Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The myth is stark enough in its immediacy and needs no further gloss on the omnipotence and sexual energy of the goddess, expressed in the imagery of her dancing and riding naked, exhausting even the most powerful male to abject submission and ultimately death, decapitating (i.e., castrating) millions of “bad boys” with demonic desires, and so on. The only feature of the myth I would like to highlight, and which is absent both in M.’s case vignette and in the myths narrated so far, is that of the sword-and spear-wielding Devi as the phallic mother. In the Indian context, this fantasy seems more related to Chasseguet-Smirgel’s notion of the phallic mother’s being a denial of the adult vagina and the feelings of inadequacy it invokes rather than allowing its traditional interpretation as a denial of castration anxiety.17 In addition, I would see the image of the goddess as man-woman (or, for that matter, of Shiva as ardhanarishwara, half man-half woman), as incorporating the boy’s wish to become a man without having to separate and sexually differentiate from the mother, to take on male sexual attributes while not letting go of the feminine ones.

  The myth continues that when Devi’s frenzied dancing did not come to an end even after the killing of the buffalo demon, the gods become alarmed and asked Shiva for help. Shiva lay down on his back and when the goddess stepped on her husband she hung out her tongue in shame and stopped. Like M.’s gentle and somewhat withdrawn father, who was the only one who could help in dissipating the impact of the nightmare, Shiva too enters the scene supine, yet as a container for the great mother’s energy and power. In other words, the father may be unassuming and remote, yet powerful. First experienced as an ally and a protector (or even as a covictim), the father emerges as a rival only later. The rivalry, too, in popular Indian myths and most of my case histories, is less that of Oedipus, the power of whose myth derives from the son’s guilt over a fantasized and eventally unconscious parricide. The Indian context stresses more the father’s envy of what belongs to the son—including the mother—and thus the son’s persecution anxiety as a primary motivation in the father-son relationship. It is thus charged with the fear of filicide and with the son’s castration, by self or the father, as a solution to the father-son competition. Shiva’s beheading of Ganesha, who on the express wish of his mother stood guard at her private chambers while she bathed, and the replacement of his head by that of an elephant, the legends of Bhishma and Puru, who renounced sexual functioning in order to keep the affections of their father intact, are some of the better-known ilustrations.18 But the fate of fathers and sons and families and daughters are different narratives; stories yet to be told, texts still to be written.

  Cultural ideas and ideals of masculinity and femininity, then, manifested in their narrative form as myths, pervade the innermost experience of the self. One cannot therefore speak of an ‘earlier’ or ‘deeper’ layer of the self beyond cultural reach. As a “depth psychology,” psychoanalysis dives deep, but in the same waters in which the cultural river too flows. Preeminently operating from within the heart of the Western myth, enclosed in the mahamaya of Europe—from myths of ancient Greece to the ‘illusions’ of the Enlightenment—psychoanalysis had had little opportunity to observe from within, and with empathy, the deeper import of other cultures’ myths in the working of the self.

  The questions relating to the ‘how’ of this process are bound up with the larger issue of the relationship between the inner and outer worlds, which has been of perennial psychological and philosophical interest. It is certainly not my intention to discuss these questions at any length. I would only like to point out that apart from some notable exceptions, such as Erik Erikson, who both held aloft and significantly contributed to the vision of a ‘psychoanalysis sophisticated enough to include the environment,’19 most theorists generally underestimated the impact of culture on the development of a sense of identity—the construction of the self, in modem parlance. Freud’s ‘timetable’ of culture, entering the psychic structure relatively late in life as the ‘ideology of the supergo,’ has continued to be followed by other almanac makers of the psyche.20

  Even Heinz Kohut, as Janis Long has shown, does not quite follow the logical implications of his concept of ‘selfobject.’21 These are, of coure, the aspects of the other which are incorporated in the self and are experienced as part of one’s own subjectivity. Kohut, too, follows Freud in talking of a ‘culture selfobject’ of later life, derived in part from cultural ideals, which helps in maintaining the integrity and vitality of the individual self.22 Yet the idea of selfobject which goes beyond the notion of a budding self’s relatedness to the environment, to the environment’s gradual transmutation into becoming the self, implies that ‘what the parents respond to in a developing child, how they respond and what they present as idealizable from the earliest age’23—surely much of it a cultural matter—will be the raw material for the child’s inner construction of the self, including the gender self.

  In other words, a caretaker’s knowing of the child, a knowing in which effect and cognition are ideally fused, is in large part cultural and forms the basis of the child’s own knowing of him-or herself. The notion that the construction and experience of the self is greatly influenced by culture from the very beginning does not imply that there is no difference between individual faces and cultural masks, no boundary between inner and outer worlds. The tension between the two is what gives psychoanalysis and literature much of their narrative power. All I seek to emphasize here is that this boundary cannot be fixed either in time or psychic space. It is dynamic, mobile, and constantly subject to change.

