Discourses on exile and the condition of the refugee are numerous. In fact, some of these discussions have even gone to the extent of romanticization of the refugee status. All these have brought to the forefront the emotional trauma of the alienated. People separated from their loved ones, from the country of their birth and even from their mother tongue cannot but suffer marginalization in its worst sense. Physical as well as psychological problems brought about by social isolation and separation from everything near and dear to one can be traumatic. The exile experience has been well represented in literature through narratives and poems. Effective representation in literature has greatly helped in declaring to the world the unsettling strangeness felt by the exiled community and thereby gaining them much deserved empathy.

It is in this context that one is forced to reflect on another kind of exile—the mental exile experienced by many in our society. These are people who inhabit strange worlds of their own, often of their own making. They experience all the distress of the geographically exiled, maybe in a more excruciating manner. Psychological or mental problems are of course experienced by the geographically exiled, but these are not of their own making. On the other hand, such problems are offshoots of their sad predicament of having to leave their homeland and root themselves in alien territory. The mentally exiled community, however, is in such a predicament largely because of some inherent negative tendencies that may be called their tragic flaws. Common feelings such as guilt, jealousy, suspicion, possessiveness, and haughtiness have wreaked the ruin of many. Living in the midst of society, they are isolated. Caught in their own fancies they lead lives in hell. Very often, the actions they indulge in might be impulsive, hasty or thoughtless, but the price they have to pay is enormous. Thus we have in our midst any number of Hamlets, Lears, Othellos and Lady Macbeths. The strapping youth who puts off his vested duty until it is too late, the doting father who disowns the offspring that has failed to feed his ego, the loving husband consumed by the passion of jealousy, or a wife who would have her husband achieve his ambition at whatever cost, are not strangers to us. Psychoanalysts can find reasons why they behave as they do, but the important aspect is that they lead the painful lives of exiles in their own lands.

When one considers the theme of exile, these figures that inhabit the limbo also merit our attention. It is a question of human rights—like that one allows the criminal who has done a crime on an impulse. Just as the criminals that are victims of circumstances, the mentally exiled are victims of their tragic flaws. The physical sufferings they encounter on account of their actions are often unnoticed by them, because of the overwhelming nature of their mental agony.

The greatest problem in the case of the mentally exiled is that it might take a long time—sometimes too late— for their condition to be noticed or understood by even those who are close to them. So, all that time they suffer the silent trauma, either without having the capacity of expressing it, without wanting to express it, or they are too caught in the webs of their own minds that they don’t even think of expressing it. So when Kritya devotes herself to examining the theme of exile, the case of the mentally exiled can also be highlighted. As masters of expression, I feel that poets can best unravel the minds of such people among us. This is clearly borne out by the fact that the condition of the mentally exiled is so well represented by the great poet William Shakespeare, that the characters he introduced in this category remain forever the subjects of psychoanalytic criticism.


Jayasree Ramakrishnan Nair