Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The analytic competence, the method of loosening the text, works in tandem with interpretation, as a way of reorganizing it. Whereas there is a well-defined consensus in the psychoanalytic community on ‘loosening,’ on what consitutes competence, on how an analyst ‘reads,’ there is no longer a similar agreement on the psychoanalytic theory that should underlie the reorganization, i.e., on what he has read. Although psychoanalysis has not quite fragmented into several competing frameworks, it has begun to show greater tolerance for theories other than the classical instinctual drive theory. Of course, given Freud’s stature and authority within the discipline, these theories—not unlike scholarship in the Hindu tradition which permitted innovation only under the guise of interpretation—have been at pains to proclaim their fealty to the intention and concerns of the founding father. Yet the fact remains that many of these later contributions diverge in critical ways from the assumptions of drive psychology, still considered by most people outside the field as the ‘Freudian Theory’.

  In general, most of the newer approaches are closer to a conception of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic enterprise concerned with reasons rather than causes, explanation rather than prediction, a Geisteswissenschaft of meaning and configuration rather than a natural science of mechanisms employing the metaphors of physics or chemistry. Without going into specific details, it may be noted here that the focus of these ‘relational’ theories—to subsume the quite diverse work of theorists like Melanie Klein, Donal Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Heinz Kohut, Erik Erikson, and Otto Kemberg, among others, under one label—is not on the derivatives of instinctual drives but on the mental representations of relationships with others which are assumed to build the fundamental building blocks of mental life.11 There is a relative shift of emphasis in that the primary question being asked in a session changes from ‘What infantile wishes does this material fulfil in the patient?’ to ‘What is the patient, as who, saying to the analyst, as whom, and from when—and why?’12

  The theory I choose for my own work of interpretation is finally a matter of personal choice. The choice is dictated by how well the theory speaks to my own experience of the self and of others. In the last analysis, then, the criteria for selecting one theory over another are more ‘aesthetic’ than ‘scientific’. They have to do with my relative attraction to the Ur-images conjured up by different theories. On Freud’s screen, there is the whirling of imperious passions, the sharp stabbings of searching, burdensome guilt. On the next screen, a post-Freudian one, there is the voracious hunger of the urge to merge and the black empty despair in absence of the other. You look into your own soul, you pay your money (in fees of the training analyst), and you take your pick. Depending upon the context, I have used both kinds of theory in my own interpretations.

  Besides the analytic competence and the choice of a theoretical framework, the interpretation of a literary text also needs a model which permits the equation, in some form or other, of the literary and the psychoanalytic enterprises. In other words, in contrast to the narrative produced in the analytic situation, the psychoanalytic interpretation of other narrative forms require, in addition, a model that allows us to regard these essentially literary and cultural narratives as if they were psychoanalytic ones.

  The number of models available for our interpretative enterprise, at least as far as literary texts are concerned, is embarrassingly large. Depending upon one’s attitude toward psychoanalysis and one’s personal aesthetic preference for the baroque or the classical this can denote either the richness and success of psychoanalytic theorizing or its poverty and failure to recommend the best way of going about such efforts. Traditionally, the psychoanalysis of literature has followed one or the other of these models: first, the interpretation of the unconscious motivations of fictional characters; second, the psychogenesis of the text, i.e., a psychoanalytic study of the author’s life history; and third, the psychodynamics of the reader’s response. To this traditional triad of character, author, and reader, Lacan has added the text. In the literary criticism influenced by him, the narrative is viewed as a movement of desire, with arousals, expectation, surprises, reversals, delays, disappointments, transformations, and fulfilment.13 More recently, Meredith Anne Skura’s influential work has suggested the reorganization of analytic models of literary interpretation into five categories: literature as case history, as fantasy, as dream, as transference, and as psychoanalytic process.14

  In my own analysis of the more literary texts, such as the novels, I have approached them as the raw material of family case histories. Here, in the flow of events and the flux of feeling, I try to draw out some of their characters; secrets which, psychoanalysts like to believe, the authors only half knew they knew. Indeed, what makes the man-woman relationship particularly fruitful for psychoanalytic inquiry is the fact, as Freud recognized long ago, that there is nothing about which our consciousness can be so incomplete or false as about the degrees of affection or dislike which we feel for another human being. If such an attempt involves approaching the fictional characters as if they were real men and women, we should not feel discomfitted. As Joyce Carol Oates observes,

  A serious author deals only with ‘real’ experiences and ‘real’ emotions, though they are usually assigned to people with fictional names. I cannot believe, frankly, that anyone could—or would want to—write about experiences the emotional equivalents of which he has not experienced personally. Writing is a far more conscious form of dreaming, and no one dreams dreams that are of no interest to him, however trivial and absurd they may appear to someone else.15

