|
Magazine
Intellectual charmer
|
T.G.Vaidyanathan was that rare man who was never satisfied with the surface of whatever interested him but always sought its depths. Renowned psychoanalyst SUDHIR KAKKAR remembers a friend and guide.
|
I FIRST met TGV when he came to Delhi some years ago. He was editing a book of psychoanalytic essays on India, he said, and wanted my help in identifying some of the more important ones. We talked, or rather he talked and I listened, with mounting fascination. What I was hearing were surprisingly insightful opinions on writers who had used psychoanalysis to understand Indian society and culture. Surprising, because I was unaccustomed to the sophistication and wide-ranging reading in subjects that are not a person's primary field of interest. But, then, I discovered over the years in conversations carried out through correspondence — we never met again although we always intended to — that TGV was that rare man who was never satisfied with the surface of whatever interested him but always sought its depths.
Gradually, we drew closer, through a fitful correspondence now carried out over e-mail. I came under the spell of his intellectual passion and could easily identify with his former students he had awakened to the life of the mind. I wished I could have taken some of his legendary classes in English literature for he was more than a brilliant teacher who transformed more than he taught. When Oxford asked me to suggest someone to write an introduction to my Essential Writings, I could not think of anyone better suited than TGV. He would be fair without being flattering, his affection for me never subverting his remarkable critical gift.
Last month, he surprised me with an e-mail saying he had been hospitalised and that he wanted me to come and see him in Bangalore on my forthcoming trip to India. It was a personal plea he had never made before. To my shame, I attributed it to his depressed state. I replied, saying that my visit was a short and busy one and that I'd certainly visit him when I returned later in the year. I might not be there anymore, he answered. Of course you will be, my selfishness asserted. His last e-mail, a week before he died, reassured me. It was so typical of the man I had known. He had been reading the introduction to Wendy Doniger's and my translation of the Kamasutra wherein Wendy had compared the Indian post-coital sharing of the paan to the cigarette in similar situations in American movies of the 1940's and 1950's featuring the famous Hollywood pair of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. "Dear Sudhir," he wrote. "Got the Kamasutra yesterday. I was intrigued by Wendy's reference to Bacall and Bogart. But I think there is a difference between `Now, Voyager' and `To Have or Have not'. The double sharing in `Now, Voyage' (with its highly romantic closing line: `Let's not ask for the moon when we have the stars') is tonally different from slightly cynical Bacall of `To Have or Have Not'. I don't remember enough about `Casablanca' to know whether cigarette smoking between lovers ever figured."
Ah, he is his old self, I thought. And now I must live with the guilt of having failed a friend who always gave and never asked — except this once.
Sudhir Kakkar is the author of several scholarly books as well as works of fiction. With T.G. Vaidyanathan, he edited Vishnu on Freud's Desk.
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
