Indian Identity Read online

  I do not remember the details of those conversations but their life and spirit are still alive within me. The way he looked at people and events, with that indefinable quality called wisdom, was opening up my mind—and yes, my spirit—in a way I had never experienced before. It was the mental counterpart, rarely experienced, of the sudden opening up of senses and emotions in one’s first, passionate love affair. It was not as if he talked a great deal. He was not one of those people infesting academic and public life who hold forth at great length, afflicting our ears and violating our sensibilities. Erik was quite capable of listening to my callow views on Gandhi and on life with a grave courtesy and responding in a way which never made me feel that he did not take them, or me, seriously. Many years later, when I was working with him at Harvard as his assistant, I saw this quality again and again in his seminars. Even if according to me, someone was spouting forth complete nonsense, Erik would paraphrase the person in a way that made the contribution seem valuable, a value he added himself. Time and again, I saw the delighted surprise on the face of a student—‘Did I say this?’ Everyone who attended a seminar with Erik or talked to him, went away with a sense of enhancement, never of being diminished. I believe it was this innate generosity of spirit which made him pay attention to me. I was lonely, desperately longing to return to Europe and stay in India, full of the most outrageous plans for my life, wanting to do so many things because I did not know what I wanted.

  I read his writings, intially with curiosity and later with mounting excitement as I discovered that my own inner confusion was perhaps not a symptom of an idiosyncratic and pathological disorder (which I had secretly feared) but something many people have had at one or another time in their lives. My ‘identity problems’ (Erikson’s concept of identity crisis was to become very well known in the next few years), though perhaps unduly prolonged, ‘belonged’ to a normative crisis of adolescence and young adulthood. The problems were, in addition, not only personal but located in my communal culture in the sense that they were a reflection of the contemporary crisis in the historical development of the Indian middle class, torn in its orientation between the East and the West, conflicted between European and Indian models and values.

  Put simply, I was having an ‘identity crisis’. It was my good fortune I could spend so many hours with a man who had coined the term. I recognized that an identity crisis is not a sickness but another chance to realign the shape of one’s outer life with the core of one’s being, with one’s true self What I really wanted, I discovered, was that special kind of life of the mind which I believed psychoanalysis could give me. I wanted to be like him.

  The day Erikson left Ahmedabad for Delhi, on his way back to the United States, was also the day I discovered that what I wanted more than anything else was to work with him as an apprentice and, if possible, learn the psychoanalyst’s craft. It became clear to me, as if in a sudden revelation, that he was the guru my Indian self was searching for. Unfortunately, there seemed to be no way of reaching him in time to give him the good news of his selection as my guru. The train journey to Delhi took 23 hours, by which time he would already have left India, and I could not afford to fly. Here, another piece of luck came my way. The chief representative of the Ford Foundation—one of the financial supporters of the Institute of Management—had come to Ahmedabad for a day and was returning to Delhi the same evening in the Foundation’s private aircraft. All I had to do was ask him for a lift, a request to which he obligingly agreed. We reached Delhi airport at around ten in the night. I took a taxi straight to the hotel where the Eriksons were staying. After having said goodbye to me only the previous day, Erikson must have been surprised to see me. His face, however, did not betray any surprise as he listened to me pour out the news of my discovery. Courteously, and with his characteristic attention, he listened to what I wanted of him.

  It was to his credit that he did not laugh out aloud when I told him of his adoption as my mentor and my intention to work with him when he returned to his job as professor of human development at Harvard. My degrees in engineering and economics were my only formal qualifications but I had published short stories in German, I told him. Gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye, he pointed out the vital flaw in my plans to teach in his course on the human life cycle. ‘You have never studied psychology,’ he said. I could only nod my assent to this intrusion of reality. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘neither have I’. For although later in life he was to be showered with honorary doctorates from universities all over the world, the culmination of his formal academic training remained a high school diploma. He had never studied at a university and had spent his ‘wander-years’ in Europe as a painter before he came to Freud in Vienna. ‘I liked your stories, though. They show talent and a psychological-mindedness which is sufficient for me,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he went on to say, ‘if you get your doctorate in the next two to three years, I’ll try my best to get you an appointment at Harvard to work with me.’ We shook hands as I once again bid him goodbye.

