Sons And Lovers

It took a longer time for Pran to become aware of the terror his mothers overwhelming invasiveness inspired in the little boy and his helpless rage in dealing with it. He railed, and continues to do so, at her selfishness which kept him bound to her and wept at memories of countless occasions when she would ridicule his efforts to break away from her in play with other boys, or in the choice of his workplace, clothes or friends. She has destroyed his masculinity, he feels. As a boy, she made him wash her underclothes, squeeze out the discharge from her nipples, oil her hair and pluck out the grey ones on an almost daily basis. The birth of his four daughters, he felt, was due to this feminization which had made his semen weak. He realised that all his manly activities were not only in pursuit of individuation as a man, or even in a quest for pleasure but also because they would lacerate the mother. I always wanted to hurt her and at the same time I could not do without her. She has been raping me ever since I

was born, he once said.

Often, as he lies there, abusing the mother, with a blissful expression on his face reflecting her close presence, I cannot help but feel that this is nindastuti, worship of a divinity through insult, denigration and contempt, [a] recognised relationship of a Hindu devotee with a divinity.

I have selected this particular vignette from my case histories because in its palette of stark, primary colours and in its lack of complex forms and subtle shades, it highlights, even caricatures, a dominant theme in the analysis of many male Hindu Indians. Judged by its frequency of occurrence in clinical work and in its pre-eminence in the Hindu cultural imagination, the theme of what I call maternal enthrallment and the issue of the boys separation from the overwhelming maternal feminine rather than the dilemmas of Oedipus appears to be the hegemonic (to use the fashionable Gramscian term) narrative of the Hindu family drama. It is the cornerstone in the architecture of the male self. The reason why I mention cultural imagination in conjunction with clinical work when advancing a generalised psychoanalytic proposition about the Indian cultural context, is simple. Clinical psychoanalysis is generally limited to a small sample from three or four large Indian metropolises. It cannot adequately take into

account the heterogeneity of a country of eight hundred million people with its regional, linguistic, religious and caste divisions. Clinical cases can, at best, generate hypotheses about cultural particularities. The further testing of these hypotheses is done (and remains true to psychoanalytic intention and enterprise) by testing them in the crucible of the cultures imagination.

The kind of maternal enthrallment and the prolonged mother-son symbiosis I have described in this particular vignette, including the peek-a-boo, was-it-or-was-it-not incest, would ordinarily be associated with much greater pathology in analytic case conferences in Europe and North America. Prans level of functioning, however, is quite impressive in spite of his many inhibitions and anxieties, especially sexual. I wonder how much of this kind of psychoanalytical expectation that Pran is sicker than what I believe to be actually the case, is due to a cultural contamination creeping into the clinical judgement of his sexual differentiation and separation-individuation processes. For instance, is the psychoanalytic evaluation of Prans undoubted feminisation and a certain lack of differentiation also being influenced by a Western cultural imagination on what it means to be, look, think and behave like a man or a woman?

This becomes clearer if one thinks of Greek or Roman sculpture with their hard, muscled mens bodies and chests without any fat at all and compares it with the sculpted representations of Hindu gods or the Buddha where the bodies are softer, suppler and, in their hint of breasts, nearer to the female form.