Indian Identity Read online

  The Independence of the country opened up avenues of ‘getting on in the world’ other than the traditional route through the civil service. The country was embarking on a process of modernisation and industrial development and it was accordingly decided, with my surgeon grandfather’s vigorous support, that I would become an engineer. I was 17 when the decision was made, and like most Indian youth of the time, and perhaps even of today, I did not have much choice in the matter—even if I had shown a marked preference for a particular profession, which I did not. Unaware of what I really wanted to do with my life and with implicit confidence in the collective wisdom of family elders to look after my interests, I went off to study mechanical engineering at a college in Ahmedabad, north of Bombay, famous for its textile mills. In Ahmedabad I was to live with my mother’s younger sister, Kamla, who was the head of the pyschological division of a research institute established by the textile industry.

  Kamla was a remarkable woman who, like many other Indian women I came to know later, revealed unsuspected reserves of strength and depths of character when misfortune tore away the protective cocoon that enveloped Indian girls of her class. Married at the age of 18 to a man who had just returned from England after entering the Indian Civil Service, Kamla seemed set for a predictable life as the wife of a higher civil servant. Three months after her marriage, though, she became a widow in tragic cirumstances. Her husband had been posted to a town in the northwest, near the border of Afghanistan. In the course of his judicial duties, he had sentenced a man to prison. One evening, after being released, this man hid himself in the bedroom of the young couple’s house. When Kamla awoke the next morning she found her husband lying dead next to her, shot in the head, flies buzzing over the brains spilled on his face. She had not heard a sound, the report of the gun transformed into exploding crackers in her dream.

  Kamla did not remarry. She studied philosophy and then spent five years in the United States, acquiring a doctorate in psychology. By the time she returned to India, the country had been partitioned and she took up a job in distant Ahmedabad. She not only lived on her own, unusual for an Indian woman in those days, but openly took a married man as her lover, further scandalizing conservative Ahmedabad society. It was while living at Kamla’s house that I encountered and took my first hesitant steps into the Western world. In her large library, I discovered European novels—Camus and Sartre, Huxley and Mann. I browsed through the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Russell and remember being fascinated by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Psychopathology of Everyday Life. I cannot pretend that I understood everything I consumed so voraciously. Reading the books was like travelling through a foreign country in a fast train, with glimpses of unusual landscapes where I might have liked to linger and of strange towns I might have wanted to explore further. I was still a shy and awkward adolescent, with no one to discuss the world I was discovering in these books. My studies had become a burdensome chore and though I did not know what I was going to do with myself I was certain I was not going to be an engineer.

  The visitors to Kamla’s house were a further revelation. As I listened to their animated talk, absorbing information, attitudes and ideas, I was also discovering the fascination of being an individual, of a person who did not need to think or behave only as a member of a group but could range beyond the traditional confines of family and caste. For, yes, however much I was later to long for the warmth of the family and community and return to a celebration of their virtues, I regarded them as wholly confining in those days. Through Kamla and her Westernised friends, I thought I caught glimpses of an Occident which, in my imagination, became the home of the ‘heroic’ individual following his desires and inclinations unencumbered by expectations and human ties. It was this caricature of the psychoanalytic man that enthralled me then and remained my model for many years.

  I was 22 when I finished my engineering studies and began my journey to the West. The family had arranged for my further training in a shipyard in West Germany and, as usual, I had acquiesced in these plans. I embarked from Calcutta on a freighter that took a leisurely six weeks to reach Hamburg, loading and unloading at various Indian and African ports on the way. Each day at sea increased my newly-discovered feeling of freedom, and of escaping from the oppressiveness of a highly structured Indian society. I recall that I spent most of my time on board playing chess with any of the ship’s officers that happened to be free, reading Victorian romantic novels borrowed from the ship’s small library and, above all, daydreaming on the deck chair. They were the typical daydreams of a young man conquering the world except that they could not have been dreamt in India. My fantasies were of passionate love affairs, of drinking wine and of conversations late into the night with intellectual men and women with the world’s knowledge of art and science; they were dreams of the success that excites the envy of men and the love of women. The reality, that I was a gangling provincial youth from an underdeveloped land, with nothing to offer but a bright-eyed enthusiasm and a puppy-tailed friendliness, on my way to an arrogant European country whose language I did not speak, did not affect the content of these daydreams in the least. I was 22 and everything was not only possible but capable of a magical transformation.

