Rajiv Malik
DELHI, INDIA, December 5, 2003: Dr. Ravi Kapur, a psychiatrist, trained in India and UK, is currently the JRD Tata Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. He has been the Deputy Director of the same institute and before that the Professor and Head, Department of Psychiatry at the prestigious National Institute of Mental Health & Neurosciences. He is Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Indian National Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Academy of Medical Sciences. Dr. Ravi Kapur delivered a public lecture entitled- “The making of a Sadhu: An enquiry into higher states of mental health,” jointly organized by National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies and India International Centre under the series-DIMENSIONS of SCIENCE, on the evening of December 1, 2003. The conference hall was packed with intellectuals, researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists, media persons, former bureaucrats and diplomats,
Dr. Kapur said that some of the sadhus wanted to be on their own and did not want to be disturbed by the people. Someone close to one such sadhu said that he was not mentally disturbed but did not want to interact with the world. This person also gave the instance of Saint Totapuri, the guru of Ramakrishna Paramhans, who used to throw dirt in the face of the people as he did not want them to come to him.
In his twenty years of research, Dr. Kapur has interviewed sadhus of all categories. On the one hand he has interviewed sadhus who are globe trotters and on the other hand he has interacted with the down to earth ones and the ones undergoing penance on the roads and in the caves of Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kedarnath and Gangotri areas of Uttaranchal Region. Out of around 100 sadhus interviewed by him, he spent with them two to four hours to a few days and also a few weeks, on a case to case basis.
Commenting on his relationship and experiences with the various sadhus, Dr. Kapur said, “I would like to share with you that almost all the sadhus were extremely co-operative and were very generous in extending hospitality to me. Not even one of them asked me for money, though I myself offered dakshina to many of them.”
Giving some interesting details of the sadhus interviewed by him, he said, “Out of the 100 hundred sadhus interviewed by me in the past twenty years, it would be around 40 of them that I had a detailed interaction. Out of these 40, 12 had become sadhus due to some problems faced by them in their social and married lives. As becoming a sadhu solves their problems of food and shelter, this life had an appeal for many people. But these 12 people still carried the baggage of their past lives with them and kept cribbing and complaining about their past. The rest of the 28 sadhus I interviewed had no reason to escape their home and material world. They had opted for becoming a sadhu out of free will and had been attracted to the life as a sadhu since their childhood days. They were absolutely normal people and showed no signs of any psychological problems or illness. Many of these had abandoned their successful careers and social lives, they were happy people and had a good social network to support them as normal human beings. When asked, they said that they had chosen to live as a sadhu because it was in their prarabdha karma (destiny as a result of actions in a past life) and there was no way to scientifically deal with this phenomenon. However most of these 28 people had a religious bent of mind since their childhoo