Whether or not we agree with Basanta Kumar Mallik’s assertion that Gandhi’s assassination was ‘a radical break with past historical patterns’ (Sondhi 2008: 294), his reading of the outcome of the event bears serious consideration. Mallik believed the assassination had inaugurated an era of ‘widespread scepticism that simultaneously neutralized all major traditions’ catapulting the world ‘into a stage of non-triumphal ism, where no traditional scheme could any longer command comprehensive faith and allegiance’ (ibid.: 377–378). What interests me in Mallik’s analysis is not only his evolutionary idea of history, which he shares with other thinkers of his time including Jean Gebser, but his assertion that we would have to search for alternatives in the ‘realm of Non Absolutes’ [italics in original] (ibid.: 378). Perhaps, for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari the failed revolution of May 1968 in France also marked a similar break with the past. Certainly, it propelled them to inaugurate a new critical praxis called schizoanalysis, which showed us a way to dismantle the master narrative not only of universal Marxism but also universal Freudism, the latter most aptly symbolized by the straitjacket termed Oedipus. Their attempt too was not to replace one quest for totality by another, but rather to look at splitting and fragmenting both the subject and the object as the means to freedom. It is not in totality that we can find answers, but in fragments.
Jumping from Gandhi’s assassination to Deleuze and Guattari may at first seem strange, but serves an important purpose. There is the strange but convincing family resemblance that must be explored. Even if we do not call it a family resemblance, we must certainly not lose out on the immense creative potential of putting (pitting) them in contrapuntal juxtaposition. Both Gandhi and Deleuze and Guattari share a passionate, somewhat anarchic, commitment to freedom. Even if the former is holistic while the latter is fragmentary, what is overriding is the liberative thrust of their work. The kind of freedom that Deleuze and Guattari strove for is surely homologous to Gandhi’s own concept of moksha. For Gandhi ‘Freedom from all bondage is moksha’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 343). To quote from Michel Foucault’s Preface, Deleuze and Guattari regard freedom as ‘living counter to all forms of fascism’, finding a way out of ‘all unitary and totalizing paranoia’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: xiii). Both views have in common their commitment to break free from all forms of bondage and damaging authority. Secondly, both Gandhi and Deleuze and Guattari help in our fight against colonialism – not just political, but psychological. After reading Gandhi’s murder in Oedipal terms, it would not be proper to leave it at that, without offering a way out. Repression should not be replaced by another form of oppression, this time of psychoanalysis. And it is Deleuze and Guattari who are most enabling in our need to break free from the Oedipal prison house.
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari declare: ‘Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education’ (1977: 190). We have already seen earlier attempts to dethrone Oedipus. Malinowski, for instance, inaugurates a culturalist questioning of dogmatic Oedipal universalism. That line, followed by other anthropologists, ethnologists, mythographers and folklorists has already led us to India, where we have examined in detail the possibilities of an Indian Oedipus. From within the psychoanalytical tradition, too, it was not just Girindrasekhar Bose, using a culturalist, even anti-colonial reasoning, who questioned Oedipus, but Melanie Klein and others, too, who tried to mitigate its oppressive, reductive and masculinist implications. Indeed, apart from Deleuze and Guattari’s ferocious, even delirious dismantling, some other recent attempts to question Oedipus are noteworthy.
In his fascinating overview of some of these attempts, Peter L. Rudnytsky observes:
Although Freud’s notion of the ‘Oedipus complex’ has had an incalculable impact upon modern culture, a number of recent studies have sought to dislodge the Oedipus myth from the privileged position accorded to it by psychoanalytic theory. This effort, which has come from several directions, represents an important trend in contemporary criticism.
(1982: 462)
It is, however, somewhat ironic that Rudnytsky’s overview stems from his express desire to ‘to reassert the centrality of the Oedipus myth’ (ibid.). Apart from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, to which we shall turn to shortly, Rudnytsky identifies two other challenges ‘to the psychoanalytic veneration of the Oedipus myth’ (ibid.).
First is the novel thesis of Sandor Goodhart in which he reinterprets the source of the myth, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, to suggest that Oedipus never killed his father Laius. For students of literature and practitioners of criticism, this reading is both exciting and reassuring in its ability to restore the interpretation of texts to a very high order of skill and significance. Goodhart follows and extends Rene Girard’s argument that Oedipus was framed for Laius’s murder, that the deed could as easily have been done by Creon or Tiresias. Oedipus, in other words, is the scapegoat. Goodhart argues that ‘Rather than an illustration of the myth, the play is a critique of mythogenesis, an examination of the process by which one arbitrary fiction comes to assume the value of truth’ (Goodhart 1978: 67). Of Laius’s ‘many murderers’ Oedipus is singled out for punishment. Goodhart thus strikes a blow at ‘the idolatry of the Oedipal’ (ibid.: 64): after all, if the available textual evidence were reassembled or reinterpreted to show that Oedipus was not Laius’s murderer, then the entire edifice of Oedipus, based as it is on the twin taboo of patricide and incest, would be severely undermined. If Oedipus never actually killed his father, at least one of the pillars of the Oedipus complex, that of patricide, would come crashing down. So would Freud’s theories of civilization, repression, and ‘nuclear complex’ of all neurosis. Rudnytsky calls Goodhart’s exegesis a ‘hand-to-hand combat with the received understanding of Oedipus the King’ (1982: 464) because it problematizes what is generally regarded as the ‘truth’ of the play, revealing it to be just one of many possible fictions:
From Freud’s perspective of ‘demystification’, the action of Oedipus the King entails the discovery of a hidden but nonetheless decisive truth; the essence of Goodhart’s ‘deconstructive’ reading is precisely that there is no absolute or final truth to be found.
(1982: 468)
The paradox of such a reading, however, is that by shifting the blame for Laius’s murder to someone else, it is merely shifting the ‘truth’ of the play, not denying it altogether. If the all meaning were indeterminate, we would not be able to make sense of the play, but by offering another explanation for the known facts in the play, Goodhart shows us how someone other than Oedipus could have killed Laius. Of course, such a reading also undermines the impact of the tragedy, the horror of the discovery of Oedipus’s unintentional crime, both taking away from the anguish of his mother/wife, Jocasta, and rendering pointless his self-blinding. In a word, with such a reading, the play ceases to be a tragedy. In fact, Rudnytsky uses Goodhart’s own strategy to question his (Good-hart’s) interpretation: ‘But it seems likely that this alternative version of events is included by Sophocles simply to heighten the dramatic irony’ (Rudnytsky 1982: 679). After all, the language in the play is known for its ‘ “double striking” quality’ (ibid.) whose express purpose appears to be the highlighting of Oedipus’s tragedy. The ‘audience knows from the outset that Oedipus is guilty’ (ibid.); its ‘superior awareness’ heightens the effect of watching ‘the transformation of Oedipus’ hope into despair’ (ibid.).
Apart from destabilizing Oedipus, Goodhart’s thesis has little else to offer us, when it comes to Nathuram’s slaying of Gandhi. This act, as we have seen, was neither accidental nor unconscious, but deliberately planned and executed. What was perhaps unconscious was that it was patricidal, that it showed the classic Oedipal triangulation in which the same object of desire, Mother India, was the cause of a struggle between a faithful son and an allegedly faithless father. Nathuram’s Oedipal intentions might not have been fully conscious to him, nor to the people of India, who had to, perforce, repress the fuller implications of this act. If it were possible that Nathuram had not even killed Gandhi or if he had been wrongfully framed for this murder, then Goodhart’s reading would be directly applicable. But, instead, Nathuram waited to be recognized as Gandhi’s murderer and used the trial to offer not only an elaborate justification but also his own alternate vision for Hindu India.
