Rethinking the Body in South Asian Traditions

Diana Dimitrova, Diana Dimitrova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000257953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esprit et corps en philosophie

This book analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in religious and cultural contexts, as well as the processes of interpreting notions of the body in religious and literary texts.

Utilising an interdisciplinary perspective by means of textual study and ideological analysis, anthropological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, the book explores both insider- and outsider perspectives and issues related to the body from the 2nd century CE up to the present-day. Chapters assess various aspects of the body including processes of embodiment and questions of mythologizing the divine body and othering the human body, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of South Asia. The book analyses notions of mythologizing and "othering" of the body as a powerful ideological discourse, which empowers or marginalizes at all levels of the human condition.

Offering a deep insight into the study of religion and issues of the body in South Asian literature, religion and culture, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian studies, South Asian religions, South Asian literatures, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative literature.

1 The corporeal vaṃśa

Seizure and restriction of the body in the Harivaṃśa

Christopher Austin

Introduction

The theme of the body has proven enormously popular and hermeneutically powerful across most branches of Religious Studies, and has already inspired a good number of studies in the South Asian context (Staal 1993, Bouillier and Tarabout 2003, Michaels and Wulf 2011, Pati 2011, Holdrege and Pechellis 2014, and Holdrege 2015 to name but a few).¹ As a framework of focalization, the body provides a number of powerful typologies for reflecting on religion and religious experience, not only in immediate and physical terms (corporeality and the sensuous aspect of religious devotion, gendered aspects of embodied religion, purity, pollution, and ritual management of living and dead bodies, and so on) but also as a model, analogue or symbolic system (conceiving the body of God as a theological tool, the framing of religious organizations as social bodies, and so on). Such symbolic deployments of the body may in fact originate in the religious traditions themselves – the most famous example in the South Asian context being perhaps Ṛgveda 10.90, which traces the origins of the cosmos and human society to the dismemberment of the body of Puruṣa, the cosmic Male. As such, scholars may at times invoke or deploy the body as an invented hermeneutic tool or frame of reference imposed from without (what might be called an “etic” application of the concept), while at other times the tradition itself mobilizes the trope of “body” in its own construction of meaning (providing an “emic” or indigenous tool for understanding). This chapter engages with the notion of the body in both etic and emic senses, and in what follows I attempt to make sense of a recurring motif in the Harivaṃśa by deploying the construct of “body” as tool imposed from without, as well as by paying close attention to certain of the Brahminical tradition’s own preoccupations with the management of male bodies.

Over the past several years, I have indulged a fascination with the narratives of Kṛṣṇa’s adult life (Austin 2011; 2013; 2014), and particularly those involving his son Pradyumna and grandson Aniruddha (Austin 2018; 2019a; 2019b; 2019c). Kṛṣṇa is best known and celebrated in Hindu tradition as a child and adolescent, but it is clear that the poets who composed the first continuous narrative account of Kṛṣṇa’s biography – namely the Harivaṃśa (cir. second or third century ce; hereafter HV) – were no less concerned with his adult than with his young life. Whatever may be Kṛṣṇa’s ultimate identity as the transcendent, unborn and unchanging Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa, as the father of sons he is the sustainer of a human patriline, and the HV’s creators were clearly deeply invested in a long-standing Brahminical ideology that valorized male lines of descent. In the present chapter, I will take up the notion of the “body” as an interpretive tool for examining certain key narrative episodes of the HV. These episodes involve corporeal seizure and bodily restriction or obstruction in the accounts of Kṛṣṇa and his male offspring, and I would like to argue here that the vaṃśa or lineage of Kṛṣṇa itself can be conceived (this being an etic application of the construct) as a kind of male body, threatened, and restored together with its individual members in the HV. I will approach this hypothesis by first looking briefly at the ritual culture surrounding the veneration of the pitṛs or ancestral fathers, and by highlighting the permeability or two-way genetic interdependence between male generations that we find reflected and asserted in that culture. Tied to this is the notion of debt, particularly ancestral or genealogical, and the associated motif of physical binding and bodily seizure (these being emic or indigenous systems of meaning concerning the body). Thus, by setting the HV episodes against a larger background of Brahminical thinking concerning male lines of descent, I hope to provide a rationale for the persistence of the theme of bodily seizure and abduction in this, the earliest account of Kṛṣṇa’s life.

