The saint as madman

In his latest offering, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar plays the middleman between Hindu and Buddhist spirituality, and Western psychology, writes Shiv Visvanathan

Mad And Divine: Spirit And Psyche In The Modern World
Sudhir Kakar
Penguin Viking
188 pages
Rs325

The intellectual world of psychoanalysis and psychology in India has been dominated by two contrasting and complementary figures. One-time colleagues and fellow professionals, Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy have both sustained long, inventive, impressive careers. And there the similarity ends. A wag once differentiated them. Both emphasise style, both convey an individual aesthetic, both move beyond mere competence. Both write brilliantly. But if Kakar is the presiding angel of what psychology should be, Nandy is the psychologist who reaches where angels fear to tread. Both have an eye, an ear, and a nose for unconventional topics. Mad And Divine, Kakar’s study of spirituality, is one such offering.

Beginnings, as Edward Said once suggested, are an art form. They open and locate a subject, they create the staging of a problem, and Kakar is adept at beginnings. He is always able to locate the problems and himself bi-culturally, between the professionally orthodox and the unconventional, between West and East, and between the secular and the imaginative search for the spiritual. He is open to other interpretations and possibilities. This is what makes Mad And Divine an open-ended book on spirituality; tough, pragmatic with a touch of empathy, and always with an ear for an out-of-the-box interpretation. There is one problem. At one level, this is not a book, but an assortment of essays, a series of meditations woven around a common thread of questions. As a book it would have to be richer in detail. In that sense it is a fascinating prelude. It is also a story about how a professional psychologist enters the problematic domain of the spiritual.

One must define the spiritual because in the West in particular, it gets embroiled in the controversies over spiritualism, with its mad medley of occult and theosophist practices, from table-tapping to the delights of planchette. It needs a hard-headedness —which
Kakar has in good measure — to traverse the divided world of the enlightenment. Kakar is firmly located in Western psychology. He is firm in his affiliation to Sigmund
Freud, Heinz Kohut, and Erik Erikson but convinced that good fences don’t make good neighbours. The dialogue of the rational and the spiritual becomes almost autobiographical as he traverses the worlds of Rajneesh, Gandhi and Drukpa Kunley.
Each piece becomes simultaneously a meditation on the spiritual and a reflection on what psychology can learn from this world.

The piece on Rajneesh is a brilliantly written homage. But at the same time it is also a hard-headed analysis of the narcissism that drove his life and made it swing between the childlike to the childish. Yet the essay is too slim. It sputters to a stop just when you want more details. The young Rajneesh is superbly captured, the aging man is caught in duller colours.

A certain playfulness enters the next two essays on Drukpa Kunley. These two pieces constitute the most fascinating part of the book, capturing the saint as madman, clown and trickster contra the guru and the priest. There is laughter here as desire plays out between the sexual and the spiritual, and a Falstaffian ease, which makes spirituality more interesting as practice. Kunley is probably the only saint exclusively identified with the phallus and the phallic travelogues are captured deftly.

Kakar is delightful as he moves between anecdote and psychological reflection. The essay on Gandhi is correct and enlightening. One senses Kakar’s predilection for
Gandhi as a practical saint who entered the slum of politics. The three biographical essays are more than competent. Then Kakar switches to studies of empathy and ritual, the latter with shades of the autobiography. Kakar is master at formulating doubt and ambivalence but a bit hurried in resolving them. His comments on the spiritual guru in Hinduism and Buddhism clarify the nature of the relationship between guru and disciple which is often misunderstood as exploitative in Western eyes. As a clarifier of Hindu and Buddhist spirituality, Mad And Divine is fruitful. In playing the middleman between spirituality and Western psychology, Kakar completes a tantrik somersault as he reads Sigmund Freud’s last essays, ‘The Future of an illusion’, his hostile critique of religion. A hardheaded Freud meets a hardheaded Hindu in a delightful interrogation.

Yet the book fails to satisfy. It is a collection of preludes, laughing, professional, enjoyable, written by a man who enjoys what he writes. But it lacks depth. It is not quite Haiku, not quite epic, but still a joy, like a satisfying paan one is content to chew on.

The reviewer is a social anthropologist.