A sprawling, selective and unsatisfactory account of the life of a genius
Sudhir Kakar’s “first-of-its-kind psychobiography”, as the blurb puts it, intends to deepen “our understanding of Rabindranath Tagore”. It is, the author clarifies, an “inner biography” and “not to be confused with ‘psychoanalysis of Tagore’”. Since the clinical situation usually involves a direct exchange of words between the analyst and the analysand, it is impossible to use such a methodology to describe the interior life of a subject who is dead. But the challenge, in Kakar’s case, is also greatly enhanced by his limited access to Tagore’s writing, and the rich literature on it, in Bengali. The result, unsurprisingly, is not salutary.
Those familiar with Tagore’s life and work in the original, or even in translation, will learn nothing that they do not already know about him, or cannot figure out for themselves, if they have some common sense and imagination. In his various memoirs, Tagore made no secret of his feeling neglected while growing up in a family of more than a dozen siblings, with a largely absent and distant father, and a mother who did not live long enough to see him through boyhood. His profound aversion to institutional education, lack of close friends in his early years, and a soft spot for his sister-in-law, Kadambari, are also well documented. Kakar reads this existing wealth of information through the lens of clinical psychoanalysis. We come across terms such as “repetition compulsion”, “screen memory” and “connective imagination”. But do these enrich, extend or complicate our reading of Tagore? Not really, I’m afraid.
A major difficulty of engaging with Kakar’s survey is its sprawling ambition. One is never clearly told what the epithet “young” in the title of the book exactly implies. If one is to expect a comprehensive account of Tagore’s life as a young man, one gets a fair amount of it. But if the idea is to also read his mature years in the light of his early experiences, which seems to be a part of Kakar’s design, one gets a highly selective, and lazy, narrative.
There is but a glancing reference to Tagore’s prose fiction, practically no mention of his musical oeuvre, and precious little about his engagement with other forms of writing, such as the essays and the textbooks he wrote for children. An exploration of Tagore’s dark fantasy for young readers, Shey (translated as “He”, though the Bengali word refers to a gender-neutral pronoun), could have opened up fascinating areas of inquiry. For that matter, a psychoanalytical assessment of Tagore as a father to his own children could have allowed us a nuanced, and more complex, perspective on his own childhood. Kakar writes at length on Tagore’s public persona and private solitude, though Amartya Sen has been far more illuminating on these.
We get rambling digressions on Tagore’s encounter with the civilizations of the East and the West, a chapter on his life as a painter, an activity he did not properly embrace until much later in life, and an intriguing propensity for trite observations.
For example, a painstaking argument is made to establish that “creativity is born from the harmony of conflicting and contrary forces”. There is a glib passage explaining why Tagore was bullied by his schoolmates for pursuing such “effeminate” interests as writing verse: “Boys of this age – and this applies across cultures – admire other boys who are talented in what is considered ‘phallic’ and masculine behaviour”. In the chapter on Tagore’s paintings we are informed: “Eminent artists of both genders almost universally profess that androgyny is critical to artistic productivity.” Statements of this sort – and there is no dearth of them – made me wonder if Kakar wasn’t seriously underestimating his readers’ intelligence or if I was missing something all along (the baggy prose is worse served by lapses such as Mugabodh, on page 74, for Mugdhabodha, the treatise on Sanskrit grammar).
One of my favourite encounters between psychoanalysis and literature is recorded by Virginia Woolf in her diaries. In 1939, Woolf met Sigmund Freud, who had moved from Vienna to London the year before, to escape the Nazis. The octogenarian was dying of a cancer of the throat, which prevented much conversation. But Woolf noted that Freud was a “A screwed up shrunk very old man… inarticulate but alert… an old fire now flickering”. And Freud ceremoniously presented her with a narcissus.
Where there is real sophistication and true understanding, psycho-biography need not be longer than a haiku or more elaborate than the simplest of gestures.
Young Tagore – The Makings of a Genius
Sudhir Kakar
Penguin-Vikin
238 pages; Rs499