The vaṃśa as body in Brahminical tradition

In the Vedic-Brahminical tradition which preceded, surrounded, and directly informed the composition of the HV, the boundaries that distinguished a man from his male predecessors and progeny were extremely thin or porous. If we look briefly at the ritual and ideological culture surrounding death, cremation, and ancestor veneration, it will become clear how and why multiple male generations were understood to be so precariously interdependent. I will propose that this precarious interdependence suggests a model of a vaṃśa or lineage as a kind of living body of multiple members – members both here and in the beyond – which requires continual sustenance from different sources and is always susceptible to failures, obstructions, or threats, as is any single living body.

The Brahminical imperative for men to have male offspring is well known, but the point is worth restating here: however much the doctrines of karma, rebirth, and liberation came to dominate South Asian understandings of death and the afterlife, the older Vedic notion of pitṛlokas or divine realms of ancestral fathers persisted, usually awkwardly, alongside the basic understanding of saṃsāra (see, e.g. Kane 1953: 335–339). Karma and rebirth notwithstanding, Brahminical tradition insists that all men are born with a pitṛ-ṛṇa or congenital debt to the ancestors (see Malamoud 1989) which can only be paid by the fathering of male offspring. Knipe (1977) has written with clarity and substance about the way in which this culture expresses itself in the ritual procedures punctuating the death and śrāddha or memorial services: at death one is advanced to the realm of the fathers only by the ritual intervention of one’s son at the time of cremation. The deceased first becomes a preta or wandering spirit, and through the ritual feeding, by the son, of piṇḍa rice balls, the ghost has constructed for him a new body with which to enter the pitṛloka. One finds some variety regarding the time required for this transition process, but the numbers 10, 11, and 12 days are very common, generally with a fairly explicit logic whereby days represent months. Ten days of ritual preparation mirrors ten months of a human foetus’s gestation in the womb, and the rite of sapiṇḍīkaraṇa, as Knipe demonstrates, marks the key transition point to the status of ancestor either after one actual year of ritual offerings or 12 days. Time and again in the ritual literature treating these issues we see that sons become the nurturing parents of their fathers, caring for and feeding piṇḍas – a word which, incidentally, also means foetus, body and testicle (Doniger O’Flaherty 1980: 8) – to the preta spirit like a foetus until it takes birth as a pitṛ. Once this dangerous liminal period has been successfully negotiated, however, regular offerings to the ancestors must still continue, otherwise the pitṛs will fall and suffer a “re-death.” In the “upward” direction then, we see foetal imagery of bodily creation, rebirth, and continual feeding, with sons in a sense giving birth to their fathers.

Thinking through Knipe’s materials, Doniger O’Flaherty stresses the “downward” direction as well, or derivation of benefit to the living from the pitṛs above (Doniger O’Flaherty 1980: 6–7).² Already in the Ṛgveda there is a clear sense of reciprocity between the living and the ancestors, who bestow blessings when fed (e.g. RV 10.15). But more importantly, the ensuing Brahminical ritual culture develops the foetal and gestation imagery further in the “downward” direction, for it is said that if the wife of a man who has cremated his father wishes to conceive a son, she may consume the piṇḍa offering, and so in a sense conceive and give birth to her father-in-law:

The wife who is wedded according to the Law, devoted to her husband, and intent on worshipping the ancestors may eat the middlemost of those balls in the proper manner, if she wants to have a son. She will give birth to a son endowed with long life, fame, intelligence, wealth, progeny, righteousness, and goodness.³

Manusmṛti 3.262–263
(Olivelle 2005: 121)

Many later sources, including the HV (see below) will make similar promises about the benefits of śrāddha rites to the ancestors, which bring not only the blessing of sons, but long life, wealth, knowledge, heaven, liberation, and pleasure.

Clearly, here it is difficult to distinguish one generation from another as distinct and autonomous individuals. Most telling of this corporate identity and ontological permeability of multiple generations is a ritual gesture, again closely documented by Knipe, that forms an important part of the crucial sapiṇḍīkaraṇa rite. Here the piṇḍa rice ball representing the preta ghost is divided in three and each third incorporated into each of the three piṇḍas representing the deceased’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and the three thusly enlarged balls are then incorporated into a single blob (Knipe 1977: 121). It is hard to ask for a more explicit image of a corporate body in which multiple generations come to form a single being.

Where a family has succeeded in producing male offspring every generation and has observed the proper ritual forms, a graduation process moves more and more distant ancestors upwards towards an abstracted and somewhat anonymous body of forefathers. But at any given moment at least three generations are understood to occupy very particular celestial stations and to interact with the living: the deceased father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. These three generations, again, are fed and supported by their living male descendants, and – ve...