  8

  An Ending

  This book has presented the viewpoints of the actors involved in the drama of the sexes in India. Each chapter was, so to speak, a site report, an account of intimate relations as perceived and defined by the participants. For a long time, the ruling orthodoxy in social sciences devalued such personal testimony as ‘subjective.’ It preferred to see individual feelings, desires, and fears as an epiphenomena of macro forces located in genes, culture, history, social or sexual division of labour. Conflicts between the sexes could then be attributed to one of the many theories in vogue: ‘programmed genetic traits,’ ‘system of patriarchy,’ ‘mode of production,’ and so on.1

  The intent of this study has been to avoid conceptualizing Indian gender relations in such abstract terms and to eschew the overobjectification of human behaviour that this kind of theorizing entails. Instead, I have tried to highlight the personal and the ‘storied’ nature of relations between the sexes. I have then interpreted these stories in a way which circumvents the second common weakness of most social theories—their lack of appreciation of the role of sexuality and the irrational in human affairs.

  As portrayed in various narratives, from films to folktales, from autobiographies to case histories, gender relations seem impelled more by hostility than tenderness or love. The fantasies entertained by each sex in relation to the other are pervaded as much by hatred and fear as by desire and longing. Partly, this has to do with the very nature of the narrative enterprise. It is difficult to conceive of a tale which will hold our attention and grip our imagination if it is totally devoid of conflict between its sexual protagonists. Somewhere along the course of the story, men and women must misunderstand, mistrust, or hurt each other, given if the chasm that opens up between them is temporary and will be ultimately spanned. Stories in which lovers continue to dwell in a blissful paradise with nary a serpent to intrude upon the stillness of their repose, dramas that show couples in complete harmony undisturbed by the slightest tremor, are understandably rare.

  Apart from the needs of the narrative form, our cultural conditioning makes us unwilling to accept the existence of a fundamental hostility between the sexes. For its own reproduction, each society has to focus on the positive aspects of this most basic of all human relationships. Official spokesmen of a culture, the apologists and sentimentalists of its tradition, must necessarily hold up affirmative models. In
India, for instance, the images of the pativrata wife and the couple that is like the ardhanarishwara, have been held up as the immanent reality of the relations between the sexes. Hostility and rage will tend to be dismissed as pathological episodes, avoidable occurrences which are neither an integral part of the sexual drama nor inherent in the man-woman connection.

  Yet we know from psychoanalysis that sexual desire which compels men and women toward each other in promised fulfilment of a timeless yearning has another darker face. In desire, the body’s wanting and its violence, the mind’s yearning for sexual pleasure but also the need to rid itself of ancient pain and noxious hate, the excitement of orgasm and the fierce exultation of possession, all flow together.2 Forces of selfishness, destruction, and ambivalence always accompany the quest for sexual pleasure and spiritual union. In the coming together of the sexes, we resent the violation of the body’s boundaries even while we want nothing more than to transcend them. We fear sexuality’s threat to the tenuous order we have carved out for ourselves during the course of our development—even as we long for its dissolution into a veritable mahabhava, a ‘great feeling’ that will allow us esctasy and exaltation rather than the small joys and dribbles of pleasure we extract from our inner order.

  Little wonder, then, that theories of gender relations, especially as they pertain to the oppression of women, founder on the ambiguities and ambivalences of sexuality. Although oppressed in many societies, women still cannot be likened to any other exploited group, such as the blacks in South Africa or the ‘untouchable’ castes in India. Blacks and whites, low and high castes do not have to deal with the conscious and unconscious exigencies of a mutual desire which is both a promise of self-enhancement, even transcendence, and a threat of disintegration to the self. Nor do they, or any other pairing of the oppressor and the oppressed, need each other—in Plato’s comment on his myth of the origin of sexes—for ‘reuniting our original nature, making one of two, healing the state of man.’3

  Coming back to Indian gender relations, we saw that in plumbing the fantasies of men and women we reached a common bedrock in human imagination. Here, the similarities in the ways the sexes perceive each other—within the culture and between cultures—seems to outweigh differences, at least as far as patriarchal societies are concerned. This universality springs from our infantile discovery, struggling against wishes and fears which would have it otherwise, that we are either one sex or the other—as are our beloved and hated caretakers and siblings. In other words, the universally shared features in the portrayed amalgamation of fact, fantasy, and folklore men call ‘woman’ and women ‘man’, spring from a common psychical reality and are relatively independent of my looking at these portraits from an ‘essentialist’ psychoanalytic perspective.

  Universality is not synonymous with uniformity. Within global clusters of human longings and anxieties, cultures can and do accentuate certain elements more than others. In India, too, the dominant Hindu culture has created its own brand of sexual mythology through the fantasies it has chosen to underscore in its narratives. Thus, for instance, it is generally true that the public discourse of all patriarchal societies stresses motherhood as the primary if not the sole reason of woman’s existence whereas, ironically, it underplays the importance of fatherhood for a man. Hindus, too, share this widespread orientation wherein the image of woman as mother is sought to be superimposed upon and thereby to obliterate the picture of woman as a sexual being. Yet during the superimposition, and this is the most salient feature of male fantasy in India, what emerges is a composite image of the sexual mother. As we saw, she is an overwhelming presence in man’s perception of woman, a being to whom one is in danger of ceding both genitals and the self. She pervades Gandhi’s agonizings but also looms large in clinical case histories, myths, and in popular narratives.

