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ABRAMS BOOKS - Kakar Sudhir Kakar

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89 pages

English

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Ram Das Baba, as his devotees call him, is the son of a devout Brahmin family. He spends a lifetime seeking spiritual knowledge and his journey is filled with illuminating visions, severe tribulations, and an unwavering faith. His destiny as a highly evolved Sadhu is fulfilled through ordeals of monastic bliss, tantric awakening, madness, and transexuality. But as his life nears its end he meets a young man who belongs to a very different India and a profound relationship develops.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	28 octobre 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781468307771
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0808€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Also by Sudhir Kakar
FICTION
T HE A SCETIC OF D ESIRE
I NDIAN L OVE S TORIES , Editor
NON - FICTION
T HE K AMASUTRA, OR T HE B OOK OF S EX : A N EW T RANSLATION
(with Wendy Doniger)
T HE I NDIAN P SYCHE:
T HE E SSENTIAL W RITINGS OF S UDHIR K AKAR
C ULTURE AND P SYCHE:
S ELECTED P APERS ON P SYCHOANALYSIS AND I NDIA
T HE C OLORS OF V IOLENCE:
C ULTURAL I DENTITIES , R ELIGION AND C ONFLICT
L A F OLLE ET LE S AINT
(with C. Clement)
T HE A NALYST AND THE M YSTIC
I NTIMATE R ELATIONS : E XPLORING I NDIAN S EXUALITY
T ALES OF L OVE , S EX AND D ANGER
(with J.Ross)
S HAMANS , M YSTICS AND D OCTORS : A P SYCHOLOGICAL
I NQUIRY INTO I NDIA AND ITS H EALING T RADITIONS
I DENTITY AND A DULTHOOD , Editor and contributor,
with an introduction
T HE I NNER W ORLD : A P SYCHOANALYTIC S TUDY OF
C HILDHOOD AND S OCIETY IN I NDIA
C ONFLICT AND C HOICE : I NDIAN Y OUTH IN A C HANGING S OCIETY
(with Kamla Cowdhry)
U NDERSTANDING O RGANIZATIONAL B EHAVIOR , Editor
(with Kamla Chowdhry)
F REDERICK T AYLOR : A S TUDY IN P ERSONALITY AND I NNOVATION
To the memory of my father Sardarilal Kakar,
a confirmed agnostic,
and my mother Bimla, an equally convinced believer.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2002 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York
www.overlookpress.com
N EW Y ORK :
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
Copyright © 2001 by Sudhir Kakar
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system now known
or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
The paper used in this book meets the requirements for paper permanence as described in the ANSI Z39.48-1992 standard.
ISBN: 9-78146-830-7-771
Contents
Also by Sudhir Kakar
Dedication
Copyright
Gopal
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Vivek
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Ram Das
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Baba
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
Afterword
ecstasy. The state of being ‘beside oneself’; An exalted state of feeling which engrosses the mind to the exclusion of thought; rapture; transport
—Oxford English Dictionary
Gopal

I feel like dancing
The beat comes from you
Like a puppet on a string
You make me swing
—T UKARAM , Tuka Says
Chapter One
G opal’s visions ended when he grew breasts.
He was fifteen. His were not the flabby breasts of an old man but the small, firm and perfectly pronounced ones of a young girl. He had always been a plump child but now the loose flesh on his chest had gathered itself neatly into two distinct little mounds. For a while in the beginning, he kept the upper half of his body covered with a wrap even in the heat of summer. Sometimes, when he was alone in the fields, he would slap his breasts, saying, ‘Go in, go in!’
There were other changes in his body. His genitals, too, were thickening, and grew darker than the rest of his skin. His shoulders broadened, but so did his hips, which again had a distinct swell to them. At the time he felt that his ecstatic states had ended because the gods had withdrawn from him since he was no longer a child, that they did not like the ways in which his body was changing.