  Humming to myself, I walked out into the sprawling Lodi Gardens next to the hotel. It was a clear night at the beginning of April, at the fag end of Delhi’s tantalizingly short spring. The strong perfume of white narcissus that flowers in the night hung in the air. The gardens, with their imposing 800-year-old tombs of the grandees of a bygone empire, were quiet except for the rustle of a gentle breeze through the trees and the occasional cry of a parrot in uneasy sleep. The lights in the upper floor of the newly-built meteorological station next to the garden were still burning. I walked on the gravel path meandering between the mausoleums with a lightness in my step, feeling intensely active and alive. The confusion seemed to be over, the future stretching before me full of promise.

  In the years to come, I would finish my doctoral studies at Vienna, work as Erikson’s assistant at Harvard, and do my psychoanalytic training at Frankfurt. I would teach, practise, write books, marry and have children. I would know loneliness and sadness; but never again would I know the panic and confusion of the year I travelled through the villages with no idea of which direction I should turn, when I alternated between holding fast to a stubborn selfhood and a surrender to the family of which I was a part, when I spent many sleepless nights in the construction of private utopias that crumbled into nothingness in the morning.

  I whistled to myself as I walked through the garden on my way to my grandparents’ house, where I would spend the night eagerly anticipating the expression of delighted surprise on my grandmother’s face at my unexpected arrival.

  Intimate Relations

  Exploring Indian Sexuality

  Contents

  Dedication

  1 Introduction

  2 Scenes from Marriages

  3 Lovers in the Dark

  4 The Sex Wars

  5 Husbands and Others

  6 Gandhi and Women

  7 Masculine/Feminine: A View from the Couch

  8 An Ending

  Acknowledgments

  For

  Elisabeth and Manfred,

  Anita and Vikram

  1

  Introduction

  This book is a psychological study of the relationship between the sexes in India. It is about men and women—lovers, husbands, and wives—living in those intimate states where at the same time we are exhilaratingly open and dangerously vulnerable to the other sex. It is about Indian sexual politics and its particular language of emotions. Such an inquiry cannot bypass the ways the culture believes gender relations should be organized nor can it ignore the deviations in actual behaviour from cultural prescriptions. Yet the major route I have selected for my undertaking meanders through a terrain hewn out of the fantasies of intimacy, a landscape whose contours are shaped by the more obscure desires and fears men and women entertain in relation to each other and to the sexual moment in which they come together, What I seek to both uncover and emphasize is the oneiros—the ‘dream’—in the I
ndian tale of eros and especially the dreams of the tale’s heroines, the women.

  Tale, here, is not a mere figure of speech but my chosen vehicle for inquiry and its unique value for the study of Indian gender relations, as indeed for the study of any Indian cultural phenomenon, calls for some elaboraion.

  The spell of the story has always exercised a special potency in the oral-based Indian tradition and Indians have characteristically sought expression of central and collective meanings through narrative design. While the 20th-century West has wrenched philosophy, history, and other human concerns out of integrated narrative structures to form the discourse of isolated social sciences, the preferred medium of instruction and transmission of psychological, metaphysical, and social thought in India continues to be the story.

  Narrative has thus been prominently used as a way of thinking, as a way of reasoning about complex situations, as an inquiry into the nature of reality. As Richard Shweder remarks on his ethnographic experiences in Orissa, whenever an orthodox Hindu wishes to prove a point or convey what the world is like or ought to be like, he or she is more than likely to begin his exposition with that shift in the register of voice which is a prelude to the sentence, ‘Let me tell you a story.’1 The belief is widespread that stories, recorded in the culture’s epics and scriptures or transmitted orally in their more local versions, reflect the answers of the forefathers to the dilemmas of existence and contain the distillate of their experiences with the world. For most orthodox Hindus, tales are a perfectly adequate guide to the causal structure of reality. The myth, in its basic sense as an explanation for natural and cultural phenomena, as an organizer of experience, is verily at the heart of the matter.

