Sudhir Kakar (1938-2024)

During my maiden visit to Lucknow in 2013, I dropped into the legendary Ram Advani Booksellers. One of the books that I picked up from the visit was Sudhir Kakar’s memoir, ‘Book of Memories’ – a work that first introduced me to the trailblazing Kamla Chowdhry.

Kakar -India’s most celebrated psychoanalyst was her nephew while Chowdhry’s lover was the architect of India’s space program – Vikram Sarabhai. Kakar, in his memoir, writes about the teenage resentment that he felt towards Sarabhai thus:

I was also dimly aware of an occasional upsurge of resentment, which I attributed at the time to his refusal to do the ‘right thing’ by my beloved aunt by marrying her. It was many years later, during my years of apprenticeship on the psychoanalytic couch, that I realized that my resentment of Vikram who had always been kind to me was more occasioned by my unconscious jealousy of his place in Kamla’s affections than by my moralistic posturing. In the sexual flux of late adolescence, the reactivated oedipal feelings, that is, the jealousy and resentment of the little boy at his father’s sexual access to the mother, were inflamed – on the few occasions I returned home early from college in the afternoon-by the evidence of crumpled pillows and bedsheets in Kamla’s bedroom, or the lingering glow of gratified desire on her face after Vikram had just left.

Chowdhry was married to a civil servant who ended up being murdered soon after their marriage. (He was shot dead by a disgruntled relative of a guy convicted by her husband. Chowdhry woke up in the morning to discover him lying dead next to her, with a bullet lodged in him. Years later, the defense counsel who appeared for the apprehended accused was a young Khushwant Singh). Chowdhry didn’t allow fate to pause her dreams. She pursued a Masters in Philosophy from Punjab University and followed it up with a Doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. Soon after this, she ended up crossing paths with Mrinalini Swaminathan, her batchmate from Santiniketan and her husband Vikram Sarabhai. The rest, as they say, is history. Within a short time, Chowdhry and Sarabhai began a lifelong affair which ended with Sarabhai’s untimely death in Trivandrum in 1971 at the age of 52. Chowdhry, with Sarabhai’s backing, was initially associated with the Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association. It’s widely believed that IIM A was setup in Ahmedabad instead of Bombay due to Sarabhai’s efforts to retain Chowdhry in the city and have her closeby. For a more in-depth profile of Chowdhry and her contributions, read this deep dive by Chinmay Tunbe.

When I read about Kakar’s passing away earlier this week, the above passage from his book came to my mind along with his analysis of the myths of Ganesha and Skanda which also left a deep impression on me when I read it last year. For Kakar, the family of Shiva, Parvati, Ganesha and Skanda (Murugan) and the myths surrounding the births of the two can be deconstructed in myriad ways. Ganesha was fashioned out of clay and butter by Parvati and raised with all the affection a mother could give her son. Skanda on the other hand, was fathered by Siva but carried in the wombs of many as no single woman could have borne a child made from such powerful semen. The story of their tiff over a mango, Skanda’s choice to circle the world and Ganesha’s decision to cling on to his mother and Skanda’s vow of celibacy are also, according to Kakar, very Oedipal.

Here Skanda and Ganesha are personifications of the two opposing wishes of the older child at the eve of the Oedipus stage. He is torn between a powerful push for independent and autonomous functioning, and an equally strong pull toward surrender and reimmersion in the enveloping maternal fusion from which he has just emerged. Giving in to the pull of individuation and independence, Skanda becomes liable to one kind of punishment—exile from the mother’s bountiful presence, and one kind of reward—the promise of functioning as an adult, virile man. Going back to the mother—and I would view Ganesha’s eating of the mango as a return to feeding at the breast, especially since we know that in Tamil Nadu, the analogy between a mango and the breast is a matter of common awareness13—has the broken tusk, the loss of potential masculinity, as a consequence. Remaining an infant, Ganesha’s reward, on the other hand, will be never to know the pangs of separation from the mother, never to feel the despair at her absence. That Ganesha’s lot is considered superior to Skanda’s is perhaps an indication of Indian man’s cultural preference in the dilemma of separation-individuation.

Rest in Peace Kakar.