Beginning in 2015, for four hours a week for four years, I participated in that once crucial ritual of modernity: psychoanalysis. My training analyst was Sudhir Kakar (1938-2024), whose passing this April, marks the end of an almost sixty-year career of reflection upon the notion of an Indianness of the imagination – what Kakar would come to call a cultural unconscious – imprinted upon by cultural myths, values and products. It was a renegade project, in defiance of the traditional field of psychoanalysis, whose borders are still primarily defined by its European and North American practitioners.
Like many of Kakar’s students and analysands – each of us, I suppose, for different reasons – I had been searching for Sudhir Kakar before I met him. I first introduced myself to him at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2010 where he was speaking on his book The Ascetic of Desire. Then 72, Kakar was established both as a writer and a psychoanalyst, accomplishments to which I, not quite 35, and still finishing my post-doc in psychology, aspired. I had approached him nevertheless with that intimacy to which youth feels it is entitled: I imagined I knew him already, from his books. Though he could have easily disabused me of this fantasy, he did not: he had a generosity of spirit, the core of which included a deep respect for other people’s imaginations.
The fiction writer
Sudhir Kakar’s writing trajectory began around 1962, with a set of short stories written in German and sold for fifty Deutsche Marks a pop. Rough, and self-admittedly unoriginal – a plot stolen from Premchand’s Shatranj ki Khiladi, a motif taken from A Thousand and One Nights – these stories nevertheless represented the beginnings of a thinking project that would come to define him. Reflecting on these beginnings almost fifty years later in his memoir, A Book of Memory, Kakar describes them as an effort to connect the intellectual excitement he had encountered in his studies abroad with the powerful emotional presence that his life in India represented to him.
Dialectical themes, such as these two seemingly opposed forces of Western intellectualism and Indian emotionalism, are the stuff of Freudian psychoanalysis, the field that Kakar went on to study. With an unremitting writerly energy that lasted into the weeks before his death, Kakar tackled Indian dialectics – fantasy elements, shaped by culture – in pairs such as Men and Women, Hindus and Muslims, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality, Puritanism and Desire, the Tragic and the Romantic view of life, and Western psychoanalysis and Hindu thought.
As for the short stories, the advantage of this professional foreshadowing was that on his return to India, following his years of training in Business Economics in Mannheim, Kakar showed the stories to Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst and professor of human development at Harvard University, who happened to be renting an apartment from Kakar’s aunt Kamala in Ahmedabad. On the basis of these stories, and their conversations, Erikson agreed to work with Kakar.
With the promise of being able to work with Erikson in the future, Kakar set off toward a fast-track PhD in Economics, and then eventually to train as an analyst at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. The relationship with Erikson was an important imaginative source of identity – what psychoanalysts call an identification – that gave energy to Kakar’s transformation from economics graduate to the “writing psychoanalyst” in public life that he went on to become.
Despite his orthodox training at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Kakar’s decision to practise in India, and eventually the themes of his writing, made him unrecognisable to European Freudians. Commenting in 1982 on the orthodoxy of Kakar’s training, the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni nevertheless remarked: “I have met and interviewed him a few times, and I cannot say I can consider him an analyst at all similar to us.”
The psychoanalysist
Kakar’s version of Indian psychoanalysis does not sharply deviate from Freud’s vision, it extends it. On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Freud famously declined the title “discoverer of the unconscious”, saying instead, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” Ever the clever post-colonial, who read with, rather than against Freud, Kakar took it as his right to include in the terroir of the psychoanalytic unconscious the “discoveries” of poets and philosophers far removed from the origins of psychoanalysis in Europe. A shortlist of these includes readings of philosophers such as Gandhi, Tagore, and Vatsayana; poets such as Bhartṛhariand Bilhana; Urdu folk tales such as those of Laila Majnun and Sohni-Mahinwal; and psychoanalytic readings of popular versions of Hindu myths such as those of Ganesh and Yayati. Mining the literature and philosophy of the subcontinent, Kakar gradually defined a regional unconscious of psychoanalysis, one that International Psychoanalysis would eventually recognise.