  My first actions after I settled into my cheap lodgings in Hamburg, arranged for me by the shipyard, was to buy a large bottle of inexpensive red wine, enrol myself in a school for ballroom dancing, start on the first page of a novel, and write to my father that I had no intentions of going on further with engineering and would like to study philosophy instead. The consternation this later caused in the family must have been very great indeed. I got a quick reply from my father appealing to my reason, a reproachful how-much-I-was-hurting-her letter from my mother, and a thunderous missive recalling me to my duty towards the family from my surgeon-grandfather. With the relative safety of a 7,000-kilometer distance between us, I could afford to remain adamant. And while our letters went back and forth, I was discovering the attractions of a West that had been such a dominant counterpoint in all our personal and collective lives. I learnt German, though it was the slang German of docks and shipyards, full of interesting expletives. I learnt to dance the boogie-woogie and the cha-cha, the most popular dances of the time, and took music lessons on the clarinet. I heard my first Mozart, read my first Brecht, slept with my first woman.

  It took eight months before my family finally relented—eight months in which I did a variety of jobs in the shipyard that further increased my distaste for engineering. I made sand moulds in the steamy, hot foundry, drinking enormous quantities of beer, and stood for hours at the drawing board in the design section, endlessly drawing pipes and waiting for the clock to strike five. Philosophy was out of the question, my father wrote. No one had ever made any money through the study or practice of philosophy and in any case it was a subject more suitable for the speculative Brahmins than for active Kshatriyas like us—just as playing the clarinet (as an uncle once wrote) was more the province of the low-caste musician than of the gun-wielding Khatri. If I insisted on studying further, then the compromise subject suggested, lying midway between philosophy and engineering, was economics. Still dependent on my family, both emotionally and financially, I agreed to this suggestion and went off to study economics, first at the University of Mainz and then at Mannheim, the choice of the university dictated more by the movements of a girl I was passionately, in love with than by the reputation of either unversity’s economics faculty.

  I studied economics as I did engineering, with half my mind and with none of my soul. In my youthful love affair with the world I needed passion and surprise; engineering and economics had neither. In the five years of economics studies at Mannheim, I learnt some formal economics but collected a much greater store of an unsystematic knowledge of Western art, literature and philosophy. My teachers were less the remote Herr Professors of the university and more a group of budding painters and aspiring writers with whom I became close. I stayed up with th
ese German friends almost every night of the week. Moving from one tavern to another as they closed for the night behind us, we drank vast quantities of beer, flirted with the waitresses and earnestly discussed Life and Art. Finally at daybreak, bleary-eyed with alcohol and replete with talk, we would end up in one of the sleazy joints near the wharves on the riverfront where we drank coffee in the company of incurious sailors and the last whores in town who were still awake. The Western artist given to creative excesses rather than the contemplative Indian mystic became my ideal, the hero of my personal myth and under the influence of these friends I began writing short stories in German that were occasionally published in the feuilleton section of the town’s newspaper. When I now look at the yellowing newsprint of these early stories, I am struck by their intensity of longing for the life of provincial Indian towns where I grew up. For though my head was filled with the intellectual excitement of the West, India was still an overpowering emotional presence and these stories, crude in many ways, convey a deep and persistent undercurrent of nostalgia, almost sensual in character, for the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of the country of my childhood.

  Like many other young men of my class who had discovered the West in India and who later went abroad to study, I too began to discover India while living in the West, understanding its history, culture and mythology primarily through the eyes of Western scholars. Without my being aware of it at the time, I was enthusiastically acquiring a certain perspective on the life I had lived and the tales and myths I had grown up with. In the German society of the early 60s, this perspective was very much informed by the modern enlightenment values of universality, objectivity, rationality and the notion of progress. Indian culture, though demanding respect for its past achievements, was—when compared to its modern Western counterparts—definitely on a lower rung of the ladder of human development. Not having sufficiently developed the ‘scientific spirit’, Indian society contained a greater share of ignorance, superstition, fanaticism, and oppression which crippled human effort and frustrated the search for timeless truths and rational self-direction. This was the heritage of all colonised minds, including that of my father, and it took a long time before I questioned these values and their underlying, unstated assumption that post-renaissance Europe marks the flowering of the human spirit and civilization. I travelled far on the road (on which Marx is an inevitable wayside stop) where the uniqueness of each human culture and the plurality of cultures is denied, where the myths of other cultures are considered false statements about reality—to be corrrected by later rational scrutiny—rather than seen as embodying visions of the world as authentic as, for instance, Platonic philosophy. For too long a time I was enamoured by the quest for the construction of universal laws in human affairs and only much later in life gradually veered to the view that to understand anything was to understand it in its individuality and its development, in its concreteness rather than its abstraction. Indeed, my later attraction to Freud, who in many ways is also an epitome of the rationality of enlightenment, was less to his theoretical speculations or to his metapsychology than to his fascinating case histories, rich with individual detail. It is the latter model that I have tried to follow in my own recent work in the belief, bordering on conviction, that theories and insights must naturally emerge from the narrative and that for an understanding of human life one must never move far from the narration of human experience, much of modern social science writing, where narrative truth is missing, leaves me openly skeptical if not quite cold. I am, however, moving too far ahead of my own story.

