Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Together with the speculated impact of early mother-child interaction in Ramakrishna’s psychic life, admittedly a construct derived from analytic theory rather than a reconstruction based on compelling psychobiographical evidence, I would tend to attribute his acute sensitivity to the theme of separation to the mystical gift (or curse) of a specific kind of creative experiencing. This can be understood more clearly, if we take recourse to some ideas of the ‘metaphysical’ analysts mentioned earlier.

  Lacan, for instance, has postulated that man’s psychic life constantly seeks to deal with a primordial state of affairs which he calls the Real. The Real itself is unknowable, though we constantly create myths as its markers. Perhaps the principal myth involves the rupture of a basic union, the separation from the mother’s body, leaving us with a fundamental feeling of incompletion. The fantasies around this insufficiency are universal, governing the psyche of both patients and analysts alike. In the psyche, this lack is translated as desire, and the human venture is a history of desire as it ceaselessly loses and discovers itself in (what Lacan calls) The Imaginary and, with the advent of language, The Symbolic order. Born of rupture, desire’s fate is an endless quest for the lost object; all real objects merely interrupt the search. As the Barandes put it, ‘It is the task of the neotenique [i.e., immature, even foetalized being] being separated from its original union by its fall into life and into time, to invent detours for itself, deviations of object as well as means and aims. Its condition is inexorably perverse—if perversions must be.’49 The mystical quest seeks to rescue from primal repression the constantly lived contrast between an original interlocking and a radical rupture. The mystic, unlike most others, does not mistake his hunger for its fulfilment. If we are all fundamentally perverse in the play of our desire, then the mystic is the only one who seeks to go beyond the illusion of The Imaginary and, yes, also the maya of The Symbolic register.

  One of Ramakrishna’s more ‘private’ vision attempts to paint the issue of separation with crude yet compelling brushstrokes. As Bion would say, here he is like the analyst who knows that emotional truth is ineffable, available only in intimations and approximations. Like the Bionian analyst, the mystic too is compelled to use terms from sensuous experience to point to a realm beyond this experience, ‘Let me tell you a very secret experience. Sitting in a pine grove, I had the vision of a small, hidden [literally ‘thief’s door’] entrance to a room. I could not see what was inside the room. I tried to bore a hole with a nail file but did not succeed. As I bored the hole it would fill up again and again. And then suddenly it made a big opening.’ He kept quiet and then started speaking again. ‘These are all higher matters. I feel someone is closing my mouth. I have seen God residing in the vagina. I saw Him there at the time of sexual intercourse of a dog and a bitch.’50

  Ramakrishna’s vision, followed by an associative sequel, does not need extended analytic gloss. The small secret opening to a room into which he cannot see and which he tried to keep open, the seeing of God in the genitals of a bitch in intercourse, do not encode the mystical preoccupation with opening a way back to the self-other interlocking in any complex symbolic language. This interlocking, the mystical unity, is not unitary. As we saw in Ramakrishna’s case, it extends in a continuum from the foetalized being’s never having known separation from the mother’s insides, an expulsion from her womb, through the satiated infant’s flowing feelings of merger at the breast, to the toddler being pulled back to the mother as if held at one end of an invisible string.

  What I am emphasizing, however, is not the traditional analytic agenda of pathological, defensive, or compensatory uses of these various degrees of dyadic unity in mystical experiencing. As Michael Eigen has elaborated in a series of papers, for Freud, ideal experiencing, that is, states or moments of beatific (or horrific) perfection, in which I would include the mystical states, usually involved something in disguise—mother, father, sex, aggression and so on.51 Lacan, Winnicott and Bion (and implicitly also Erikson), on the other hand, look at ideal experiencing in its own right, as a spontaneously unfolding capacity for creative experiencing. This capacity can be deployed defensively as has been spelled out in detail in the Freudian literature, but it is not conterminous with defence.

