A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  I have very fond memories of the six weeks I spent at the foundation. At noon, I would walk up to the main square for a glass of Pernod in a café before going into the butcher shop for ‘demi kilo hacher, s’il vous plait’ and for ‘demi kilo petit pois, oignon, ail et tomate’ at the vegetable stall—all the French vocabulary I needed to buy the ingredients to cook my evening meal of keema mattar. I then walked back in the hot sun to the cooler environs of my cottage where I wrote during the afternoon. In the evenings, I would again go to the café, often accompanied by another resident of the foundation, a painter from Congo. An affable young man of my age, the painter easily entered into conversations with the café regulars. My participation in these conversations was limited to frequent smiles, shrugs of the shoulder and two French phrases, ‘Ca depend—It depends,’ and ‘C’est la vie—That is life,’ which fitted most situations when someone looked expectantly at me for comment. Of course, I had to guess from the intonation of the other person’s speech which of the two phrases, that lent me an air of philosophical gravity, was appropriate in a particular context.

  The pleasant somnolence of my days in Vence was agitated by the arrival of Countess Karolyi’s granddaughter from England. Ina had just finished her O levels and was vacationing in France before beginning her university studies at the end of summer. We were instantly attracted to each other. My evenings with the Congolese painter were now replaced with those with Ina. The memories are of ardent embraces on a wooden bench in a hidden nook of an olive grove, the scent of lavender all around us, my face tickled by strands of her long blonde hair. The memories are utterly romantic though they do not mask a lustful intent. But before the liaison could proceed further, Mme Karolyi acted quickly by packing her granddaughter off to England. One morning when I climbed up to the main house, Ina was no longer there. Ina and I had tried to be careful, to the extent of not even looking at each other when other people were present. But her grandmother was an observant lady and had correctly interpreted the dilation of my pupils and the eyes that began to shine whenever her granddaughter was in my vicinity. Ina and I exchanged a couple of letters when I returned to Mannheim, more in honour of the magic of those summer evenings than with any expectation of future meetings. In the spring of 1964, the afterglow of the late summer romance still lingering within me, I returned to India after a five-year stay in Germany. I was twenty-five years old.

  Identity Crisis

  1964–65

  Ahmedabad

  The return to India was a leisurely journey. Walter accompanied me. We travelled by train through Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey till we reached Baghdad. We had planned to do the whole trip by the overland route, taking what would later become the Hippie trail to India, through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but had had enough by the time we reached Iraq. Our luggage had been stolen on the way and our money was running low. The decision to abort the earlier plan was taken when, tired and unwashed from two days and nights on the train, we arrived in Baghdad in the morning and took a room in a cheap hotel. Walter had gone to the common toilet at the end of the corridor. I had just thrown myself down on the filthy sheet of a bed that sagged in the middle when I heard Walter’s cry of distress. When I pushed open the door of the lavatory, I saw Walter throwing mugs of water from a bucket on the floor. Looking more closely, I saw parts of the floor covered with a thin crust of dried faeces that Walter was trying to clean before he could empty his own bladder. The lower part of the wall around the squat toilet had served as toilet paper and was discoloured with a profusion of brown patches left by people wiping their fingers after evacuation. We took the bus to Kuwait the very next day and then an Air India flight to Delhi.

  I arrived at my grandparents’ house with a three-week growth of beard, a cloth bag containing soiled underwear and a toothbrush purchased in Baghdad. The warmth of the family’s welcome, my parents’ delight and the sight of my sister, now a beautiful young woman, were more than enough to compensate for the loss of clothes, records and most of my books, and I had no difficulty in regressing to my former place in my family’s life. Letting the waves of their love and concern wash over me, my recently acquired notions of independence and individual autonomy forgotten for the time being, I let myself be fed to bursting point by the women as they discussed the proposals for my marriage received in my absence.

  The talk of marriages and how to contract them was very much in the air in family councils. My cousin Nina, to whom I had been close when we were children, had married a year earlier, selecting her own mate in a ‘love marriage’. My sister Suleena was not averse to an arranged match. Arranged marriages were (and continue to be) not only a pan-Indian norm, cutting across the divides in education, social class, religion and regions but, more important, they were (and are still) rarely seen as an imposition by the young people concerned who overwhelmingly prefer them to the love marriage typical of Western societies.

  The Indian preference for an arranged marriage is partly based on the young person’s acceptance of the cultural definition of marriage as a family, rather than individual, affair, where harmony and shared values that come from a common background are more important than individual fascination. The greatest attraction of an arranged marriage, though, is the fact that it takes away the young person’s anxiety about finding a mate. Whether you are plain or good-looking, fat or thin, you can be reasonably sure that a suitable mate will be found for you. Even in the 1970s, marriages in India were arranged to varying degrees depending on how much a young girl or boy participated in the process of selecting her or his mate. An extreme form was seen in Bollywood movies, that bastion of young love, where the lovers finally get married after defying the vehement opposition of their families. In this case, the love marriage of the hero and heroine became an arranged one ‘after the fact’ when one or other set of parents withdrew their opposition to the love match and both sets of parents came together at the end of the movie to bless the couple. Suleena was somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of ‘arrangedness’. She was content to let our parents and other family members suggest possible grooms. She would then meet the man and give her decision. After rejecting eleven potential suitors, I believe she simply got weary of saying nyet in imitation of the Russian foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s famed contributions to the UN Security Council deliberations and finally said da to the twelfth.

