Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Sexual taboos, then, are still so strong among some Hindu communities that many women, especially from the higher castes, do not have a name for their genitals, At the utmost, the genitals are referred to obliquely—for instance ‘the place of peeing,’ though even this euphemism carries a strong affective charge. One patient, educated in England, did not have any trouble in mentioning her sexual parts as long as she could do so in English. If asked to translate the words into her mother tongue, the language nearer her early bodily experience, she would either ‘forget’ the appropriate words or freeze into a long silence which all her conscious efforts could not break. Ignorance, of course, thrives in the socially generated pall of silence. One college-educated patient believed well into her late teens that menstrual blood, urine and babies all came out through the urethra. Another woman, brought up in a village and presumably more familiar with the ‘barnyard’ facts of life, realized with deep consternation only when giving birth to her first child that babies were not born through the anus as she had believed. Writing on Indian sexuality some 2000 years after the Kamasutra, I still cannot say to its author—‘Elementary, dear Vatsayana’.

  Of course, the modern notion of sexuality diverges in essential ways from that of Vatsayana, a change to which psychoanalysis has significantly contributed. Sexual need in the psychoanalytic sense is not a need for coitus, and sexuality is neither equated with genitality nor with the expression of a biological drive. The psychoanalytic concept of sexuality is far more than simple genital conjunction or a question of ‘fit’ in organ sizes. A mental absence of satisfaction can exist where there is no lack of normal sexual intercourse. Sexuality, in psychoanalysis, is a system of conscious and unconscious human fantasies, arising from various sources, seeking satisfaction in diverse ways, and involving a range of excitations and activities that aim to achieve pleasure that goes beyond the satisfaction of any basic somatic need.

  What we are talking of here is the cultural impact on psychosexuality in Indian marriage. Cultural injunctions perhaps do not affect the act of coitus or regulate its transports. What they can do, though, is to increase the conflicts around sexuality, sour it for many, and generally contribute towards its impoverishment. This can effectively block many men and most women from a deep full experience of sexual love and the mutual cherishing of bodies, the only containers we have of our souls. Cultural injunctions become significant for the family since a fundamental aspect of the relationship between the parents involves the meaning of each child in terms of the parents conscious and unconscious fantasy around the act that produced the conception. And if one agrees with Winnicott, as I do, that the way we arrange our families practically shows what our culture is like, just as a picture of the face portrays the individual, then beliefs and norms around sexuality in marriage gain a wider significance for the understanding of culture.21

  The considerable sexual misery is not only a postulate inferred from Hindu cultural ideals and prohibitions relating to sex in marriage or deduced from interpretations of modern fiction. Even discounting the sexual woes of a vast number of middle-and upper-class women who come for psychotherapy as being an unrepresentative sample, there are other, direct indications that sexual unhappiness is also widespread in the lowest castes whom the upper sections of society have always imagined to be free of the culture’s restrictive mores. Thus interviews with low-caste, untouchable’ women from a poor locality in Delhi, most of them migrants from villages of Uttar Pradesh, revealed sexuality pervaded by hostility and indifference rather than affection and tenderness. Most women portrayed even sexual intercourse as a furtive act in a cramped and crowded room, lasting barely a few minutes and with a marked absence of physical or emotional caressing. Most women found it painful or distasteful or both. It was an experience to be submitted to, often from a fear of beating. None of the women removed their clothes for the act since it is considered shameful to do so. Though some of the less embittered women still yearned for physical tenderness from the husband, the act itself was seen as a prerogative and need of the male—‘Admi bolna chahta hai (man wants to speak)’.

  If we agree with Lokoff and Johnson that human thought processes are largely metaphorical, that we understand and experience things and concepts in the network of their metaphorical affinities, then it is instructive to look at other metaphors used by this group of women for what in English is called ‘love-making.’22 ‘Hafte mein ek bar lagwa lete hain (I get it done to me once a week),’ has in its original Hindustani the connotations of a weekly injection, painful but perhaps necessary for health. The most common expressions for intercourse are kaam and dhandha, work and business. Sexual intercourse for these women (and men) seems to be structured in terms of contractual and impersonal exchange relations, with the ever-present possibility of one party exploiting or cheating the other.

  The conflict between the sexes in marriage, which I have charted out in this chapter, is not devoid of moments of tenderness between the spouses and, especially for the women, the feelings of loss and mourning at its absence. Mitro’s occasional gestures of physical affection and of financial generosity toward Sardari when the family is in deep financial trouble, or Rano’s deeply felt anguish and regret as she tells Mangla that the war between the sexes is like that of the Mahabharata, are just two illustrative scenes from our novels. Indeed, Rano’s analogy of the Kurukshetra battle is an apt characterization of the basic struggle between husbands and wives. The war is between antagonists who know each other well, even have loyalty and admiration for one or another member of the enemy host, and where regular pauses in the daily hostilities do take place.

  What these novels only hint at and which becomes an overwhelming issue in fiction (and patients) from (and of) the middle-and upper-middle-class social milieu is the profound yearning of a wife, as a woman, for a missing intimacy with the husband—as a man. Generally fated for disappointment, the fantasy of constituting a ‘couple,’ not in opposition to the rest of the extended family but within this wider network, is a dominant theme running through women’s lives, actual and fictional. Connecting the various stages of a woman’s adulthood, from an expectant bride to a more sober grandmother, the intense wish to create a two-person universe with the husband where each finally ‘recognizes’ the other, is never far from her consciousness. It stands as a beacon of hope amidst the toil, drudgery, fights, disappointments, and occasional joys of her stormy existence within the extended family. In contrast to much of popular Western fiction, the Indian ‘romantic’ yearning is not for an exploring of the depths of erotic passion, or for being swept off the feet by a masterful man. It is a much quieter affair, with the soul of a Mukesh-song, and when unsatisfied this longing shrivels the emotional life of many women, making some go through life as mere maternal automatons. Others, though, react with an inner desperation where, as one woman put it, even the smell of the husband is a daily torture that must be borne in a silent scream. The desired intimacy, forever subduing the antagonism between husband and wife, inherent in the division of sexes and culturally exaggerated, is the real sasural—the husband’s home—to which a girl looks forward after marriage and which even a married woman keeps on visiting and revisiting in the hidden vaults of her imagination.

  3

  Lovers in the Dark

  When I was growing up in the 1940s, going to the cinema, at least in the Punjab and at least among the middle-and upper-classes, was regarded as slightly dissolute, if not outright immoral, and the habit was considered especially dangerous to the growing sensibilities of young children. Of course not all films were equally burdened with disapproval. Like everything else in India—from plants to human beings—there was (and is) a strict hierarchical classification. In the movie caste system, stunt films, the Indian version of Kung Fu movies, were the low-caste Shudras at the lowest rung of the ladder while the Brahmin ‘mythological’ and the Kshatriya ‘historical’ vied for supremacy at the top. The only time I was admitted to the owner’s box of Pr
abhat Talkies—the cinema owned by a grand-uncle in Lahore—was to see an eminently forgettable mythological called Kadambari. In childhood, stunt films were my favourite, although my taste was quite catholic, consisting as it did of indiscriminate adoration. With the complicity of a friendly doorman who doubled as an odd-job man in my grand-uncle’s adjoining house, I was in the fortunate position of being able to indulge my secret passion for films whenever we visited Labore. I use the word ‘passion’ literally and not as a metaphor, since my craving for movies was insatiable and my consumption equally remarkable; I saw Ratan 16 times, Shikari 14 times, and even Kadambari three times after that first viewing from the owner’s box.