  The narratives forming chapters of this book to which I have listened with the analyst’s ‘third ear,’ possess a diversity matching that of the culture from which they originate and which, in its beliefs and attitudes toward gender relations, they seek to reflect. Modern fiction from North India, folk narratives, box office movie hits of the last 20 years, middle-aged women from the slums of Delhi recounting their lives and loves, Gandhi’s autobiographical writings, case histories from the consulting rooms of Indian psychoanalysts, all have combined in the construction of the story of Indian love relations. The story is complex, played out in the cultural-psychological space that lies between universally shared wishes of the inner world and the specific restrictions placed on them by a particular society. The story’s characters and the twists and turns of its plot are at times surprisingly familiar and at others utterly strange. But, then, each human culture is perhaps a kind of magical mirror for the others. Sometimes it appears to be an ordinary piece of glass coated with silver at the back which faithfully reflects the contours, planes, and details of our own familiar faces. At others, it throws up dark menacing visages, forceful intimations of our disavowed selves which we thought no longer existed. Through such a looking glass, crafted in India, let me tell a story.

  2

  Scenes from Marriages

  Ek Chadar Maili Si (A Sheet, Somewhat Soiled) by the Urdu writer Rajinder Singh Bedi, which has also recently been made into a film, narrates the story of a poor Sikh family in a village somewhere on the northern border of Punjab.1 Rano, the heroine of the book, is a spirited young woman in her early 30s. Her husband Tiloka earns a meager living plying his tonga (horse carriage) for pilgrims who pass through the village on their way to the Vaishno Devi temple in the nearby hills. The couple has a daughter, just entering puberty, and two young sons. The rest of the family consists of Tiloka’s old parents and his 20-year-old younger brother Mangla.

  Tiloka is a layabout and a drunkard and Rano’s struggle to ensure that he does not drink away the little money he earns is unremitting. Rano’s attempts to prevent Tiloka from drinking whenever and wherever he chooses are perceived by him as an affront to his virility, a challenge to his overlordship as a male. The resulting quarrels are bitter and invariably end in physical violence. In these fights Rano, using her nails and teeth, tries to give as good as she gets, but Tiloka’s superior strength ensures that she
ends up bruised and battered.

  One day, Tiloka abducts a young girl pilgrim and takes her to a shady hotel where she is raped by some of his disreputable friends. In a macabre revenge, the girl’s temporarily crazed brother kills Tiloka, biting into his neck and drinking his blood. The village elders’ council decides that it would be best for the community and the bereaved family if Mangla, who now drives the tonga and has otherwise taken his brother’s place, also takes over his wife. He should, in the language of their community, ‘cover her with a sheet’. Rano, who had brought up Mangla as her own son, giving him her breasts to suck when at the birth of her daughter the little boy too had insisted on being fed, is intially averse to the idea of this marriage. However, she soon overcomes her scruples. Although she views her turnabout as submission to the collective wish, Rano secretly welcomes the prospect of being the wife of someone who had often protected her against her drunken husband’s onslaughts and toward whom she feels considerable tenderness.

  Mangla, though, cannot bear the thought of a marriage with such a strongly incestuous colouring. As the time of ceremony draws near, he runs away in blind panic to hide in the fields. Hunted like a wild beast, he is caught and badly beaten by the village men. Half-senseless from the beating, he is dragged back to the house and compelled to cover Rano with a sheet.

  Mangla now becomes quite withdrawn and barely goes through the motions of a family life. To Rano’s considerable chagrin, and her friends’ growing consternation, he refuses to consummate the marriage. One day, he finds an old bottle of liquor among his dead brother’s personal effects. As he opens the bottle and as Rano makes her first protests in an eerie repetition of similar scenes with her former husband, she feels both fear and a fierce exhilaration. She dimly senses that in the impending violence Mangla will beat her like a husband and she will fight back like a wife, finally establishing a conjugal relationship which till now has only existed in the community’s will. Afterwards, as she lies in bed, in excruciating pain from drunken blows, a repentant and tearful Mangla trying to staunch the flow of blood from a wound in her scalp received when he had flung her against a wall, Rano is filled with a deep satisfaction. In the preceding encounter, her body had ceased to be an object of avoidance. It had been man-handled, touched by Mangla as a husband. The marriage is consummated the same night and the couple begin to live together as husband and wife.

  Rano’s greatest worry now is the marriage of her daughter. The family’s abysmal poverty makes it almost impossible to find a husband for the girl. Then one day, at the time of the annual festival of the local goddess, Rano is told of the arrival of a rich and handsome young man who has vowed that he will marry only Rano’s daughter. The family is puzzled but nonetheless overjoyed at the good turn in their fortunes. When the procession of singing and dancing men passes by the house, the young suitor is conspicuous among them by the abjectness of his penitent mien and the frenzy of his devotion to the goddess. Rano recognizes in the man the killer of her husband, just recently released from prison. The procession stops in front of the house as if awaiting her decision. Rano is in a turmoil till her blind father-in-law tells her to regard the proposed marriage as the workings of fate, a play of unseen powers which rule over man’s destiny and whose intent she should not even try to fathom. Rano consents to the nuptials of the daughter with the murderer of the girl’s father, a version of the “wild man” of many an Indian tale, with whom the heroine has a sexual relationship.

