Indian Identity

Sudhir Kakar

Description

As A Commentator On The Worlds Of Love And Hate , India S Foremost Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar Has Isolated The Ambivalence, Peculiarly Indian, To Matters As Various And Connected As Sex, Spirituality And Communal Passions. In Intimate Relations, The First Of The Well-Known Books In This Edition, He Explores The Nature Of Sexuality In India, Its Politics And Its Language Of Emotions. The Analyst And The Mystic Points Out The Similarities Between Psychoanalysis And Religious Healing, And The Colours Of Violence Is His Erudite Enquiry Into The Mixed Emotions Of Rage And Desire That Inflame Communalism.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184750737
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUDHIR KAKAR
Indian Identity
Intimate Relations The Analyst and the Mystic The Colours of Violence
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
1. A Personal Introduction
2. Intimate Relations
3. The Analyst and the Mystic
4. The Colours of Violence
5. Notes
6. A Note from the Author
PENGUIN BOOKS
INDIAN IDENTITY
An internationally renowned psychoanalyst and writer, Sudhir Kakar has been a visiting professor at the universities of Chicago, Harvard, McGill, Melbourne, Hawaii and Vienna, and a Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study, Princeton and Berlin. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Leadership at INSEAD in Fontainbleau, France. His many honours include the Bhabha, Nehru and National Fellowships in India, the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and Germany s Goethe Medal. The leading French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur listed him as one of twenty-five major thinkers of the world.
Sudhir Kakar s books, both non-fiction and fiction, have been translated into twenty languages. His non-fiction works include The Indians: Portrait of a People ; The Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India ; Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality ; The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism and The Colours of Violence . His three published novels are The Ascetic of Desire , Ecstasy and Mira and the Mahatma . He has also translated (with Wendy Doniger) Vatsyayana s Kamasutra .
To the memory of Erik H. Erikson, shared with my two dear friends, John Ross and Pamela Daniels.
A Personal Introduction
In the memories of my childhood, the season is always summer. Blazing hot, dry, and invariably dusty, it is the special summer of small district towns in West Punjab, an area that now lies in Pakistan. Each of the towns-Dera Ghazi Khan, Multan, Lyallpur, Sargodha-where we would live for two to three years before my father was transferred to another town, indistinguishable from the one we had just left, have coalesced in my memory into one quintessential town. This is a town without character, neither old nor new, and no one is interested in its past history or its future prospects. Through the nostalgic haze of childhood, I can still summon up images of the town s cheerful dirtiness: its narrow, crowded bazaars lined with open, flowing gutters carrying children s pee, vegetable peelings and eggshells bobbing on the surface of the inky-black water. I can see the flies clustering on mounds of raw brown sugar in eating places where the chipped enamel plates with their blue borders are never clean enough and the smell of fried onions, garlic, cardamom, cloves and turmeric is embedded in the very walls.
The town is also the central market for surrounding villages. After the harvest, ox-carts loaded with gunny bags full of wheat or stacked high with sugarcane stream in. Their arrival is announced by the chiming of small bells that hang around the necks of the oxen drawing the cart, placidly ignoring the mangy, yelping dogs attempts to provoke them. On market days the farmers are accompanied by their gaily-dressed women and excited children, giving the drab town a touch of shy festivity. These large family groups move deliberately from one shop to another, looking at the wares without expression, unhurriedly bargaining for their small luxuries-coloured glass bangles for the women, a piece of cloth for a child s shirt, a burnished copper pot and brass tumblers for the family kitchen.
As a child, I was as much an outsider to the bazaars as any child from the village. We lived a couple of miles away from the heart of the town in what was called the Civil Lines. The Civil Lines and its military counterpart, the Cantonment, were to be found in many towns. They were creations of the British whose rule was approaching its end in the period of which I write, the early 1940s. The houses in the Civil Lines, built at the end of the last century, were sprawling single-storeyed affairs with acres of ground and a number of servants quarters. Lawns and flower beds, a vegetable garden, a pond or a well, groves of fruit-bearing trees (I particularly remember the blood-red oranges of the grove in Sargodha), were often a part of the estate. Not many Englishmen were now left in these towns. There was the deputy commissioner, of course, the chief representative of the Raj, a virtual lord over the half-a-million or so Indians who lived in the district. Then there was the superintendent of police and perhaps the chief medical officer, who were still Englishmen. All the other higher functionaries of the provincial government living in the Civil Lines, together with a couple of lawyers and doctors, were Indians. My father was one of these Indians, a magistrate dispensing justice in the district court and carrying out the tasks of civil administration in the villages.
