Images of the Body in India

South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity

Axel Michaels, Christoph Wulf

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138662841
• eBook ISBN: 9781136703928
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This intriguing book engages with the concept of the body in its cultural context by acknowledging and demonstrating that the human body is understood differently in Western and Indian cultures. The contributors go on to show that any attempt to put forward a single concept of the body within Indian culture would be misleading.

Divided into three parts, the book examines the considerable and often conflicting variations in body images and body concepts. In Part One the contributors focus on the representation of the body in religious and philosophical texts; representations that emerged from reading, translating and interpreting classical writings from diverse historical and anthropological approaches. Through predominantly ethnographic studies, Part Two explores the role of the body in narratives and ritual performance, from dance to ritualistic ceremonies. Visualisation processes of the body are examined in Part Three, focusing on developments in modern and contemporary periods: from visual practices at the Mughal court, to the multiple bodies of the bride, and the influence of new media.

This volume is a fascinating collection of articles for those in the fields of sociology and anthropology, history, religion, cultural studies and South Asian studies.

The Body in Religious and Philosophical Texts

Francis Zimmermann

A Hindu to His Body: The Reinscription of Traditional Representations^*

Although the following pages fall into the field of classical Indian studies and the author has access to Sanskrit sources, they are not directly concerned with Hindu representations of the body as developed before the days of British colonialism. This is an attempt to put into a historical perspective the knowledge gathered over two centuries, a construction of the knowledge about the representations of the body in the Hindu world. In view of the critical history of Orientalist disciplines that has developed over the last few years we make a clear distinction between two periods in the construction of this knowledge. The representations of the body that emerged from reading, translating and interpreting classical writings of Hindu India, became the subject of two successive reinscriptions beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. Our analysis of these reinscriptions is presented below.

This analysis is firmly rooted in the modern age. Drawing on the work of historians of Indian nationalism, we will retrace how a “Hindu science” of the body emerged for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, followed, at a later period, by the reception of the representations of Hinduism in the West. One might say that there have been two successive phases or two directions in the modern craze for the wisdom of Hinduism. Phase One: engendered by the writings of Indian intellectuals themselves, the birth of an indigenous Orientalism, nationalist in its inspiration, which brought the subject of the existence of a “Hindu science” into the public arena of colonial India (1860–1920). Thus, in the midst of other domains of the senses was born a Hindu science of the living body (animal and human), appearing as an ideological construction, constitutive of an exotic world and a sharing of reality between them (the Hindus) and us (the moderns). Phase Two: almost a century later came a new militant Orientalism, this time created in the West, governed by an ideology which was a mixture of cultural relativism, the craze for Hindu spirituality and the political counter-culture movement (1970– 1980). These two phases can be interpreted, retrospectively, as two rewritings of traditional Hindu representations which were influenced by the West. In both cases, Orientalism was the instrument of a construction of ideological realities which were highly imbued with subjectivity. Tangible reality, aspects of the body such as moods and illnesses, food and gestures, were constructed and presented culturally as particular to India, essentially Hindu.

As a European studying Sanskrit texts, I would classify myself as having, of necessity, been part of this second phase. Therefore I bring an introspective, critical approach to bear on this retrospective view of the contemporary rewriting of Hindu representations. How can we speak of India without appearing presumptuous in speaking for other people? For some years now our Indian colleagues have been engaged in writing the history of the construction of colonial knowledge and Orientalism in nineteenth century Anglo-India. About fifteen years ago, they dismissed the afore-mentioned militant Orientalist phase, denouncing it as being “postcolonial,” i.e., an extension of Europe’s exoticising projections on to India. They then put forward a different approach to Indian studies—i.e. creating an archaeology of knowledge about India. I would also like to take up this criticism, drawing on a recent work by Gyan PRAKASH (2000)¹ which expands and refurbishes the theories of Subaltern Studies (a school of historiography which came into being in India during the state of emergency in the nineteen seventies and pursued the objective of giving a voice to the natives), in the History of Science, basing its analyses of the relationship between erudite knowledge and political power on Michel Foucault.

The seventies was the time when, promoted by the enormous popularity of alternative medicine, a certain image of the Hindu body became widespread. It was seen as functioning on the basis of unctuousness and fluidity and characterised by the dialectic of fire and water (the coction of the humours), by a fluidity as opposed to the rigidity of the western body. This was a body image that differed from ours in the West, which functioned as a critical theory establishing the legitimacy of the alternative therapies which were inspired by this image—“critical” in the sense that it ran counter to western biomedicine. It assumed a metonymy between the body (the humours) and the plant kingdom (saps), an image a body in symbiosis with nature which established the legitimacy of practices imported from India by the counter-culture movement—non violence, i.e. vegetarianism. The work done by Indologists on this subject during the seventies implicitly fulfilled the moral, political and existential expectations of the enlightened American and European public of the time. My hypothesis in what follows, however, is that this image of the Hindu body developed by Indologists was originally constructed by Hindu nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century. I find Gyan Prakash’s interpretation convincing and draw upon it in my detached reflections on the subject of “representations in the Hindu world,” an area that can only be considered within the ideological framework of the Hindu nationalism that has now been in existence for a hundred years.