  I took my economics degree in 1964 and returned to India after an absence of five years. The return journey was a leisurely one by train through Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Somewhere on the way in Iraq my baggage was stolen and I arrived in Delhi with a three-week growth of beard and a cloth bag containing soiled underwear and a new toothbrush purchased in Baghdad. The warmth of the family’s welcome, the delight on my parents’ faces and the sight of my sister, now a beautiful young woman, were more than enough to compensate for the loss of clothes, books and records, and I had no difficulty in regressing to my former place in the 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 proposals for my marriage received in my absence, and with equal pleasure I listened to my father, uncles and grandfather ponder over questions of my future career.

  While in Germany, I had applied for an academic position at the newly established Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, one of the two such institutes modelled on American business schools that pioneered fashionable management studies in India. I was appointed research fellow in the faculty for the management of agricultural and rural development where my work involved collection of cases on leadership in rural institutions, cases that were later intended to be used in training administrators of development programmes. I travelled widely in rural India that year and during my travels, lost any idealizations I might have had 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 opposing 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 great amount of time by myself. Alter the round of interviews in a particular 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 normally went early to bed and I remember many nights lying out in the open, under the canopy of a sky packed densely with glittering stars, listening to the occasional barking of village dogs and to conversations that were taking place in my head on the future shape of my life. There were fantasies of my becoming a writer (but how would my family react and who had ever heard of anyone in India earning his livelihood through writing?), of applying to a film school for training as a movie director and of once again packing my bags and going back to Europe. 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 had become addicted, search for love and beauty and the great passion of my life? Of course, I now look back at my anguished 26-year-old self with affectionate irony. At the time, though, my tortured confusion about what I was and what I wanted to be was a serious affair that did not evoke indulgent smiles, either in me or in my parents. They 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 confusion gripping my soul. 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 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 at that time.

  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. A tall, well-built man with almost shoulder-length white hair and a drooping Einsteinian moustache, Erikson and his wife Joan had rented my aunt Kamla’s house while she was away on an extended visit to the United States. They became my neighbours since I lived in a small annexe on the grounds.

  Erikson was very well known in the field of psychoanalysis, a field I only knew from rumours, but he was not yet the world famous figure he was to become later. He had complemented Freud’s psychosexual stages of growth with his own theory of psy
chosocial stages of human development. Briefly, Erikson had shown how significant relationships at various stages of life contribute specific strengths or pathologies to the self over the life cycle. Childhood and sexuality were vital but not completely determining for our personality and eventual fate. His contributions to other areas, such as psychology of religion and the initiation of a new field he called ‘psychohistory’, were to have a widespread impact on the study of humanities. Caught up in my own youthful turbulences, I was unaware of his stature and in fact confused his name with that of Erich Fromm.

  I could therefore approach him naturally, without any inhibiting awe. Whenever I was back in Ahmedabad from my travels, I loved to go over to his house at sunset when he had finished his own work and we would sit out on the balcony overlooking the Sabarmati river. In companionable silence, we would sip at our cold drinks and contemplate the vista of an age-old life unfolding on the river bed: strings of small white Kathiawari donkeys, as mild and not bigger than sheep, carefully climbing up the river bank carrying bags of sand for the city’s construction projects; wiry washermen clad in loin cloths and burnt black by the sun, beating cloth on flat-topped stones with loud rhythmic grunts; dyers with their steaming cauldrons practising an ancient craft, the freshly dyed five-yard long sarees strung between wooden stakes to dry in a riot of changing colours as the sun gradually sank below the horizon and the vermilion dusk deepened to grey.

  We watched and talked of Gandhi and of the men and women whose lives he had transformed. Like Gandhi, Erik was no mean transformer himself. Erikson’s sparse observations were full of wise insight and occasional gentle humour that completely captivated me. What struck me most about him was a benevolence singularly free from all traces of condescension—whether of the old towards the young, of the learned towards the ignorant, of the established scholar towards the novice or the famous towards the unknown. He had that rarest of gifts, a possession of the truly generous in spirit, of paying complete and total attention to the person he was with—even when what the person was saying was neither particularly original nor especially interesting.