Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Vikram Zutshi: Your body of work has consistently attempted to find a happy medium
between western modes of analysis and indigenous eastern epistemology. What led you to
this space and what have you found?
Sudhir Kakar: At the beginning of my practice in India, I was acutely aware of the
struggle within myself between my inherited Hindu-Indian culture and the Freudian
psychoanalytic culture that I had recently acquired and in which I was professionally
socialized. My romantic Indian vision of reality could not be easily reconciled with the
ironic psychoanalytic vision, nor could the Indian view of the person and the sources of
human strengths be reconciled with the Freudian view — now also mine — on the nature
of the individual and his or her world.
Vikram Zutshi: Please describe the premise of your book Shamans, Mystics and
Doctors. Do you feel there is a gap in western science and medicine which can be filled
by so called 'alternative' ways of seeing the body in relation to the environment?
Sudhir Kakar: The impetus for the book was the curiosity to explore the practice of my
indigenous colleagues — the ojhas, gurus, vaids, the patients they strive to heal, and the
rationale behind their healing systems. I not only wanted to look at their practices through
my psychoanalytic lens but also the questions they would raise about my lens which
needed to be taken seriously by psychoanalysis.
As for the gap, if we look at the body through the Ayurvedic lens then the body is
intimately connected with nature and the cosmos and there is nothing in nature without
relevance for medicine. This body image, then, stresses an unremitting interchange taking
place with the environment, simultaneously accompanied by a ceaseless change within
the body. Moreover, in this view, there is no essential difference between body and mind.
Vikram Zutshi: What can western psychoanalysis learn from the classical Indian view of
the 'Self'? Are the two diametrically opposed?
Sudhir Kakar: I would say that they are two different views of the self which are
opposed in some respects but complementary in others and need each other for a proper
balance.
The opposition lies in the Western notion of a self which, like the body, is encapsulated.
And if the Western self has a location then it is in the body, in the brain. The Indian self is
much more open and strongly influenced by its surround. You may picture it like a TV set
receiving signals from the universe whereas the Western self is receiving signals from the
neurons firing in the brain. The Indian self is more at the junction of the body and the
universe than is the case in the modern Western conception of the self.
These are not abstract, academic issues but have practical consequences. The view of the
self as not only based in the body and human biology but one which is intimately
connected to its surround, to vegetation and animal life, would bring nature into the
notion of the self and its ideal development. Protection of the environment then becomes
a part of fostering one’s own intellectual, emotional and spiritual development and that of
one’s children. We then have a much stronger motivation for protecting the environment.
Unless you associate the protection of the environment, selfishly, with your own
protection, the energy put in environmental efforts will remain low.
In the second case, of a possible complementarity of the views of self, both Tagore and
Gandhi thought the Indian self was marked by the attribute of sympathy, with nature and
all of life, in contrast to the Western self emphasizing understanding nature and thus
seeking power over it. Here, I believe, sympathy and understanding are not in opposition
but complementary to each other. The consequence, for instance in psychotherapy is that
the desirable ‘autonomous self’ of Western psychotherapy needs to be balanced by the
‘caring self’ of classical Indian thought.
Vikram Zutshi: You have studied the Kamasutra from a few different perspectives.
Please give us an overview of your work in this space. How does the contemporary
Indian approach to sexuality differ from the classical and pre-classical era?
Sudhir Kakar: From all available evidence, there was little sexual repression in ancient
India, say from the 3rd to 12th centuries, at least among the upper classes, the primary
audience of the Kamasutra and of Sanskrit poems and plays of the period. The demands
of sexuality had to be reconciled with those of morality, dharma, yes, but it was
reconciliation rather than repression. The uninhibited sexuality of the Kamasutra where
nothing is taboo in imagination and very little in reality, which combines tenderness with
playful aggression in lovemaking, where gender roles in the sexual act are neither rigid
nor fixed, was brought to its visual culmination between 9th and 12th centuries in temples
of Khajuraho and Konarak.
In the intervening centuries, and especially the last two hundred years, Indian society
managed to enter the dark ages of sexuality that is marked by the erotic grace which frees
sexual activity from the imperatives of biology and unites the partners in sensual delight
and metaphysical openness.
