Sudhir Kakar’s Ascetic of Desire

The Ascetic of Desire is a fictional portrayal of Vatsyayana, the fourth-century author of the Kamasutra. This is Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s first novel, and he transports us to an ancient culture, ponders the sensual wisdom of the Kamasutra, and recites a drama suffused with intense eroticism and psychopathology. The text opens with the thoughts of a young Brahman narrator describing his overwhelming confusion and panic over prostitutes, who are simultaneously seductive and threatening. He hopes to overcome his “dread of women,” but becomes impotent. In one page we have a protagonist who craves women yet fears and loathes them as predators, who cannot

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trust women, surrender to them, or maintain an erection inside them. It is this youth who seeks out the author of the Kamasutra, for enlightenment on the mysteries of sex.

Vatsyayana adopts the narrator as a symbolic son while the narrator himself leaves the disapproval of his father behind in pursuit of erotic wisdom. The disciple’s encounter with Vatsyayana’s wife is equally profound. Malavika is almost indescribably beautiful and sensual, yet gentle and compassionate. The narrator experiences intense sexual desire for the ideal(ized) woman but feels mortified as well. The narrator seeks an understanding of kama (desire) to free him from his distress and guilt.

This illicit eroticism presages the dramatic fulminations of the novel. We are told of Vatsyayana’s childhood, of growing up in an elegant brothel, of exposure to prostitution and exhibitionism. Seduction is the norm in Vatsyayana’s childhood, and the mysteries of sexuality engender the pursuit of sexual enlightenment. Vatsyayana’s father is absent. When he brings Vatsyayana along on his merchant trip, the father is killed, leaving Vatsyayana with a dramatic sense of loss. Vatsyayana’s youth ends when he enters an ascetic hermitage, as he engages in a paroxysmal sexual encounter with his guru’s wife which leaves him in a feverish coma.

The novel accelerates with this catastrophic sexual encounter, the only one of Vatsyayana’s life, and the horrific event which renders him ascetic. We return suddenly to the narrator, who has been having an affair with Malavika for months. We learn mere pages from the end of the novel that Malavika has her own story, where she is possessed by feverish orgasmic bouts of sexual delusion, culminating in an affair with the man who had inspired her delusions, and a life with Vatsyayana where she is required to sanitize herself of every feminine secretion, odor, and desire to attain the purity of a goddess. Vatsyayana discovers their affair, and suddenly the narrator and Malavika are found living in a distant city with their four-year-old daughter. The concluding wisdom of the novel is that the experience or satiation of pleasure is not what people want, but that blissful static union after the consummation of love. Finally, the heart endures.

We do not know how the narrator, so permeated by the dread and loathing of women, could suddenly have a passionate affair. We are told that the narrator has been practicing with prostitutes for months in preparation. But his patronage of prostitutes and his liaison with Malavika are out of character. He is disgusted with his master for having had sex with his guru’s wife, and now we find that the narrator had planned a subversive affair and had practiced in advance. Nor is there any explanation of his surmounting his inhibitions. The narrator suddenly transcends his impotent sexuality through kamic catharsis.

Perhaps Kakar envisioned a youth who needed to be guided by a compassionate lover, who would gently provide him with a safe holding environment where he could learn to love, trust, and feel vulnerable, where he could maintain an erection inside an non-predatory, loving, and sincere woman. Orgonomic fantasies aside, we are not prepared for this by any element of the novel. It is difficult to believe that such entrenched conflicts and feelings would simply disappear under the tutelage of the right woman. The novel describes the search for guidance amid excruciating psychosexual debilitation. For these struggles to end precipitously in ecstatic and blissful transcendence deflates the text. Some narration of their intimacy, his struggles to overcome his inhibitions, resentment, and disgust, her support and erotic initiation, might have been useful if unlikely solutions to such serious sexual problems.

Malavika’s transformations are equally inexplicable. Until 20 pages before the end of the novel, Malavika is presented as the apex of voluptuous feminine beauty and aplomb. We read suddenly of her delusions, massive orgasms, and psychotic episodes, and then she is the vision of female tranquility again. The idea of a woman in conflict with her sexuality is interesting, and the portrayal of a person possessed by sexual delusions and the return of the repressed is fertile. However, the transitions here are immediate and baffling.