  All these authors emphasize the positive, regenerative aspects of this experiencing not as idealists but as empirical analysts who chart out its developmental vicissitudes from early infancy onward. The experiencing itself, they maintain, should not be confused with the introjection of the mother and father images or functions. These only foster or hamper this capacity. ‘If one reads these authors carefully, one discovers that the primary object of creative experiencing is not mother or father but the unknowable ground of creativeness as such. Winnicott, for example, emphasizes that what is at stake in transitional experiencing is not mainly a self or object (mother) substitute, but the creation of a symbol, of symbolizing experiencing itself. The subject lives through and toward creative immersion (including phases of chaos, unintegration, waiting).’52 What we should then pay equal attention to is not only the conflicts of the mystic that threaten to deform or disperse his creative experiencing, but the experiencing itself—its content, context, and evolution.

  Most of us harbour tantalizing ‘forgotten’ traces of this kind of experiencing, an apperception where what is happening outside is felt to be the creative act of the original artist (or mystic) within each of us and recognized as such with (in Blake’s word) delight. For in late infancy and early childhood we did not always see the world as something outside ourselves, to be recognized in detail, adapted, complied with, and fitted into our idiosyncratic inner world, but often as an infinite succession of creative acts.

  Mystical experience, then, is one and—in some cultures and at certain historical periods—the preeminent way of uncovering the vein of creativity that runs deep in all of us. For some, it is the throes of romantic love that gives inklings of our original freshness of vision.

  Others may strive for creative experiencing in art or in natural science. In the West, the similarities between mystics and creative artists and scientists have been pointed out since the beginning of the century. Evelyn Underhill in her path-breaking work on mysticism emphasized the resemblance between artistic geniuses and mystics—though one should hesitate to use the terms as interchangeable—while James Leuba pointed out the similarity at a more mundane level in creative phenomena of the daily kind and at a lower level of intensity.53 In China, we know that it was the mystical Taoists stressing spontaneity, ‘inaction,’ ‘emptying the mind,’ rather than the rational Confucians, who stimulated Chinese scientific discovery. In India, too, in different epochs, the striving for mystical experience through art, especially music, has been a commonly accepted and time-honoured practice. And Albert Einstein writes of his own motivations for the scientific enterprise, ‘The most beautiful, the most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle to true art and science.’ Einstein goes on to say that there is a need ‘to escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from fetters of one’s own shifting desires.’ Instead the scientist and the artist creates his own reality, substituting it for the world of experience and thus overcoming it: ‘Each makes his own cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.’54 Here it seems to me that Einstein is not talking as someone who is depressed but with a creative individual’s clear-sighted and inevitable response to the world as it is. When Buddha, as the young Siddhartha confronted with illness, old-age, and death proclaims ‘Sabbam dukham (All is suffering)’, he too is not depressed but in perfect attunement with the reality principle. To see the world with a creative eye but a sober perspective is perhaps our greatest adaptation to reality—a state where Buddha, Freud and Ramakrishna come together.

/>   Sexuality and the Mystical Experience

  Ramakrishna was one with other Vaishnava mystics in his insistence that sexuality, by which he meant male sexuality, phallic desire, constituted the biggest obstacle to mystical experiencing. This is a formulation with which psychoanalysts will not have any quarrel. For both male and female infants, the differentiation between self and object is achieved and ego boundaries constituted by a gradual detachment from the mother. The presence of the father is vital for this process. Whereas the masculinity of the father makes it possible for the boy to overcome his primary femininity, the presence of the paternal phallus also helps to protect the little girl from fusional tendencies with the mother. Male sexuality and male desire may thus be viewed as obstacles in the path of fusion, the phallus as the prime symbol of boundaries the mystic seeks to transcend.