  I remember my movie-going with a nostalgia which cloaks childhood events, at least the good ones, in a unique glow of permanence and ephemerality. In the anonymity of a darkness pierced by the flickering light which gave birth to a magical yet familiar world on the screen, I was no longer a small boy but a part of the envied world of adulthood, although I sensed its rituals and mysteries but dimly. I always joined in the laughter that followed a risqué comment, even if its exact meaning escaped me. I too would hold my breath in the hushed silence that followed a particularly well-enacted love scene, and surreptitiously try to whistle with the O of the thumb and the index finger under the tongue, in imitation of the wolf-whistles that greeted the obligatory scene in which the heroine fell into the water or was otherwise drenched. Recently, when in Satyam Shivam Sundaram Miss Zeenat Aman’s considerable charms were revealed through her wet and clinging saree at the receiving end of a waterfall, I felt grateful to the world of Hindi movies for providing continuity in an unstable and changing world. When I was a child, the movies brought the vistas of a desirable adulthood tantalizingly close; as an adult, I find that they help to keep the road to childhood open.

  I have described my engagement with the world of Hindi films at some length, not in order to claim any vast personal experience or specialized knowledge but to stress the fact of an enduring empathic connection with the world of Indian popular cinema. Today, this cinema, which draws upon images and symbols from the traditinal regional cultures and combines them with more modern Western themes, is the major shaper of an emerging, pan-Indian popular culture. Though its fixed repertoire of plots, with which the audience is presumably thoroughly familiar, has striking parallels with traditional folk theatre, the popular culture represented by the cinema goes beyond both classical and folk elements even while it incorporates them.

  The appeal of the film is directed to an audience so diverse that it transcends social and spatial categories. Watched by almost 15 million people every day, popular cinema’s values and language have long since crossed urban boundaries to enter the folk culture of the rural-based population, where they have begun to influence Indian ideas of the good life and the ideology of social, family, and love relationships. The folk dance of a region or a particular musical form such as the devotional bhajan, after it has crossed the portals of a Bombay or Madras studio, is transmuted into a film dance or a film bhajan by the addition of musical and dance motifs from other regions as perhaps also from the West, and is then relayed back in full technicolour and stereophonic sound to decisively alter the original. Similarly, film situations, dialogue, and decor have begun to colonize folk theatre. Even the traditional iconography of statues and pictures for religious worship is paying homage to film representations of gods and goddesses.1

  My own approach to popular cinema is to think of film as a collective fantasy, a group daydream. By ‘collective’ and ‘group’ I do not mean that Hindi film is an expression of a mythic collective unconscious or of something called a group mind. Instead, I see the cinema as the primary vehicle for shared fantasies of a vast number of people living on the Indian subcontinent who are both culturally and psychologically linked. I do not use ‘fantasy’ in the ordinary sense of the word, with its popular connotations of whimsy, eccentricity, or triviality, but as another name for that world of imagination which is fuelled by desire and which provides us with an alternative world where we can continue our longstanding quarrel with reality. Desire and fantasy are, of course, inexorably linked. Aristotle’s dictum that there can be no desire without fantasy contains even more truth in reverse. Fantasy is the mise-en-scène of desire, its dramatization in a visual form.

  The origins of fantasy lie in the unavoidable conflict between many of our desires, formulated as demands on the environment (especially on people), and the environment’s inability or unwillingness to fulfil our desires, where it does not proscribe them altogether. The power of fantasy, then, comes to our rescue by extending or withdrawing the desires beyond what is possible or reasonable, by remarking the past and inventing a future. Fantasy, the ‘stuff that dreams are made of,’ is the bridge between desire and reality, spanning the chasm between what is asked for and what is granted. It well deserves psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s paean as ‘the vehicle of hope, healer of trauma, protector from reality, concealer of truth, fixer of identity, restorer of tranquillity, enemy of fear and sadness, cleanser of the soul.’2 Hindi films, perhaps more than the cinema of many other countries, are fantasy in this special sense.

