Cultural Continuity and Change in Kakar's Works: Some Reflections

Abstract

This article reviews the works of the well-known psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, centering on the themes of cultural continuities and demographic change. Kakar's works span about three decades and represent sensitive psychoanalytical forays into Indian society and the interpretation of its various cultural processes. In this endeavor, Kakar's concern has been to understand the connection between the subjective imagination accessed mostly in psychoanalytical, clinical work and the cultural processes as manifested in myths and folklore, in popular arts and cinema, in the life histories of historical figures on the Indian firmament, and in the traditions of various systems of Hindu religious philosophy. He has been concerned about the modification of the very tool—the psychoanalytic sensibility (and the theory around it)—that he has so adeptly used, while acknowledging its limitations in creating links with phenomena such as mysticism and communal violence. I have tried to understand the processes of cultural continuity and change by focusing on various images of women and men represented in Kakar's work. Selection of these images is guided by the various expressions of desire, playfulness, the search for a political idiom with which to initiate and sustain cultural changes, etc., as represented by the characters in Kakar's analyses. Analyzing their implications for the issues at hand, a special emphasis is placed on the criticism of Kakar's work by Kurtz. The article concludes with a section on the traditional notion of individuality as it has evolved in selected works by Kakar and other Indian psychoanalytically-oriented authors.