Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  There are germs of truth in the signal importance Indian cultural tradition attaches to sexuality. The notion, arising from this emphasis, that sexual urges amount to a creative fire—not only for procereation but, equally, in self-creation—is indeed compelling. Further, a tradition that does not reduce sexual love to copulation but seeks to elevate it into a celebration, even a ritual that touches the partners with a sense of the sacred, and where orgasm is experienced as [a symbolic blessing of man by his ancestors and by the nature of things,’ is certainly sympathetic.73 My concern here has to do with the concomitant strong anxiety in India surrounding the ideas of the ‘squandering of the sperm’ and ‘biological self-sacrifice.’ Such ideas and the fantasies they betray cannot help but heighten an ambivalence toward women that verges on misogyny and phobic avoidance. As for self-realization through renunciation of sexual love, I would tend to side with Thomas Mann when he observes:

  It is undeniable that human dignity realizes itself in the two sexes, male and female; so that when one is neither one nor the other, one stands outside the human pale and whence then can human dignity come? Efforts to sustain it are worthy of respect, for they deal with the spiritual, and thus, let us admit in honour, with the preeminently human. But truth demands the hard confession that thought and the spirit, come badly off, in the long run, against nature. How little can the precepts of civilization avail against the dark, deep, silent knowledge of the flesh! How little it lets itself be taken in by the spirit!74

  How would Freud, who in his mid-life also chose to become celibate, have regarded Gandhi’s celibacy and its intended efficacy? In general, Freud was understandably skeptical about the possibility that sexual abstinence could help to build energetic men of action, original thinkers, or bold reformers. Yet he also saw such attempts at the sublimation of ‘genital libido’ in relative terms:

  The relationship between the amount of sublimation possible and the amount of sexual activity necessary naturally varies very much from person to person and even from one calling to another. An abstinent artist is hardly conceivable; but an abstinent young savant is certainly no rarity. The latter can, by his self-restraint, liberate forces for his studies; while the former probably finds his artistic achievements powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience.75

  It is quite conceivable that Freud would have conceded the possibility of successful celibacy to a few extraordinary people of genuine originality with a self-abnegating sense of mission or transcendent purpose. In other words, he would have agreed with the Latin dictum that ‘what is allowed to Jove is forbidden to the ox.’ The psychoanalytic question is, then, not of sublimation but why Gandhi found phallic desire so offensive that he must, so to speak, tear it out by the very roots.

  Some of Gandhi’s uneasiness with phallic desire has to do with his feeling that genital love is an accursed and distasteful prerogative of the father. In his autobiography, in spite of expressing many admirable filial sentiments, Gandhi suspects his father of being ‘oversexed’ since he married for the fourth time when he was over 40 and Putlibai, Gandhi’s mother, was only 18. In his fantasy, we would suggest, Gandhi saw his young mother as the innocent victim of a powerful old male’s lust to which the child could only be an anguished and helpless spectator, unable to save the beloved caretaker from the violation of her person and the violence done to her body. In later life, Gandhi would embrace the cause wherein the marriage of old men with young girls was adamantly opposed with great zeal. He wrote articles with such titles as ‘Marriage of Old and Young or Debauchery?’ and exhorted his correspondents who reported such incidents to fight this practice. The older men he respected and took as his models were those who shared his revulsion with genital sexuality. These were the men who (like Tolstoy and Raichandra) had sought to transform sexual passion into a more universal religious quest or (like Ruskin) into a moral and aesthetic fervour.

  If phallic desire was the violent and tumultuous ‘way of the fathers,’ genital abstinence, its surrender, provided the tranquil, peaceful path back to the mother. Here Gandhi was not unlike St Augustine, who, too, inwardly beheld celibacy garbed in soothing, maternal imagery:

  …. there apeared unto me the chaste dignity of Continence, serene, yet not relaxedly gay, honestly alluring me to come and doubt not; and stretching forth to receive and embrace me, her holy hands full of multitudes of good examples; there were so many young men and maidens here, a multitude of youth and every age, grave widows and aged virgins; and Continence herself in all, not barren, but a fruitful mother of children of joys….76

  More specifically, the psychobiographical evidence we have reviewed above is compelling that Gandhi’s relationships with women are dominated by the unconscious fantasy of maintaining an idealized relationship with the maternal body. This wished-for oneness with the mother is suffused with nurturance and gratitude, mutual adortion and affirmation, without a trace of desire which divides and bifurcates. Replete with wishes for fusion and elimination of differences and limits, Gandhi ‘perceived’ sexual desire, both of the mother and the child, as the single biggest obstacle to the preservation of this illusion. Many of his attitudes, beliefs, and actions with regard to women can then be understood as defensive manoeuvres against the possibility of this preception rising to surface awarenes.