  Traditional Indians, then, are imbedded in narrative in a way that is difficult to imagine for their modern counterparts, both Indian and Western. The stories they hear (or see enacted in dramas and depicted in Indian movies) and the stories they tell are worked and reworked into the stories of their own lives. For stretches of time a person may be living on the intersection of several stories, his own as well as those of heroes and gods. Margaret Egnor, in her work on the Tamil family, likens these stories to disembodies spirits which can possess (sometimes literally) men and women for various lengths of time.2 An understanding of the person in India, especially the untold tale of his fears and wishes—his fantasies—requires an understanding of the significance of his stories.

  What could be the reasons for the marked Indian proclivity to use narrative forms in the construction of a coherent and integrated world? Why is the preference for the language of the concrete, of image and symbol, over more abstract and conceptual formulations, such a prominent feature of Indian thought and culture? Partly, of course, this preference is grounded in the universal tendency of people all over the world to understand complex matters presented as stories, whereas they might experience difficulty in the comprehension of general concepts. This does not imply the superiority of the conceptual over the symbolic, of the paradigmatic over the narrative modes, and of the austere satisfactions of denotation over the pleasures of connotation. Indeed, the concreteness of the story, with its metaphoric richness, is perhaps a better path into the depths of emotion and imagination, into the core of man’s spirit and what Oliver Sacks has called the ‘melodic and scenic nature of inner life, the Proustian nature of memory and mind.’3 For it may be, as Sacks further suggests, that the final form of the brain’s record of experience and action is organized iconically and is, in fact, ‘art’, even if the preliminary forms of cerebral representation are computational and programmatic.4

  Apart from any possible universal grounding in brain physiology, the Indian celebration of the narrative (and the dramatic) has its roots in one of the more enduring and cherished beliefs of the culture. This particular belief holds that there is another, higher level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies, and our emotions. A fundamental value of most schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, the belief in the existence of an ‘ultimate’ reality—related to ordinary, everyday reality in the same way as everyday reality is related to the dream—is an unquestioned verity of Hindu culture, the common thread in the teachings of the culture’s innumerable gurus, swamis, and other mystics. This ultimate reality, whose apprehension is considered to be the highest goal and meaning of human life, is said to be beyond conceptual thought and indeed beyond mind. Intellectual thought, naturalistic sciences, and other passions of the mind seeking to grasp the nature of the empirical world thus have a relatively lower status in the culture as compared to meditative praxis or even art. Aesthetic and mystical experiences, as Robert Goldman has pointed out, are supposed to be closely related so that the aesthetic power of music and verse, of a well-told tale and a well-enacted play, makes them more rather than less real than life.5 Moreover, since ultimate reality can only be apprehended experientially, its hue, flavour, and ramifications for ordinary life are best conveyed to the uninitiated mass of people in the culture through story—myth, fable, parable, and tale—thus further elevating the prestige of the narrative form. Little wonder that on occasion interrupting a story has been viewed as a sin equivalent to the killing of a Brahmin.6

  With the declining fortunes of logical positivism in Western thought, the giving up of universalistic and ahistorical pretensions in the sciences of man and society, the traditional Indian view is not far removed from that held by some of the newer breed of social scientists. Many psychologists, for instance, believe that narrative thinking—‘storying’—is not only a successful method of organizing perceptiosn, thought, memory, and action but, in its natural domain of everyday interpersonal experience, it is the most effective.7 Other thinkers are convinced that there is no better way to gain an understanding of a society than through its stock of stories, which constitute its dramatic resource.8 The psychoanalyst, of course, whose practice has always consisted of helping the client construct a comprehensive self-narrative that encompasses previously repressed and disavowed aspects of the self, thus making better sense of his symptoms and behaviour, finds himself quite at home with the Indian insistence on story as the repository for psychological truth. At least in one influential view articulated by Ricouer, Habermas, Steele, and others, psychoanalysis is essentially telling and retelling the story of a particular life.9 Explanation in psychoanalysis is then narrative rather than hypothetical-deductive. Its ‘truth’ lies in the confirmatory constellation of coherence, consistency, and narrative intelligibility. Whatever else the analyst and the analysand might be doing, they are also collaborators in the creation of the story of an individual life.