Re-drawing boundaries for psychoanalysis has a history in India that pre-dates Kakar. Kolkata-born Girindrasekhar Bose (1887-1953), the first President of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, famously shared a seventeen-year correspondence with Freud, during which he argued against the Western universalisation of penis envy, insisting that womb envy was more representative of the anxieties of the Indian male. Following in Bose’s lineage – though they never met – Kakar, too, advocated against the blind universalisation of the findings of the science promulgated by the now famously WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) countries. He relentlessly leveraged his readings of Freud to challenge the notion psychoanalysis had of itself.
For conservative psychoanalysts, this was going too far. Despite his theoretical soundness, many Western psychoanalysts regarded Kakar with a circumspection that turned out to be a front for disciplinary territorialism. While the circumspection slowly passed, its presence reflected the enormity of the task that Kakar had set himself. Consider, for example, the work that had put the French psychoanalyst Mannoni into a state of veritable consternation: Kakar’s venture into what might be considered the magical realism of Indian healing paradigms in Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors (1982). Since Romain Rolland’s famed exchange with Freud in response to The Future of an Illusion (1927), few psychoanalysts had had the chutzpah to challenge the boundaries of what could be brought under the lens of psychoanalysis, and in doing so, demand that European psychoanalysts take note of ways of being vastly different from their own
The Indian
At home, critics of Kakar’s writing who objected to his tendency to sometimes use “Indian” and “Hindu” synonymously missed the larger picture of a psychoanalyst who wrote with few peers alongside him. In the tradition of Freud, Kakar continually made room for other writers to join his project – his ideas, he insisted, were “one building block in a larger edifice”. The “Indianness” that he argued for, in relationship to the world, used as its methodology a combination of patient cases, literary readings, and sometimes film analysis, a necessarily subjective set of instruments.
His theory of the cultural unconscious, on the other hand, was a more vast project which demanded that international psychoanalysis expand its imagination and its reading list. The significance of this project is lost if Kakar is read as an advocate for a Hindu reading of the world. It is closer to the soul of his vision to read his project as necessarily incomplete, despite his extraordinary output.
We should read Kakar as someone who authorised an Indian way of dreaming rather than as the author of it. The “way” is in the sense of a road or pathway. By asking international psychoanalysis to take note of culture-specific child-rearing techniques, culturally important myths, stories and archetypes and culturally iconic images found in films and artwork, Kakar was implicitly pointing out what Freud clearly admits to – dream interpretation is structured by literature and by life experience.
For such a prolific reader and writer, Kakar was surprisingly cautious about language. In yet another radical difference from his Western counterparts – perhaps in tribute to the “Indian emotionalism” he tried to understand in his writings – Kakar’s clinical method did not hinge as strongly upon words as is usual for psychoanalysis. When I brought up Adam Phillips – another writer-psychoanalyst – who said that psychoanalysis was “a kind of conversation between two people and all the books each had ever read”, Kakar agreed, but amended “conversation” to “communion”.
At his home and in public settings, Kakar often sat alone. One of his rituals was to face the setting sun with a bemused beatitude, silent and as if absorbed in some theatre taking place within, in tandem with the drama of the rosy, darkening, skies. When I first encountered him thus, I was puzzled, though I knew better than to interrupt this silence with chit-chat. I found sunsets melancholy, so also the opening bars of The St Louis Blues about the setting sun – the Louis Armstrong song which Kakar loved, and is rumoured to have sung for senior students, though before my time.
Over time I would come to understand that Kakar’s reticence, in and outside the consulting room, nurtured his internal climate of dreaming. And, as he reminds us in his work on this subject: dreaming is a form of thinking.
It will be hard for me to talk about him in the past tense, because for so long in my life in this field, it has seemed that Sudhir Kakar has always been there: a calm, brilliant, sui generis force in psychoanalysis.
Amrita Narayanan is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is the author of Women’s Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress.
Also read:
What Sudhir Kakar (1938-2024) had to say on violence, secularism, and religion in India
