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This paper 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. The analysis of these reinscriptions is presented in this paper.

This paper discusses some aspects and moments of the Vedic ritual in which the skin of an animal, when removed from the body to which it belonged, may either be used as a cloth and/or as a symbol, or transformed into the living skin of a new body it is meant to cover (earth for instance). The formulas one has to recite while performing these rituals operate this shift from nature to artefact and back to nature.

Discussions on the nature of the relationship between a god, his body and his material representation are almost non-existent in the Hindu devotional perspective, where such concerns are superfluous. Hindu theological and ritual Sanskrit texts, on the other hand, applied procedures of reasoning with regard to that relationship. This rationalization however accommodated rather than conflicted with the devotional attitude. Their attempt to clarify their stand vis-à-vis god′s body and material image followed from ideological or technical requirements. This was done sometimes systematically, as in the Viśiṣṭādvaita school of philosophy where the ritual image is declared to be “a divine descent (of God) for the purpose of worship”; sometimes incidentally, as in ritual manuals, where the process of changing statues into divine bodies is described. But why should gods have a body at all? While some contend that they do not possess any body, others assert that they possess several at the same time, yet others infer the necessity of a body for God to create the universe, to reveal sacred texts, etc. These are some arguments and counter-arguments found in theological texts. The nature of the hierarchy between divine descents and images (which may or may not be considered as real bodies of gods) is another aspect of the discussion. Another question is the various ways in which ritual texts consider the relation between a god and his image. While immediacy characterizes the relation between the devotee and the image of god, the relation between ritual and image is far from being spontaneous. Rituals insure the presence of a god in an image through a technico-mystical process consisting of successive stages and involving patrons, astrologers, artists, priests and others. The final product, namely a concrete god-cum-image, is fit for devotion, but remains for ever fragile, dependent on the continuity of rites and on the material preservation of the image. Behind the ritual perspective also lies the notion that this process of creating a body for a god is in keeping with “natural” laws. Hindu ritual prescriptions are applicable only to the religious images which, though man-made, are considered as “natural”. Supra-natural divine images, known as “self-manifested” images, must be worshiped, but are beyond the range of these prescriptions.

In the late Upanishads and the Mahabharata, one begins to encounter descriptions of Yogis who are possessed of the power to exit their bodies—via “rays” (raśmi) that radiate outward from their eyes, heart, or fontanel—as a means to rising up to the sun or to entering the bodies of other creatures. In the centuries that follow, this power becomes a commonplace of yogic theory and yogic lore, with ritual, narrative, and philosophical texts describing the Yogi′s appropriation of other creatures′ bodies in both symbiotic and predatory modes. In the former case, the yogic “fusing of the channels” is the means by which a Tantric teacher initiates his disciple: exiting his own body, his mindstuff travels along a ray to enter his disciple′s body, which he transforms from within. In the latter, the practice of “subtle yoga,” as described in the ninth-century Netra Tantra, becomes a means by which a Yogi may take over another person′s body, either to inhabit it or to draw its energy back into his own body, thereby increasing his own power. Through these techniques, the Yogi is said to possess the power to enter multiple bodies simultaneously, creating armies of “himself” in the process. These practices, which are attested in hundreds of documents, fly in the face of received notions of so-called “classical yoga,” in which the emphasis is placed on turning the senses inward to isolate the mind-body complex from the distractions of the outside world. In the light of these practices of yogic self-externalization, a re-evaluation of “classical yoga” itself is in order.

This paper examines the idea of the subtle body as described in chapter 7 of the Netra Tantra. It shows how the body is understood as a symbolic system for mapping the cosmos and human beings place within it and examines the relationship between symbolic system and lived body.

An analysis of what the physical description of bodies tells us about the hypocritical characters of government officials, bawds, drunkards and dishonest gurus in Sanskrit satirical works. This paper presents selected portrayals of the physical female and male bodies from both satires and comic monologue plays. These satires make fun of hypocritical people in power, while the plays comment on life in the red light district. Bodies in these works are seen as mirrors and metaphors of the personalities and types who inhabit them, revealed both through their shape and their body language.

Cultures, and especially medical cultures, did not develop in isolation from one another, indebted only to their own dynamics, but in constant interchange. A history of the body hence can only be written as a history of entanglements. The article elaborates this thesis with reference to Unani medicine, a cluster of medical systems still today widely in use among the Muslims (and a good number of Hindus) of South Asia. The history of Unani medicine shows that the “Indian body” is the site of a long tradition of multiple influences and entanglements, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Central Asian, Western and Ayurvedic.

On the basis of Patañjali′s classic definition of yoga in Yogasūtra 1.2 yoga usually has been interpreted as a practice to calm down the restless agitations of our embodied minds during their entanglement with the material world. A yoginī thus has to turn her senses away from the outside world in order to unite herself with the absolute that dwells in all of us. In line with David G. White one could call such a classic view of the Indian body a closed model of the same. It is the aim of this text to offer an alternative reading of the Indian body as an open system, in which a body is understood as an entity, always already ex-posed, substantially, toward the world it is surrounded by, so that it is impossible for it to hide itself from the environment it is embedded in and affected by. In the final part of my text I will compare this ancient Indian concept of an open model of bodies with contemporary efforts of Jean-Luc NANCY to induce such an idea in the West by interpreting bodies as a space of a world-wide being-with.