  Like the initial interview in clinical practice where the patient unconsciously presents his major conflict in a dramatized scene—produced by the characteristic way he uses the space of the therapist’s office, the way he makes his entry and exit, the movements of his body, and his speech as he enters into a dialogue with the therapist—the novel’s opening scene, too, dramatizes its main theme: the woman’s wish to be valued by the husband as a woman and as a wife, that is, as his woman, and her longing for the tenderness such a valuation implies. The scene itself is quite short: It is late in the afternoon and the family’s dog steps out into the street to find his favorite bitch lying dead. The dog sniffs at the carcass a couple of times and then unconcernedly ambles away. Rano has been watching the dog with a woman friend who remarks, ‘The race of men! They are all the same.’ Rano feels the tears smarting in her eyes but, controlling herself, attempts a mild jest. ‘But your dog is not like that!’

  In the reader’s mind, this short scene sets up psychological eddies which gradually spread out into wider and wider circles. Some of the dimensions of struggle between Rano and Tiloka are already sketched on the very first pages. Behind the husband and wife conflict we can sense the perennial one between man and woman which, incidentally, is explicit in the novel as it is in much of Indian domestic life and folklore. Thus, for instance, Margaret Egnor reports from Tamil Nadu:

  Within the household, as well as in the domain of paid labour, there was a strong spirit of rivalry between many women and their husbands. Wives would not automatically accept submission. Neither would their husbands. Consequently, their relationship was often, from what I was able to observe, disputatious…. The eternal conflict between spouses is abundantly reflected in Indian mythology, especially Tamil which debates the issues of male vs. female superiority back and forth endlessly on a cosmic level in the form of battles and contests between deities or demons and their real or would-be mates.2

  In folklore, Shiva and Parvati, for instance, argue interminably as to who is the better dancer, while Vishnu and Lakshmi need to descend to earth to find out which of them is the greater divinity.

  Now in most regions of the country, male folk wisdom offers similar overt reasons for man’s perennial war with woman. It agrees in portraying the female sex as lacking both sexual morality and intelligence. Punjabis and Gujaratis are of one mind that ‘The intelligence of a woman is in her heels (Strini akkal edi mā).3’ Tamils maintain that ‘No matter how educated a woman is, her intelligence is always of the lowest order,’ and Malayalis warn that ‘One who heeds the advice of a woman will be reduced to beggary (Penachollu kalkkunnavanu peruvali). Folk sayings in the northern languages, however, place singularly greater emphasis on the employment of force and physical chastisement to correct perceived female shortcomings. ‘The place of a horse and a woman is under the thighs (ghoda aur aurat rān talē)’ we hear in Hindi. And in Gujarati, ‘Barley and millet improve by addition of salt, women through a beating by a pestle (Usī jawār bājrī musē nār pādhrī)’: ‘Better to keep the race of women under the heel of a shoe (Rāndni jāt khāsdane talē rākhelij bhalī)’; (Mūrkh nāri ne nagārā kutyani kāmnā)’. The proverbs in the South Indian languages, on the other hand, convey more a man’s sense of helplessness and resignation in the face of general female cussedness and constant provocation. ‘Wind can be held in a bag, but not the tongue of a shrew,’ is common to both Kannada and Telugu. ‘Neither the husband nor the brother-in-law can control a pugnacious woman’ goes another Telugu saying, while yet another admit even a king’s helplessness in the face of female disputatiousness.

  Like wives in other novels, Rano uses words, biting, scornful words that seek to humble male pretensions—to enrage an already furious spouse. She taunts the husband to do his worst as far as physical battering is concerned and then emerges bloody but triumphant, victorious in that she denied him her submission to his will.

  Rano’s chief weapon in her battle against Tiloka, a weapon she is constantly seeking to hone and make more effective, is her attempted control over Tiloka’s sexual appetites. When she goes to the village baba (holy man) for a charm, it is for a spell which puts her husbands in her power—a charm even more coveted by the village women than the talisman for the birth of a child. The tablet which the baba gives is for the sexual enthralment of the husband. If it works, Rano fantasizes, she would refuse Tiloka all sexual access. Only after a long stretch of his begging and entreaty, his throwing himself at her feet in abject submission, rubbing his nose on
the ground in repentant surrender, might she just allow him to approach her in carefully rationed doses.

  Rano’s need for the charm is far removed in intent from similar quests by women (for instance that of Sachi, Indra’s wife) mentioned in the Rig-and Atharvavedas, in which spells are sought to win the love of the husband from other co-wives.4 Female sexuality for Rano and her friend is very much a utilitarian affair whose chief value lies in its capacity to redress a lopsided distribution of power between the sexes.