Tuesday, May 8, 2012

A Book of Memory - Sudhir Kakar



One of India's most celebrated psychoanalysts, Sudhir Kakar, may have analysed the psyche of scores of men and women in the course of his practice of 36 years. However his recent book, A Book of Memory, is an attempt to examine his own self on the couch. Through this book of autobiography he has tried to present and analyse the journey of his life.

Kakar's childhood coincides with a period in history when the twin nations-- India and Pakistan-- were born and when they were both taking the baby steps with all their pain and predicament. It was in the backdrop of the tumultuous period of partition that he grew as a child. So the story of his childhood also relates the pangs of unwanted and unpleasant separation of the people from the innocent view of a child.

Son of a senior bureaucrat and the grandson of a leading surgen of Lahore he enjoyed special care as a child. He attended some of the well known public schools in Delhi and Shimla and finally took up a conventional course in engineering that his parents had already decided for him in the mid fifties in Ahmedabad. Ironically it was this period of his stay in Ahmedabad in the company of his aunt and her charmed circle that shaped the course of his future career as a practising, researching and writing psychoanalyst in the years to come.

Sudhir Kakar is living in what he calls the 'Vanprastha' of his life in Goa at present.