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 rooted in the materialism of geography, land and other physical phenomena such as the body. To focus on ideology directs analytical attention to the structured coherence of beliefs, however fantastic and utopian these ideas may be, and away from the materialist and mimetic contingencies of historical development.

Because the body is a tangible material thing that reveals, and is implicated in, the artifactuality of ideas, it is useful to theorize nationalism in terms of the body. In this regard the body is not 'read' as a text. It provides a medium through which to undertake a genealogy of the present as a condition of contingent – as opposed to coherent – meaning. The body gives form to meaning even as that meaning is produced as the consequence of the body's imbrication in the mimetic effects of history. The body thus stands in a peculiar relationship to ideas in general and to ideology in particular. In Daniel's terminology, the body fills that space, both logical and material, wherein there is the seductive illusion of hope that event and description are the same. In Susan Stewart's terms, the body is the ghost of deferred ontology that haunts the play of signifiers; and in nationalism the play of signifiers can take on epic, rhetorical significance.

In my previous work I have looked at the way in which Foucault's notion of body discipline provides a means with which to analyse the cultural politics of nationalism. Foucault's theorizing is often referred to as discursive. This is somewhat misleading, since it is designed to deconstruct the rational continuity of canonical discursive knowledge by locating 'the history of ideas' in places other than texts, for example in bodies. A theory of body discipline produces a pervasive tension in the construction of knowledge, a tension wherein the history of ideas manifest in bodies is subject to representation in written, textual forms that are not embodied. Although problematic, since the body can be 'read' in various ways and reading is not subsumed by the mechanics of discipline, the distinction between text and body is useful. In some sense embodied practice resists the textualization of knowledge and all that it signifies in terms of the production of logical, rational, structured and ultimately published bodies of knowledge.

As Benedict Anderson's work makes clear, writing in particular and print capitalism in general are closely linked to, and constitutive of, post-colonial nationalism. Imagined communities are imagined through the medium of writing. However closely linked to the text-based constitution of imagined communities, nationalism is clearly not simply a knowledge system. It involves bodies, embodied acts, and both commonplace and elaborate forms of social practice. Moreover, some forms of nationalism are so deeply invested in body discipline that writing about the body creates both logical and visceral dissonance in the production of an embodied community engaged in practice.

To understand this it is necessary to answer two interrelated questions. Firstly, there is the question of how nationalists write the disciplined body so as to imagine community. Secondly, there is the issue of how it is possible to translate a sense of imagined community back into context-specific practice, which is where the nationalist body must take literal' shape, without losing touch with the figurative, often utopian idea of nationalist sentiments manifest in a decontextualized, transcendent sense of imagined community. Another way of putting this is to question the relationship between rhetoric as a discursive form of practice and embodiment as an act of self-discipline, and ask how the regimes of truth and power that are specific to each are reconciled. How does this reconciliation produce a specific form of nationalist politics?

To address these questions, a body of literature has been selected that is explicitly nationalistic and, significantly, is also concerned with the disciplinary reform of bodies to produce conditions of health that reflect identity. Although this is not the place to pursue such an assertion, this literature probably represents a much broader, cross-cultural genre, which deserves critical analytic attention. This genre is concerned with the representation of disciplined bodies and might be called the political prose of physiology. Within this genre would fall, for example, many eugenicist tracts of the early twentieth century, literature on aesthetic surgery in Weimar Germany, books on nature cure in early-nineteenth-century Europe, and the extensive popular literature on nineteenth-century Muscular Christianity in the USA.

The cases of wrestling and yoga reflect broad patterns of nationalist thought that have developed over the course of the twentieth century as well as unique features associated with a kind of nationalism which is ambiguously linked to the standard features of linguistic, ethnic and religious identity and which is ambivalent about the distinction between modernity and tradition that is often made in nationalist discourse. The literature in question is self-consciously nationalist and programmatically political, albeit in a cultural mode. Yog Manjari and Bharatiya Kushti are special-interest magazines where the clear articulation of ideology matters and where those who are counted as the community are those who subscribe to the magazines, even though the imagined community extends well beyond delimited membership and subscription rosters.