The second author that Rudnytsky identifies is Rene Girard, whose justly celebrated Violence and the Sacred (1977; 1995) offers an original theory of violence. Girard rescues ‘the Oedipal struggle from the familial terrain’ but introduces another ‘mimetic triangle of the model, the disciple, and the object’ in its place (Rudnytsky 1982: 466). Girard is interested in finding the root of ‘the structure of violence itself ’ (ibid.) which he identifies in mimetic desire. Ignoring that the mother is the object of desire disputed by father and son, Girard argues that all desire is mimetic: ‘the subject desires the object because the rival desires it. In desiring an object the rival alerts the subject to the desirability of the object’ (Girard 1995: 145). Furthermore, this clash of desire leads to violence: ‘By making one man’s desire into a replica of another man’s desire, [mimetism] invariably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence’ (ibid.). This conflict between the model and the disciple, the subject and the rival tie them in a cycle of reciprocal violence. That is why ‘violence is the great leveller’ (ibid.: 77); in violence we become each other’s perfect doubles, identical to our rivals in both ‘obsession and hatred’ (ibid.).
Girard’s theory leads away from Oedipus but into another sort of trap. What is the way out of this cycle of violence? Is it possible to have non-violent or cooperative desire? Instead of violence mimicking itself, can non-violence also be mimicked? At least, as we shall see later, Gandhi thought so. What about sharing or absenting from pressing one’s claim? Girard does not fully explain or account for these issues because he is only concerned with cycles of violence. But we can clearly see how profoundly Girard’s thesis may apply to the story of the Partition of India. ‘Rivalry’, Girard says, ‘does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it’ [emphasis in original] (1995: 145). Muslims wanted a nation because Hindus did; it was a mimetic desire that led both to the wholly destructive cycle of reciprocal violence. Further, this mimetic desire continued to reproduce itself, with the Sikhs wanting their own nation, the Kashmiris wanting their own nation, the Nagas wanting their own nation, and so on, each time drawing communities in cycles of fratricidal violence. We can see other instances of conflict, including the one over the disputed Babri Masjid, as arising from such mimetic and competitive desire. As Girard puts it:
If the model, who is apparently already endowed with superior being, desires some object, that object must surely be capable of conferring an even greater plenitude of being.
(Ibid.: 146)
This is how two desires converge on the same object; no doubt ‘Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash. Thus, mimesis coupled with desire leads automatically to conflict’ (ibid.). Girard’s analysis now reaches its most profound pitch:
Mimetic desire is simply a term more comprehensive than violence for religious pollution. As the catalyst for the sacrificial crisis, it would eventually destroy the entire community if the surrogate victim were not at hand to halt the process and the ritualized mimesis were not at hand to keep the conflictual mimesis from beginning afresh.
(Girard 1995: 148)
If we were to apply Girard to our situation, then Gandhi offered himself as the surrogate victim for a whole society’s crisis. This was also the crisis of the competing desires for India, for the new nation that had arisen, free at last, from the shackles of colonialism and slavery. Girard’s idea of such a victim is spelled out in his other book Scapegoat, but it certainly resembles the pagan-Christian notion of the sacrifice of the priest--king that James Frazer elaborated in The Golden Bough and is so clearly present in the Christian story of Christ’s sacrifice and crucifixion.
Gandhi’s great contribution to this crisis of the nation was that he wanted Indians, especially Hindus, not to be drawn into the logic of reciprocal violence when faced with the reality of unilateral violence. Gandhi perceived very clearly that reciprocal violence was wholly destructive. By offering himself as a scapegoat, he effected a substitution that turned unremittingly destructive reciprocal violence into a ritual violence, at once creative and protective. As he said in his speech at the prayer meeting on 21 January 1948, nine days before his assassination: ‘The death of a non-violent man will always have desirable consequences’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 98: 284). By engineering, so to speak, his own death at the hands of a fellow Hindu rather than a Muslim, he proved not only that Hindus were not wholly innocent, but that the logical consequences of Hindu-Muslim violence would be fratricidal violence between Hindus themselves, as suggested in his invocation of the destruction of the Yadavas at the end of the Mahabharata: ‘But if we only continue our internecine strife