An introduction to Indian Freud, thanks to Ashis Nandy

The one thing I really enjoy about Delhi, beyond the city, beyond the food, is that Delhi as a city gives you an opportunity to meet and listen to people, the extraordinary and ordinary, talking of history, memory and adventure.

There is a huge bouquet of options but I guess the favourite is India International Centre, cosmopolitan enough to contain a lecture of Kashmir, a discussion with Medha Patkar and lecture by Ashis Nandy on the same evening.

Legend

I arrive early with a bunch of students all keen to see a man who excited a whole generation with his ideas. He is late. I bump into Medha Patkar. It is like enacting a pilgrimage. The woman is a living legend, a Cassandra who along with Aruna Roy, Teesta Setalvad gave voice to the voiceless, talks of the injustice to the Narmada oustees.

She asks me to write, asks us all to remember Narmada. For her more than displacement, the act of forgetting becomes even more criminal as routine like a drug flatters our lives. Medha is hurrying to the airport. One feels fortunate to have said hello to a woman whose courage and persistence, in fact tenacity, has been legendary.

It is like shaking hands with Joan of Arc. Medha disappears and one waits for Nandy. Between tea and biscuits, the man floats in. He is tipping 80 and yet still plays the bottle imp, complains that his recent claims to respectability are wearing him out.

He has come to give the third Freud lecture. Ancestors are important for Nandy not to worship, or create genealogies, but to converse. The ancestor becomes lens, mirror and kaleidoscope for a subject and he proceeds to capture psychology, more particularly Freud in India.

Nandy loves conversation, ideas and one can see him light up with anecdotes. No one enjoys an anecdote more than Nandy. It is an aperitif to intellectual life. He talks of Freud like a character in a café or nukkad. Freud in Vienna gets domesticated to Freud in Calcutta and tacitly, there is a sense of the affinity in the intellectual life of the two cities.

Calcutta becomes another pretext for inventing and domesticating and translating the West. There is laughter and poignancy as the city wrestles with each great intellectual and idea. For Nandy, the Indian encounter with the enlightenment needs to be chronicled.

It is an encounter with Freud, Marx, Darwin, each upsetting, each refreshing in its own way. Marx and Freud have run their course. In fact, each now desperately demands to be reinvented but Nandy says Freud is replete with possibilities.

India greeted Freud differently from his reception in the West. India was not Victorian. In fact, we took the sexuality almost casually. As he hinted, even grand aunts and housewives read Freud with a straight face. It was not sexuality that bothered them but the other aspects of the Freudian myth. It was as if the Indian storyteller was desperate to rework new possibilities.

Analysis

Nandy talks of Girindrasekhar Bose, the father of Freudian psychology tells of how one of his daughters visited Freud. She arrives at Freud's house to find Freud is a dog lover and she is mortally scared of dogs.

Freud greets her and asks "didn't your father tell you what fear of dogs means?" Unfazed, the woman writes in her memoirs that she wished she could psychoanalyse his love for dogs in the same way.

The openness of India leaves the expert and the doctor as vulnerable to analysis. The attention slowly shifts to Nandy.

Freud oddly becomes a text and then pretext to view one of India's most playfully inventive social scientists. He is fascinating to watch and listen to even as he peddles his favourite anecdotes.

The West comes alive in a different way as even its otherness becomes a part of us. He talks of Kipling, the orientalist and imperialist, talks of Kipling's greatest creation Kim. In Kim and through Kim and his companion the Lama, Kipling the white imperialist suddenly creates a critique of the West.

For a moment Kipling and Tagore become improbable siblings in their critique of the West. The alien and the familiar are merely two layers in the icing called life.

Curiosity

The audience is fascinated by the man and his work, wondering what made him different from the standard stuffy social scientist playing second fiddle to the World Bank. Some think it is his style, the stray dog curiosity that made him shift from medicine, to sociology, to psychoanalysis.

Others feel it is his ability to hybridise the eccentric and the dissenter, which allows him to tease out possibilities and keep them alive. Some worry or more wonder about his silences, think of fields he has not or does not want to talk about.

But what is moving is to see three generations of social scientists struggle, wrestle, content with the work and achievements of the man. Nandy is vintage scholarship, not the forgotten flavour of the week or a part of an idiot list of 50 important Indians. The creativity of the man, his perennial playfulness eludes such idiot clichés.

The audience is a beehive of memories and expectations, each wanting to add a little story, each wanting to find out a little more about the man. A vintage evening, where a wonderful scholar lets the audience go home with a wonderful feeling.

The event itself becomes a tribute to the quality of the man and his style of work.

(Courtesy of Mail Today.)