However, I propose to go still further and dissect the mechanism behind Prakash’s genealogical explanation. He contextualises the representations of India in the West, showing that they were initially reinscriptions of traditions, traditions that have been reappropriated by politics. This explanation applies not only to the representations of the body in the work of subalternist historians (even though the Body is a strategic theme), because they were profoundly influenced by Foucault’s critical philosophy of biopower and the governing of human bodies; Prakash’s explanatory mechanism is valid for all sorts of Indian matters, and in particular for all the moral, political and aesthetic issues which are widespread in contemporary Indian-language literature: the theme of the little village community, for example, or the theme of kinship which gives structure to traditional Hindu society, etc. I will therefore attempt to describe the approach and critical position of a scholar such as Gyan Prakash within the field of “Indian Studies” (a field whose legitimacy he contests, although he does not say so explicitly).

The Governing of Human Bodies in Colonial India

I turn first to Gyan Prakash’s excellent chapter on “Body and Governmentality,” (cf. PRAKASH 2000, ch. 5) which takes from Foucault the analysis of a genealogy of the modern mutation, the procedure which, in simple terms, has brought about the evolution of the European state from wielding legal power to wielding bio-power. Initially a purely political, administrative authority, the state has come to represent power over biological life and power over the body, an authority that controls the population, establishing law and order through the knowledge and practices of public sanitation.

To govern the modern subject is to inculcate in him or her methods of knowing and controlling his or her own body. Governmentality is a complex of procedures proposed or prescribed to individuals to establish, maintain or transform their identities through self-mastery or self-knowledge. Governmentality is an internalisation of the government within the spirit of each citizen. According to Foucault, all societies have technologies which permit individuals to perform a certain number of operations on their bodies, souls, thoughts and behaviour in order to improve themselves and attain a certain state of happiness, purity or supernatural power. To a cynical observer it appears as an internalisation of disciplines of government through which the state benefits from the appropriation of individual strategies. Prakash applies this concept of the hold of political power over private life to colonial India, and within this concept, in India, Hindu representations of the body have historically always played a role.

In modern India (during the colonial period), Hindu representations of the body were technologies of the self as conceptualised by Foucault, that is, the relays of social control in every individual subject’s cultural baggage, (native) disciplines, reappropriated by the state to ensure the self-fabrication of the bodies of the natives through good public health policies (which the English called sanitation). From the perspective of the subject, technologies of the self, which embrace technologies of the body (and particularly technologies of care or the control over vital fluids) are nothing other than correlates of the technologies of social domination. To mobilise these technologies of the self or disciplines of the self, as was done in India, is to mobilise the “governmentality” of individuals in such a way that they assume the responsibility for their own discipline.

“What was colonial about the colonization of the body [by the British authorities in India]?” asks Gyan PRAKASH (2000, p. 127). How did the British colonial authorities, who at the outset had only Western knowledge of medicine and psychology to apply to matters of the body and sanitation, succeed in governing the Indians as if they were modern subjects—in other words making colonial knowledge function as technologies of the self? They did it by reappropriating the Hindu representations of the body. They managed to reappropriate the representations of the body in the local culture by eliminating all compromise between modern science and Ayurveda and the traditional therapies.

In the early nineteenth century the British treated the Indians as part of the scenery, as products of the soil, of drainage, water, climate and illnesses, whom they counted and classified according to distinct medical-topographical regions. Confident In the belief that India represented uncharted territory, the colonial medical authorities concentrated on identifying different regimens of health and illness. Thus it was that the effort to control, regulate and reform the tropics, where climatic fevers combined with the irrationality of the inhabitants to cause violent epidemics, resulted in new knowledge based on grand administrative surveys. From this medical geography there emerged an image of the body in the tropics, a kind of basic personality of the human body in an Indian environment, made up, in the eyes of the European observers, of unsanitary habits and superstitious beliefs, to which it was necessary to apply modern science and sanitation to reform and restore its health and well-being.

Initially, but for quite a short period, culminating in 1835², native ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Rethinking the Body: An Introduction
• The Body in Religious and Philosophical Texts
• The Body in Narratives and Ritual Peformances
• The Body in Visualisations and Images
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors