by Sudhir Kakar
American race relations entered my life through my girlfriend, the daughter of a Harvard professor whose New England parents were quintessential WASPS (White Anglo Saxon Protestants). She had just separated from her black musician boyfriend. Her guilt over the separation was less personal than social and historical, the guilt of the white liberal who had dumped a black, and could not be quite mitigated by the choice of an Indian as a replacement. It poisoned our relationship. I was not surprised to hear from her that she had gone back to her black boyfriend after I left for India. And although their relationship did not last long, it left her the cause of racial equality as its heritage. In giving her an ideology that attracted her total commitment, it strengthened her shaky sense of identity. I was glad for her, but for many years, black jazz pianists did not top the list of my favourite people.
Becoming a Psychoanalyst
1968–75
Ahmedabad – Frankfurt
By now I was a veteran traveller between two worlds, India and the West, and my jet lags, literal and metaphorical, were minimal. My inner world was like a stage with two different sets required by a dramatic production. As the scene shifts, one part of the stage with all its props and people goes dark while the other where the action is now concentrated lights up. The audience is subliminally aware of the dark set but is absorbed in the action taking place in the lighted section, its attention again shifting when the dramatic action moves back to the first. Although my work was to be on the boundaries between established disciplines—psychology and anthropology, psychology and religion—my life, inner and outer, was always a total immersion in the world in which I found myself at any particular point of time. The exceptions to this pattern, to which I will return, were when I was deeply in love.
As I began teaching at IIM in Ahmedabad, I slipped into my Indian self, picking up with ease the threads of intimacy with my family and old friends like Suhrid Sarabhai and especially Subash Mashruwala, with whom I had shared the sexual disaster of Colombo. In Ahmedabad, I again lived in Kamla’s guest house. Although their bond continued to be deep, Vikram’s visits to Kamla were now less frequent than was the case when I had stayed with her three years ago. Ravi Matthai, the new director of IIM, had replaced Vikram as her lover. Ravi, who lived by himself on the IIM campus at Vastrapur (his family continued to reside in Bombay), would come over on the weekends. Our Sunday lunch of meat curry and rice, preceded by forbidden gin and tonic—Gujarat then, as now, had total prohibition—became a pleasant ritual that I looked forward to the whole week. The flat, half bottles of Blue Riband gin, smuggled into Ahmedabad in a suitcase whenever one of us went to Delhi (Bombay, too, was ‘dry’), were a precious commodity and were accorded the same homage that is due to a bottle of fine French champagne. The alternative to this illegal consumption would have been to register with the government as an alcoholic whose health would be jeopardized without his daily tipple and then buy the two bottles a month allowed by the liquor permit from the licensed vendor in Cama Hotel. The liquor permit not only required a medical certificate but the filling of a form which began invitingly with ‘Drunkard’s (Sharabi’s) name’, followed by ‘Drunkard’s father’s name’, in the next line. I could not bring myself to visit this indignity on my father.
Overwhelmingly vegetarian and teetotal, Ahmedabad, in 1968, though one of Indias largest cities, was certainly not a ‘swinging’ town. It had one restaurant, the Kwality on Relief Road which served two Western non-vegetarian dishes: spaghetti bolognese and fish and chips. For college students and young middle class couples, the highlight of the day or the week was to go in the evening to the Law College Garden and eat Vadilal’s ice cream, especially the newly invented and hugely popular kajudraksh—cashew-raisin. I was quite satisfied with my life of teaching, writing, long bridge-playing sessions on Saturday nights and heavy Sunday lunches. Harvard Square belonged to another rapidly retreating galaxy.
My only problem was an involuntary celibacy. I began to learn playing the tabla, a long-cherished wish, and started writing a novel, but if these were efforts at sublimation then they were not successful. As the months passed and when a dumpy, middle-aged librarian at IIM with a perpetual frown began to appear attractive, I knew it was time to take seriously my parents’ letters urging me to ‘finally settle down’ and that they had some good marriage proposals for my consideration. But before I could go to Jaipur, where my parents now lived after my father’s retirement, and begin the whole process of seeing different women with a view to an arranged marriage, I met a girl who was to be my first wife and the mother of our two children.
I had gone to Bombay with my friend Subash to clear from customs a nippy little Fiat sports coupe that I had bought in Europe on my way back and was importing into India. This was the time of ‘planned economy’ and ‘socialist pattern of society’ when, in the political instability and the split in the ruling Congress Party after the general elections of 1967, politicians were vying to highlight their own socialist credentials while disparaging those of their rivals. Import of luxury goods was banned and factories had quotas on how much they could produce. To get a licence to produce a car, for instance, was a licence to print money. Premier Padmini, Hindustan Ambassador and Standard Herald, the Indian versions of Fiat 1100, Morris Oxford and Triumph cars of the 1950s, had long waiting lists. I was guaranteed to cut a dashing figure in my light blue sports coupe as I zipped along on Ahmedabad’s roads, an image that had motivated my purchase in the first place.