we shall meet with the same fate as the Yadavas did’ (ibid.: 86). Manubehn also recalls how Gandhi alluded to the internecine and self-destructive fighting between the Yadavas when he heard about the altercation between his publisher Navajivan Publishing House and one of his associates, Chandrashankar Shukla: ‘Wherever I see, I find internal rifts, like the rifts that existed among the warring Yadavas. Owing to personal differences, we are doing great harm to society’ (Manubehn 1962b: 38). Yet it is not sufficiently persuasive to see the tussle between Godse and Gandhi over Mother India as a Girardian triangulation wrought by mimetic desire; it is not as if Godse desired India because his model, Gandhi did. Interestingly, Godse was once a follower of Gandhi; to that extent, the model–disciple pattern is evident in their relationship. Yet again, Gandhi’s non-retaliation also goes contrary to Girard’s notion of reciprocal violence. It is time to return to Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, which even Rudnytsky agrees, is the most defiant repudiation of the Oedipus complex. Anti-Oedipus aims at fracturing the ‘familialism’ of Freud’s Oedipus, with its triangulation of the stifling ‘tripartite formula’ of ‘Daddy-Mommy-Me’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 23). It is their way out of this strangulation of what Mark Sheen in his Introduction called the ‘holy family’ (ibid.: xv) that makes Anti-Oedipus so special. Oedipus to Deleuze and Guattari is not just psychological, but supremely social; it is how capitalism controls and rechannels for its own purposes the entire mechanism of desire–production which characterizes the operation of both personal and social libido. What is more, Deleuze and Guattari perform their schizoanalysis through a delirious-delicious prose, bristling with new ideas and coinages. The attempt is to show us how to free ourselves radically.
As Eugene W. Holland explains, Anti-Oedipus rejects ‘the oedipal axiom of psychoanalysis – that you desire Mommy and envy Daddy, or forego Mommy to identify with Daddy – as a misleading social representation of desire’ (1985/1986: 294). Desire as libidinal energy cannot be reduced and subordinated to the ‘family triangle’ which then becomes its ultimate determinant. Neither is the unconscious structured, as Lacan claimed, like language; instead it is structured ‘like the ‘word-salad’ of schizophrenia, with no center, and no Law’ (Holland 1985/1986: 295). Oedipus, then, is ‘an archaic and reactionary despotism installed at the heart of the nuclear family under capitalism to re-contain the free-flow of desire’ and the very ‘institution of psychoanalysis’ is itself ‘the repressive agency of last resort’ to ‘ensure complete oedipalization’ in the face of the deterioration of the nuclear family (ibid.: 298). While the inherent logic of capitalism breaks down, as Marx shows, all barriers to the force of capital, it also recodes desires for its own ends, to generate greater profits. The social effects of such capitalism, which functions as an end in itself, includes ‘Narcissistic personality-splitting, cynical-defensive disdain for others and for community, and desperate self-absorption’: these are not products of the breakdown of the stable or nuclear family, but of ‘the libidinal structure of capitalism itself ’ (ibid.: 301). Anti-Oedipus is about how to resist such recoding in the name of the father: ‘Schizoanalysis, then, addresses itself primarily to the contradiction between processes of de-coding which free libidinal energy in ongoing social revolution, and processes of re-coding which constrict and limit those energies to the codes of capitalist paranoia’ (ibid.: 304). Anti-Oedipus embodies a refusal to be subject to the Oedipal ‘castrating mediation’, to the programming and conditioning that not just capitalism, but also other master narratives such as Marxism or Freudism engender, all of which are ways of controlling desire and locking individuals into different forms of subjection (ibid.: 304). Instead of master narratives, Deleuze and Guattari, like Lyotard after them, promote ‘minority’ discourses that resist totalizing and ‘scientific’ closure (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 24). Summing up a book which resists easy recapitulation, Holland says Schizoanalysis thus ends up not only reformulating psychoanalytic doctrine, but also proposing new directions for postmodern revolutionary strategy: provoking struggles on part of all who are engaged in socialized production, against the restrictions imposed by private appropriation and oedipal despotism on the limitless productive and libidinal forces unleashed in permanent revolution – with the ultimate aim of redistributing wealth and disseminating power for the use and joy of all.
(Holland 1986: 305)
This utopian impulse at the heart of schizoanalysis, along with its uncompromising commitment to truth and freedom, enables us to connect it with Gandhian satyagraha.
