A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  With hindsight, it was the general elections of 1987 that marked the beginning of the end of my association with CSDS. The centre was actively involved in support of the Janata Dal, a combination of opposition parties, where Kothari and his inner circle had good friends in the top rungs of the leadership. The cyclostyle machines at CSDS had whirred and clattered till late into the nights, helping out the printing needs of the Janata Dal party office in Delhi. The election, which ended in the defeat of Rajiv Gandhi and the Congress Party and brought in V.P. Singh as the prime minister at the head of a Janata Dal government, was greeted with enthusiasm. ‘To borrow a phrase from the old British Empire, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has just presided over the liquidation of a dynasty,’ Kothari told the Los Angeles Times.4 In an interview to the New York Times, he said of Rajiv Gandhi, ‘His vision of society was an extremely alien model. It was not politically thought through. I used to say that if, when Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, we had asked the United Nations to send a body to run India, it wouldn’t have been very different from Rajiv Gandhi’s Government. It has no roots in this society.’5 Ashis Nandy was more charitable: ‘In the India of Rajiv Gandhi there were many good people, but Rajiv Gandhi chose people wrongly. His advisers were glib, yuppie, whisky guys. He could have used his friends, but not for making fundamental political decisions.’6

  Although apolitical, Vijai, Ali and I had been enthusiastic when Rajiv Gandhi had been elected prime minister three years earlier after the assassination of his mother with the largest majority ever in the history of Indian parliament. He was young, obviously sincere and aroused high expectations in large sections of the Indian middle class, especially the youth, for a clean-up of a corrupt system. The hope turned into ashes when after a couple of years his own government became mired in corruption scandals. There are still people in the older generation who hope that the son, Rahul Gandhi, will redeem Rajiv’s unfulfilled pledge; that the son can at least live his political life as a delegate of his father.

  Soon after the new government was sworn in, Kothari was appointed the chairman of ICSSR and later a member of the Planning Commission. The centre’s movement towards social and political activism became a headlong rush. Lokayan, a project to connect grass-roots political and social activists all over India, was initiated. The vibes towards the three of us South Delhi fellows became distinctly colder as we chose to remain aloof from the new developments. The parting became inevitable after an acrimonious faculty meeting where we were attacked for our apolitical, ‘elitist’ stance and refusal to participate in the new era that was dawning in the history of CSDS.

  The difficulty now was to find a pretext for getting rid of us. Along perhaps with Nandy, I was the most prolific writer of books and papers in professional journals and thus the charge of lack of productivity would not stick. Yes, I spent much of my time in clinical work but, then, it was recognized that encounters with patients are the raw data of psychoanalytic research where hypotheses on individual and collective psychological phenomena are formed. I earned money from my practice, true, but none of the other senior fellows had ever passed up an occasion to make additional income.

  An eminent law professor at Delhi University who was consulted on ways to remove us from the CSDS faculty later told me that an old friend of Kothari and Sheth from their Baroda days, who had once held a high administrative position in Baroda University and was experienced in getting rid of recalcitrant colleagues, suggested a simple solution which would hold up in a court of law. This was for the director, Giri Deshingkar, to issue an office order that every member of the CSDS staff should be in office by 9 a.m. A wall clock was installed in the reception that doubled as the administrative office and everyone was required to sign the attendance register kept there. Refusing to go through the humiliation, Ali and I resigned. Vijai, who needed more time to secure his financial future, made a deal with the ‘ruling group’ that he would resign within two years. The clock and the register—that had seriously inconvenienced at least one of the senior fellows of the group who was in the habit of reaching the centre just before lunchtime—were removed immediately after our resignations were received.

  There was no hiding my bitterness from myself at my unceremonious exit. In quick succession, I wrote two articles for a widely read news weekly, reflecting on my experiences in working in the best of Indian academic and research institutions: JNU, IIM and IIT. The pieces were, of course, also directed against the leadership of CSDS, but I believe I used my anger for a larger purpose than just private target practice. Sometimes anger gives thought a clarity that it otherwise might not have. I have always felt, for instance, that V.S. Naipaul’s travel writing is at its best when he is simultaneously angry and concerned, as he is in India: A Wounded Civilization, which has neither the bile of his first book on India that made it unpalatably acidic nor the relative benevolence of his later writings which dulled his distinctive edge.

  I wrote in the first piece:

  Like enterprises of the public sector, sooner or later most Indian intellectual institutions lose sight of their central purpose: the production of knowledge. We forget the fact that the productivity of the researcher is the raison d’être for any such institution. All other purposes are secondary and everything that hampers the individual’s intellectual potential and output is to be eliminated.

  Gifted intellectuals [I was immodestly, if silently, including myself in the category] have a strong sense of the self. They may be eccentric and often have vastly different perceptions on the nature of their disciplines. They may be ideologically conservative or radical, their sartorial preference may range from three-piece suits to frayed jeans and crumpled kurtas and pyjamas. A successful institution is flexible enough to accommodate these idiosyncrasies as it tries to facilitate each individual’s intellectual self-expression. Discipline and regularity are virtues of the bowels, not of centres of research.

