righteous, against the inequities of Indian society and ‘oppressions of the (Congress-ruled) state’ that Kothari and his inner circle of Nandy, Sheth and Deshingkar wanted CSDS to engage in.

  As for me, a psychoanalyst forever differentiating among shades of grey behind the couch, daily made aware of human self-serving which is one of the nurturers of lofty ideals, I, too, found it hard to summon up the required degree of moral indignation which is needed to man the barricades of populist activism. Temperamentally,
too, I was a wayward planet, reluctant to be a part of the centre’s solar system. But let me first remember the good years of my marriage with CSDS before I come to our acrimonious divorce.

  Because of limitations of office space in the dilapidated colonial-style bungalow in Rajpur Road north of Delhi, where CSDS was located, Vijai and Ali, who lived in South Delhi, worked from home, going to the centre once or twice a week. When I joined CSDS, the three of us who lived near each other in the area between Vasant Vihar and Hauz Khas, formed a car pool and took turns to drive to Rajpur Road, some twenty-five kilometres away, once a week on Wednesdays. The drives were most enjoyable, full of friendly banter and laughter. Once we reached CSDS, each of us did his own thing. I would bring my handwritten pages from the week to a typist, attend to my correspondence, and then have lunch with the other fellows where we all shared the cooked meals we had brought from our homes. Vijai and Ali would, so to speak, ‘shoot the breeze’ with friends among the CSDS staff; Ali who matched Vijai in charm was a great favourite with female members of the staff and the young research assistants.

  The lunches, where I showed the South Delhi flag, were collegial affairs, laced with academic and political gossip. The discussions were more serious when visitors dropped in. There was one particular political scientist from an American university in the midwest who came for a few weeks each winter and pestered everyone with questions on Indian political developments. He was always politely received though everyone was convinced that he was a CIA agent. I would inwardly smile at one of the centre’s inventions, which it should have patented, by which some of the fellows would close an argument they did not wish to pursue further. This was by quoting imaginary statistics, ‘63% of . . . say, believe, think that . . .’, a show of scientific certainty which is difficult to challenge, at least at the luncheon table.