Rather than lamenting the breakdown of ‘whole’ individuals, Deleuze and Guattari celebrate the splitting up of the subject. That is what endows the delirium that is desire with ‘extraordinary fluidity’:
It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him, never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking the same genealogy, never recording the same event in the same way.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 15)
Deleuze and Guattari, taking their stand against ‘the analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex’ (ibid.: 23), boldly assert:
Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.
(Ibid.: 26)
They wish to replace the ‘totalizing paranoia’ of the Oedipus complex with an ‘affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity’ (ibid.: 42), by shattering the ‘iron collar of Oedipus’ they hope to ‘discover everywhere the force of desiring-production’ (ibid.: 53)
To knock Freud off balance, they take their cue from Melanie Klein’s idea of ‘partial objects’.
Partial objects unquestionably have a sufficient charge in and of themselves to blow up all of Oedipus and totally demolish its ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 44)
Unlike Klein, Deleuze and Guattari regard ‘the production of desire’ as ‘absolutely anoedipal’ (ibid.: 45):
Partial objects are not representations of parental figures or of the basic patterns of family relations; they are parts of desiring-machines, having to do with a process and with relations of production that are both irreducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedipal figure.
(Ibid.: 46)
Later, as Rudnytsky points out, they ‘expand their discussion of “partial objects” ’ by showing how they are ‘not partial (partiels) in the sense of extensive parts, but rather partial (partiaux) like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees’ (Rudnytsky 1982: 643); in other words, partial objects are not ‘part of ’ any lost unity, but rather ‘intensities’ that ‘know no lack’ (ibid.). More profoundly, Deleuze and Guattari disagree that the desires of a small child are completely confined to the family or by the ‘restricted code of Oedipus’; instead, ‘from the very first days of his life, he immediately begins having an amazing nonfamilial experience that psychoanalysis has completely failed to take into account’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 47). What is more, the child is a ‘metaphysical being’, not just a desiring machine, asking questions such as ‘What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to breathe? What am I? What sort of thing is this breathing-machine on my body without organs? (ibid.: 48). This leads them to draw the amazingly liberating conclusion: ‘the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man’ (ibid.: 49). Such ‘autoproduction of the unconscious’ (ibid.) is unfortunately subjected to the ‘bourgeois repression’ that is the practice of psychoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 50). Psychoanalysis, instead of ‘participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation’, helps to keep ‘European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all’ (emphasis in original) (ibid.).
Closer to our concerns Deleuze and Guattari also take on, later in the book, the question of the universal claims made in the name of Oedipus. ‘How’, they ask ‘are we to understand those who claim to have discovered an Indian Oedipus or an African Oedipus?’ (ibid.: 189). They show how though none of the ‘mechanisms or attitudes’ that constitute the Oedipus complex are to be encountered in other cultures, the advocates of Oedipal universality claim that
the structure is there, although it has no existence whatever that is ‘accessible to clinical practice’; or that the problem, the point of departure, is indeed Oedipal, although the developments and the solutions are completely different from ours.
(Ibid.: 190)
This to Deleuze and Guattari is not surprising: ‘There or here, it’s the same thing: Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means’ (ibid.). Deleuze and Guattari solve the ‘well-known and inexhaustible debate between culturalists and orthodox psychoanalysts’ over the universality of Oedipus by mocking the idea of Oedipus as ‘the great paternal catholic symbol, the meeting place of all the churches’ (ibid.: 171); they totally reject ‘the postulate common to Oedipal relativism and Oedipal absolutism – i.e., the stubborn maintenance of a familialist perspective, which wreaks havoc everywhere’ (ibid.: 173–174). They solve the problem by claiming that ‘It is colonization that causes Oedipus to exist’ (ibid.: 178). If Oedipus is the ‘internal colony’ in Europe, elsewhere it is Europe’s export, along with alcoholism and disease, of ‘familial reproduction’ imposed on the ‘savages’, depriving them ‘control over their own social production’ and thus Oedipalizing them ‘by force’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 178). Or as they say later in the book, ‘We are all little colonies and it is Oedipus that colonizes us’ (ibid.: 265). Our own anti-colonialism, then, is another factor, as I already indicated, that links us to Deleuze and Guattari.