  The larger story of gender relations I strive to narrate here is composed of many strands that have been woven into the Indian imagination. There are tales told by the folk and the myths narrated by family elders and religious storytellers, or enacted by actors and dancers. These have, of course, been of traditional interest for students of cultural anthropology. Today, in addition, we also have popular movies as well as modern novels and plays, which combine the society’s traditional preoccupations with more contemporary promptings. I have always felt, at least for a society such as India where individualism even now stirs but faintly, that it is difficult to maintain a distinction between folktales and myths as products of collective fantasy on the one hand and movies and literature as individual creations on the other. The narration of a myth or a folktale almost invariably includes an individual variation, a personal twist by the narrator in the omission or addition of details and the placing of an accent, which makes his personal voice discernible within the collective chorus. Most Indian novels, on the other hand, are closer in spirit to the literary tradition represented by such 19th-century writers as Dickens, Balzac, and Stendhal, whose preoccupation with the larger social and moral implications of their characters’ experiences is the salient feature of their literary creations. In other words, it is generally true of Indian literature, across the different regional lang
uages, that the fictional characters, in their various struggles, fantasies, unusual fates, hopes, and fears, seek to represent their societies in miniature. Indeed, one of the best known Hindi novels of the post-Independence era, Phanishwarnath Renu’s Maila Anchal, goes even further in that it centres not on an individual but on a whole village. At the most, one could say that novels, films, folktales, and myths are ranged in order on a continuum which spans the expression of individual fate at one end and collective aspirations on the other. To a greater or lesser degree, the individual characters of each narrative form are symbolic revealers of a much larger universe.

  In addition to drawing on the above-mentioned forms, I have also made use of other texts such as autobiography and clinical case history. In their use of imagination for the reconstruction of lives, combining facts and fiction to arrive at life-historical truth, they too are stories, strategically placed doorways into the arena of intimate relations.

  My own narrative here is informed by the psychoanalytic perspective, which required a particular kind of imagination as well as a model for interpretation. Similar to the special competence of a literary critic which enables him to ‘read’ a poem by converting its linguistic sequences into literary structures and meanings, there is a specific kind of psychoanalytic reading—of the patient’s utterances, a tale, or a myth—though, as we shall see later, not every type of narrative is read in exactly the same way. Developed through didactic analysis, clinical training, and experience, the ‘psychoanalytic competence’ as Donald Spence has called it, consists of certain conventions that affect the analyst’s overall understanding of the material and his sense of the important units of meaning.10 To mention some of these conventions. First, there is the convention of thematic unity, namely, that there is an underlying commonality among separate, discrete details, whether of the therapeutic hour or of the text. Second, there is the convention of thematic continuity, which holds that if a patient dramatically changes the subject, or presents more than one dream during the hour, we continue to listen to the original theme through the apparent discontinuities. In other words, in spite of the narrative’s postponements and detours, we keep a lookout for the recurring theme. Third, there is the convention of thematic significance, which holds that significant problems are always under discussion no mater how trivial the details. This convention insists that the analyst pay attention to everything while, of course, continuing to mistrust the seemingly obvious implications of what he observes. (Another convention, namely of transference, which leads an analyst to hear a patient’s utterance on at least two levels—as a statement about an obvious referent and as communication about the analyst-patient relationship—applies more to the clinical situation than to the nonclinical psychoanalytic reading of texts.)