If you have not read Sudhir Kakar’s analysis of Indian character, you have missed out something very precious. I have read every book he has published and eagerly await for the next one. He is India’s best-known psychoanalyst and a veryhandsome man to whose charm many beautiful women have succumbed.
He now lives in Goa with his second wife, a German psychiatrist.
You can start with his latest The Crimson Throne (Penguin-Viking) which I think is his best work. It is about the last year of the reign of Emperor Shahjahan and the war of succession between his four sons. It is based on the observations of two European adventurers — the Italian Niccolai Manucci, a semi-literate fellow from Venice with an appetite for women. He worked as a deck cleaner and arrived in Goa in 1675. He recorded his experiences in Storia Do Mogor. The other was a Frenchman Francois Bernier, a more perceptive observer who arrived in Surat and wrote about the state of affairs in the Mughal Empire. Kakar has based his work entirely on these secondary sources and what he said about India in the 17th century is true about the India of today.
To whet your appetite, let me tell you how Manucci travelled from Goa to Delhi and made his name as a magic healer. He received the hospitality of Jesuit priests who found him lodgings on top of a hill. His sole companion was a Hindu vaid practising Ayurveda. He told him that the stomach was the repository of all ailments and an examination of a sick person’s faeces before prescribing medicine was vital.
Full report here Hindustan Times
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