Anti-Oedipus extends Freudian repression to the realm of capital, with ‘Father, mother, and child’ becoming ‘the simulacrum of the images of capital (“Mister Capital, Madame Earth”, and their child the Worker)’ (ibid.: 264). Their ferocious resistance to any form of totalizing thought control thus helps liberate us from our own, somewhat complicit and inauthentic notions of political correctness, which boil down to little more than a ritual genuflection to shibboleths from the left, right and centre. The authoritarian and repressive structure of doctrinaire left parties all the world over is well-known, with their intolerance towards any form of dissent. Thus, whether in the social or the personal realms, Deleuze and Guattari wish to destroy the ‘familialist reduction’ that takes the ‘place of the drift of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 270). Invoking D. H. Lawrence, oddly bringing us closer to Gandhi via sexuality as much as chastity, they say: ‘Lawrence shows in a profound way that sexuality, including chastity, is a matter of flows, an infinity of different and even contrary flows’ (ibid.: 351). Gandhi’s experiments in chastity can thus be read as magnificent attempts to strengthen his desire for non-violence. Chastity, we might argue, sets up a strong current of desire that counters the violence of Partition. Throughout, Deleuze and Guattari never let us forget the revolutionary, utopian drive that informs the desiring machine: ‘in delirium the libido is continually re-creating History, continents, kingdoms, races, and cultures (ibid.: 352). Gandhi’s great desire to transform the world made him, like ‘Every loved or desired being … a collective agent of enunciation’ (ibid.: 353). His libido did not have to be, ‘as Freud believed … desexualized and sublimated in order to invest society and its flows’; from the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘on the contrary … it is love, desire, and their flows that manifest the directly social character of the nonsubli-mated libido and its sexual investments’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 353). Gandhi’s own experiments with sexuality were thus part of his tremendous investment in personal and social transformation.
What this discussion of Anti-Oedipus shows us is that Mohandas or little Mohna, though very attached to his mother and somewhat critical in his autobiography of his father’s sensuality, managed through his experiments in celibacy to free himself from the ‘iron collar’ of Oedipus. He did so even though his biography has been read so obviously in Oedipal terms, especially his enormous guilt over his neglect of his sick father, whom he was nursing on the death bed, at the very moment of the latter’s death, when Gandhi rushed to his own bedroom to have sex with Kasturba, his wife. Then there was a knock on the door to announce his father’s demise. Gandhi claimed that the child so conceived was sickly and soon died. Some aver that the incident turned an otherwise sensuous man to revolt against sex, which he associated with dereliction of duty, corruption and death. Gandhi’s anti-sexuality, however, was transformed into an enormously productive drive to non-violent social transformation, which we see working even in his last days, when he became a one-man peace-keeping force, not only in Noakhali, Bihar, or Calcutta, but in Delhi itself, which to Gandhi was the symbol of the rest of India. Gandhi managed to liberate himself from the triangulation of the Oedipal family complex to unfurl his desire so that it inundated all of India and the world beyond with its liberative energies. From his ‘narrow guilt’ restricted to familial desire, Gandhi demonstrated the ‘primacy of the libidinal investments of the social field’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 356). Recent work on Gandhi’s brahmacharya¸ such as Veena Rani Howard’s (2013) attest to such a transformation.
Nathuram, instead, shunned the ‘schizoid revolutionary pole’ finding himself stuck instead in the ‘paranoiac, reactionary, and fascisizing pole’ (ibid.: 366). Though not restricted to a familial investment, his libidinal energies were nonetheless triangulated in a destructive transference of hatred to the Father of the Nation, whom he murdered ostensibly to protect Mother India, betrayed and defiled by the Muslim Other. However, if reports are to be believed, Godse and Apte’s slogan-shouting as they were led to the gallows, ‘Akhand Bharat Amar Rahe’ – long live undivided India – lacked both conviction and fervour. How did their act contribute, in any way, to prevent the division of India? How, instead of targeting their rivals, the Pakistanis, as Apte had once boasted he would do, claiming that he planned to blow up their Parliament, did the killing of the old and frail Mahatma help? What did it prove?
