Personality - Sudir Kakar (G.Read)

P.K.Ajith Kumar

He graduated in Mechanical Engineering, took a doctorate in Economics, studied psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Institute, worked as an engineer, taught at prestigious institutes across the globe, practised as a psychoanalyst, authored several scholarly books and, at 60, wrote his first novel. Life has been a remarkable journey for Sudhir Kakar, described by leading French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur as one of the top 25 thinkers of the world.

Currently working on his fourth novel, Kakar speaks on a variety of subjects, including his books, Mahatma Gandhi, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, religion, Kamasutra, democracy and Barack Obama. Excerpts:

All your three novels were based on characters from history. What about the fourth?

It also will be historical. I like to have some ground under my feet.

You made your debut as a novelist at a not-very-young age.

I believe in the Hindu philosophy of ashrams; I began to write fiction seriously when I began my vanaprastha. I had stopped practising psychoanalysis, wasn’t teaching much, so I had more time, more reflective time. I needed to give some new voice to myself and found fiction ideal. When I was 10, I wrote plays for All India Radio; they were promptly returned, but I was very proud of the rejection slips. While I was in Germany, I wrote short stories in German; I was 24 or 25 at that time.

Why did you decide to base your first novel, The Ascetic of Desire, on Vatsyayana?

Since fiction was a new experience after so many non-fiction books, I didn’t want to go away from familiar territory. Kamasutra is sexuality territory and, therefore, psychoanalytical. The book is about a scholar, which also I know a bit about.

You have also translated Kamasutra. Are you surprised by the attention this ancient Indian book has received?

Very much so. It is by far the best known Indian book in the world. I recently met some German film producers who want to make a German film on Kamasutra based on my book. They will begin to shoot soon and they want to do it in India. I don’t think sex is the only reason why Kamasutra has become so successful. There have been many books on sexuality, in German, Chinese… It is not the oldest book on sex either; there are older ones in Chinese. Kamasutra got its reputation right from the beginning. How it achieved a cult status is one of the many mysteries of India.

The fact is, India’s international reputation rests on Gandhi and Kamasutra. I can explain why Gandhi, but not why Kamasutra.

Your last novel was on Gandhi.

I wrote Mahatma and Meera because I was intrigued by the conflict between the spirit and the flesh, especially with Gandhi. I wrote about Gandhi and women in Intimate Relations, where Meera had come up.

The coming together of Gandhi and Meera fascinated me. There were so many contrasts: he was a man, she a woman; he was Indian, she English; she was more of a real seeker than Gandhi, who wanted tolerance more. I found the psyches of these two very interesting.

If you were to look at Gandhi from a psychoanalytical point of view…

A: As a person he was very complex and had sexual problems. He had problems with people coming very near him, be it his family or Meera. That explains his problems with his children and Kasturba; he feared intimacy. A psychoanalyst can only explain illness, not greatness.

Where, then, does Gandhi’s greatness lie?

Gandhi is the Indian icon. There’s no one who matches him. I would agree with Einstein’s statement that posterity would find it difficult to believe such a man actually lived on this planet.

Somehow he is dismissed by young India. That’s sad. He’s become something to be used by “Munnabhai”, for instance. As for explaining his greatness, I will take his words for it. He said of wanting to follow the spiritual path; everything is secondary. Even non-violence is not a strategy, unless there is love behind it; unless you love the person you protest against, it means nothing. He wanted to love others, much further than tolerate.

I don’t know how successful he was or would have been as a politician, probably not much. He was more of a spiritual person acting in the world. People sensed that there was something unusual behind him, that there wasn’t any hatred or manipulations; there was purity and they could sense it. Lots of people, saints for instance, have that kind of purity, but not everyone could be Gandhi.

In your second novel, ‘Ecstasy’, you modelled your protagonist, Gopal, on Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

What struck me most about Ramakrishna was his freedom. He broke conventions in such complete ways; he had the freedom of crossing the gender boundaries. There was nothing new about it though, as saints like Chaitanya, long before him, too had cross-dressed in their devotion to the lord. Even the gods themselves have crossed the gender boundaries in Hinduism; our mythologies have several such tales, of Vishnu, Arjuna…

Our gender boundaries, culturally, are not stiff; though, unfortunately, that is not the case today. Tolerance was our biggest strength, becoming less tolerant is not Indian. The biggest strength of Hinduism is tolerance; I am saddened when it is regarded as weakness. The traditional Hindu is much more tolerant, that in fact is the biggest attraction of Hinduism. I am proud to say I am a Hindu because of that; almost everything is acceptable and I wish that quality would not go away.

You said that “Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy” in The Indians: Portrait of a People?

Whenever an Indian sees somebody, he makes several distinctions; the first is whether the person is male or female, then older or younger and then higher or lower. This is peculiar to India and it will take long to get out of it; it has been built into our psyche over thousands of years. But there has been a change with the coming of Islam and the brotherhood it advocated and Christianity questioning hierarchy. The democratic movements in the West also questioned hierarchy.

Talking of democracy, were you surprised by the rejection of Hilary Clinton in favour of Barack Obama?

I was; I would have thought the race barrier would have been stronger than the gender barrier. Obama offers a lot of hope, but I wonder what will happen when the elections come. If Obama wins, I will really be surprised but be happy that America has changed.

Yes, women have ruled democracies in South Asia, but we shouldn’t forget those women have been part of a hierarchical society. And caste plays a significant part. In a country like India, the feeling is: a Brahmin woman is better than a lower caste male. We don’t mind a woman ruling us as long as she is of a higher caste. The biggest thing would be if Mayawati becomes the Prime Minister.