The chaotic and almost oxymoronic character of Sudhir and Katharina Kakar’s engagingly written portrait of Indians is signaled by the sentence, “the cultural part of our personal identity, modern neuro science tells us, is wired into our brains.” Culture as sticky neurons we cannot get over is an idea that needs more philosophical unpacking. But there is something brave and outlandishly politically incorrect about the authors’ claims that there are such things as essential cultural attributes of peoples; that these are difficult to overcome and exercise their dominion over us, even when we are unaware of them and these attributes are shared by most Indians. But at crucial moments in the argument they skirt the crucial question. Are these attributes endogenous to forms of social organisation, or do they survive large scale social transformation? Will deeper penetration by capitalism and globalization preserve these national characteristics? Or will the only feature of our national character that will remain be, as Bhudev Mukhopadhya once feared, our toilet habits? Each chapter hedges its bets by gesturing in the direction of change, rather than immutability and the cumulative effect is to make you wonder whether the authors have written, not so much a portrait of Indians, as an elegy for an India that is fast vanishing. But whatever the complications over what exactly the authors are claiming, the result is an interesting rumination. The important thing is that this book is largely about national character rather than national identity. It is about the cultural traits that govern us, not the symbols that we identify with to create meaning. Most of the material in this book will come as no surprise to readers of Sudhir Kakar’s previous forays into the India Self in his studies of childhood, medicine, sexuality, caste, nationalism, history and communalism. So what are we like? Predictably, Indians are hierarchical, obeisant; mentally enraptured by the joint family, personality oriented rather than rational legal; susceptible to charisma; incapable of saying a frank no (not out of politeness but out of the need for face saving); vulnerable to in group collectivism and narcissism; obsessed with inner purity; incapable of repudiating caste obligations; worried about an afterlife that is still stamped by caste and family patriarchal; obsessed with the perfect union but confused about love, aware of eroticism but containing it through myriad psychic interdictions; less prone to dichotomous gender differentiation, anxious about the histories that craft us into religious communities; a paradoxical combination of rigidity in identity combined with great flexibility in practice; in the grip of ritual and pilgrimage, though whether for material or spiritual ends is not clear; given to sensitive contextualisation, as if our judgments were always hemmed in by a ceteris paribus clause. Readers can judge for themselves how much they recognise of themselves in these descriptions and how much they think these are hard wired. And even if you don’t recognise yourself in this portrait, worry not, as any good psychoanalyst will tell you, the most important determinant of who you are is the one you recognise the least. It is curious that a book that so touchingly recounts the context sensitivity of Indians does not have a single sentence that is not a generalisation of some kind. But then we might also have the gift of dialectically reconciling opposites. As a piece of social science and as a prognostication of our possibilities, this book is, at best, an uneven achievement. Some of the chapters on the politics of nationalism contain valuable historical insights; but these are less due to the peculiarities of our psyche than problems generic to all nationalisms. But it is nevertheless a good book to read, as a think piece. The book is full of incidental insights, admirably unbullying and discusses subjects rarely discussed in writing. But how Indians can be so easily deciphered and made legible will remain something of a mystery.