  Since the mother is a woman, a first step in the defensive operations is to believe that women are not, or only minimally, sexual beings. ‘I do not believe that woman is prey to sexual desire to the same extent as man. It is easier for her than for man to exercise self-restraint,’77 is an opinion often repeated in his writings. Reflecting on his own experiences with Kasturbai, he asserts that ‘There was never want of restraint on the part of my wife. Very often she would show restraint, but she rarely resisted me, although she showed disinclination very often.’78 Whereas he associates male sexuality with unheeding, lustful violence, female sexuality, where it exists, is a passive, suffering acceptance of the male onslaught. This, we must again remember, is only at the conscious level. Unconsciously, his perception of masculine violence and feminine passivity seem to be reversed, as evident in the imagery of the descriptions of his few erotic encounters with women. In his very first adolescent confrontation, he is struck ‘dumb and blind,’ while the woman is confident and aggressive; in England, he is trembling like a frightened wild animal who has just escaped the (woman) hunter.

  The solution to the root problem between the sexes is then, not a removal of the social and legal inequalities suffered by women—though Gandhi was an enthusiastic champion of women’s rights—but a thoroughgoing desexualization of the male-female relationship, in which women must take the lead. ‘If they will only learn to say “no” to their husbands when they approach them carnally…. If a wife says to her husband: “No, I do not want it,” he will make no trouble. But she has not been taught…. I want women to learn the primary right of resistance.’79

  Besides desexing the woman, another step in the denial of her desire is her idealization (especially of the Indian woman) as nearer to a purer divine state and thus an object of worship and adoration. That is why a woman does not need to renounce the world in the last stage of life to contemplate God, as is prescribed for the man in the ideal Hindu life cycle. ‘She sees Him always. She has no need of any other school to prepare her for Heaven than marriage to a man and care of her children.’80 Woman is also

  the incarnation of Ahimsa. Ahimsa means infinite love, which, again means infinite capacity for suffering. Who but woman, the mother of man shows this capacity in the largest measure? Let her transfer that love to the whole of humanity, let her forget she ever was, or can be, the object of man’s lust. And she will occupy her proud position by the side of the man as his mother, maker and silent leader.81

  Primarily seeing the mother in the woman and idealizing motherhood is yet another way of denying feminine eroticism. When Millie Polak, a female associate in the Phoenix ashram in South Africa, questioned his idealization of m
otherhood, saying that being a mother does not make a woman wise, Gandhi extolled mother-love as one of the finest aspects of love in human life. His imagery of motherhood is of infants suckling on breasts with inexhaustible supplies of milk. For example, in a letter explaining why the Gita, the sacred book of the Hindus, is called Mother, he rhapsodizes,

  It has been likened to the sacred cow, the giver of all desires (sic!). Hence Mother. Well, that immortssal Mother gives all the milk we need for spiritual sustenance, it we would but approach her as babies seeking and sucking it from her. She is capable of yielding milk to her millions of babies from her exhaustless udder.

  In doing the Harijan (untouchable) work in the midst of calumny, misrepresentations and apparent disappointments, her lap comforts me and keeps me from falling into the Slough of Despond.82

  Whereas desexualizing, idealizing, and perceiving only the ‘milky’ mother in the woman is one part of his defensive bulwark which helped in preserving the illusion of unity with the maternal body intact, the other part consists of efforts at renouncing the gift of sexual desire, abjuring his own masculinity. Here we must note that the Hindu Vaishnava culture, in which Gandhi grew up and in which he remained deeply rooted, not only provides a sanction for man’s feminine strivings, but raises these strivings to the level of a religious-spiritual quest. In devotional Vaishnavism, Lord Krishna alone is the male and all devotees, irrespective of their sex, are female. Gandhi’s statement that he had mentally become a woman or that he envied women and that there is as much reason for a man to wish that he was born a woman, as for women to do otherwise, thus struck many responsive chords in his audience.

  If Gandhi had had his way, there would be no art or poetry celebrating woman’s beauty.

  I am told that our literature is full of even an exaggerated apotheosis of women. Let me say that it is an altogether wrong apotheosis. Let me place one simple fact before you. In what light do you think of them when you proceed to write about them? I suggest that before you put your pens to paper think of woman as your own mother, and I assure you the chastest literature will flow from your pens, even like the beautiful rain from heaven which waters the thirsty earth below. Remember that a woman was your mother, before a woman became your wife.83

  Although Gandhi’s wished-for ferminization was defensive in origin, we cannot deny the devlopment of its adaptive aspects. Others, most notably Erik Erikson, have commented upon Gandhi’s more or less conscious explorations of the maternal stance and feminine perspective in his actions.84 In spite of a welter of public demands on his time, we know of the motherly care he could extend to the personal lives of his followers, and the anxious concern he displayed about their health and well-being, including solicitous inquiries about the state of their daily bowel movements.85 We also know of the widening of these maternal-feminine ways—teasing, testing, taking suffering upon oneself, and so on—in the formulation of his political style and as elements of his campaigns of militant nonviolence.

