Oedipus in India

In his oft-quoted footnote added in 1920 to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud declared:

It has justly been said that the Oedipus complex is the nuclear complex of the neuroses, and constitutes the essential part of their content. It represents the peak of infantile sexuality, which, through its after-effects, exercises a decisive influence on the sexuality of adults. Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis. With the progress of psycho-analytic studies the importance of the Oedipus complex has became more and more clearly evident; its recognition has become the shibboleth that distinguishes the adherents of psycho-analysis from its opponents.

(1905; 1955; 2000: 92)

Even earlier, in Totem and Taboo, first published in 1905, Freud had started calling the Oedipus complex ‘the nuclear complex of the neurosis’ (1913; 1950; 2001: 149–150). The importance to Freud of the Oedipal complex is underscored by his repeated use of the word ‘nuclear’, thus emphasizing how central it is to psychoanalysis itself. For instance, later in the same book, he posits that the ‘two crimes’ of Oedipus corresponding to the two ‘primal wishes’ of children that form ‘the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis’ (ibid.: 153). In his concluding section, Freud returns to the Oedipus complex, emphasizing how it ‘constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses’ (ibid.: 182), and how ‘the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object – lies at the root of many important cultural institutions’ (ibid.). Again, in his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud repeats how ‘the Oedipus complex may justly be regarded as the nucleus of the neuroses’ (1916–17; 1978a: 337) as he does in ‘A Child is Being Beaten’: ‘the Oedipus complex is the actual nucleus of neuroses, and the infantile sexuality which culminates in this complex is the true determinant of neuroses’ (Freud 1919; 1978b: 193).

For Freud, the complex was universal. The curse on Oedipus is also upon us: ‘His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him’ (1900; 1955; 2010: 280). All of us, Freud believed, directed our ‘first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father’ (ibid.). No wonder in Totem and Taboo, Freud posited incest and patricide as universal taboos that were common to all civilizations, indeed as the primary constituents of all civilization, the source of conscience, morality and guilt. In the concluding section of this book, he avers:

I should like to insist that … the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex. This is in complete agreement with the psycho-analytic finding that the same complex constitutes the nucleus of all neuroses, so far as our present knowledge goes. It seems to me a most surprising discovery that the problems of social psychology, too, should prove soluble on the basis of one single concrete point – man’s relation to his father.

(1913; 1950; 2001: 182)

So convinced of this thesis was Freud that he never deviated from it.

In its own heyday, Freud’s formulation was challenged by Bronislaw Malinowski who, during extensive fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, found no evidence of the Oedipus complex among the matrilineal Melanesians. He published the results of his study in German as early as 1924 and in English in his classic Sex and Repression in Savage Society. Malinowski concluded that the applicability of the Oedipus complex ‘is restricted to the Aryan, patriarchal society’ (1927; 2001: 137). More importantly, Malinowski pointed out a fundamental problem with placing the Oedipus complex at the originary moment of civilizations. But how, if it is the cause of civilization, can it be read civilizationally in the first place? In other words, the taboo can only be imposed and internalized after the event, which, when it first occurs, cannot logically be read in terms of totem or taboo. The ‘complex’, thus, cannot come to be recognized as such until it has been interpreted in terms of totem and taboo, which occurs after its occurrence. As Malinowski puts it:

I have pointed out repeatedly that the Great Tragedy has been placed by Freud at the threshold of culture and as its inaugural act … [I]t is important to realize that this is an assumption indispensable to their theories: all their hypotheses would collapse if we do not make culture begin with the Totemic Parricide.

(1927; 2001: 129)

But, as Malinowski argued, this founding event is absent in matrilineal societies, thereby undermining it universal applicability.

Freud, however, was able to deflect from too literal a reading of the Oedipus archetype by explaining that

The Oedipus complex has a merely ‘symbolic’ meaning: the mother in it means the unattainable, which must be renounced in the interests of civilization; the father who is killed in the Oedipus myth is the ‘inner’ father, from whom one must set oneself free in order to become independent.

(1914a: 62)

In effect, while Freud continued to insist on the universality of the complex, his moving it to the symbolic plane made it possible to look for cultural variations or local differences in how it was expressed or worked out.