  Attempting to instil a shared institutional perspective is to sound the death knell of individual creativity. Our institutional heads should remember Abraham Lincoln’s reaction to the complaint that his most successful general during the American Civil War drank himself to a stupor every evening. Lincoln only wanted to know the brand he drank so that he could send some crates to his more indifferent generals.

  In the second piece, which grew out of my recent experience with CSDS, I was making an old complaint about the hypocrisy that so often bedevils expressions of moral idealism in our country.

  Whereas we may be in the process of developing an ear for cant around sexuality, we are still far from having a nose for the hypocrisy which envelops self-love and self-promotion. The rhetoric of altruism continues to beguile most of us, successfully camouflaging its characteristic smell of the waste material which comes out of the rear end of a bull.

  Politicians, of course, are the most visible purveyors of both bull and its manure. We love to hate them because they are the most acceptable containers of our impulses towards selfishness, arrogance and self-aggrandizement. We need our politicians to be transparent rogues whose professions of public service sometimes luckily coincide with their private purposes of self-promotion. Indeed, it would disturb the psychological balance between us and our political leaders—we, only altruistic; they, cheerfully narcissistic—if we felt that politicians truly believed their own rhetoric.

  Even when rightly suspicious of politicians, we are not sufficiently wary of altruistic postures struck in other fields of human endeavour such as business, journalism, academia and the judiciary. With politicians, we have made a compact of simple delegation: we will let them be self-serving on our behalf. With the other occupiers of the moral high ground, we have entered into a collusion: let us fortify each other’s altruism. Such false notes as environmentalists cosying up with international agencies in Goan beach resorts, conferences on poverty eradication taking place in elegant Italian villas, extollers of egalitarianism sending their children to exclusive schools, are not quite as readily
registered in our consciousness as the contradictions apparent in the poor politician.

  When a high-profile academic colleague tells me [this was an eminent colleague from my CSDS days] that he is going to a seminar in Rome only to earn a fee that will enable him to impart his wisdom to a small college in Kerala—the road to Kozhikode leading via Rome—it takes a little while before the whiff from the bull’s hindquarters reaches my nostrils. Most of our new preachers lack the savoir faire of the leftist French mayor who, on being reproached for his taste for high living, replied, ‘Monsieur, I am a socialist, not an idiot.’

  The piece was not against altruism, perhaps the noblest of human urges. I have come to regard empathy, the base of altruism, as the supreme human virtue, an achievement higher than all other forms of human creativity, artistic or scientific. What I was trying to do was to point to the hypocrisies that pervade so much of the rhetoric of altruism in our public life.

  Since my understanding of social or cultural psychology—as the psychic reflection in the individual of the history and culture of his people—was congruent with the centre’s vision of social sciences, I had felt welcome by my other colleagues in the early years of our association. The first project I took up was an exploration of Indian healing traditions. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors examined the practice of my indigenous colleagues—the exorcists, spiritual gurus, Ayurvedic physicians; the patients they strive to heal; and the rationale for their healing efforts. One year into the fieldwork, I wrote to a friend:

  The healing project is going very well. My assistant [Ashok Nagpal, now a distinguished professor of psychology at Delhi University] who does most of the travelling is extremely bright and fancies himself as another Castaneda. So I am getting detailed protocols of conversations with the various ‘men of knowledge’. I’d hate to lose all this material although it may become overwhelming by the end and my main problem would be to use it—how to combine the raw experiences with explanations, reflections etc. and in what proportion. My forgotten novelist self would like much more description and observation while the analytic self clamours for interpretation. So at the moment I don’t write and keep jotting down ideas besides collecting the material.

  I greatly enjoyed my meetings with the traditional ‘psychotherapists’ and I believe some of the enjoyment came through in the writing. In a country teeming with conformists and yet also well endowed with eccentrics, these men and women were some of the more delightfully unusual people I have met in my life. For instance, researching my chapter on Tantra and tantric healing, I met a Bengali economist, let me call him Bose, who had been a practising tantrik for over twenty years. I met him when he came to visit CSDS one Wednesday. After lunch, we struck up a conversation and Bose informed me of the many tantrik exercises he had gone through to develop his extraordinary capacity of concentration and attunement with the environment. These enabled him to pick up cues from his surroundings milliseconds before they reached the awareness of others. Vijai Pillai, who was a passionate cook, had talked to him earlier in the morning about the preparation of a rare yellow fish from Tibet in Chinese cooking and was effusive in his praise of Bose’s culinary knowledge. Giri Deshingkar, who was a specialist on the Chinese navy, had discussed the Indonesian navy with Bose and was convinced of Bose’s superior knowledge of the field. Later in the evening when Bose came to visit me at my home, I asked him how he had mastered such disparate subjects as Chinese cooking and Indonesian navy. ‘I have no idea about any of them,’ he said. ‘I was just picking up cues from what they were saying and playing back their own knowledge to them.’