  The renunciation of adult masculinity is not only a feature of Hindu devotional mysticism but is also a feature of Christian emotional mysticism of medieval and early modern Europe. Affective prayer or Bernardine mysticism, as it has often been called after the influential sermons of the 11th-century saint Bernard of Clairvaux, possesses a striking affinity to its Hindu counterpart. Femininity pervades both. In the case of medieval Europe, most of the practicing mystics were women. But even the outstanding male mystics—St John of the Cross, Francois de Sales, Fenelon—show strong feminine identifications and produced their most important ideas under the direct influence of women.55 The psychological stance of Christian ecstatic toward Divinity, paralleling that of the Vaishnava mystics, is either that of the infant toward a loving maternal parent, or of a woman toward a youthful lover. Like the Hindus, the Christian mystics too disavowed or overthrew the paternal phallus as they divested the Judeo-Christian God of much of his original masculinity and sternness, virtually relegating him to the role of a grandfather. The message of the European emotional mystics seems to be the same as that of Ramakrishna: the actual gender of the mystics is not important for his practice. It is, however vital that the mystic accept and cultivate his or her femininity to the point that the female-self part becomes dominant in his or her inner psychic reality.

  Of the many mystical disciplines, the one Ramakrishna could never practise was the ‘heroic’ one of tantra where, at its culmination, God as a female is sought to be pleased—or perhaps I should say, pleasured—as a man pleases a woman through intercourse. In his own tantric training, he had escaped the demand for ritual sex by going into an ecstatic state just before he had to actually ‘perform’. He repeatedly warned his disciples against kamini-kanchani (literally, woman and gold), and his advice to novices on the mystical path was to avoid the female sex altogether, the whirlpool in which even Brahma and Vishnu struggle for their lives. For a renunciant, he felt, to sit with a woman or talk to her for a long time was a kind of sexual intercourse of which there were eight kinds. Some of these were to listen to a woman, to talk to her in secret, to keep and enjoy something belonging to a woman, to touch her, and so on. Given the fact that a vast majority of widely known mystics, at least in medieval Christian and devotional Hindu traditions, have been celibates, one wonders whether clibacy, with its profound influence on hormonal balance, is not an important physiological technique for mystical ecstasy.

  The prescribed avoidance of women was only for beginners. Once mystical knowledge was gained, sexual differentiation too vanished: ‘Then you don’t have much to fear. After reaching the roof you can dance as much as you like, but not on the stairs.’ Yet though Ramakrishna constantly reiterated that he looked at the breasts of every woman as those of his mother, that he felt as a child or as another woman with women, his male awareness of women as sexual beings, and of the dangers of a desire that separates and bifurcates, never quite disappeared as his biographers would have us believe. He felt uncomfortable with female devotees sitting in his room and would ask them to go and visit the temple as soon as he could decently get rid of them. Being touched by a woman was not a matter of unconcern but evoked strong physical reactions. ‘If a woman touches me, I fall ill. That part of my body aches as if stung by a horned fish. If I touch a woman my hand becomes numb; it aches. If in a friendly spirit I approach a woman and begin to talk to her, I feel as if a curtain has come down between us.’56 However minimal his sexual conflict, even a great mystic seems to retain at least a vestigial entanglement with the world of desire. In his normal nonecstatic state, Ramakrishna too was never quite free of the sexual maya free from the delight, wisdom, beauty, and pain of the ‘illusion’ which so beguiles the rest of us.

  Ramakrishna’s attempted renunciation of male sexual desire is the subject of one vision, although as someone who claimed to never having even dreamt of intercourse with a woman, the conscious promptings of desire could not have been too peremptory. ‘During the sadhanas, I vividly perceived a heap of rupees, a shawl, a plate of sweets and two women. “Do you want to enjoy any of these things?” I asked my mind. “No,” replied the mind. I saw the insides of those women, of what is in them; entrails, piss, shit, phlegm and such things.’57 We can, of course, try to understand the contents of this vision in biographical terms. Money, shawl, and sweets embody overpowering temptations for a boy who grew up in a poor family whose dire financial straits allowed but the most spartan of fare. Similarly, one posible cause for the hankering after sexual purity in his youth could be a deep feeling of shame he associated with the sexual act. In a country and at a time where women not infrequently became grandmothers in their late 20s, where sexual activity has always been considered a prerogative of the young—sexual desire of older men and women occasioning derisive laughter—Ramakrishna’s birth itself (followed by that of the sister) is the sign of a tainted and deeply mortifying sexuality of his old parents. We have already seen how Ramakrishna’s enduring wish to be a woman, expressed variously in dressing and moving his limbs like one, his fantasy of being a girl widow who secretly trysts with Krishna every evening, fitted in well with a tenet of Vaishnava mysticism that all mankind is female while God alone is male. Ramakrishna would approvingly cite the opinion that irrespective of biological gender everyone with nipples is a female. Arjuna, the heroic warrior of the Mahabharata, and Krishna are the only exceptional males since they do not have nipples. In the madhurya bhava, Ramakrishna had even tried to engender in himself female erotic feelings. Moved by an intense love for Krishna, ‘such as a woman feels for her lover,’ he had stretched out his arms to embrace the Lord’s stone idols.