What happened? Some blame the Muslim invasions and the medieval Muslim rule when
the full covering of women’s bodies and segregation of the sexes became a sign of high
social status. Yet medieval Islam was not a sexually repressive creed. At least in the upper
classes, sexual love was marked by a cheerful sensuality. Indeed, a number of hadiths, the
commentaries on the Quran, strongly favour the satisfaction of the sexual instinct. At
least, that is, for the privileged male.
Others blame the Victorian prudery of British colonial rule, itself the consequence of
Christianity’ uneasy relationship with the body, when some Victorians even covered the
legs of chairs because they were ‘legs’. There is some truth to both these influences but
the more fundamental factor in the rejection of the erotic has to be looked for within the
Hindu culture itself.
It is the ascetic tradition in Hinduism that is the real counterforce which undermined the
Kamasutra legacy. The duality of eroticism vs. asceticism dialectic has been always a part
of Hindu culture. The one or the other might become dominant in a particular period of
history though the other is never submerged. At the same time the Kamasutra was
composed there were other texts holding fast to the ascetic ideal and extolling the virtues
of celibacy for spiritual progress. The ascetic ideal, that can degenerate into puritanism, is
then also quintessentially Indian, perennially in competition with the erotic one for
possession of the Indian soul. It is very unlikely that ancient Indians were ever, or even
could be, as unswerving in their pursuit of pleasure as, for instance, ancient Romans.
That India has been a sexual wasteland for the last two centuries is then due to a
combination of British prudery, adopted by the upper classes in what may be called an
‘identification with the aggressor’, and our own deep seated strain of Brahaminical
asceticism, held aloft through the centuries by the Hindu version of the poet William
Blake’s “priests in black gowns…binding with briars my joys and desires.”
Vikram Zutshi: Tell us more about your work in the area of the Psychology of Religion.
Is it reductionist to view Indic modes of thought through a Freudian lens?
Sudhir Kakar: It is not reductionistic if one recognizes that this is only one of the many
possible lenses, with its own basic assumptions. The question is whether the Freudian
lens brings out certain features of the phenomena that is being studied which was not
thought of before, thus enriching our understanding or at least provoking us to further
thought, if only in refutation. Psychoanalysis is an iconoclastic discipline. This means
that it is a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and would evoke hostility anywhere, and
especially in India where so much of our classical modes of thought subscribes to what I
call the ‘hermeneutics of idealization.’
Vikram Zutshi: What are your impressions on the current political climate in India?
Does it represent a sea change in the collective psyche of modern India? How do you see
this evolving in the decades to come?
Sudhir Kakar: The current political climate is bringing two issues to the fore which
India has been struggling with since many decades. These are not new but are being
brought out in sharp relief. One is of diversity and the other of the nature of Indian
modernity.
Diversity is one of the country’s greatest resources. But diversity can also be divisive and
the question arises whether the protection of this diversity needs a framework to contain
its centrifugal forces of caste, religion, language and so on. Superordinate identities, like
Indian identity or Indian-ness, if they evolve by mutual consent of various groups and are
not imposed by force or diktat, dampen internal conflicts and are an antidote to
divisiveness. I am not talking of a unity but a search for harmony within India’s diversity.
What should be the shape of this Indian-ness, this bharatiyta, would be one political issue
that would involve us in the decades to come.
The other issue would be the nature of Indian modernity. There has been a long tradition
in India of absorbing influences coming from outside and dealing with them in a creative
manner. Indians have never completely absorbed nor completely rejected foreign ideas
and influences. They have digested them in a process of assimilation and re-creation.
West-inspired modernity, or at least parts of this modernity, have been welcomed by even
the most fanatical of Hindu revivalists. For instance, they have always been enthusiastic
about the technological aspects of modernity and even some of its legal framework. So
modernity has not come in a bundle but has to be dis-aggregated. Yes, to some part of
modernity, no, to others. There will be cultural and hence also political conflicts around
which parts of modernity should be embraced and which ones rejected. Individualism for
instance, especially its narcissistic extreme, the “looking out for number one.”? Justice
and how much violence is permissible in the quest for justice? There are many other
aspects of modernity which will create conflicts but we don’t have space to discuss them
here.