Novelist and feted Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s autobiography A Book of Memory is a memoir where recollections, dreams, wishes, ideas and thoughts mingle with a recapitulation of a life lived well.
Sudhir Kakar is both author of fiction and non-fiction including Mystics and Doctors, Shamans, The Indians, Mira and the Mahatma, The Colours of Violence, Intimate Relations and the Crimson Throne. He remains a prominent psychoanalyst whose opinions on psychology, religion and sexuality and psychoanalysis and social mores have attracted attention and induced debates.
Kakar has the unique distinction of being a mechanical engineer-turned-Harvard student who at last found his calling in psychology, later in life. Now in his seventies, he continues to live and work in Goa and remains an engaging voice on psychoanalysis, sociology, sex and religion.
A Book of Memory is, however, not written in typical autobiographical style. The narrative is rambling, chatty, bringing alive the reminiscences and regrets of Kakar’s life as he looks back on them. It is more an encapsulation and recollection of events, people, family and friends through his childhood, adolescence and into his adult life. Kakar recalls his experiences through his travels to the West, his fascination as a young man to the freedom of choice and individualism it allowed him, contrasting with the narrow confines of traditions and conformity with which he grew up in India. He narrates how his engagement with the eroticism of family bonds and freudian feelings in India and his sexual abandonment in the West contributed to his psyche.
Kakar’s autobiography also takes the reader through partition and the effect it had on his family. He walks through the turnpikes of political and social events across the world, during his time in Harvard during the Vietnam War, the counter culture revolution and the civil rights movement. He also lists his presence through the founding of new business empires in India, post independence and the people associated with institutions like the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad that he was witness to in his life and the moments that he could recall of those landmark occasions.
Kakar’s biography is at its warmest when he recalls his first memories as a child, his attachment with his mother, the large Punjabi family from Lahore and the stories of his uncles and aunts. Partition memories that “did disturb my psyche”, recollections of caste that seem unavoidable for even a privileged family, the ambiguous attraction and disenchantment with the patriarch and oedipal memories of his mother (the objects of the mighty love of a child’s heart) and his aunt, the subtle fondness of an au pair bring a flavour of the “eroticism” of large Indian families that live in close proximity. Kakar’s prose is elegant and devoid of the sentimental.
In the intertwining of events from childhood to boyhood or “teenage consciousness” and adulthood, Kakar’s narrative often skips and jumps over memories, overstepping chronology of events, and in a surreal fashion revisits them later as his memories lead him. Memories of wife, teacher, coach, cinemas, cities and towns are recollected against the passage of his life. For instance, even as he describes his childhood, a passing comment of how it could have affected the failure of his first marriage that he promises to talk about in detail later makes the reading jumpy. Kakar’s intuitiveness is apparent when he describes his early sexual awakenings and encounters brought on by loneliness at the boys’ communal bathrooms and teacher violence. As also his endearing candour about his Punjabi bawdiness that continues into his 70th year.
Kakar brings out best the duality in diasporic existence while talking about his student days in Germany and later at Harvard and his stay and alternate periods of stay in India. The identity issues he faced in his youth and his own forays in Europe into seeking literature and the sensual help reveal the making of a psychologist with modern sensibilities with Indian roots well.
A detailed account of his aunt’s 20-year relationship with a married man, one of independent India’s pioneering institution builders Vikram Sarabhai, is detailed. His struggle and dilemmas to convince his father and distill his own interest from the world of mechanical engineering into the worlds of psychology and philosophy that would govern his interests and life to this day are expressed with empathy. The disengagements and distances that cropped up in his relationships with parents or aunts and uncles summon up the inevitable regret.
Kakar is not particularly sparing of his own failed first marriage and his broken relationships as well as that of his family. This is an elegant biography by a shrink who narrates how memory and the mind shape much of our living consciousness. It certainly makes for an interesting read. But for all that, it remains a book of recollections.
A BOOK OF MEMORY—CONFESSIONS AND REFLECTIONS
Sudhir Kakar
Viking/Penguin
318 pages; Rs 499
