Sudhir Kakar
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A brief biography
Avijit Ghosh, April 24, 2024: The Times of India
New Delhi : Sudhir Kakar psychoanalysed India’s past and present producing an extraordinary broadsweep of nuanced and pioneering work on subjects as diverse as religion and medicine, communal violence and sexuality.
Prominent French newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur once listed him among the world’s 25 major thinkers. Leading German weekly Die Zeit profiled him as one of 21 important thinkers of 21st century. Among other places, he also taught at Harvard and IIM, Ahmedabad and wrote copiously authoring at least 25 books of non-fiction and fiction.
“From Taylor’s system of scientific management to Sri Aurobindo’s mysticism to the classical texts of ancient Indian and Western philosophy, few social scientists have displayed such a terrific sweep as him,” said social scientist Shiv Visvanathan.
Born in Nainital, Kakar grew up in a mélange of cities such as Sargodha (now in Pakistan), Simla and New Delhi. In his learning too, he moved from one discipline to another earning bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Gujarat University, masters in business economics from Mannheim in Germany and doctorate in economics from Vienna.
Kakar trained as a psychoanalyst in Frankfurt’s SigmundFreud Institute and set up a clinic in Delhi where he also became head of department of humanities and social sciences at Indian Institute of Technology.
“At the beginning of my practice in India, I was acutely aware of my internal struggle between my inherited HinduIndian culture and the Freudian psychoanalytic culture that I had recently acquired and in which I was professionally socialised…. My work then has revolved around seeking to bridge these two cultural universes,” he told online magazine Scroll in 2016.
Over the years, Kakar produced a rich body of work investigating the Indian identity in every hue. Shamans, Mystics and Doctors explored the multiple ways in which India's healing traditions dealt with emotional disorder. The Colours of Violence analysed the psychological aspect of communal violence. The Ascetic of Desire was a riveting fictional account of the life of ancient Indian sage, Vatsyayana, author of Kamasutra. Another novel, Mira and the Mahatma, used imagination to explore the association between Madeline Slade and Mahatma Gandhi.
Kakar had the gift of imbuing lucidity and bringing perspective to complex ideas. At a Litfest in 2015, he spoke up against intolerance, especially right-wing extremists. He pointed out that from the fifth to the seventh century AD, ancient India too was in the grip of “culture wars.”
“Then it was the vision of human life. Should it be sensual and erotic? Or, should it be moral and spiritual? That was being contested. What we are witnessing now is another culture war between the liberal and conservative views of life. It is interesting how the past keeps repeating itself,” he said. Visvanathan says that Kakar displayed a deep understanding of power, asked the right questions. “But sometimes his answers were inadequate. There was a need for a wider philosophical questioning which he had to have but then his books would have been of a different length,” he said.
The psychoanalyst-writer believed in the innate strength of Indian civilisation. “What is needed is a revival of an ‘idea of India’ that has deep roots in our civilisation and to which our greatest cultural icons have borne witness, namely that each one of us is deeply embedded with other human beings as also connected to animate and inanimate nature, a connectedness that demands a cultivation of sympathy for all that is not self,” Kakar wrote in TOIin 2019.
Social commentator and columnist Santosh Desai sums up the man. “Kakar’s was a foundational voice that decoded the psyche of the Indian with great depth, insight and lyricism,” he says. Kakar, who lived much of his later life in Goa, was married to Katharina Poggendorf-Kakar, a scholar of comparative religions and a visual artist.
