Book review: S.K. Kumar,and S. Sarkar,eds.,Contextualizing the body: An Indian Experience

This volume includes papers presented at a seminar held in 2015 at History Department, University of Burdwan, along with some commissioned later, numbering 14 in all.

Since such a volume must necessarily be disparate in content and uneven in quality, one looks up to the editors’ introduction for a synthesis. The editors in this case, however, appear to have chosen words not to illuminate but to obfuscate: Human body is described as ‘[A] cultural metaphor, as manifestation of lived experience, as medium of existential encounter with the outer world, and as a surface for social calligraphy’. Human body is ‘a cultural trope’ and ‘an instrument of lived experience’; it has become ‘the historiographical dish of the day’!

Though the volume title mentions India, most papers deal with colonial Bengal. The first two contributions stand apart in that they deal with ancient times. The very first essay by Syed Tanveer Nasreen discusses how Manusmrti regulated the feminine body. The author has, however, merely handpicked passages from the text, and given their meaning. The translation moreover is not literal. Often, even the exact references to the consulted text are not given. Sanskrit verses are written in Roman alphabet, but most of the words are fused together and the entire verse presented as an incomprehensible long word. Manusmrti became known to the world including India in the closing years of the eighteenth century through the work of Sir William Jones. It was never a living document. Even from the point of view of a present-day scholars, it is one among many Dharma Shastras, composed at different times in different geographical and political settings.

‘Female body as the site of the mystical and the erotic’ in medieval Bhakti movements by Vijaya Ramaswamy is compact and instructive. It quotes in translation many passages from South Indian writers.

In a long and well-illustrated paper, Jayanta Bhattacharya discusses ‘Anatomy knowledge at the 3rd level’, but the discussion is more focused on medicine than on sociology and quite unconnected with India. Ujjayan Bhattacharya’s ‘Body resistance and atmospheric threats’ deals with small-pox in colonial Bengal. His starting point is a 1767 account by J.Z. Holwell. The author asserts: ‘The British colonial government proscribed variolation in 1865 on extremely discriminatory grounds, and goes to credit Holwell with recognising the scientific basis of the treatment almost a hundred years before the practice was outlawed’ (p. 91). It would be anachronistic to pitch variolation against vaccination. The former contained an inherent element of risk in that through it smallpox could also spread. Vaccination was safer and therefore a decided improvement. Variolation was introduced into England in 1721 from Turkey, and British science establishment was keen to learn about inoculation as practised in China, India and other countries. That is why Holwell’s account is directed at European audience and addressed to the College of Physicians in London. When the safer procedure of vaccination was introduced, variolation was slowly phased out in Britain. It is wrong to say that variolation was an all-India phenomenon. It was confined in India mainly to Bengal and adjoining areas. The British tried to introduce variolation in Madras Presidency but without success. Once vaccination was introduced, attempts were made to make it popular. The only territory which took to vaccination was Peshwa Baji Rao II’s territory where the mythology around Shitala was modified to accommodate the innovation.

There is a discussion on how the colonialists stereotyped the ‘effeminately timid’ Bengali and how as reaction the ‘urge for manliness became the need of the hour during the Swadeshi movement’ (p. 269). There seems to be much exaggeration here. By manliness, the author, Amitava Chatterjee, seems generally to mean playing football.

In his essay on the Bawdy Body, Sudit Krishna Kumar, who is also a co-editor, asserts that ‘[t]he term baboo might have been derived from the Sino-Tibetan stock of words, a part and parcel of the local dialect of pre-Aryan Bengal’ (p. 139). This takes no note of the well-known fact that the word bābū is also used in Hindi-speaking world, where the dictionaries give it a Sanskrit derivation.

The book includes an index. Regrettably, it is not a book one would enthusiastically place in one’s personal library.