This is precisely what India’s pioneering psychoanalyst Girindrasekhar Bose (1887–1953) did. Bose wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at Calcutta University in 1921 on the ‘Concept of Repression’, where he tried to blend insights from Hindu psychology with Freudian ideas. Bose’s bold act of sending this thesis to Freud led to a 20-year correspondence, which Bose subsequently published (Bose 1964). Bose was also instrumental in forming the Indian Psychoanalytic Society in Calcutta in 1922. Some of Bose’s ideas, including the importance of mothers rather than fathers to Indian children and the Indian male’s wish to be a female shaped the whole course of subsequent work by Indian psychoanalysts including Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy. Christiane Hartnack’s Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (2001) offers a detailed and fascinating account of this encounter, summed up in the very readable summary ‘Freud on Garuda’s Wings: Psychoanalysis in Colonial India’: In his correspondence with Freud, Bose explicitly pointed to the importance of the maternal deities in his culture. Other Indian psychoanalysts even criticized classical Freudian psychoanalysis for being a product of a ‘Father religion or Son religion.’

(Hartnack 2003: 10)

Bose sent Freud 13 of his articles on psychoanalysis, underscoring his differences with the latter: ‘I would draw your particular attention to my paper on the Oedipus wish where I have ventured to differ from you in some respects’ (Hartnack 2001: 148). In an essay presented in 1928 to the Indian Psychoanalytic Association, referenced in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (Oct. 1929, Part 4), and later published in Samiksha: Journal of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society, Bose declared:

The super-ego must be conquered and the ability to castrate the father and make him into a woman is an essential requisite for the adjustment of the Oedipus wish; the Oedipus is resolved not by the threat of castration, but by the ability to castrate.

(Bose 1964: 237)

Earlier in the same paper he also said, ‘The desire to be a woman or its modification the castration wish is regularly discernible in all analyses’ (ibid.: 231).

Commenting on how Freud himself might have taken these culturalist modifications of his theory, Hartnack wryly observes:

Perhaps Freud, in the privacy of his diary, expressed a premonition that, like the statuette of Vishnu, psychoanalysis would not travel easily. In Bengali joint families in the early part of the twentieth century, the biological father was only one of several patriarchal figures, and the biological mother just one of several maternal authorities.

(Hartnack 2003: 10)

Bose’s important Indian modifications to the Oedipus complex force us to think not only of weak fathers and threatening mothers in the Indian context, but also of the desire to be a woman or to be castrated in Indian males. Perhaps Nandy’s observations on Gandhi’s androgyny may fruitfully be linked to Bose’s hypothesis. Strong mothers and boys not with a castration anxiety but with a castration wish certainly mitigate the threatening or coercive aspect of the Oedipus complex that creates neurosis in the first place. Does this mean that Oedipus is neither as neurotic-making or anxiety-inducing in India as it is in Europe?

Without quite being aware of Bose’s work, it was A. K. Ramanujan who carried out the most extensive search for the Indian Oedipus to answer such questions. Ramanujan published an early version of this essay in Indian Literature (1972); a decade later he expanded and rewrote the essay for Oedipus: A Folklore Casebook (1983) and revised in 1984; finally the essay found its way into his Collected Essays. Ramanujan starts ‘The Indian Oedipus’ with this observation:

Searching for stories of the Oedipus type (Tale Type 931) some years ago in the myth and folklore of the Indic area (i.e. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), I found very little that looked like the Sophocles play, where a young man kills his father and marries his mother.

(Ramanujan 1999: 376)

Ramanujan was following in the footsteps of scholars like Philip Spratt, whose work he acknowledges: ‘Others have searched before me (e.g., Spratt 1966) and concluded that Indian narrative has no Oedipal tales, and therefore, of course, Indians have no Oedipus-complex’ (Ramanujan 1999: 378). After trawling in vain in not only through the Vedic and Puranic lore, the closest Ramanujan comes to finding anything similar to Oedipus in India is a Kannada folktale. But here it is the mother who is accursed with the knowledge that her son will impregnate her, something she tries very hard to avert but, in the end, cannot, and therefore kills herself. As Ramanujan observes, ‘The most striking difference between the Kannada tale and the Greek myth is the absence of the father and hence of patricide. There are very, very few stories of actual patricide in Hindu myth, literature and folklore’ (1999: 385).

