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97 pages

English

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Plumbing the hearts of women and men in India and exploring the relations they engage in, Sudhir Kakar gives us the first full-length study of Indian sexuality. His groundbreaking work explores India's sexual fantasies and ideals, the "unlit stage of desire where so much of our inner theater takes place." Kakar's sources are primarily textual, celebrating the primacy of the story in Indian life. He practices a cultural psychology that distills the psyches of individuals from the literary products and social institutions of Indian culture. These include examples of lurid contemporary Hindi novels; folktales; Sanskrit, Tamil, and Hindi proverbs; hits of the Indian cinema; Gandhi's autobiography; interviews with women from the slums of Delhi; and case studies from his own psychoanalytic practice. His attentive readings of these varied narratives from a vivid portrait of sexual fantasies and realities, reflecting the universality of sexuality as well as cultural nuances specific to India.

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Ethnic studies

India

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	14 octobre 2000
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351181682
Langue	English

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SUDHIR KAKAR
Intimate Relations
Exploring Indian Sexuality

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
1 Introduction
2 Scenes from Marriages
3 Lovers in the Dark
4 The Sex Wars
5 Husbands and Others
6 Gandhi and Women
7 Masculine/Feminine: A View from the Couch
8 An Ending
Footnotes
2 Scenes from Marriages
5 Husbands and Others
6 Gandhi and Women
Notes
Acknowledgments
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
INTIMATE RELATIONS
Sudhir Kakar, a distinguished psychoanalyst and scholar, is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. He has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow, Nehru Fellow and a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton. He has taught at IITM, Ahmedabad, IIT, Delhi, the Universities of Vienna, McGill and Harvard and now teaches annually at the University of Chicago.
His several previous books, which have been widely translated, include Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovations, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytical Study of Childhood and Society in India, Identity and Adulthood (ed.), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors and Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (with John Ross).
Dr. Kakar is married with two children and lives in Delhi.
Also by Sudhir Kakar
Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation.
The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India
Identity and Adulthood (ed.)
Shamans, Mystics and Doctors
Tales of Love, Sex and Danger (with John Ross)
For Elisabeth and Manfred, Anita and Vikram
1 Introduction
This book is a psychological study of the relationship between the sexes in India. It is about men and women-lovers, husbands, and wives-living in those intimate states where at the same time we are exhilaratingly open and dangerously vulnerable to the other sex. It is about Indian sexual politics and its particular language of emotions. Such an inquiry cannot bypass the ways the culture believes gender relations should be organized nor can it ignore the deviations in actual behavior from cultural prescriptions. Yet the major route I have selected for my undertaking meanders through a terrain hewn out of the fantasies of intimacy, a landscape whose contours are shaped by the more obscure desires and fears men and women entertain in relation to each other and to the sexual moment in which they come together. What I seek to both uncover and emphasize is the oneiros -the dream -in the Indian tale of eros and especially the dreams of the tale s heroines, the women.
Tale, here, is not a mere figure of speech but my chosen vehicle for inquiry and its unique value for the study of Indian gender relations, as indeed for the study of any Indian cultural phenomenon, calls for some elaboration.
The spell of the story has always exercised a special potency in the oral-based Indian tradition and Indians have characteristically sought expression of central and collective meanings through narrative design. While the twentieth-century West has wrenched philosophy, history, and other human concerns out of integrated narrative structures to form the discourse of isolated social sciences, the preferred medium of instruction and transmission of psychological, metaphysical, and social thought in India continues to be the story.
Narrative has thus been prominently used as a way of thinking, as a way of reasoning about complex situations, as an inquiry into the nature of reality. As Richard Shweder remarks on his ethnographic experiences in Orissa, whenever an orthodox Hindu wishes to prove a point or convey what the world is like or ought to be like, he or she is more than likely to begin his exposition with that shift in the register of voice which is a prelude to the sentence, Let me tell you a story. 1 The belief is widespread that stories, recorded in the culture s epics and scriptures or transmitted orally in their more local versions, reflect the answers of the forefathers to the dilemmas of existence and contain the distillate of their experiences with the world. For most orthodox Hindus, tales are a perfectly adequate guide to the causal structure of reality. The myth, in its basic sense as an explanation for natural and cultural phenomena, as an organizer of experience, is verily at the heart of the matter.
