The Body of One Color: Indian Wrestling, the Indian State, and Utopian Somatics

Abstract

South Asian scholars are well aware of the central place of the Hindu body in ritual, ascetic, and artistic life. A great many scholars who have examined the Hindu body have studied the parameters of purity and pollution as the structuring principles of caste hierarchy. Others have focused on the relationship between power and purity in ritual, exchange, and transaction (Dumont 1970; Marriott 1968, 1976); the structural logic of dietetics in ayurvedic science (Khare 1976; Zimmermann 1983, 1988); the psychosomatic experience of identity (Daniel 1984), personality (Kakar 1990), and emotion (Lynch 1990; Trawick 1990); and the embodiment of gender in various sociopolitical arenas (Chatterjee 1989; Mani 1987). In the literature on these and other themes there is general consensus that a South Asian view of the body is quite different from its Western counterpart. Put simply, most scholars accept that moder Hindu concepts of self and society are not guided by a simple notion of Cartesian mind-body duality. Rather, the whole person is regarded as a complex, multilayered indivisible synthesis of psychic, somatic, emotional, sensory, cognitive, and chemical forces (cf. Parry 1989; Staal 1983-84).' Too much should not be made of this stark opposition, however. When particular instances of somaticity in either Europe, America, or India are given careful study, there appear to be degrees of congruity: Judeo-Christian dualism expands into complex three dimensions when the individual body is subject to the workings of spirit, soul, sin, and salvation (cf. Parry 1989:512-514), just as the Hindu body seems, at times and in places, to be fabricated in terms of such dualities as subtle consciousness and gross materiality. However, Hindu philosophy seems to accommodate a fluid synthesis of cognitive and somatic factors to a much greater degree and with less contorted rationalization than do most Western philosophies. In this article I will provide an example of how a psychosomatic synthesis characterizes a particular category of person in northern India: the pahalwan, or Indian wrestler.2 I will argue that the wrestler's identity is the product of a precise