E-Paper
Kakar's Meera and the Mahatma
Psychonalyst Sudhir Kakar disentangles Mahatma Gandhi from modern noise, with a sublime, sensual portrait of him.
For most Indians, Gandhiji is an anachronism receding rapidly from physical memory. Ever elusive, either we discuss him as a political being, or as an experimenter with celibacy. It's about time someone disentangled him from modern noise, and Sudhir Kakar does so with a sublime, sensual portrait of the Mahatma.
Kakar, a psychoanalyst, isn't the first professional to try and get under Gandhiji's skin: psychologist Eric Ericson tried as much in 1969, emerging with some Freudian mumbo-jumbo that was part trivialisation, part gratuitous, in dealing with Gandhiji's relationships with women. Gandhiji himself tried self-analysis in his autobiography (tormenting himself for enjoying conjugal bliss during his father's final moments), but that story was more a spiritual journey than an explicitly temporal one.
Kakar tries to merge the two while weaving fact with fiction in the story of Gandhiji's relationship with Madeleine Slade, the daughter of an admiral who left a life of English rural nobility to join Gandhiji's Sabarmati ashram. She was christened Mira, after the Rajasthani Rajput princess who spurned her world of royalty for a life of devotion to Lord Krishna. Mira and the Mahatma did not have a simple relationship, and Kakar does not try to simplify it, instead depicting it as intertwined vines of devotion, affection and sexuality.
What stands out is the physicality of Kakar's Gandhiji: "His childlike smile, framed by a straggly gray moustache and exposing five missing front teeth, introduced an odd feeling of protectiveness in the affection and reverence they felt for him." As a literary device, it makes Gandhiji immediate. Philosophically, it makes clear Gandhiji's metaphysics of mastering biology. "What people listen to is your life, not your ideas," he tells Navin, Kakar's alter-ego in the story.
And in Gandhiji's pursuit of extra-corporeal ideals, we witness details. Gandhiji is so remorseful when three boys in the ashram are caught in homosexual acts that he goes on a fast with a meticulous regimen. He makes a thorough examination of the dalit Shyam's smelly faeces to find out what went wrong with the ever-changing diet. And in a rage, Gandhiji slaps an enthusiastic German lady whose huge breasts brush against him.
Gandhiji's relationship with Mira was naturally tumultuous, since she was from her childhood a solitary and quiet figure innately drawn to mysticism and nature. At the same time, however, she unconsciously saw desire as the highest expression of the eternal. Wherein Gandhiji tried to separate the two, she saw them as one.
In providing a context to their attachment Kakar details two other of Mira's relationships. In her early life, she is obsessed with Beethoven (and spends her last years retracing his steps). And in the 1930s, she becomes infatuated with Prithvi Singh Azad, a hotheaded revolutionary, who, sadly, is simply not attracted to her. One is a love that's purely abstract; the other, given Prithvi's animal presence, is pure desire. Did Gandhiji fall between the two, or were her feelings for him a synergy of the two? Kakar's genius is that he leaves us to ponder the point.