Clearly there are other kinds of texts that can be nationalist. Perhaps most significant, in the context of this discussion, are those books that are so thoroughly fetishized as to have a virtual life of their own: the Koran, the Bible, the Gita, the Ramacharitmanas and the Guru Granth Sahib, to name but a few. These texts take form and have specific, although by no means singular, meaning through the medium of print capitalism. They are, however, a step beyond the field of rhetoric and ideology in the sense that for believers they are the truth unto themselves as things, rather than simply representations of the truth in other arenas. Thus, to a degree, these kinds of texts break down in the sense of obfuscating – the kind of tension between text and body that characterizes those kinds of nationalism that are not subsumed under the mantle of religious faith and holy books. Viewed from the other side, religion is not inherently nationalistic and so the textuality of holy books must be rendered nationalistic, which is not at all the case with the programmatic texts under investigation here.

Reading the wrestler's written body: articulating somatic nationalism

In this modern age we have reached a point of progress and development in which strength has no value. Blind, lame and men with crippled limbs who have not even the strength to flip a switch, affect the stance of warriors even as they engage in their own self destruction.

Wrestling in India is much more than a sport insofar as its social significance is not delimited by the terms of competition and contest. It also has a long history that extends well beyond the nationalist concerns of modern wrestlers. In contemporary practice, wrestling as a way of life is not subsumed by nationalism. Just as there are non-nationalistic forms of religious faith, so there are apolitical expressions of wrestling. Nevertheless, wrestling in contemporary urban India is clearly nationalistic insofar as many wrestlers are principally concerned with the way in which their bodies engage with modernity in order to reform India and rebuild national character in terms of hyper-masculinity. It is important to note that wrestling is self-consciously marginal, pitted against the kind of commercialized elitism and high-profile, patriotic nationalism that is manifest in international cricket, field hockey and athletics. This is not necessarily to say that wrestling is categorically subaltern in terms of social location and cultural form. However it does tend to be regarded as a kind of traditional rural sport linked to an ethos of rustic simplicity.

The nationalist project of wrestling, if it can even be referred to as a project, is not in the least structured. There is no concern with governmentality in the sense of organized political action. The body is the nation and the nation is the body in a direct, one-to-one equation. Significantly, incremental recruitment of young men into the wrestling 'community' is thought to establish a nation of wrestlers. Nationalism in this context is embodied as both individual and collective biomoral strength. In this sense it is an extreme example of cultural politics wherein culture is understood as an interpretive, unbounded system of meaning. What anchors this cultural politics is meaning rooted in physiology rather than in the structure of social practice.

Social practice is manifest in the arena of the gymnasium, which is most certainly an institution in the good, old-fashioned, sociological sense of the term. Indeed, gymnasiums are thoroughly embroiled in local politics. But this kind of politics is not thought to provide an institutionalized structure for the politics of nationalism. Historically, many modern gymnasiums were established in the context of the Indian nationalist struggle, but here again the concern was less with building a network of organized resistance than with body-building of a particular kind as an end in itself. There is, as one might guess, a high degree of disconnection between local political action and embodied nationalist vision. However, in an important sense the social form of collective gymnasium life, rallying in support of a municipal candidate for election or inviting neighbourhood notables to a festival, is regarded as political and thereby somewhat tainted rather than as meta-political in the sense that nationalism is imagined to be. Gymnasium affiliation can relate directly to a local community identity and examples include Yadav dairy farmers, Brahmin priests, recently urbanized peasants, Muslim weavers, unionized labour and college students. However these designations, along with the associations of class, caste and occupation, are relatively unimportant in the context of a way of life that is geared towards personal transformation on the one hand and national reform on the other. In more general terms, therefore, the body is to nationalism in the context of wrestling what rhetoric is to ideology in the context of the nation–state, and it is this level of materialized abstraction that I concerned with.