We were staying with Subash’s sister’s family in Bombay and were having tea one evening when she walked in. My first impression of Apeksha was of her striking vivacity. The black eyes sparkled; the raven-black hair seemed to crackle with energy. Subash introduced her as his niece, the daughter of an elder sister who had died when Apeksha was a child. She was now nineteen, in her final year of college where she was studying French. The attraction was immediate and mutual and unlike most young Indian women she did not try to hide it. Emboldened myself by her boldness, I discreetly followed her when she went to one of the inner rooms and asked her if she would come for a drive the next day after we had fetched the car from the docks where the customs warehouse was located. I also asked her for her telephone number which she readily scribbled down on a piece of paper torn from her college notebook. After she went out to join the others in the living room, I waited for a few minutes before I came out, wiping my hands with a handkerchief as if I had been to the bathroom. No one noticed the minor emotional earthquake the two of us had just been through.
Secrecy gave our affair that extra sexual charge. In the next few months, I came to Bombay as often as I could. She would come to my hotel room in the afternoon after college, a girlfriend covering up for her not going straight back home when classes were over. We remained closeted in the room till she left in the evening. I was her first man and not immune to the atavistic thrill associated with the fact. She assumed we would marry and I was ready for marriage. Any doubts I had, and they did surface, were swept away by the shocked reaction of her family when she told them of her intention. If secrecy is the black mantle of night under which sexual excitement grows and flourishes, then obstacles in the path of union are guaranteed to purge a budding relationship of any misgivings and uncertainties.
She was a Kilachand, a prominent business family of Bombay, though she herself came from its relatively impoverished branch. Her grandfather, Chhotelal, the elder brother of Tulsidas Kilachand who was now head of the clan, had lost his fortune through unwise speculation on the stock exchange in the 1920s. Her father and two uncles, all of whom lived with their wives and children in a joint family in a decaying mansion in Girgaum, the original Kilachand home, were now employed in Tulsidas Kilachand’s various enterprises. I was ‘just a professor’ whom would never make any real money and yet sought to be a part of a family whose ethos considered dhandha—business, as the supreme human endeavour and the making of money as the only worthwhile goal of life. Not that the family
was old-fashioned or uncultivated. Some of the younger male members had studied in American business schools and recognized that IIM, Ahmedabad, was not an ordinary college but the country’s premier institute of management education. They would have been happy to have me as a consultant for their companies, but not as a relative by marriage. The older ones had an innate Hindu respect for learning but this did not mean that they wanted a teacher as a son-in-law of the family. Then, she was a Gujarati bania and I a Punjabi khatri (reversing the categories of the Vikram/Kamla pairing), the differences between us not only of caste but also of region and language, signifiers of divergence in world views, ways of life and habits of thought. Looking back, her family was not wrong.
There is nothing more effective than outer obstacles to love to conceal the knowledge of its inner impediments. As Apeksha struggled to bring her family around to an acceptance of our match, I became absorbed in her battle, despondent at the setbacks and rejoicing in her occasional success of winning one or the other relative to her cause. I admired the nineteen-year-old girl’s grit in resisting the pressure that was brought to bear upon her. Finally, the family relented. They were aware that Apeksha was a headstrong girl who would elope if the marriage was not allowed, an eventuality that would be more damaging to the family’s reputation than marriage to a Punjabi professor. Thus it came about that in December 1969, wearing a gold-brocade achkan, churidars and a four-pound heavy turban on my head, I found myself riding a skittish white mare at the head of the wedding procession of my relatives who had come to take part in the festivities in Bombay from as far as Amritsar and Delhi. The brass band in front of me was playing the catchy ‘Mere sapnon ki rani kab ayegi tu—The queen of my dreams, when will you come,’ from the year’s biggest movie hit, Aradhana, a song that marriage bands must have played in at least half the weddings in urban India that year.
If my parents had any reservations about my choice of partner or thought that my rush towards marriage was ‘too rash, too unadvised, too sudden’, they kept their doubts to themselves. They were so happy with the fact that I was finally getting married that they did not question my choice. I suppressed my own doubts about our compatibility with the help of two fantasies that at the time I did not admit to my conscious awareness. The first was that because of her youth, inexperience and obvious idealization of my person, I would mould Apeksha’s personality after marriage according to my wishes. I was planning to be Pygmalion to her Galatea, a worldly Professor Higgins to her raw Eliza Doolittle. The second fantasy was more mortifying than naïve since it involved the imagined envy of other men of being married to a ‘wealthy heiress’; an embarrassing admission that the choice of a life partner and of the Fiat sports coupe had an aspect in common—the demands of my vanity.
Our differences of upbringing and outlook, once the erotic tide whipped high by secrecy and obstacles had ebbed, revealed themselves as deep-rooted incompatibilities. To give just one example: I had essentially grown up in a nuclear family where, as a child, I was the ‘prince’ who had rarely encountered my parents’ open anger; in fact, I cannot remember more than a couple of occasions when they had berated me with raised voices. Apeksha had had to struggle from childhood on for an affirmation of her identity in a large joint family with entrenched patriarchal values where her meek father had rarely stood up for his daughter who, in contrast to her adored brother, had been regarded as stubborn and wilful, and openly devalued. We expressed our anger in our characteristic fashions, she through rages and I through sulky withdrawals which, given the trajectories of our life histories, were the worst possible ways to air a grievance or demand the other’s attention. There were other points of friction and discord, all coalescing in the predictable if unspoken complaint, ‘My husband/wife does not understand me.’ A sad truth made sadder by its ubiquitous banality. It is a lament that is a butt of witticisms and knowing sniggers, even though it rests on a fundamental human yearning which Dostoevsky called ‘the lover’s vision’: to be seen by our partner as God might see us—with total love, total understanding, total forgiveness.
