The disappointment of hope is often deadly to electoral fortunes: An interview with Sudhir Kakar

A distinguished psychoanalyst who is celebrated for both his craft and his writing, Sudhir Kakar recently published his new novel The Devil Take Love. Kakar has written over 25 books, many of which are based on historical characters in a fictionalised setting. In The Devil Take Love, he chronicles the travails of the Sanskrit poet, Bhartrihari, known for his grammatical works and aphoristic poetry incorporating three principal themes: shringara, vairagya and niti—love, dispassion and morality. Drawn from these elements, Bhartrihari’s poems reflect the critical tension between desire and renunciation. Through his book, Kakar weaves Bhatrihari’s poems into an explorative commentary on the nature of eros and highlights the complex negotiation of desire in the interior landscapes of the human mind. In an email interview with Nikhil Pandhi, an intern at The Caravan, Kakar talked about the book, his love for poetry and his take on recent political phenomena such as the ban on pornography by the central government.

Nikhil Pandhi: In the latter half of your book, Bhartrihari declares, “For so many years, my body has trudged on under the burden of desire that has been my torture and my god.”

Sudhir Kakar: Desire is a primal force, not only in human beings but in all creation. Our ancestors, especially in the classical period of which we are so proud, not only acknowledged but celebrated it. For instance, the sixth century Brihatsamhita says: “The whole universe, from Brahman to the smallest worm, is based on the union of the male and female. Why then should we feel ashamed of it, when even Lord Shiva was forced to take four faces on account of his greed to have a look at a maiden.”

Desire is not simply the physical underpinning of love, its aim is the keen pleasure of sexual intercourse and orgasm. Burning torments of unrequited or unconsummated desire, sharp stabs of jealousy, possessive violence are as much a part of desire’s terrain as are the unconscious illusions that the fulfillment of desire will rid the mind of noxious hates, will release me from the prison of a separate body, make me transcend the boundaries of my body and self in union with another. The vision Kama sends is not only of the body’s ultimate pleasure but also of its transcendence.

NP: Bhartrihari is fundamentally seeking love distilled from sexual passion and erotic disenchantment. How would you characterise this love? Would you agree that it is the most primal emotion or experience of the human psychosocial life?

SK: Yes, love, eros, is the fundamental experience of human life and, along with death, the primary definer of the human condition. Love combines the cravings of the body with longings of the soul. Under sway of either the moralists or the hedonists, we have a tendency to separate the two, not realising that both the streams combine to become—in [Herman] Melville’s words—the “endless river that flows into the cave of man.”

NP: Was writing the book in first person, in the voice of Bhartrihari, a conscious choice? Were you letting aspects of your own “self” seep into the narrative”?

SK: It was not a conscious choice.  What I must emphasise is the use of plural—character(s) and not only the main protagonist, Bhartrihari. My self would have also seeped into other characters of the book: the king, the father, the friend, the courtiers and courtesans, Bhartrihari’s wife and lovers.

NP: How do you believe your position as a psychoanalyst enhances your perspective of human history and vice versa?

SK: History, or rather historical biography, is generally written from a third person perspective: the facts or outer events of a person’s life. The narratives of psychoanalysis and fiction are from a first person perspective—even if the fiction is not written in the first person: how did the person experience the events of his life, what were his feelings, memories fantasies of the future. In striving for emotional rather than historical truth of a life, first person perspective is much more speculative but brings the historical person alive. The third person perspective of the historian is helpful for the novelist since it puts some necessary constraints on the novelist’s unfettered exercise of imagination, keeps him honest.

NP: You write that your book has taken shape, “through a long and deep immersion” in Bhartrihari’s poems. Do you write poetry as well?

SK: I wish I wrote poetry but I don’t have the gift. Besides writing some doggerel in my youth, my relationship to poetry has been that of a voracious consumer. I think I will use the testimony of a poet for the power of great poetry, of what it does—a verse by Giuseppe Ungaretti’s [the Italian modernist poet], “M’illumino/d’immenso” (“I illuminate myself/with immensity”).

NP: As a psychoanalyst who has worked and written extensively on the Indian psyche, how do you view the recent ban on pornography by the Indian government?

SK: Pornography incorporates the darker aspects of desire: violence, sadism, and heedless rush of tidal instinct where the partner is but a degraded body. But should you try to ban the depiction of the rawer forms of desire, or even get into a struggle you are fated to lose? Pornography is like cigarettes. The latter are injurious to health, the former to development of healthy sexuality, certainly if not consumed in moderation. As in the case of cigarettes, a campaign to highlight the harmful effects of pornography will be more in line than a ban. Here I am talking of adults. This does not apply to child pornography, which should be vigorously prosecuted by the state with all powers at its command, including bans.

NP: You have written in the past about the idea of a “psychological demographic dividend” as “the augmentation of hope and the stirring of ambition.” Do you think the success of current and future political dispensations critically hinges on the reactivation of this hope?

SK: Yes, I do. I think the current dispensation’s electoral success was due to the stirring of hope in a large number of people, especially youth. The actions of governments and the promises and rhetoric of political parties are not motors of voting behavior per se but how these are perceived and worked into the calculus of hope and fear. The disappointment of hope, of having hoped too much or hoped in vain, often releases an anger that is even more deadly to electoral prospects than the promise of hope was to its fortunes.

This interview has been edited and condensed.