Ever since he was ten years old, Gopal had been in great demand at religious ceremonies and festivals in the village, where he loved to sing in praise of whichever god or goddess was being celebrated. What so attracted his listeners was not only his sweet voice—a lyric soprano—or his ear for melody and rhythm, but the intensity and depth of feeling he put into his songs, especially those in praise of Krishna, his favourite god. It was as if he was in a trance. There were three occasions when sitting in front of the congregation, singing along with the others, he had seen the idol of the god come alive. Involuntarily, he had stood up and stretched his arms toward the deity. While an awed hush fell on the gathering, his body began to sway rhythmically as songs of praise came to his lips from somewhere deep within him, without his having made a conscious choice of a particular song or an effort to remember its words. The ecstatic mood deepened as he sang, and tears of joy streamed down his face from his half-closed eyes. After a while, the rapture was so sublime that his song stopped in mid-sentence. His limbs stiffened, his body became as rigid as a statue and he had to be supported by others lest he fell and hurt himself.
He was almost fourteen when he was graced with the last and most striking vision of his boyhood. It was early in the evening, at the beginning of the monsoon when the storm clouds have not yet covered the heavens in one dark, turgid mass but are still small and playful, jostling each other across an indulgent sky. He was returning home, munching on puffed rice, walking on a narrow mud embankment between the ploughed fields, when looking up he saw a flock of white cranes fly in an arc against an ink-black cloud that was rolling in to blot out the setting sun. The contrast in forms was so beautiful that he was filled with wonder and sank to the ground on his knees. And even as he went down, a tremendous force pulled him off the ground and placed him in the picture he had just seen. The cloud and the cranes curved in to enclose him and fill his entire vision. The clods of ploughed earth in the fields and the scarecrow made of dried millet stalks standing a few yards to his left disappeared. He felt he could almost touch the cloud, push his hand through the sliver of crimson light lining its edges. He could smell the coming rain, feel the cool breeze that was about to blow, and his feet tingled in anticipation of contact with wet earth.
Then the outer edge of his vision began to darken. The cloud and the cranes were swallowed up by the spreading darkness, which deepened for an infinitesimal moment before the sudden emanation of an inner light, as if in a rapidly accelerated dawn, that illuminated his whole field of vision. What he now beheld was Lord Krishna’s blue-black chest with a garland of white jasmines thrown across its broad expanse. The invitation to rest his head against the Lord’s dark flesh was irresistible, and as his cheek brushed against the dusky skin, ecstasy surged through his limbs in such a powerful current, filling him with a rapture so sublime, that he no longer knew himself to be in the body.
When he came back to the world that evening—he had not been unconscious but only absent, ecstatically absent—he found himself at home, lying on the familiar straw mat spread on the mud floor of the hut where he lived with his mother. A kerosene lamp burnt in one corner, throwing flickering shadows of his mother and the two squatting men on the wall in front of him. His head nestled in his mother’s soft lap. The upper part of her body rocked back and forth as she made short, mewling sounds of distress. The two farmers who had found him lying in the field, apparently unconscious, and carried him home were vainly trying to reassure her that there was nothing wrong with the boy, that he had only fainted. When she saw him open his eyes, she gathered up his head in her arms and pressed it to her heart. Weeping uncontrollably with relief, she kissed him all over his face.
Amba worried about her son. Deeply religious herself, she welcomed Gopal’s enthusiastic participation in her daily worship of the household gods but was torn about letting him go to the rituals of the neighbours. She did not think it was normal for a boy his age to be so religious and frowned when the village women told her that he was a singularly blessed child. ‘O Gopal’s mother,’ they said, ‘we are animals unless we sing to the Lord. Surdas says that to come to the feet of the Lord in song is enough to make stones float on the sea, and your son has been graced by God to touch Him through the realm of song. He is destined to be a great saint, like Surdas or Kabir.’ Amba did not like this talk about saints.
‘Saints leave home,’ she had snapped back to one particularly tiresome neighbour. ‘They never earn enough to support their families. May my Gopal’s enemies become saints!’
The ecstatic trances had troubled her deeply. They were the province of hysterical young women or of God-crazed sadhus high on ganja, not of young boys. She suspected an undiagnosed physical malady behind the trances and his fainting in the fields that evening seemed to confirm her worst fears. She decided to keep him back from school till the Western-style doctor who came to Deogarh once in three weeks all the way from Jaipur, thirty miles away, had given the boy a thorough physical examination. She did not quite trust the village vaid, reputed to be a secret tippler of some of his own medicines which had a high proportion of alcohol in their base. He had found nothing wrong with the boy.
‘You are blessed, Gopal’s mother,’ he had said, his breath reeking of alcohol and medicinal herbs, his yellow teeth spreading out crookedly in what was meant to be a winning smile. ‘The boy’s trances come from God, not from a disturbance in his bodily humours.’
Amba was impatient with the vaid not only because he was talking of trances and sainthood. It seemed to her that he was being dismissive about the illness because Gopal was a boy, and these men expected boys to be tough and hardy. Did the vaid not know that her Gopal was special? He was not like the other boys.
Gopal was indeed different. With his clear, lustrous skin, long eyelashes and delicate features, Gopal had always looked like a