Sudhir Kakar

Some Lesser Known Facts About Sudhir Kakar

• Sudhir Kakar spent his early childhood near Sargodha (now in Pakistan) and Rohtak, Haryana.

• During the partition of India and Pakistan, his family had to relocate from city to city because of his father’s posting.

• He served as an assistant to Professor Erik Homburger Erikson and taught in his course “The Human Life Cycle” for one year (1966-67) at Harvard University.

• In 1967, he started working as a research fellow in the Program for Applied Psychoanalysis at Harvard University, Graduate School of Business Administration.

• In 1968, he started working as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In 1971, he was promoted to Professor of Organizational Behavior.

• After completing his post-doctoral training in Frankfurt, he returned to India in 1975 and started living with his aunt Kamla Chowdhry in Delhi, where he started practising as a psychoanalyst.

• In 1976, he joined the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences as a Professor and Chairman at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi.

• He was also an adjunct professor at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

• He had been a Senior Fellow for almost a decade (1980-90) at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

• In 2001, he started working as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University.

• He had given lectures as a visiting professor at several universities across the world including the Sigmund Freud Institute of Psychoanalytic Training and Research, Frankfurt (1972), University of Economics, Vienna (1974-75), ​University of Chicago​ (1989-93), and Goa University (2013).

  

• In 2003, he moved to Goa, where he lived till his death. ​

• In 2014, he joined GITAM, Vishakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh as an honorary professor.

• He has been listed on the list of ’25 Major Thinkers of the World’ by French magazine ‘Le Nouvel Observateur.’

• He has also been described as one of the 21 important thinkers of the 21st century by the German weekly Die Zeit.

• He is mainly known for his research work on the post-Independence Indian psyche.

• One of his most notable books “The Essential Sudhir Kakar” (2011) is a collection of 15 essays on psychoanalysis, culture and religion, and their confluence in his work.

  

• In his translation of the ancient Indian text ‘Kamasutra,’ which he did jointly with Wendy Doniger, Kakar recovers and reconstructs the persistence of the text on the essentiality of the balance between the erotic and the spiritual.

• He had done the analysis of various famous personalities including Swami Vivekananda in “The Inner World” (1978), Mahatma Gandhi in “Intimate Relations” (1989), and Ramakrishna in “The Analyst and the Mystic” (1991).

  

• His second novel ‘Ecstasy’ (2003) was “written exclusively for the senses of the sceptic and the mind of the mystic.”

• Most of his novels including “The Seeker” (1995) and “A Book of Memory” (2016) are based on the themes of identity, family relationships, and the complexities of modern Indian life.

• His works have been translated into more than 20 languages.

• He was often spotted smoking cigars on various occasions.