  At some time during the evening, our conversation came to the subject of dreams. I was telling Bose about the essential elements of Freud’s dream theory when he interrupted me. ‘But this is exactly what a tantric text from the seventeenth century says about dreams! Dreams are wish fulfilment, often of a sexual wish. The text goes even beyond Freud in maintaining that while some dreams are the fulfilment of a childhood wish, there are others that fulfil the wishes of a previous life.’

  I was excited. ‘You mean to say Tantra anticipated Freud? Where is this text?’

  ‘In the Royal Asiatic Library in Calcutta. I have gone through it myself. I am sure I can reproduce it exactly from memory. It’s no more than forty or fifty pages.’

  Bose had told me of some of the memory-training exercises he had undergone during his tantrik training. In one, his guru asked him to repeat verbatim what had transpired between them in a previous conversation. The guru then pointed out his memory lapses, corrected his errors, and the next time Bose had to reproduce the first conversation together with the additions and corrections made by the guru in the second. This went on for some time. Each time they met, Bose was expected to repeat the first conversation together with all the additions of the subsequent meetings. ‘It is merely a matter of practice,’ Bose said. ‘Of course, people believe we have extraordinary powers merely because some of us have good powers of recall or have a kind of concentration that shuts out all sensory inputs except the one to which attention is being paid at a particular moment.’

  The next morning Bose appeared at my breakfast table with a handwritten Sanskrit text of around thirty pages. ‘This is the text on dreams I told you about. I am pretty sure I have reproduced it accurately,’ he said with a degree of satisfaction.

  He then pointed out passages that could have been written by Freud himself. I was elated! A seventeenth-century tantrik master had anticipated Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. I needed to see the original, get it translated and then write a paper on the discovery.

  ‘Come to Calcutta. I’ll take you the Asiatic Library and we can get it translated,’ Bose said as he tucked into his omelette. He was a very messy eater and ate with the same gusto as he talked.

  I was on the Indian Airlines flight to Calcutta the next week. Bose seemed distinctly unhappy to see me at the door of his house where he lived with his mother. Mother and son had attended the MA economics classes at the university together and she was, or rumoured to be, the son’s partner in tantrik rituals. The visit to the library to view the desired manuscript was postponed each day on some pretext or the other. Bose took my persistence as an excuse to wash his hands off the whole affair and I trudged to the library alone. No such text had ever existed. Bose had made up the entire text and wrote it down in scholarly Sanskrit in four to five hours on the night after he left my home in Delhi.

  Later, when I showed his handwritten pages to a Sanskrit specialist, I was told that it was not in the seventeenth-century style but in a more modern form of what for most purposes is a ‘dead’ language, limited to ritual specialists and scholars of ancient India. I should not have been surprised, given the tantric goal of liberation from all human conditioning, of becoming the Nietzschean Superman who is beyond such categories as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood. I should have only admired Bose’s brilliance and ingenuity rather than be upset that he had, from my unenlightened perspective, lied.

  There was another famous tantrik who was also a reputed astrologer. I read his books and went to hear him address the All India Conference on Astrology in Delhi over which he was presiding. He lived in Jodhpur in Rajasthan. A couple of days before I was to travel to Jodhpur to interview him, I read in the newspaper that there had been an income tax raid on his house. A large sum of unaccounted money in bundles of hundred-rupee notes was discovered on the premises. He was now in prison, having failed to foresee his own future. ‘No one can prevail over the power of his karma!’ he is supposed to have philosophically remarked.

  In 1982, Shamans, Mystics and Doctors was published by Knopf in the US and Oxford University Press in India; I had sensibly given up my earlier promise to myself to publish my books exclusively with an Indian publisher. The book was received well and translated into many European languages. Other books followed: Tales of Love, Sex and Danger in 1984, and Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, which was one of the fi
rst books published by the newly established Indian branch of Penguin-Viking, in 1986. David Davidar, the managing editor of Penguin, wanted to have a book launch for Intimate Relations, a relatively novel notion at the time. Book launches were far from the glittering social occasions in hotel ballrooms with cocktails, kebabs, canapés and hundreds of invited guests they have now become. My launch consisted of David bringing two bottles of the popular brand of Peter Scott whisky and a dozen large bottles of Thumbs Up cola to the living room of my house. Our cook provided the samosas. Around ten journalists turned up. David introduced the book to an impatient audience covertly eyeing the refreshments while I hovered in the background, smiling modestly. The whisky bottles were quickly emptied and the journalists left.

  We had created a circle of close friends in Delhi, couples like us, with small children, who we often met for dinner or at parties in each other’s homes. In the inevitable division of assets after a divorce, in which friends are the most valuable possessions, I was glad to have Vikram and Anita Lal, two of my dearest friends as my ‘share’. Vikram, who turned his father’s almost bankrupt tractor manufacturing company into one of India’s leading automotive concerns, was in some ways a most unlikely CEO who made a virtue out of his necessity. Painfully shy, he delegated his public interactions, an important part of a leader’s job, to a carefully selected management team. They revelled in being centre stage of a success story, the public recognition increasing their commitment to the company while Vikram continued to work backstage where he felt most comfortable.