Perhaps what is needed is to shift the focus slightly, from Nathuram or Gandhi to the object that they both desired and which Nathuram killed Gandhi for, Mother India, or the nation itself. If we go back to Girard, then we know that the nation is torn between rival suitors, Hindus and Muslims. The Hindutvawadis, unfortunately, deify the nation as mother, which Gandhi refused to do. Instead, he wanted to espouse the nation, not worship her. There is a fundamental difference between the two. Nathuram’s deification proved counterproductive. Instead of fighting to overthrow those who held the nation captive, he struck at the very person who strove the hardest to liberate her. That is why, to invoke a totally different but not unrelated duo, Bankim, in a profound and limited sense, is ‘wrong’ and Tagore is ‘right’. We do not need to deify or worship the nation as is shown in Anandamath. Instead, we need to find out how best to espouse her. The problem is well defined in Tagore’s Ghare Baire: who will espouse Bimala, the symbol of Bengal and the nation, not who will worship her as the Mother. Sandip seduces Bimala by exalting her as the Mother, she who is childless and, at that moment, estranged from Nikhil, her husband. Amulya, the young, misguided revolutionary, whom Sandip betrays, does worship her – and dies for it. Nikhil is weak and unassertive, perhaps unable to claim and keep what is his, but, in the end, we must admit it is he who has the right idea. The nation needs to be espoused, not worshipped or pedestalized. We do not need to die and kill for the nation but to live and work for it. This requires concretizing a vision of how the nation should be organized and governed, how all its constituents ‘enjoy’ her, regardless of how they regard her, whether as Mother and deity or as secular ideal.
The holism and unity that Gandhi championed and aspired for possibly eluded him, but I am not sure that he would therefore endorse Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, except as a means of personal, individual freedom. Perhaps a new integralism, such as proposed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, where nothing short of a change in human consciousness occurs, would equip us to handle such intractable problems. Thus Gandhi’s religious politics finds its uncertain foothold somewhere between the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari and the new integral totality of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Gandhi’s own evolutionary teleology has been very little explored but he too believed, for instance, that biological reproduction was not the only way to further the human race. A race that had perfected brahmacharya would find hitherto unknown heights of potency and creativity, indeed ushering a society of spiritually enhanced, if not perfected beings. Incidentally, celibacy was also the established norm in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and only later, in Auroville, did the Mother create a space for consensual, though not spiritualized sexuality.
Rudnytsky reminds us how Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy characterizes the grand design of Oedipus Rex: ‘nothing more nor less than the luminous afterimage which kind nature provides our eyes after a look into the abyss’ (Rudnytsky 1982: 469). For him contemplating the forces of anti-Oedipus is like ‘gazing into the abyss’ while returning to the Oedipus complex is like the ‘luminous afterimage’ that Nietzsche spoke of. I find this a clever but utterly unconvincing simile. Whatever affords us a way to free ourselves from the manacles of both oppressive and repressive forces, only that may be considered not just luminous, but empowering. If psychoanalysis get us there, well and good; but if it creates its own pathologies and repressions, surely we should find a way out. Even Erik Erikson, with whom we started this inquiry, would agree. After all, he likened psychoanalysis to satyagraha, in its commitment to discovering the truth. If anti-Oedipus will serve as a way to truth, which destabilizes the repressive regime of Oedipus, then we should not hesitate to embrace it. As to Deleuze and Guattari, there is little chance of their own delirious and disruptive energies becoming an institutionalized straitjacket. Moreover, in their very next book, A Thousand Plateaus, they deconstruct much of what they asserted in Anti-Oedipus, thereby (re) proving the irreverent philosophy at the heart of the earlier text, adhering somewhat paradoxically to rather than nullifying the arguments of Anti-Oedipus.
