A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  For three years we divided our time between Berlin and Delhi. These were the years when Katha was doing her doctorate in the anthropology of religion. Her thesis on the religious practices of urban Indian women allowed us to live for seven months in Delhi, the site for her fieldwork, and five months in Berlin in spring and summer where she taught a course on Indian religions at the university. In 2001, while I was a fortieth Anniversary Fellow at the Centre for the Study of World Religions at Harvard and Katha a fellow at the same institution, we often discussed the question of where we should settle down after the year was over. We were both tired of the nomadic life with its European summers that had appeared so attractive at first glance. One never knew which books or clothes were where. More important, the regular move from one country to another distanced us from friends in both Berlin and Delhi. Since we were away for months, we could not become completely absorbed in their concerns and their day-to-day lives that had continued in our absence. The gaze of the anthropologist was forcing itself into our eyes that only wished to be those of close friends.

  I was prepared to live anywhere Katha chose but she sensed that I wouldn’t be happy in Berlin or indeed anywhere else but in India. Cheerfully, she would give up her beloved Berlin, her family and friends, to come and live with me in India. But where in India? Indian cities, for all their vibrancy, and squalor, did not have any of the qualities of a vana, the ‘forest’, that I needed. Having grown up on the north coast of Germany, with childhood memories of sailing with her father on the Baltic Sea, Katha wanted to live near the ocean, while I wanted a place from where I could easily travel to fulfil my teaching commitment in France and speaking engagements elsewhere in the world. Goa met all our requirements; it was a vana, but one with internet connectivity and good airplane connections.

  During the winter break of 2001, we flew to Goa to look for a house. I had not been to Goa in thirty years and Katha in fifteen. For one week, the real-estate broker showed us houses near the beach belt of north Goa. These beaches, of Calangute, Candolim and Baga, made famous by the Hippies in the 1970s, were now the playground of well-off Indians and charter-loads of tourists from Europe and Russia who crowd there in the winter months. Trance music, rave parties and dirty beaches littered with empty plastic bottles and refuse were not what we had visualized for our retreat. Following the well-established practice of real-estate brokers, the houses he showed us for the first five days were the ones he had not been able to unload for many years, even on innocents like us. We gathered a good deal of information on Goan houses—legal pitfalls due to the Portuguese inheritance laws governing Goa, renovation costs of old houses, and so on—but were nowhere near getting one. We had almost given up the search when on the day before we were to leave, the broker asked us if we were interested in looking at houses in south Goa, the quieter and sleepier part of this tiny state. Since we did not know the difference between north and south Goa, we readily agreed. The moment Katha and I saw the farmhouse in Benaulim in which we now live, we looked at each other and immediately said, ‘Yes!’, first to each other, and then to the broker.

  Our experience of living in this house for the last seven years and hearing stories of the difficulties faced by others contemplating a similar move, has proved the truth of Freud’s observation that when making a decision of minor importance, one must always consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, the decision should come from our deep intuitive feelings. Empirical research has supported Freud, but with one proviso, namely, that this does not mean that important decisions should be taken on impulse, without any thought. Our brain must have time to process all the relevant information and here, in the gathering of information, of facts and data, consciousness is superior to non-conscious processes. It is only after a thorough and conscious collection of information has been done that the subsequent processes of reaching a decision should be left to the unconscious. With its database that is estimated to outweigh the conscious on an order exceeding ten million to one, the unconscious is most often the wiser part of the mind.

  I must confess that the move to Goa was not only dictated by a wish to enter a new stage of life, free of the concerns and attachments of an older, outgrown one, but was also an escape from an increasingly painful rift that had opened up between Kamla and myself after my marriage to Katha. Since both of us worked from the premises of the Vikram Sarabhai Foundation in Delhi, it was excruciating to encounter her coldness towards me on a daily basis. To cross her path many times during the day and to see her face close, her eyes lose their sparkle and warmth as we engaged in formal, stilted exchanges was a psychic depletion that left me tired and depressed by the time I reached home in the evening. My anger that my efforts to reach out to her were regularly rebuffed, alternated with pangs of guilt that by beginning a new life with Katha I had somehow betrayed the intimacy she had always offered and I had often needed. What she had written about her own character when she was eighteen had not changed now that she was eighty. ‘I am of a very loving disposition but I will never be satisfied with the amount of love given to me,’ her diary entry had read in 1940, ‘I always will feel that I should have more, that the response is not equal in the quantity and intensity of love I give.’ As I get older myself, I realize that some of her heightened expectations and silent recriminations were not only a part of her character but also a consequence of ageing. Like many old people she was becoming increasingly needy of love while pretending indifference to a need that does not fit in with what young people like to believe is the detachment and wisdom of old age. In some old people, the need for demonstrable affection becomes a craving approaching that of a baby wanting to be constantly touched and stroked, except that in the old person the wish becomes deeply shameful as it comes up against the repulsive reality of a wrinkled skin.