The most carefully drawn character is Vatsyayana, who slowly transforms from a wizened guru into a defeated man. His conflicts make him the most convincingly human, and the most pathological. Vatsyayana is less a sage immersing himself in erotic experience, than a pitiable nomad fleeing his terrors. He pontificates sex in escape from sex, the only experience of which culminated in overwhelming trauma. Vatsyayana experienced sexual intercourse as disintegration and psychotic fragmentation. Thereafter the author of the Kamasutra became ascetic and impotent. While Vatsyayana explicated tolerant sexuality, he demanded utter renunciation from his wife, requiring her pu-

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rity and asexuality.

One of the most perverse aspects of Vatsyayana’s story is his testing his wife’s fidelity. He adopts our narrator as disciple because he would be an ideal lure for Malavika, hoping that she will attain the status as goddess by not giving into sexual desire. Vatsyayana refuses sex with his wife, moves her to a hermitage, orchestrates secluded forest rendezvous between his wife and a young disciple studying sexuality, and expects her to be asexual.

Did Vatsyayana desire an illicit liaison between his wife and disciple? Vatsyayana suffered from the trauma of sexual psychosis, the guilt of having betrayed his teacher, and the rage of his wife having engaged in previous infidelitous sexuality. Vatsyayana is displacing his revenge upon women who have injured him. Requiring purity and abstinence from one’s wife is sadistic and cruel, and orchestrating an affair as moral test repeats the need to engender illicit sexuality and blame the transgressor. This is a compulsion to repeat and abreact Vatsyayana’s youth, where his mother and sister cultivated their sexuality as prostitutes. Vatsyayana’s incestuous desire, coupled with his confusion and shame, engender a desire to know, and a need to escape that confusing and seductive childhood. The liaison is a reenactment and denial of the primal scene.

Purity is the sequestration of illicit sexuality, where rage and anxiety demand that the feminine be purified and separated from images of its frightening and disgusting qualities. Vatsyayana demands that his wife be the opposite of the illicit feminine encountered in his youth, his asceticism a reaction formation away from his own desire. While Vatsyayana is disappointed by his wife’s transgressions, he experiences unconscious gratification attaining evidence that women are deceitful prostitutes. He is thereby justified in his asceticism, his retreat from sexuality, and his rationalizing disappointment in sexuality into a philosophy where abstinence is a virtue. Vatsyayana revenges himself upon the women who seduced him and later abandoned him to a hermitage during adolescence. From such seductive yet disappointing sexuality arise the requirements that women be pure, and the motive to punish them for not being so.

Vatsyayana undoubtedly derives satisfaction from the voyeuristic discovery of illicit sexuality. By seducing his own guru’s wife, Vatsyayana is violating in the manner his mother and aunt were being violated by patrons of the brothel. Covetous of the bodies of his mother and aunt, whom he wished to possess sexually and exclusively, Vatsyayana attains the erotic joy forbidden to him by invading what is not his. The guilt of his opprobrium and his overwhelming cathartic sexuality lead to psychotic breakdown and finally demand expiation through orchestrating the seduction of his wife by his disciple years later. However, that revenge still contains his childhood arousal of watching his aunt masturbate. Finally, Vatsyayana becomes a recluse, vanishing from human intercourse.

The soul of Vatsyayana is executed with poignancy and fascinating psychological complexity. The Ascetic of Desire is an exciting and insightful read, and it certainly tells an absorbing and original story. Kakar succeeds in his insight into the madness of passion and the fear of the feminine. His narration sometimes lags, and abrupt interpolations of dramatic events and significant changes can be disruptive. This novel relays the conflicts somewhat rigidly, though they otherwise communicate the tangible crises of alienation, betrayal, and loss. Kakar is exciting when depicting conflicted characters, but they sometimes lack depth or consistency. The way he exposes the reader to dramatic sexual encounters, amidst their failures, passions, and pathology, is gripping. Nevertheless, the narrative tumescence dissolves prematurely. This novel is definitely worth reading, but the reader craves further narrative.

The Ascetic of Desire is a novel set in ancient India, but Kakar has constructed a text which is susceptible to modern European psychoanalytic interpretation. While the setting consists of specific cultural dynamics such as life in a brothel, the guru-disciple relationship, and sexual possession, these are nevertheless depicted by a psychoanalyst who intentionally plays with the notions of primal scene, transference reenactment, and oedipal conflict. For those fascinated by a drama which expresses timeless human themes, the novel succeeds in depicting them with such force in a unique and intriguing setting. For those who believe that a distant culture is impenetrable to Western psychoanalytic interpretation, the novel will be rejected as inauthentic. Kakar is both an authentic psychoanalyst and a native of India. His narrative contains indigenous Indian cultural dynamics, but the psyche remains fundamentally transcultural and transhistorical, sustaining the desires, conflicts, and frailties endemic to all human beings.

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