Salagna Sengupta – Jung in India
INTRODUCTION
Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. —Carl Jung, The Tavistock Lectures, 1935
The Beginnings
t the Tavistock lectures of 1935, noted Swiss psychologist Carl Jung
spoke of the “unconscious” as a fundamental conception of
psychology.1
The unconscious processes are not directly observable, he
said, but can be assumed from their peculiar outcomes.
The first part of this
he called the “personal unconscious,” the contents of which are of a personal
origin and make up the personality as a whole.
About the second, Jung said,
then there is another class of contents of definitely unknown origin, or at all events of an origin which cannot be ascribed to individual acquisition. These contents have one outstanding peculiarity and that is their mythological character. It is as if they belong to a pattern not peculiar to any particular mind or person, but rather to a pattern peculiar to mankind in general. . . . They belong to mankind in general, and therefore they are collective in nature.2
He spoke of these collective patterns as “archetypes” and elucidated them by giving empirical instances.
The audience was a discerning British psychoanalytic group, well versed in Freud’s tenets of the unconscious, but not as familiar with Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious.3
Some quick rejoinders and hasty rebuffs followed before the listeners tuned in to Jung’s views.
The lectures left a lasting impact, establishing Jung’s authority on the subject.
“The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer a distinct individual but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind, where we are all the same,” he said.4
Hinting at the dangers of identifying too closely with this layer, Jung affirmed that several peculiar coincidences of Nature could be traced to the collective unconscious.
The Tavistock colloquium was perhaps Jung’s most inspiring disquisition on the collective unconscious ever.
At the close of the decade, he was on his way to India to receive ceremonial honors from the British (Indian) government, where he would encounter a culture vastly alien to his own.
It is possible that what he elucidated at Tavistock resonated vividly in his
experiences in India, for the distant and alien world of the East was not entirely unfamiliar to Jung.
Much transpired during that journey, but Jung chose to let go of the minutiae of his experience, penning only some highlights of the tour.
For a long time these served as the principal aidemémoire of his historic visit.
What Jung may have considered insignificant about his experience at the time, or perhaps difficult to contend with, turned out to be de rigueur, provoking my search for him seventy-five years later and culminating in this historical account of Jung in India.
Jung’s contribution to modern psychology has been acknowledged widely, and his works have witnessed a fresh resurgence in recent years.
The publication of the Red Book, the onset of Jungian studies in the Far East, and
the circulation of his little-known seminar notes are salutary moves.
But in all of that, the story of Carl Jung and India is not to be found.
Among Jung’s broad reminiscences of India and distant reflections on Eastern religious philosophy, the particulars of his journey of 1937–1938 are conspicuously
missing.
Jung penned a few essays on India, but these do not give a full account of his celebrated tour.
It is true that his writings are dotted with references to India; they offer some illuminating insights on the East, but they do not shed light on the history of his relations with India.
There are no visible traces of his presence in India in the dominant chronicles of that period.
It seems that a significant record concerning his visit has been lost and has remained untraced for decades.
Not having access to that history is discomfiting, especially for those of us deliberating on Jung’s ideas in the East and inquiring into the relevance of his psychology in the Eastern world.
While this could have been the raison d’être for this study, it alone could not have ensured the fulfillment of such an impossible task—impossible because there are no known historical records of Jung’s journey to India and Jung himself did not archive a full account of his tour for later use.
The idea of tracing an obsolete event that had no historical corroboration was therefore far-fetched.
It is not surprising then that a stream of unlikely coincidences stimulated the inquiry and set it rolling.
Random searches in colonial records showed glimpses of Jung’s journey, but these were few in number and haphazardly strewn.
A more resolute probe led to a surge of discoveries, so many in number that I was compelled to consider this as something significant and not just a handful of unrelated coincidences.
Several persons had in fact recorded information about Jung’s presence on the subcontinent.
The last surviving man in India who had met Jung in 1937 was a retired German bureaucrat whose memoir of Jung I found a week after this study was conceived.5
He was ailing and inaccessible, but fortunately his little-known chronicle containing information on Jung could be sourced from a local bookseller.
An offbeat write-up in a Sri Lankan journal referred to a Ceylonese physician who had met Jung in 1938.