  We have seen that for Gandhi, the cherished oneness with the maternal-feminine could not always be maintained and was often threatened by the intrustion of phallic desire. His obsession with food at these times, evident in the letters and writings, not only represented a preparation for erecting physiological barriers against desire, but also the strengthening of his psychological defences, and thus a reinforcement of his spiritual armamentarium. In other words, in his preoccupation with food (and elimination), in his persistent investment of edible physical substances with psychological qualities, Gandhi plays out the ‘basic oral fantasy,’ as described by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott—‘when hungry I think of food, when I eat I think of taking food in. I think of what I like to keep inside and I think of what I want to be rid of and I think of getting rid of it’—whose underlying theme is of union with the mother. His experiments with various kinds of food and a reduction in its intake—in his later years, he abjured milk completely so as not to eroticize his viscera—appear as part of an involuted and intuitive effort to recover and maintain his merger with his mother.

  Gandhi’s relationship with women and the passions they aroused are, then, more complex than what he reveals in his own impassioned confession. Nor does a recourse to traditional Hindu explanations and prescriptions for their ‘diagnosis and cure’ reflect adequately the depths of the inner life in which his desires found their wellsprings. Beset by conflicts couched in moral terms familiar to Christian and classical psychoanalyst alike, he struggled with the yearnings aroused by the goddess of longing besides the passions provoked by the god of desire. Or, to use a well-known Indian metaphor in which a woman is said to have two breasts, one for her child, another for her husband, Gandhi’s unconscious effort to shift from the one breast to the other—from man to child—was not always successful. He was a man in spite of himself. We know that the sensuality derived from the deeply felt oneness with a maternal world, a sensuality that challenges death, energized Gandhi’s person, impelled his transcendent endeavours, and advanced him on the road to a freedom of spirit from which India, as well as the world, has profited. Yet we have seen that throughout his life, there were profound periods of emotional turmoil when this original and ultimately illusory connection broke down, emptying him of all inner ‘goodness’ and ‘power’.

  7

  Masculine/Feminine: A View from the Couch

  On 11 April 1929, Girindrasekhar Bose, the founder and first president of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, wrote to Freud on the difference he had observed in the psychoanalytic treatment of Indian and Western patients:

  Of course I do not expect that you would accept offhand my reading of the Oedipus situation. I do not deny the importance of the castration threat in European cases; my argument is that the threat owes its efficiency to its connection with the wish to be female [Freud in a previous letter had gently chided Bose with understating the efficiency of the castration threat.] The real struggle lies between the desire to be a male and its opposite, the desire to be a female. I have already referred to the fact that the castration threat is very common in Indian society but my Indian patients do not exhibit castration symptoms to such a marked degree as my European cases. The desire to be a female is more easily unearthed in Indian male patients than in European…. The Oedipus mother is very often a combined parental image and this is a fact of great importance. I have reason to believe that much of the motivation of the maternal deity is traceable to this source.

  Freud’s reply is courteous and diplomatic.

  I am fully impressed by the difference in the castration reaction between Indian and European patients and promise to keep my attention fixed on the opposite wish you accentuate. The latter is too important for a hasty decision.1

  In another paper, Bose elaborates on his observations and explains them through his theory of opposite wishes:

  During my analysis of Indian patients I have never come across a case of castration complex in the form in which it has been described by European observers. This fact would seem to indicate that the castration idea develops as a result of environmental conditions acting on some more primitive trend in the subject. The difference in social environment of Indians and Europeans is responsible for the difference in modes of expression in the two cases. It has been usually proposed that threats of castration in early childhood days, owing to some misdemeanour is directly responsible for the complex, but histories of Indian patients seem to disprove this.2

  Bose then goes on to say that though the castration threat is extremely common—in girls it takes the form of chastisement by snakes—the difference in Indian reactions to it are due to children growing up naked till the ages of nine to ten years (girls till seven) so that the difference between the sexes never comes as a surprise. The castration idea, which comes up symbolically in dreams as decapitation, a cut on a finger, or a sore in some part of the body, has behind it the ‘primitive’ idea of being a woman.

  Indeed, reading early Indian case hist
ories, one is struck by the fluidity of the patients’ cross-sexual and generational identifications. In the Indian patient, the fantasy of taking on the sexual attributes of both the parents seems to have a relatively easier access to awareness. Bose, for instance, in one of his vignettes tells us of a middle-aged lawyer who, with reference to his parents, sometimes

  took up an active male sexual role treating both of them as females in his unconscious and sometimes a female attitude, especially towards the father, craving for a child from him. In the male role sometimes he identified himself with his father and felt a sexual craving for the mother, on the other occasions his unconscious mind built up a composite of both the parents toward which male sexual needs were directed; it is in this attitude that he made his father give birth to a child like a woman in his dream.3

  Another young Bengali, whenever he thought of a particular man, felt with a hallucinatory intensity that his penis and testes vanished altogether and were replaced by female genitalia. While defecating he felt he heard the peremptory voice of his guru asking, ‘Have you given me a child yet?’ In many of his dreams, he was a man whereas his father and brothers had become women. During intercourse with his wife he tied a handkerchief over his eyes as it gave him the feeling of being a veiled bride while he fantasized his own penis as that of his father and his wife’s vagina as that of his mother.4