Spiritual science

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: That the Mahatma saw the suppression of sexual cravings as one of his greatest spiritual challenges and sought to test the same by having close women associates share his bed is well known.

Admitting the psychoanalytical possibility that the above experiments bear out an old man’s infantile need for motherly warmth, Sudhir Kakar’s latest book Mad and Divine nonetheless goes on to argue that the Mahatma was a pioneer of a new spirituality: “Whereas artistic and scientific creativity is limited to the individual, creativity in the social and political worlds, Gandhi’s chosen field of action, required that the masses were ready to recognise his inner voice as their own.” Even his political invention par excellence — the satyagraha — had a spiritual goal, to touch the hearts of both the so-called terrorists and the rulers seeking to wipe them out, to have the whole nation admit to the primacy of altruism.

Overall Kakar’s broader concern in the book is reconciling the science of psychoanalysis with the discipline of spirituality, whether it is with reference to hagiographies or common, everyday religious rituals. In training as a psychoanalyst, he remembers feeling that he was being led away from his native Indian imagination, into a Freudian worldview where all gods had feet of clay and all ritualistic performance had to be viewed with suspicion. Times have however changed. No longer is modernity considered incompatible with the wondrous narratives that form the core of divinely inflected experiences, altering states of consciousness much as the analyst seeks to do.