Tracing is son, a retired psychiatric professional based in Washington, D.C., was a
stroke of luck: a prominent Sri Lankan educator had published a memoir of her parents in which this good doctor’s name was mentioned.
A letter to Colombo and a midnight call to Bethesda, Maryland, and Jung’s story was on track.
The octogenarian doctor sent me a carefully preserved report, more than seventy-five years old, of his father’s meeting with Jung.
It was this archival report that triggered Jung’s story in India.
He introduced me to a Sri Lankan scholar, who found traces of Jung’s presence in Colombo and generously passed that information to me.
We will examine these stories as we read ahead.
Two in-depth accounts of Jung’s itinerary in India surfaced from colonial
records of that period.
A large part of the journey was mapped in these accounts, showing Jung as part of a historic scientific delegation in India.
An entire slice of colonial history that made up the elusive backdrop of Jung’s
travel was unlocked.
The records revealed that the journey, undertaken in the midst of such an extraordinary scientific gathering, was far from uneventful.
Yet Jung had made only oblique references to this in his writings.
With the big picture traced, my concerns turned to the personal.
What were Jung’s experiences during his tour?
As I rummaged through stacks of colonial literature, a biography of an eminent couple surfaced.
They had known Jung for several decades and were an important link for him in
Calcutta.
Their names were included in Jung’s voluminous list of correspondents.
Information of others whom Jung had met emerged consequently.
Following these clues, I reached Pondicherry in search of a private interview that Jung had granted in Calcutta in 1938.
The custodian of this information had preserved a cache of her father’s writings, himself a scholar of psychology of the colonial era.
He had participated in the historic Science Congress of 1938 and had interviewed Jung privately.
Only a snippet of this meeting could be found (the actual notes were lost), and as I
deliberated with his daughter, an elderly scholar in Auroville, on the possible
contents of that interview and her father’s links with Jung, she provided me
copies of his writings and directed my attention to a psychiatrist living in the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram who had known her father.
This gentleman opened up a cornucopia of information on Calcutta and told me of an aging scholar in the ashram who had heard Jung’s lecture in Calcutta in 1938 and had later met him in Zürich.
From him, I received an important nugget of information about Jung’s later links in India.
Because of the heap of information that emerged from its archives and repositories, Calcutta became the most critical location of this study.
It was the midpoint of my research, as it had been decades ago the midpoint in
Jung’s journey.
While the young doctor’s claim that Jung had been associated with setting up the Applied Psychology wing at Calcutta University was not true, his references led me to the University Science College, the erstwhile residence of Girindrasekhar Bose, and the curious story of Jung’s sojourn in Calcutta.6
Knowing that all traces of Jung’s historic visit and commemoration had been erased from the precincts of this imperial city was a disheartening experience for me.
Something unusual seemed to have transpired here, but I had no clue then what that could be.
Meanwhile, the chain of coincidences continued.
During the research, I visited the hospital in Calcutta where Jung had been confined during his sickness.
I knew it well not only because it was a colonial landmark but also because it was where I had been born. Girindrasekhar Bose’s handiwork, Lumbini Park Mental Hospital, a flagpole of colonial psychiatry, came up as another familiar name.
Bose had been a significant presence in 1938 at the Science Congress gathering where Jung was commemorated.
The reminiscences of a nonagenarian psychiatrist who had been Bose’s student at
Calcutta University and had worked as his apprentice at Lumbini Park Mental
Hospital brought back vestiges of the colonial era and memories of an old family saga.
I found many antiquated volumes of British history in the deserted archives of Calcutta that offered stirring accounts of that period.
When I searched for reports of Jung’s forgotten lectures, delivered at the
celebrated congressional gatherings,
I found them not in Calcutta but stashed away in the secluded alcoves of another imperial city, New Delhi.
One of these lectures had been delivered at a college founded under the British, a
colonial edifice and my mother’s alma mater.
The mystifying chain of coincidences left me infused with the spirit of that era.
In every way, the ancestral links that surfaced reinforced the quintessence of this work, a story of inheritance and origins. ~Salagna Sengupta, Jung in India, Page 20-24