  We are very content with our life here in our village. We have never regretted our choice of making Goa our home, the site of our ‘hut in the forest’. Benaulim is a large village, with a population of fifteen thousand people, over ninety per cent of them Catholic. Like most Goans, the people of Benaulim are gentle and good-natured, even when drunk. Like many other Goan men, the Benaulikars too like to drink. If there are six churches in Benaulim, three celebrating mass every day and all of them packed for the Sunday services, there are also more than twenty bars, many of which begin their services early in the morning, just after sunrise. Some of the bars have wonderful names that testify to the owner’s piety; ‘Little Jesus Bar’ is my personal favourite. When giving directions to friends on how to reach our house, I derive an impish pleasure from telling them to come down the main road from Maria Hall to Margao and then turn right into the small lane next to Salvation Bar. People say that if you throw a stone in our village you are sure to either hit a priest or a bar.

  Living in a village, one also becomes familiar with local-level, grassroots politics that has all to do with patronage, local feuds, buying of votes with liquor and cash at the time of elections, than with differences in ideologies or party manifestos. Many of Goa’s elected representatives are political unbelievers who have changed their party affiliation more than once. Whether they are more venal than politicians anywhere else in India is a perennial topic of debate. They are certainly more brazen. One of the major but unrecognized functions served by politicians, I have come to realize, is to provide gossip about their doings and thus grease the wheel of social discourse that connects people who may otherwise remain strangers. Since the electoral constituencies in Goa are small, the quirks and antics, not to speak of the crimes—from drug running and loan sharking to murderous assault—of our elected representatives are soon a matter of common knowledge, although with little effect on their electoral prospects.

  Our house is an old one, lovingly restored in the traditional Indo-Portuguese style. It sits in the middle of an acre of land, with seventy coconut trees, two mango trees of which one bears the magnificent Mancurado that matches the much better known Alfonso in tex
ture and taste. There are other trees—chikoo, guava, jamun—though we have yet to eat one of their fruits, the birds and the bats asserting a precedence we are unable and unwilling to contest. There are two verandas in front of the house. They overlook a garden with a riot of plants and flowering bushes that absorb a good deal of Katha’s energy. To give the garden its uncultivated, wild look demands a lot of labour.

  We spend most of our days and evenings on the verandas, writing, reading, listening to music, talking. My writing desk is in one veranda, Katha’s in the other. We can call out to each other while we work and look up to exchange information or endearments. In the evenings, we often go to the beach for a walk before we sit down in our favourite beach shack to watch the sunset over the Arabian Sea slowly darken the haze over the horizon and the wet patches of sand below us turn from a blush roseate to dark scarlet.

  An Ending

  When I began this memoir, I was aware that the major pitfall in its writing would be the temptation to make it a linear account of a life of early promise, later struggles and occasional failures which, at the end, is crowned with success. I did not intend to be the kind of memoirist who drapes a flag of achievements around his shoulders as he takes a victory lap around the memory track. I wanted to speak of my life through memories that were most vivid and still evoked strong emotions. What I intended in this memoir was to relive the peaks and valleys of my life, revisit the times when, whether in joy or sorrow, I felt most alive. I do not know how far I have succeeded, but at its end it is time to take stock.

  I was never a sentimentalist, someone whom Yeats describes as one of those ‘practical men who believes in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim’.1 I would like to believe that I was a romantic but one with a well-developed sense of reality who instinctively understood that ‘When life puts away her conjuring tricks one by one, those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the sensual kiss, for our Chambers of Commerce and of Commons have not the divine architecture of the body, nor has their frenzy been ripened by the sun.’2 I was a romantic who let himself be long and willingly deceived by the maya of desire, yet always knew that sensual pleasure was not the sole purpose of life.

  Entering the autumn if not the winter of my life, I begin to wonder whether the ascendancy of the erotic in my life did not also have another aim than paying homage to the divine architect of the human body. I wonder if there is truth to what many mystics have claimed, that the erotic is not merely a tribute to our common biological fate but actually has the search for the Divine or the Spirit as its goal and that the human partner is always just a way station, a ‘transitional object’. I remember stories of saints, such as Tulsidas, the author of Ramcharitamanas, the Hindi Ramayana, who were suddenly brought to this realization at the height of their infatuation with a human lover. Could St. Augustine be right that human restlessness finds its rest only in God? I do not know. I keep oscillating between doubt and conviction, between suspicion and wonderment.

  I believe I have had tantalizing glimpses of the invisible but have also wondered if these were not merely some of the profounder illusions of the soul. Perhaps I am too much of my father’s son to take an irrevocable step across the line of reason into a wholehearted avowal of the intangible. Perhaps I am fated to remain the stem between the lotus and the mud. Like Yeats’s poet, I have never entered the sacred house of the Spirit, at best living ‘amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold’. And it is here, living at the threshold, that I too hope to find my pardon. But as I have said elsewhere, these are idle imaginings, not serious disaffections. Schopenhauer once said that at the end of life, no man, if he were sincere and in possession of his faculties, would ever wish to go through it again. Looking back sincerely, and I hope in possession of my faculties, I would still live the same life all over again . . . well, almost all of it. But let me not tempt Fate to take umbrage and intervene contrarily in the life that still remains ahead of me.