This article treats the liturgical narratives that bring on spirit possession in the Teyyam worship of northern Kerala for a deity named Poṭṭan, the apotheosis of an Untouchable who is celebrated as having openly contended with the great Śaṅkarācārya over the issue of caste. By tracing the history and stratigraphy of these liturgical materials from their later Sanskritized framing back into their earlier textual antecedents in Malayalam and Tamil, we find evidence for formalized bodies of knowledge among the lower castes which had fused indigenous cults of spirit possession with Tantric doctrines of embodied liberation to argue for the baselessness of caste discrimination.

Bhairav is the central deity in a cult of ritual healing in the Central Himalayas that is closely associated with the lowest castes. This article discusses his embodied form, arguing that it is intimately related to the bodies of low-caste people, whose oppression and suffering it both reflects and ameliorates. This history of Bhairav´s body is captured by in local memory and oral history; and its iconography is revealed in songs and rituals. Ultimately, Bhairav´s appearance in the body of a "possessed" devotee is his most important mode of embodiment, and one that tells us a great deal about what it means to be a Harijan.

This article is based on interviews made with gurus and dancers in Orissa, East India. The Odissi, a “classical” dance which stands at the centre of attention here, is a mixture of centuries-old traditions and relatively new influences, or even “inventions“. By discussing the dance′s history, its aesthetic qualities and, most importantly, the emic points of view of contemporary practitioners of the dance, it is shown that today′s Odissi is based on ideas and practices that stem as much from old Sanskrit writings and late-medieval temple practices as they do from the contemporary realms of popular Hinduism and tribal religion and art. For its practitioners, the dance represents a form of devotion to Jagannath, and Odisssi is thus understood as a “spiritual dance” through which a relationship between the god and his adherents is established or performed. While the attitude exhibited by dancers and audience alike is one of spirituality and bhakti, this spirituality and loving surrender can only be achieved through the bodily practice of the dance, which turns the presence of the deity into a somatic experience in which all the bodily senses are involved.

The essay “Ritual Competence as Embodied Knowledge” by Ute Hüsken points at the importance of questions concerning the body-mind distinction in a ritual tradition which is usually seen as text-dominated, and strictly rule-governed. The underlying case study is the initiation into priesthood in South Indian Vaiṣṇava traditions, on the basis of both field research among the priests and the analysis of the relevant mediaeval Sanskrit texts. Ritual knowledge, it is argued, is above all embodied knowledge. Even in largely “textual” traditions the bearers ritual specialists have the authority not only to perform the ritual, but also to adapt it to contextual needs.

The socio-cultural construction of human body differs from the biological construction, and the body is seen as an existential basis of human interaction within given social, cultural, political and environmental conditions. Human body is not only an organic object but also a cultural object and it is constantly being altered by natural and cultural process. Every folk society has its own traditional understanding of the concepts of 'body′, 'self′, 'soul′ and 'agency′ and several rituals are performed in order to heal, purify and transform the body. Rituals are one mode of cultural praxis through which bodies, knowledge, powers, agency and selves have been repositioned through practice. This study is an effort to understand the socio- cultural construction of human body with special reference to 'rituals′ that are performed in folk religious practices in Tamil Nadu, South India. How human body is culturally professed, purified, transformed and healed through rituals is the important subject matter of this paper.

This article investigates the ways in which visual representations reconfigured the body in North Indian political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While images were meant to transmit and translate ethical conceptions of the polity, communicative modes of the visual medium followed a dynamic that was not a rehearsal of the path taken by texts. As images cut across distinctions formulated elsewhere and drew up new boundaries, they worked to refine and pluralise the understandings of political culture beyond the normative. Pictorial experiments at the North Indian courts involved negotiating multiple regimes of visuality and arriving at pictorial choices that ended up creating a new field of sensibilities, especially the corporeal. An argument is therefore made for the agency of the visual in defining new ideas of the political body that were constitutive of politico-ethical ideals in early modern North India.

This paper examines the gap between the wedding and the beauty or fitness industries, underlining how closely they are connected by means of 'marketing the body′ and how much pressure is put on aspiring candidates in terms of their performance. The beautiful and the fit body of women as well as men have moved centre-stage in the feel-good ideology promoted in neoliberal urban India. The wedding ritual is a field of discourse through which a host of media and gender concepts are entangled in an ambivalent way: at once empowering and domesticating.

This paper is written inspired by looking at the hypocritical neocolonial/postcolonial Indians who claim to be the moralistic proper Hindu Indians. The paper discusses contemporary Indian aesthetic creations, specifically visual images and plastic arts, and correlates them with the excessive psychological, ethical, social, and gender judgments in which they are placed. Nakedness and naked bodies, the sensuous and the sacred body are judged within different hermeneutical contexts. By nakedness I do not mean just the nude body or the sexed body/body-ness, but nakedness in all its ambivalence. The paper focuses on various events in India to show how the domain of the expressive lifeworld of the sensuous and the sacred is still a question of debate, which has not changed since the Victorian moral codes.

The article focuses on Ashim Ahluwalias documentation John and Jane, which describes the living conditions, life styles and ambitions of six call centre employees in Mumbai at a time when call centres were not yet questioned in Indian society in respect of their working conditions or social implications. One main focus of the documentation therefore is a more general transition of Asian countries. The call centre agents embody almost perfectly this time of transition: Indians during day time who have never been abroad but become well trained Americans at night, their bodies still in India, but their mind overseas. This striking example is taken to analyse the framing of humans in times of globalisation and the related virtuality of constructions, including their own bodies.