  The feeling of well-being that followed a willing regression from adulthood to luxuriate in the bosom of the family and the larger one of Mother India did not last long. At Kamla’s suggestion, I applied for a position at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad and, given my ‘pull’ with Vikram as its director and Kamla as his second in command, the offer of a job as a research fellow in the faculty for the management of agricultural and rural development was not unexpected.

  The IIM, temporarily housed in one of the Sarabhai mansions in Shahibag while plans for a grand campus, with Louis Kahn as the architect, were being drawn, had come into existence in 1961. None of the founding faculty had had formal training in management studies, an academic discipline solely associated with the US. They came from functional areas like finance, marketing, human resources, mostly from industry, although a couple were academics from colleges of commerce. Harvard Business School, the collaborating institution, besides providing each member of the Indian faculty a six-month training in its International Teachers Programme, had deputed a member of its own faculty and three doctoral students to Ahmedabad to help mould the motley Indian group into teachers who followed Harvard’s model of teaching, with its emphasis on case studies and class discussion.

  My memory of the atmosphere at IIM is of the enthusiasm and idealism of its pioneering days. The faculty and the first batch of 40-odd students who were admitted to the 2-year postgraduate programme in 1963 saw themselves as the vanguard of a revolution that would change the functioning of Indian institutions. ‘Management’ in the 1960s incorporated the same hopes and had the same m
ystique as ‘governance’ does today, and all those involved in the project of setting up a management education institute believed that they were in the forefront of nation-building efforts. This idealism, for instance, gave birth to a faculty of agricultural and rural development that did not exist in the more matter-of-fact, less idealistic environs of Harvard Business School. It produced men—like the well-known management ‘guru’, the late C.K. Prahalad, who graduated in 1965 in the first batch of students admitted to IIM—who kept some of the original idealism alive in seeking to apply management thinking to the economic development of the poor and not limiting it to serve a purely corporate agenda. Even when most of the first graduates of the institute found jobs in industry and commerce, they still viewed their work as part of nation building, of bringing new skills into running the vital sectors of the Indian economy. The future of management education, where the end goal of students was a well-paying job in multinational corporations, banks and international consultancy firms, was still a couple of decades away.

  My own work involved collection of cases on leadership in rural institutions, primarily cooperatives. The cases were to be later used in training administrators of development programmes. I travelled widely in rural north India that year and during my travels, lost any idealization I might have held about the peace and harmony of Indian village life or, for that matter, about the new management ‘science’. What, for example, does one advise the village headman whose biggest problem is that the opposite faction expresses its dissent with his leadership by sending their womenfolk each morning and evening to pee against the wall of his house?

  Travelling by train and bus to remote villages, I spent a good deal of time by myself. After a round of interviews in a village was complete, and I had made my notes on the day’s work, there was nothing much to do in the evenings. The village went early to bed and I remember many nights lying out in the open, listening to the occasional barking of village dogs and to the confusion of voices in my head. There were fantasies of becoming a writer, but how would my family react? Could anyone in India earn a livelihood through writing? I did not know how the three best-known Indian writers in English of the era—R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao—managed to survive, but knew that many Hindi writers, or for that matter writers in other Indian languages, were college professors . . . of English! I thought of applying to a film school in Europe for training as a movie director. I actually sent off an application to the Ministry of Education in Delhi for the grant of one of the scholarships announced by the Polish government for study at the film school in Lodz, which had recently produced exceptionally promising directors like Roman Polanski and Andreas Wadja. Or should I accept that I was destined to be a professor in India’s premier institution for management education, one who would also earn well through consultancies with companies?

  The confusion extended to my personal life. Should I marry one of the three girls my parents had so carefully selected for me—all of them beautiful, accomplished and ‘from a good family’—or should I, in Western fashion and in the tradition of its romantic literature to which I was addicted, search for the great passion of my life? What I typically did was to postpone the choice by taking an unusual step. In Ahmedabad, living on Indian earth but with my head still in European clouds, I had asked an attractive young professor, a couple of years older than I, to share living accommodation. She had agreed and we began living together, not as room-mates, in what was at least publicly one of Indias most conservative cities. I did not give this arrangement much thought, whether it would shock my colleagues at IIM or the neighbours in the Navrangpura Housing Society where we rented a three-room, single-storey house. The woman, as perhaps my colleagues and the neighbours, took this unusual arrangement as a prelude to our legitimizing the relationship in marriage, especially when I was introduced to her parents and visited her home in the south. For me, the arrangement was part of the lifestyle of my German writer and artist friends where a man and woman who found each other attractive lived together without any promise of further commitment. No one mentioned marriage and I was genuinely if naively taken aback by the distress I caused her when I broke off the relationship before my departure for Europe.