  Following on the sexual mother’s heels, her features somewhat more amorphous and blurred, is the unfaithful mother. We saw her appear prominently in the story of the snake woman, although her visage is also glimpsed in other narratives as well as in proverbs and pronouncements of ancient law-givers. In her willing or ‘unwilling’ sexual submisison to the ‘father,’ she is the universal betrayer of a boy’s first love and primordial passion. A favorite heroine of psychoanalytic stories for over eight decades, there is nothing more one can say about her and she need not detain us further here.

  The dread of the sexual mother and the rage at the unfaithful one are dealt with in our stories in certain specific ways. In other words, the culture highlights some defences more than others. Whereas viewing women as dangerous antagonists to be subdued through violence or denying their existence altogether in a misogynous turn to the world of men are responses common enough across partiarchies, Indian fantasy seems to favour one particular defensive mode. This is desexualization, either of the self or of the woman. In the former, a renunciation of the awareness of sexual differentiation is sought in ascetic longings or in the quiescence of the infant at the breast. In the latter, the woman is unsexed, à la Hindi movies, by turning her into a maternal automaton, a dispenser of emotional pap, or into an androgynous virgin.

  Similarly, the women in the universe of our stories share many characteristics of their counterparts in other patriarchal societies. We see the same private protest, at every level of society, against a socialization which has emphasized the mother and housewife as the woman’s primary gender roles. As in the marriage scenes from North Indian novels, there is a constant struggle, waged through the bickerings of household life, for a redressal of the uneven balance of power between the sexes. In the sexual metaphors availed of by fantasy, the woman would wrest the phallus—the symbol of male power—or have one of her own in the male child she therefore craves and subsequently invests with the full might or her emotions.

  Yet what strikes me most in the Indian woman’s fantasy, as reflected in the narratives, is less a burning rage than an aching disappointment. Her imagination seems propelled by the longing for a single two-person universe—which the women from the slums called a jodi—where the affirmation of her female body and the recognition of her feminine soul take place simultaneously. The longing is for an idealized phallus which will serve as a ‘transitional object’ in the consolidation of her feminine identity. To elaborate upon what was earlier mentioned only in passing, I would speculate that this yearning has its roots in the course taken by the girl’s interactions with adult men in the family, especially the father. We know that a girl’s sexual awakening depends to a considerable extent upon the seductive attention paid to her by the ‘father,’ an entity who, according to the family type, can mean a single individual or the collectivity of paternal men. Within the space demarcated by the incest taboo, the father must make the girl conscious of his masculine appreciation of her femininity, especially at various critical periods of her development, such as early childhood and adolescence.4 Without this ‘normal seduction,’ the daughter’s desire may remain relatively inhibited. If, however, after early demonstrations of erotically tinged interest, the father withdraws or otherwise absents himself from the girl’s life, she will be deprived of a sustained experience of a more normal father-daughter relationship, which would have helped her gradually to desexualize the father. A sense of rejection of her eroticism and a fixing of her inner state of aroused desire on the paternal phallus of early childhood may then be a few of the consequences which constitute an area of vulnerability in the women’s psyche.

  What gives this particular developmental sequence in individual women’s lives a wider cultural significance is the structure of relationship between the sexes in the family, especially ‘father’ and ‘daughter,’ in large sections of Hindu upper castes. After the first four or five years of a child’s life, the father progressively (and at puberty, even precipitately) withdraws from interaction with the growing girl, who is taken over and assimilated into the community of women at an early age. Although the entrance into the women’s community miti
gates the slights and shields the girl from humiliation at the hands of the surrounding patriarchal order, it also has the result of isolating her from the ‘father.’ This increases the longing for the idealized paternal phallus which is manifested in various ways, including the menacing movie images of rape by father figures.

  Leaving the question of origins aside, the stories make it abundantly clear that in contrast to the fear and dread pervading men’s fantasies of women, anger and disappointment are a large part of women’s feelings in relationship to men.

  At the end, we will do well to remember that the Indian tale of intimate relations, or for that matter that of any culture, has many renderings. The sober, dark version recounted here, in which the dream of intimacy verges on a nightmare and where the sexual union of man and woman becomes a zone of genital combat, is preeminently a psychoanalytic story. As such it is only one building block in that imposing and mysterious edifice we call love, and which houses our soul in a more essential way than the buildings of straw and mud, bricks and mortar, sheltering our bodies.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was largely completed during the two years I was the recipient of a Nehru Fellowship. Originally intended to be a study of family relationships in India through the medium of folktales, its focus soon narrowed to the relations between the sexes, yet also simultaneously expanded to include other narratives. I am grateful to the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund for their financial support. I am also happy to acknowledge a debt to Dr Renuka Singh for her sensitive and skilful interviews with women from Delhi slums, which form the basis of chapter 5.