For a long time after the marriage ended, I tried to plumb the mystery of how and why our powerful initial attraction had over time turned into indifference, or even worse. The coming to the fore of large differences in our social backgrounds once the initial attraction had faded and familiarity had set in to undermine our illusions and idealizations of each other, provided a partial explanation. There were the inevitable bouts of mea culpa wherein I wondered whether my partner choice had not been neurotic in the first place, a hazard which besets a ‘love’ marriage as contrasted to an ‘arranged’ one. In those bouts of self-recrimination, I would wonder whether I had needed her doubts about the worth of her self, implanted in her since childhood, to maintain my own feelings of grandiosity and replenish my sense of being someone ‘special’. Had I needed her dependence to underline my own autonomy? Or, conversely, had her feelings of being deprived as a child need to feed on my self that had been so richly indulged throughout my early life? The rigidity associated with a neurotic choice would have precluded that the relationship could grow and mature over time. Given the unconscious resistance to overcome such a choice, any movement towards a psychic parity, so essential for a marriage to thrive, as against its mere survival, would have required much greater effort than perhaps I had been willing or able to make during the years we were together.
Cultural factors such as an Indianness that is not unduly disturbed if an initially passionate relationship deteriorates into a marriage of convenience, the Indianness which considers the well-being of children vastly more important than the happiness of the couple, certainly played a part in keeping an unsatisfactory marriage alive for more than two decades. We, and perhaps Apeksha more than I, were like the frog in a pot of water kept over a fire that does not notice the gradual heating of the water till it is too late to jump out. At the end, when the cracks in the marriage were widening and then shattering into shards of infidelities, on both sides, Apeksha agreed in a letter that in spite of the ‘wonderful children we were blessed with’ and though the ‘first years were not bad’, the ‘relationship began to deteriorate’.
I shall not continue with this inevitably edited version of the disquiets of my first marriage. The memories of a marriage that went wrong are even more selective and certainly more tendentious than the recollections of less intimate associations. Moreover, there is no area of life where our unconscious deceives us more than in the nature of our most intimate relationships. Or in Freud’s more precise formulation, ‘It would seem that the information received by our consciousness about our erotic life is essentially liable to be incomplete, full of gaps, or falsified.’1 I am no exception.
I remember my three years at IIM, from 1968 to 1971, not only as a time when I was busy writing papers and monographs in the field of organizational behaviour to advance my academic career but also for a widening engagement with the society of which I was a part. Just as the Indian rupee, with all its associations from childhood, though a fraction of the dollar’s value, had always felt more like real money than the American greenback, events that strained the Indian social fabric involved me more deeply than the American student unrest and protests against the Vietnam War had done while I was in Cambridge.
In 1969, Ahmedabad was the site of one of the worst outbreaks of Hindu–Muslim violence since the country’s independence. The city, as a commission enquiring into another riot pointed out, had witnessed recurring bouts of violence between the two communities that go back in history to 1714. The 1969 riot, though, was the bloodiest. Its official toll of 560 dead and 561 injured was matched only by the Gujarat violence of 2002; in both carnages, the majority of lives lost were Muslim.
There are two versions of the precipitating incident of the violence that began on 18 September. Both versions occur with such regularity in reports of Hindu–Muslim violence that they can fairly be called as belonging to one of the three archetypes. The first a
rchetype has to do with Muslim violence towards the cow, the second with the insult to the other community’s cherished symbols, while the third pertains to disputes over religious processions. These precipitating incidents are archetypal in the sense that, irrespective of their factual veracity in a particular case, they are perceived as legitimate originating causes for violence—shots from the starter’s gun, so to speak. There is thus an unarticulated expectation that an incident around a cow, the Quran or a religious procession should belong to the account of a Hindu–Muslim riot even if such an incident did not actually take place.
The version of the precipitating incident we heard in Ahmedabad was that a Hindu police inspector had trampled on a copy of the Quran which had fallen out of a Muslim vendor’s pushcart. This desecration of their highest religious symbol had brought Muslims pouring out into the streets and violence had erupted. The other, official, version from the report of the commission enquiring into the violence was that a large number of Muslims had gathered at the tomb of a saint in the afternoon when a herd of cows accompanied by their keepers passed the gathering on their way to a nearby temple. Some Muslims objected as to why the sadhus of the temple had allowed animals to disturb their gathering. An altercation followed between some Muslims and the sadhus in which some sadhus were injured. Incidents of violence, thereafter, happened in rapid succession in various parts of the city, taking a heavy toll of lives and property.