When Ramanujan’s essay was first published in 1971, he had not read R. P. Goldman’s paper ‘Fathers, Sons and Gurus: Oedipal Conflict in the Sanskrit Epics’ which was published in 1978. In the revised version Ramanujan, following Goldman, shows that the direction of the Oedipal conflict is reversed in Indian narratives, with violent and domineering fathers and submissive or obedient sons. But it is through the latter’s very act of obedience or submission that they become heroes and thus ‘constitute the ego-ideal for Hindu men’ (Goldman 1978: 364). In several stories, such as Rama’s, Bhishma’s or Yayati’s, ‘the son willingly gives up (often transfers) his political and sexual potency’ (Ramanujan 1999: 385) to the father figure. In the case of Ganesh, where his father, Shiva, beheads him, ‘The Freudian implications of the father beheading the son or breaking off his tusk are obvious’ (ibid.: 386). In nearly all cases of intergenerational conflict, the elders usually win, forcing the younger challengers to eat humble pie. Consider the humbling of all the five Pandavas, for example, each meeting with a superior adversary, a real or substitute father, who breaks their pride. When the younger hero does vanquish his elder, as in Arjuna’s killing Bhishma, it is only because the latter teaches him how to do so, thus sanctioning his own defeat or death at the hands of the younger hero. The only exception, as Ramanujan points out (ibid.: 387–388), is Krishna’s slaying of his uncle Kamsa, but Kamsa is not the father and Krishna is, after all divine, so quite above the rule. Indeed, it is Krishna who not only defeats Indra, the king of heaven, but also incites Arjuna to kill his elders in Kurukshetra, quite against the established trend.

Continuing his investigation, it is no surprise that Ramanujan finds in India a pattern rather at variance with the European:

Instead of sons desiring mothers and overcoming fathers (e.g., Oedipus) and daughters loving fathers and hating mothers (e.g. Electra), most often we have fathers (or father-figures) suppressing sons and desiring daughters, and mothers desiring sons and ill-treating or exiling daughters or daughter-figures.

(Ramanujan 1999: 392)

Ramanujan’s key conclusion is by now almost predictable: ‘The structural matrix of relations and actors is the same, but the direction is in reverse’ (ibid.: 392). Speculating on the ‘problem of psychoanalytic universals’ Ramanujan concludes that relations between fathers, mothers, sons and daughters are ‘not culture-free’: ‘While inter-generational competition … seems universal, the direction of aggression and desire, and the outcome, seem different in different cultures’ (ibid.: 393).

Ramanujan was not aware of another attempt made long before his study to prove that the Oedipus complex was in evidence in India. George Devereux in ‘The Oedipal Situation and its Consequences in the Epics of Ancient India’, an essay published in Samiksha: Journal of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in 1951, argued that the great Indian epics ‘seem to reflect in an almost undisguised form a cluster of attitudes and fantasies which center about the Oedipus complex, the primal scene, the latency period and the revival of the Oedipus complex during puberty’ (1951: 3). However, both of the examples he supplies, of Kalmashapada and Pandu, do not illustrate either incest or patricide. Therefore, his conclusions about the universality of the Oedipus complex do not seem tenable:

This finding contradicts the criticism that the nature (as distinct from the form and content) of the basic Freudian mechanisms is culturally determined, or else that they are a response to the analyst’s overt or devious suggestions.

(Devereux 1951: 13)

On the contrary, Ramanujan’s findings suggest that the stories and their internal structures take different forms in different cultures.

Reiterating that ‘In Hindu history no major instance (to my lay mind) seems to be recorded where a son overthrows or assassinates his father and usurps the throne’ (Ramanujan 1999: 396), Ramanujan asks if this absence is itself because of repression. After all, there are several such recorded instances in the history of Muslim rule in India (ibid.). Actually, there are a few instances in history of patricide, one of which is the belief that the Maghadhan king Bimbisara was imprisoned and starved to death by his son Ajatashatru. Similarly, Buddhist texts allege that Ashoka killed 99 of his brothers, sparing only one, Tissa (see Singh 2008). In that sense, Ramanujan is right in wondering if the taboo against patricide was ‘so great that Hindu historians have repressed any such instances?’ (1999: 396). At any rate, Ramanujan reiterates that ‘There are no Prometheus or Cronos figures overthrowing or defying the elder gods in Indian mythology’ (ibid.). He wonders if that might change with ‘changes in Indian family, child-rearing, economy and politics?’ (ibid.). While Ramanujan, quite modestly, admits ‘I have no clear answer’ (ibid.), I would like to suggest that Godse’s unprecedented transgression is what makes it and him so modern. He has, in a radical sense, broken with thousands of years of history and culture to kill Gandhi. This is what makes his act so unbearable to the Indian psyche.