Traditional Indians, then, are imbedded in narrative in a way that is difficult to imagine for their modern counterparts, both Indian and Western. The stories they hear (or see enacted in dramas and depicted in Indian movies) and the stories they tell are worked and reworked into the stories of their own lives. For stretches of time a person may be living on the intersection of several stories, his own as well as those of heroes and gods. Margaret Egnor, in her work on the Tamil family, likens these stories to disembodied spirits which can possess (sometimes literally) men and women for various lengths of time. 2 An understanding of the person in India, especially the untold tale of his fears and wishes-his fantasies-requires an understanding of the significance of his stories.
What could be the reasons for the marked Indian proclivity to use narrative forms in the construction of a coherent and integrated world? Why is the preference for the language of the concrete, of image and symbol, over more abstract and conceptual formulations, such a prominent feature of Indian thought and culture? Partly, of course, this preference is grounded in the universal tendency of people all over the world to understand complex matters presented as stories, whereas they might experience difficulty in the comprehension of general concepts. This does not imply the superiority of the conceptual over the symbolic, of the paradigmatic over the narrative modes, and of the austere satisfactions of denotation over the pleasures of connotation. Indeed, the concreteness of the story, with its metaphoric richness, is perhaps a better path into the depths of emotion and imagination, into the core of man s spirit and what Oliver Sacks has called the melodic and scenic nature of inner life, the Proustian nature of memory and mind. 3 For it may be, as Sacks further suggests, that the final form of the brain s record of experience and action is organized iconically and is, in fact, art , even if the preliminary forms of cerebral representation are computational and programmatic. 4
Apart from any possible universal grounding in brain physiology, the Indian celebration of the narrative (and the dramatic) has its roots in one of the more enduring and cherished beliefs of the culture. This particular belief holds that there is another, higher level of reality beyond the shared, verifiable, empirical reality of our world, our bodies, and our emotions. A fundamental value of most schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, the belief in the existence of an ultimate reality-related to ordinary, everyday reality in the same way as everyday reality is related to the dream-is an unquestioned verity of Hindu culture, the common thread in the teachings of the culture s innumerable gurus, swamis, and other mystics. This ultimate reality, whose apprehension is considered to be the highest goal and meaning of human life, is said to be beyond conceptual thought and indeed beyond mind. Intellectual thought, naturalistic sciences, and other passions of the mind seeking to grasp the nature of the empirical world thus have a relatively lower status in the culture as compared to meditative praxis or even art. Aesthetic and mystical experiences, as Robert Goldman has pointed out, are supposed to be closely related so that the aesthetic power of music and verse, of a well-told tale and a well-enacted play, makes them more rather than less real than life. 5 Moreover, since ultimate reality can only be apprehended experientially, its hue, flavor, and ramifications for ordinary life are best conveyed to the uninitiated mass of people in the culture through story-myth, fable, parable, and tale-thus further elevating the prestige of the narrative form. Little wonder that on occasion interrupting a story has been viewed as a sin equivalent to the killing of a Brahmin. 6
With the declining fortunes of logical positivism in Western thought, the giving up of universalistic and ahistorical pretensions in the sciences of man and society, the traditional Indian view is not far removed from that held by some of the newer breed of social scientists. Many psychologists, for instance, believe that narrative thinking- storying -is not only a successful method of organizing perception, thought, memory, and action but, in its natural domain of everyday interpersonal experience, it is the most effective. 7 Other thinkers are convinced that there is no better way to gain an understanding of a society than through its stock of stories, which constitute its dramatic resources. 8 The psychoanalyst, of course, whose practice has always consisted of helping the client construct a comprehensive self-narrative that encompasses previously repressed and disavowed aspects of the self, thus making better sense of his symptoms and behavior, finds himself quite at home with the Indian insistence on story as the repository for psychological truth. At least in one influential view articulated by Ricouer, Habermas, Steele, and others, psychoanalysis is essentially telling and retelling the story of a particular life. 9 Explanation in psychoanalysis is then narrative rather than hypothetical-deductive. Its truth lies in the confirmatory constellation of coherence, consistency, and narrative intelligibility. Whatever else the analyst and the analysand might be doing, they are also collaborators in the creation of the story of an individual life.
The larger story of gender relations I strive to narrate here is composed of many strands that have been woven into the Indian imagination. There are tales told by the folk and the myths narrated by family elders a