  Looking back, I see my five years of stay in Germany as comprising what Erik Erikson called a ‘psychosocial moratorium’, a deliberately prolonged adolescence and youth in which I could experiment with different identities, with patterns both juvenile and adult, in the hope of finding a niche in society which was firmly defined and was yet uniquely my own. A moratorium eases the pressure of time and I was lucky to be born in a family and class that sanctioned me a legitimate period of delay ‘often characterized by a combination of prolonged immaturity and provoked precocity’.1 I was lucky that there was no premature conclusion to the process of settling on a self-definition. I was lucky that there was no identity foreclosure, a premature commitment to an occupation I did not want and would have regretted for the rest of my days. I was lucky that I could avoid the fate of being beset with a lifelong sadness at all the potential identities sacrificed at the altar of the exigencies of life.

  But now, back in India, my reluctance to bind myself vocationally and to choose a mate, which my family had tolerated for years, no longer found much sympathy. This was even true of Kamla who had not only accepted but encouraged my need for self-exploration. She now gently conveyed that it was time for me to make ultimate choices. Other elders in my family, particularly those with short memories of their own youth, simply saw me as confused and self-indulgent. My parents could not understand why, after I had had my way and done (or almost done) what I had so stubbornly wanted, I could not now settle down to a career and to the raising of a family. I did not understand it myself. I needed help to fathom the depths of my confusion, someone to make sense of my inner turmoil. I needed to understand the ambivalence of my desires, to unravel my tangled perceptions of the world and assess the realistic possibilities it afforded for the fulfilment of my obscure wishes. Looking back, I can see in this need the seeds of my later vocation as a psychoanalyst: I became a doctor because I could not be a patient.

  The help, when it came, was from an unexpected quarter—through a chance encounter with an elderly European-born American scholar. The scholar was the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a professor of human development at Harvard who was in India for a few months to work on his book on Gandhi, later published as Gandhi’s Truth. A tall, well-built man with long silvery white hair and a drooping Einsteinian moustache, Erikson and his wife Joan had rented Kamla’s house while she was away on an extended visit to the US. They became my neighbours since I had also moved from Navrangpura to live in the annexe on the grounds of Kamla’s house on the banks of the river Sabarmati.

  Erikson was known in the field of psychoanalysis but was not yet the world famous figure he was to become later. After his death in 1992, as the full range of his contributions became clearer, the psychiatrist Robert Lifton hailed him as ‘the most creative psychoanalytic mind since Freud’, while the well-known psychoanalyst Robert Wallerstein wrote that ‘It can be unhesitatingly asserted that, after Freud, no single psychoanalyst has had a more profound impact on our twentieth-century culture and world than he. Indeed, very few psychoanalysts have reshaped psychoanalytic perspectives to the extent he did.’2

  Erikson had done much more than complement Freud’s psychosexual stages of growth with his own theory of psychosocial stages of human development where he had shown how significant relationships at various stages of life contribute specific strengths or pathologies to the self over the life cycle. What he had done, and this was heresy to some orthodox Freudians, was to impart a more optimistic edge to the psychoanalytic vision of the human condition. The view of the person that emerged from Erikson’s writings on psychoanalysis, psychology of religion and the founding of a new discipline he called ‘psychohistory’, was that an individual should be characterized not so much by what he represses or denies but by all
the contradictions in himself he is able to unify.

  Erikson had become interested in Gandhi and Indian thought on his last visit to Ahmedabad in 1962 when Vikram and Kamla who knew him from Cambridge invited him to lead a small seminar on the life cycle in India. One of his contributions to the seminar was a note on Tagore following the discussion of a paper on the poet’s childhood. I recently found this unedited note, which I believe was never published, among my papers and would like to look at it more closely, not only because of what it reveals about Tagore but because Erikson’s take on ‘greatness’ has influenced my own psycho-biographical writings.

  Erikson begins his remarks on Tagore by stating that when discussing a biography, we must abandon the attempt to find any but the crudest of ‘causes’ or ‘beginnings’. A man’s reminiscences are retrospective selections, tendentious and often self-contradictory. If one adds to this the biographer’s selections, one sees that biographee and biographer ‘conspire’ to offer the public image and to suppress any but involuntary cues to the psychology involved. They seem to fear, wrongly in Erikson’s opinion, that psychological insight would undermine the magic of a person’s image, as if ‘greatness’ and common humanity are opposed to each other. In fact, my own impression is that the inner psychological conflicts of great men and women are even stronger than those of ordinary humans but in their case a superior balance is very often restored by the creative process itself.