Generally, I was content to play within the grounds of the house with my friends, mostly the servants children. Climbing trees to eat unripe guavas that inevitably led to stomach-aches, trying to hit pigeons with pebbles from a slingshot, fishing in the pond for non-existent fish with a thread tied to a twig at one end and a bent pin at the other, the secret delights (and fears) of sexual games with Shanti, the sweeper s six-year old daughter in one town and Kishen, the washerman s precocious five-year old in another, kept me happy enough. The visits to the town s bazaars were outings I thoroughly enjoyed but did not desperately long for. Whenever I did go to the bazaar, though, accompanying a servant on a shopping errand, I quite liked being pampered by the shopkeepers, who all knew me as the magistrate sahib s son. I took this pampering for granted and confused it with the love I felt was my due as the only son of doting parents.
The pamperings continued in the village to which I often accompanied my father on his official tours. These tours, lasting from a week to a fortnight, were virtual expeditions. Bullock carts, and (in some districts) camels, loaded with tents, camping equipment and foodstuff, set off early in the morning while we followed more leisurely with a retinue of servants, policemen and court clerks. By the evening we would reach our destination, a village where my father would inspect the records, hear complaints and adjudicate disputes. In the falling darkness, which became magically alive with moving pinpoints of light given off by fireflies, cooking fires were lit, pleasantly scenting the air with the smoke from burning wood and buffalo-dung cakes. A stream of visitors and favour-seekers from the village would call on my father in our tent. From hundreds of years of experience as a conquered people, the villagers were well-versed in the arts of flattery, and making complimentary remarks about me was a part of their practised repertoire. By the age of six, I knew that the fawning I received from others in our retinue or from the villagers, was not always love, and that I was not the centre of everyone s world; of course, my sister had been born by then.
While my father worked during the day in his tent, I roamed about freely in the village, intensely curious about the other children whose lives seemed so different from my own. I longed to join in their games, yet we were all aware of the gulf dividing us that was only occasionally bridged. I might have felt myself a charmed being but there was little doubt that I was outside their charmed circle. Form the beginning, then, whether in town in village, I was the insider-outsider, the child who both belonged and yet did not.
The insider-outsider situation in my culture was very much a reflection of the life history of my parents. My father had grown up in the bazaars, though in his case they were the bazaars of Lahore, the capital city of Punjab. He came from a well-to-do family of merchants and contractors and had spent his childhood and youth in a typical Indian exended family-a sprawling noisy collection of parents, a dozen brothers and sisters, and assorted uncles and aunts on visits that in some cases could extend over a year. They all lived together in a dark three-storeyed house with little space but much warmth. My childhood impressions of life in my grandparents house, where I often went for extended visits, is of swirling movement and excitement contained within secure boundaries of fierce loyalty and protection with which the family surrounded each individual member, whether child, man or woman. Moving from one part of the house to another, I could, within a few mintes, be witness to loud quarrels, heart-rending sobs, tender consolations, flirtatious exchanges, uproarious laughter, and sober business conversations. The kitchen full of women-daughters of the house, female relatives and visitors presided over by my strong-willed grandmother-was active from early morning, and except for a couple of hours break in the afternoon closed late in the night. One ate whenever one liked and there was always a steaming hot delicacy that had just come out of the deep-bottomed frying pans. There were dozens of cousins and visiting children from the neighbourhood and we played everywhere-on the roof, from where we jumped on to the neighbouring roofs; in all the rooms of the house (there were no private spaces), as well as outside in the alley. All these spaces, inside and outside, were without boundaries, blending seamlessly into each other. Whenever I was tired, I d find an empty bed, generally a mattress on the floor, and some woman would eventually drift over to put me to sleep. As the eldest son of the eldest son of the house, I had some privileges and could ask my favourite aunt to put aside her kitchen duties and tell me stories while I tried to fight my tiredness. The stories were usually from the Hindu epics but she also had a fund of ex