  The sheer volume of unrelieved fantasy in one film after another is indeed overwhelming, and it is disquieting to reflect that this exclusive preoccupation with magical explanations and fairytale solutions for life’s problems could be an expression of a deep-seated need in large sections of Indian society. Some may even consider such a thoroughgoing denial of external reality in Indian cinema to be a sign of morbidity, especially since one cannot make the argument that fantasy in films fulfils the need for escapism of those suffering from grinding poverty. In the first place, it is not the poor who constitute the bulk of the Indian film clientele. In the second, one does not know the cinema of any other country which, even in the worst periods of economic deprivation and political uncertainty, dished out such uniformly fantastic fare. Neither German cinema during the economic crisis of the 1920s nor Japanese cinema in the aftermath of the Second World War elevated fantasy to such an overwhelming principle. And if one considers that neorealism even flourished in Italy during the economic chaos following the Allied victory, then one must acknowledge that economic conditions alone cannot explain the fantasia permeating Indian films.

  The reason for the ubiquity of fantasy in the Hindi cinema, I suspect, lies in the realm of cultural psychology rather than in the domain of socioeconomic conditions. Now, as in other cultures, we too have our film addicts. These are the unfortunate people who are pressed in childhood to view reality in an adult way and now need the fantasy of the film world to fill up the void left by a premature deprivation of magic in early life. Leaving aside this group, no sane Indian believes that Hindi films depict the world realistically, although I must admit I often feel that our willingness to suspend disbelief is relatively greater than in many other cultures. This is not because the thought processes of Indians are fantasy-ridden. The propensity to state received opinion and belief as observation, to look for confirmation of belief rather than be upon to disturbing new knowledge, to generally think in a loose, associative rather than a rigorous and sequential way, is neither Indian, American, Chinese, Japanese, or German, but common to most human beings. However, I would hypothesize, without passing any value judgment, that, relatively speaking, in India the child’s world of magic is not as far removed from adult consciousness as it may be in some other cultures. Because of a specific thrust of the culture and congruent childrearing practices which I have described in detail elsewhere, the Indian ego is flexible enough to regress temporarily to childhood modes without feeling threatened or engulfed.3 Hindi films seem to provide this regressive haven for a vast number of our people.

  If, as I have indicated above, I regard the Indian cinema audience not only as the reader but also as the real author of the text of Hindi films, what is the role played by their ostensible creators—the producers, directors, scriptwriters, musi
c directors, and so on? In my view, their functions are purely instrumental and akin to that of a publisher who chooses, edits, and publishes a particular text from a number of submitted manuscripts. The quest for the comforting sound of busy cash registers at the box office ensures that the filmmakers select and develop a daydream which is not idiosyncratic. They must intuitively appeal to those concerns of the audience which are shared; if they do not, the film’s appeal is bound to be disastrously limited. As with pornography, the filmmakers have to create a work which is singular enough to fascinate and excite, and general enough to excite many. Moreover, in their search for the ‘hit,’ the ten to 15 films out of the roughly 700 produced every year which evoke the most enthusiastic response, the filmmakers repeat and vary the daydreams as they seek to develop them into more and more nourishing substitutes for reality. Under the general rubric of fantasy, which can range all the way from the most primal images in dreams to the rationalized misinterpretations of reality in everyday life, the Hindi film is perhaps closest to the daydream. Indeed, the visual landscape of these films has a strong daydream quality in that it is not completely situated outside reality but is clearly linked to it. As Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge point out, while the landscape of the popular films contains places, social types, topological features, and situations which are reminiscent of ordinary experience, these elements are transformed or transposed so as to create a subtly fantastic milieu.4 Even film speech is reminiscent of real speech. Thus the frequently heard admonition in ‘Indinglish,’ ‘Don’t maro filmi dialogues, yaar,’ (Don’t spout dialogues from films at me, friend), is often addressed to someone expressing highly inflated sentiments of friendship, love, or hostility which typify exchanges between the characters of Indian cinema.