From this extensive review, it is clear that patricide is not only very rare in Hindu tradition but, in a sense, ‘impossible’. This is underscored by how murderous father-figures, who are scared of being dislodged from power by the next generation, are transformed from fathers to uncles. The best example of such a child devouring ‘father’ is Kamsa, the maternal uncle or mama of Krishna. It is also interesting that another mama, Shakuni, causes the carnage at Kurukshetra by cheating at the game of dice to defeat the Pandavas and usurp their kingdom. Similarly Dhritarashtra, the blind uncle of the Pandavas, connives in the latter’s banishment after the failure of an earlier plot, which he has approved of, to eliminate them in the house of lac. Uncles there may be, but there are no murderous fathers in India. This preponderance of evil uncles is clearly a kind of displacement: evil, scheming fathers are ‘inadmissible’ and such possibilities are repressed and displaced onto uncles. In addition, if the uncle is the mother’s brother, then he also serves as a useful ally to her in her battle with her husband for dominance and supremacy.

In any case, there is no Hindu equivalent of Abraham, ready to sacrifice his first-born son to a jealous God. Both the idea of a fiercely possessive and omnipotent monotheistic deity and a father willing to kill his own offspring do not have their counterparts in Hindu myths. True, some fathers fail their sons, as Nachiketas’ father does, sending the latter inadvertently to the world of Yama or death; but Nachiketas not only learns the secret of immortality from the God of Death, but also asks for the boon that his father will not miss him now that he is no more in the world of the living. Rama, too, hearing of his father’s promise to the latter’s favourite queen, Kaikeyi, betakes himself to the forest even before his father can utter the decree of banishment. It is, if anything, a voluntary exile and renunciation of the throne to honour a father’s word. Even if fathers falter or fail, sons do not turn against them, let alone rise to castrate or kill them. Perhaps a largely benevolent father and a usually dutiful son are the Hindu norm, thus defying the Oedipal pattern. Kosambi, who considered Freud’s theory inadequate and ‘arbitrary from the ethnographer’s point of view’ agreed with Malinowski that the dynamics of the Oedipal complex changed in matrilineal or matrilocal societies. In the latter, ‘when the maternal uncle occupies the position of authority in the house and over the children’ instead of the father (Kosambi 1956: 51), it would make perfect sense for the uncle to be killed instead of the father as in Kamsa’s case.

We thus see two distinct variations on Oedipus in India. First, following Bose’s line, sons becoming men not by overthrowing fathers, but by resisting and overcoming the influence of domineering mothers. Second, following Ramanujan, domineering fathers who defeat sons or sons who voluntarily accept defeat or transfer potency to their aging fathers. In either case, though, patricide is rendered impossible. Instead, dutiful sons end up deferring to the authority of fathers.

In this light, we may attempt to gauge the enormity of Godse’s crime. Nathuram’s assassination of Gandhi may be seen in psychoanalytic terms as the dutiful son’s revenge on an unfaithful father in order to uphold the honour of the wronged mother. It is, in that sense, very much an honour killing. The mother, defenceless and betrayed, who cannot act except through her son is, of course, not just Mother India but the Hindu rashtra or the Hindu nation itself. Evidently there is some gender trouble here, because the rashtra is a very masculinist construct while the idea of Bharat Mata definitely feminine. The Mother Goddess, moreover, even in the form of the nation, is not only richly endowed, both with ornaments and weapons, but can by no means be considered passive and powerless, even at her most benign. Nathuram’s ideological and psychological confusion may be seen in his notion that she, who is often referred to as ‘he’, is powerless and weak, requiring him to protect her/his honour. In such a narrative, Gandhi the Father of the Nation is untrue to the Hindu rashtra and therefore must be punished for his act of infidelity. Such an Oedipal reading of Godse’s act may go some way to explaining the horror that Gandhi’s death induces in the Hindu mind. It may also explain India’s traumatic tryst with both the nation and with modernity, the latter being inaugurated with a series of heinous killings, starting with the colonial British power’s hanging of Nandakumar, the first such execution of a Brahmin, to Nathuram’s patricide. Nathuram is thus unwittingly not merely a modern Indian, but also a product of colonialism, looking for strong masculine authority figures who must protect Mother India, now enfeebled by alien rule and Partition and betrayed by weak men. But for most Hindus, patricide is still an unspeakable crime and must be erased from the nation’s collective memory. Hence the unresolved question over Gandhi’s death, with the epochal event remaining never fully accounted for in the national imaginary, but usually explained away as sacrifice or martyrdom. Hence all those narratives on the Mahatma in museums and exhibitions never really dealing with the killing itself but always leading back in a circular fashion to his life.