Body, Text, Nation: Writing the Physically Fit Body in Post-Colonial India

Joseph S Alter

Indeed I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it. Because what troubles me with these analyses which prioritize ideology is that there is always presupposed a human subject on the lines of the model provided by classical philosophy, endowed with consciousness which power is then thought to seize on.

You notice that the metaphor of surface begins to break down. The metaphor of surface becomes the surface of metaphor; the relation among signifiers, posited as a material historical relation, nevertheless continues to be haunted by the deferred ontology that is its point of origin. What has been suppressed is the alterity that will erupt as nature and death – the alterity of the Real.

There will be in this [expressive] view of the world, a day in the indefinite future when word and object will be perfectly articulated in the OM, when event and description will be perfectly attuned. But herein lies the danger: in the seduction, the hope, the illusion that someday there will be a perfect closure.

Introduction: bodies and bodies of knowledge

In most parts of the world, but certainly in modern India, there is a great deal of concern among various groups with the relationship between health, identity and the moral integrity of both the nation as a whole and the citizenry who constitute that whole through individual embodied acts and collective social action. Often body discipline is regarded as both the means and the ends of nationalism. Based on ethnographic research conducted among wrestlers in North India who advocate the embodiment of nationalism and among a yoga society with a similar nationalistic agenda, this chapter is concerned with popular publications in which communities that define themselves in terms of physical fitness and physiological health seek to 'write the body' into popular consciousness.

The nationalism associated with wrestling, known as Bharatiya kushti or Pahalwani, takes shape in the context of gymnasiums where young men gather to engage in a complex regimen of physical fitness training. Each gymnasium is a social world in itself, but there is an important sense in which the institutional structure of gymnasiums collectively defines an 'imagined community' of men intent on building their bodies so as to rebuild the nation. Although wrestling is a 'popular' sport, as a way of life it is thought to have been marginalized by modernity. Relatively speaking, there are not many wrestlers in India, and popular publications are in part designed to counteract this trend by inspiring young men to join gymnasiums and embody a wrestling lifestyle.

Yoga in India has a long association with nationalism. The particular form with which I am concerned is a yoga society, the Bharatiya Yog Sansthan (BYS), that advocates the public performance of secularized mass-drill yoga as a regimen of fitness designed to counteract the harmful effects of modernity on public health. The BYS is unique in as far as it is explicitly nationalistic. It is a registered society, based in Delhi but extending into a number of other North Indian cities, and it has an official, dues-paying membership of several thousand. Its publications are meant to define the relationship among yoga, social reform, physiological health and national fitness.

Of particular interest to this chapter are the two magazines Bharatiya Kushti (Indian Wrestling) and Yog Manjari (Yoga in Bloom). In the age of the World Wide Web, Bharatiya Kushti and Yog Manjari are decidedly anachronistic in their continued format as ink-on-paper publications distributed by mail. The former, measuring 20 by 15 centimetres, contains some black-and-white photographs and is typically about 50 pages in length. The latter measures 28 by 18 centimetres, with colour photographs on the front and back pages, and is typically 35 pages in length. Bharatiya Kushti is published by Ratan Patodi, who founded Bharatiya Kushti Prakashan (The Indian Wrestling Press) explicitly to define Indian wrestling as a nationalistic way of life and to communicate ideas about this way of life to wrestlers and would-be wrestlers. Yog Manjari is the organ of the BYS and is designed to communicate the ideals associated with a nationalist way of life defined in terms of yoga practice. In many ways the two magazines are quite similar as regards topics and structure. Nevertheless they are different in important ways that are germane to the key issue under discussion here. The community of wrestlers and would-be wrestlers constituted through the medium of Bharatiya Kushti do not belong to an organization as such. They are simply imagined, by themselves and by those who subscribe to their views, to be out there as a potent and powerful force. The BYS, on the other hand, is an organization similar to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Samaj or Boy Scouts, where membership is paramount and the social performance of community through meetings, administrative structure, rank hierarchy of membership and parades is a significant part of what counts as nationalistic. In other words, while both are concerned with embodied reform, Yog Manjari addresses itself to a body of members and Bharatiya Kushti addresses itself to 'everyone' but to no institutionalized body as such. In any case, the key problematic in these magazines has to do with the way in which ideas that take shape as words, sentences and whole texts relate to the materiality of the body as meaningful and powerful in itself and the problematic presumption of the body's 'unmediated' relationship to nationalism.

In many respects nationalism is a form of ideology. As recent scholarship has shown, however, thinking analytically about nationalism as simply ideological is problematic since nationalism involves social acts...