We cannot leave this topic of Oedipus versus anti-Oedipus without reverting to the problem of the country, scarred at birth by the twin traumas of the Partition and the assassination of the Father of the Nation. The two incidents, I have argued, are inextricably linked, both repressed in the nation’s psyche for being so ‘unbearable’. For the nation, they pose almost as severe a challenge as Freud’s Oedipal complex might to an individual, with the horrific vivisection of the Mother taking the place of incestuous desire and the death of the Father of the Nation soon after as a matter of perpetual guilt and shame. The numerous sexual crimes of the violence of the Partition, of course, leave nothing to the imagination in terms of their violation of ancestral taboos. The real question for all of us, inheritors of this history of trauma, repression and the consequent neurosis is how to heal, how to overcome, how to end this pattern of suffering. For if we do not find the way to do so, we will be condemned to re-enact the Partition over and over again, in a never-ending fratricidal feud with our hostile brother, Pakistan, on our western frontier and in the cynical recurrence of Partition-style riots within our borders. Whether by psycho-or schizoanalysis, is there a collective redemption for us as a people and as a nation divided against itself? This is the crucial question that the second part of this book tries to address.
This probe into the meaning of Gandhi’s death started with the manner in which he was memorialized. We found that at both Raj Ghat, where he was cremated, and at Gandhi Smriti, where he was murdered, there was a strange sort of elision of his murder, of its causes and effects. A true engagement with his assassination and its implications was absent at both sites. Instead, an attempt was made to lead back to his life, as the heroic exposition of the career of a Mahatma and the Father of the Nation. The visitors to both memorials, however, subverted this official narrative in their own way, turning these public monuments into parks, recreational grounds, places of picnic, holiday frolic, or just leisure. It was therefore important to go beyond the official channelizing of the force of Gandhi’s death, beyond the way in which it was convenient to remember him, to try to find out why it was so difficult to face its full implications.
We found out that there was a massive national project to repress Gandhi’s murder because its true meaning would be too disturbing to confront. The impact of the murder was unbearably horrible, almost unspeakable, to the Hindu psyche. That is because Gandhi’s assassination was an essentially patricidal act, inconceivable to the Hindu mind, unprecedented in history and myth. Though Nathuram Godse pulled the trigger, pumping the three fateful bullets into the frail, 79-year-old Mahatma, the actual responsibility for the act was vested in a much larger number of actors. These included not only the conspirators or their ideological brethren, but a much wider range of participants and actors, including many of Gandhi’s closest associates and followers, not to speak of his erstwhile constituents and supporters. Beyond these, a larger numbers of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, dalits and others who disapproved, disliked, or detested Gandhi and were happy to see him go, might also be considered as partially responsible. And to the extent to which each of us tacitly approved of or participated in hatred and violence against our fellow countrymen and women, we were all complicit in Nathuram’s crime.
Such a wide circle of responsibility also bound us all alike in a compact of guilt, which needed expiation. But what was the way? Not merely a process of national reckoning or political psychoanalysis which might reveal some classic, Oedipal structure, but something more, something which might actually help undo the logic of Gandhi’s murder. We also saw how Gandhi’s murder was intimately tied to the Partition of India, how, in fact, the two were inextricably linked even in his killer’s mind. Furthermore, that Gandhi’s death did not remove him from the national consciousness, but instead produced a sort of haunting, which one of his closest disciples, Sarojini Naidu, actually wished for the nation. In other words, in seeking for a more powerful and extensive afterlife for the Mahatma, she actually wished for his continued, if somewhat spectral, presence in our midst. As if to prove how this was possible, Bollywood offered us an alternative to Attenborough’s moving biopic, which was a worldwide success. Hirani, however, left the life of Gandhi to Attenborough, unpacking instead the Mahatma’s hallucinatory, if not haunting, reappearance. Bollywood thus showed us ‘Gandhigiri’, a novel way of doing Gandhi in the world. Basanta Kumar Mallik’s thesis of Gandhi’s death causing a rupture in the historical process, ushering a new era of non-absolutes offered us a way to turn to Deleuze and Guattari, whose Anti-Oedipus inaugurates a novel libertarian praxis called schizoanalysis. After all, it would not do to recolonize India under the sign of Oedipus after Gandhi’s hard work in liberating us from British imperialism. Nevertheless, following Gandhi, we may have to embark upon our own individual and collective truth-finding and truth-telling to discover how to expiate for the crimes of the Partition and the slaying of the Mahatma, how to heal ourselves and the nation from the traumas of our traumatic birth as the children of a fractured midnight.
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