  Just as the writings of medieval European female mystics, wherein they wax rhapsodic over their ecstatic union with Jesus, portrayed as an exceedingly handsome and loving bridegroom of the human soul, have been analyzed as expressions of a pathological, hysterical sexuality, it would not be difficult to diagnose Ramakrishna in traditional Freudian terms as a secondary transsexual. He would seamlessly fit in with Robert Stoller’s description of the secondary transsexual as being someone who differs from his primary counterpart in that he does not appear feminine from the start of any behavior that may be classed in gender terms.58 Under the surface of masculinity, however, there is the persistent impulse toward being feminine, an urge which generally manifests itself in adolescence. The most obvious manifestation of these urges is the wish for the actual wearing of women’s clothes. Though these urges may gather in strength and last for longer and longer periods, the masculine aspects of identity are never completely submerged.

  Ramakrishna’s open espousal and expression of his feminine identifications as a boy, however, also have to do with the greater tolerance of his community and its culture towards such identifications. His urge toward femininity did not meet an unyielding opposition or strenuous attempts at suppression by an enforced participation in masculine play. Any transsexual or homosexual labels may obscure his sense of comfort and easy familiarity with the feminine components of his self. It may hide the fact that the freeing of femininity from repression of disavowal in man and vice versa in a woman may be a great human achi
evement rather than an illness or a deviation. The deviation may actually lie, as in one view of the etiology of homosexuality, in the inability to come to terms with the opposite sexual personality in one’s self.59

  Summarizing, I would say that the male-self part of Ramakrishna’s personality was split off in early childhood and tended to grow, if at all, rather slowly. In contrast, the female-self part of his personality dominated his inner psychic reality. Ramakrishna’s girl-self was neither repressed nor disassociated but could mature to an extent where psychically he could even possess female sexual equipment and enjoy female sexual experience.

  Yet even a celebratory avowal of secondary femininity in a male mystic may not be enough to exhaust the mystery of the link between sexuality and mysticism. For if, together with ‘infant-likeness,’ secondary femininity and female bodily experience—breastpride, absence of male external genitalia, the presence of vulva and womb—are important for affective mysticism, then women will be seen as having a head start in this particular human enterprise. They naturally are what male aspirants must become. This may be true though it has yet to be demonstrated that gender makes a substantial difference in the making of a mystic. What is perhaps essential in mysticism is not the presence of secondary but of ‘primary” femininity—the ‘pure female element’ (not the female person) in Winnicott’s sense of the term. In his theory of the life of male and female elements in a person, the purely male element, in both man and woman, presupposes separateness and trafficks in terms of active relating, or being passively related to, and is backed by the whole apparatus of instinctual drives.60 The female element, on the other hand, relates to the other—the breast, the mother (both with a small and capital ‘m’)—in the sense of an identity between the two. When this element finds the other, it is the self that has been found. It is the female element that establishes the simplest, the most primary of experiences, the experience of being. Winnicott remarks, ‘psychoanalysts have perhaps given special attention to this male element or drive aspect of object relating and yet have neglected the subject-object identity to which I am drawing attention here, which is at the basis of the capacity to be. The male element does (active-passive) while the female element is (in males and females) and concludes ‘After being—doing and being done to. But first being.’61