Celebrating the life and works of Sudhir Kakar

I first met the eminent Indian psychoanalyst, Sudhir Kakar, on July 22, 1999, at the wedding of the American psychoanalyst John Munder Ross. The elegant three-story brownstone in Manhattan was jam-packed with the glitterati of our psychoanalytic world, Broadway stars, and sundry celebrities of the New York Jewish intelligentsia.

Our meetings over the subsequent 25 years were no less dramatic. Just envision the two of us, leisurely walking along the Atlantic Ocean in Hyannis, Massachusetts, a short distance from the hallowed Kennedy family compound; crunched, along my brother Javed (poet and lyricist), in the backseat of a Mercedes, en route from St Stephen’s College to the Meridian Hotel in Lutyens’ New Delhi; seated on a podium with the popular Urdu poet Nida Fazli at the release of one of my books at the India International Centre; celebrating his 70th birthday on the rooftop terrace of his son’s apartment in New York City; having a drink in the bar of the majestic Taj Mahal Hotel in Lucknow and chatting over coffee in the sun-filled atrium of The Imperial in New Delhi.
The affectionate and mutually respectful bond between us was as unlikely as it was inevitable. Unlikely because we were temperamentally quite different, with I being talkative, brimming with anecdotes, given to spontaneously reciting poetry and him being somewhat shy and unexpectedly taciturn for a charming and ambitious man. Inevitable because we shared, at a deep level, an abiding love of ideas, psychoanalysis, beauty, and creativity. My quiet and meditative self was covert and his flamboyance was veiled. We met infrequently but each encounter was touching and meaningful.
Sudhir Kakar was a seeker in the truest sense of the word. Peripatetic in geography, profession, and passion, Kakar began his life in Nainital (where he was born on July 25, 1938) and then lived in succession in Sargodha (now in Pakistan), Rohtak, New Delhi, Shimla, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Hamburg (Germany), Vienna (Austria), Ahmedabad again, Boston (US), Frankfurt (Germany), New Delhi again, and finally in Goa (where he died on April 21, 2024).
No less dizzying was his passage through careers in mechanical engineering, macroeconomics, psychoanalysis, social anthropology, mysticism, historical fiction, and popular literature. While the novels he wrote during the last two decades of his life — The Ascetic of Desire (2002), The Seeker (2007), and The Crimson Throne (2010) — are widely read, less known is the fact that he had started his career as a short story writer before turning to engineering, economics, and so on.
At the young age of 24, Kakar was already a well-published author. But Kakar’s meteoric rise was due to his tutelage with the great Erik Erikson, the psychic cartographer of concepts like “basic trust”, “identity crisis”, and “generativity”. Sponsored by Erikson, Kakar underwent formal training in psychoanalysis in Frankfurt, Germany. Upon returning to India, he noticed the sharp elbows of Eurocentrism in the theory he had absorbed and thus began to fervently produce a body of work that explicated child development, personality functioning, and sexual life in terms of Indian culture. He thus became a pioneering figure in the shift from the theoretically imperialistic “psychoanalytic anthropology” to a bidirectional and socially nuanced “anthropological psychoanalysis”. His seminal books The Inner World (1978) and Intimate Relations (1990), respectively, opened up new vistas in the understanding of the emotional and erotic life of the people of India.
After the stunning psychoanalytic monograph (Concept of Repression, 1921) of Girindrashekhar Bose, who maintained a correspondence with Sigmund Freud till the latter’s death in 1939, Kakar’s books constituted a renewed and more forceful breakthrough in the application of depth psychology to non-western cultures. Kakar soon gained universal recognition. He taught at Harvard and Columbia Universities, collaborated with the masterful (admittedly, maligned by some in India) Indologist Wendy Doniger, and was held in high esteem by Sir Vidya (the doyen of post-colonial, emigre English fiction, VS Naipaul). He received numerous national and international awards, including Germany’s Goethe Prize for Literature, which made him the only other psychoanalyst after Freud to have been so honoured for his literary skills.
Sudhir died last week but the generative impact of his life will continue to shine through the effort and work of young psychotherapists and psychoanalysts in India and, in fact, throughout the world. To be sure, we mourn his death but equally, we owe him (and ourselves) a proud celebration of his venturesome, passionate (did I mention that he was a professional-level table tennis player?), and an impressively technicolour and creative life. He has left behind a legacy of generosity, authenticity, and wisdom that shall continue to live in our hearts and minds.
Salman Akhtar is an acclaimed psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and poet based in Philadelphia, US. A 10-volume collection of his Selected Papers was recently released at the Freud House and Museum in London. The views expressed are personal