  Illustrations

  Paternal grandfather (Bhauji)

  Paternal grandmother

  Maternal grandfather

  Maternal grandmother (with infant Sudhir)

  Father

  Mother

  Eight months old, 1938

  Ludhiana, February 1941

  Eight moments, November 1941

  Four years old, 1942

  The family in Delhi, 1946 (Suleena held by her mother and Sudhir in front of his father)

  Father and Mother at Barnes Court, Shimla, on Republic Day, 1950

  Suleena and Sudhir with their father, Jaipur, 1954

  Playing table tennis, 1954

  At a dance, Mainz, 1960

  Zurich, 1961

  With friends, Manheim, 1962

  Vence, 1962, during the Karolyi Foundation fellowship

  With Mother, Walter and Suleena, Delhi, 1964

  At Harvard, 1966

  With Manfred, Ahmedabad, 1966

  Kamla and Vikram

  With Apeksha, 1968

  Shveta and Rahul, 1978

  With Erik Erikson, Cape Cod, 1980

  In Delhi, 1981

  With Katha at the wedding ceremony in Hawaii, 25 February 1998

  After the ceremony

  With Rahul

  Protests against Mira and the Mahatma

  With Katha, Delhi, 1999

  With Kamla

  Cambridge, 2002

  With Shveta, Benaulim, Goa

  Notes

  Before I Begin

  1 S. Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador, 1979), 285.

  Origins

  1 A. Hamid, ‘Lahore Lahore Aye: Where Hindus and Sikhs Once Lived’, Daily Times, 7 January 2007.

  2 A fourteenth-century historian, Zia-ud-din Barani, advised Muslim rulers not to educate the ‘lowly converts to Islam’ because it would bring more evil than good to the empire; see M. Habib and A.U.S. Khan, The Political Theory of Delhi Sultanate (Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1961), 49.

  3 M. Ejaz, ‘A People’s History of the Punjab: Rise of the Middle Class’, Lahore Nama, 9 January 2009.

  4 S. Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 124.

  5 Manusmriti, 8: 352–62.

  6 S. Kakar, ‘Lovers in the Dark’, in Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (New Delhi: Penguin-Viking, 1989), 25–42.

  Of Fathers and Men

  1 S. Kakar, ‘A Personal Introduction,’ in Indian Identity (New Delhi: Penguin, 1996), xi–x.

  2 S. Kakar, The Colours of Violence (New Delhi: Viking-Penguin, 1996), 35–36.

  3 Ibid., 41–43.

  4 H. Schulman and J. Scott, ‘Generations and Collective Memories’, American Sociological Review 54 (1989), 380.

  A Welcome to the World

  1 Ramayana 3.57.17 (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1960–75).

  Kamla

  1 S.H. Rudolph and L.I. Rudolph, ‘Rajputana under British Paramountcy’, Essays on Rajputana: Reflections on History, Culture and Administration (New Delhi: Concept, 1984).

  2 Ibid.

  3 The Times of India, 29 September 2000.

  4 V. Nabakov, Ada (New York: McGraw Hill, 1969), 118.

  Rebel in a Known Cause

  1 G. Mistral, ‘The Immigrant Jew’, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, ed. & trans. D. Dana (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 49.

  2 V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (London: Andre Deutsch,1979), 159.

  3 St. John of the Cross, Poems, trans. R. Campbell (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960).

  4 V. Nabakov, Speak Memory (New York: Putnam, 1966), 240.

  Identity Crisis

  1 E.H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton, 1968).

  2 R. Wallerstein and L. Goldberger, eds, Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson (Madison, CT: International Universities P
ress, 1998), 1.

  3 E.H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), 23.

  Becoming a Psychoanalyst

  1 S. Freud (1924), Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1952–58), 165–66.

  2 W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ii.ii.135.

  3 R. Schaefer. ‘The Psychoanalytic Vision of Reality’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 51 (1970), 279–97.

  4 R.T. Fancher, ‘Psychoanalysis as Culture’, Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology 15:2 (1993), 89–90.

  5 E.H. Erikson, Life History and Historical Moment (New York: Norton, 1975), 31.

  A Shrink in Delhi

  1 Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, cited in E. Servadio, ‘A Psychodynamic Approach to Yoga Experience’, International Journal of Parapsychology 9 (1966), 181.

  2 It is important to note that everyone has had his own variation of the Oedipus complex when he was a child and that different cultures may emphasize one or the other variation as the culturally ‘preferred’ way of its resolution. It should also be observed, that in a vast majority of folk tales and legends from around the world, it is the mother-son rather than father-son conflict that takes centre stage.