Book Reviews : Images du corps dans le monde hindou

Beautifully illustrated and organized with great strategy, this collection of essays is dedicated to the study of “the body as cultural object” (p. 9) in the Hindu world, from the disciplines of history, anthropology, and sociology. The essays provide a wide range of ideas about the body in a variety of contexts, and in its animate and, in the end, inanimate forms. In their introduction, Veronique Bouillier and Gilles Tarabout take great care to situate their collection within the growing bibliography of books dedicated to the study of the body in India. They include a useful overview of the body in the anthropological theories of Louis Dumont (in ideological terms) and of McKim Marriott (in transactive terms), and in doing so, point out that in both camps, the body is “relegated to the margins of analysis” (p. 23). They argue instead for an understanding of the body in its multiple contexts. They describe their book as one which, through its various approaches, will reveal “the reality (or the realities) of bodies” in Hindu India, demonstrated in “popular oral traditions, bodily practices, ritualized or not, in legal statutes” and so on, that will collectively show “continuities between traditional textual knowledge and observed practices”, as well as disjunctures in such a way as to “avoid reductionism” (p. 25). As they write, “there is not just one unique body, nor is there just one way of talking about it” (p. 26). The book is divided into four major segments, each consisting of four discrete articles, and ends with a coda on the body in death. The first segment, titled ‘Logiques descriptives’, begins with an article by Francis Zimmermann, who identifies two phases in the study of Hindu bodies. He describes the first phase as the emergence of a “Hindu science, formulated at the birth—under the pen of Indian intellectuals themselves—of an indigenous orientalism of nationalist inspiration, which emerged in the public colonial space” (pp. 49–50). The second phase is characterized by “a new militant orientalism, forged in the West”, by westerners infatuated “with Hindu spirituality and the political movement of the counter-culture” (pp. 50–1). While Zimmermann writes of plurality and change in approaches to the study of the Hindu body, Dominik Wujastyk directs us to plural images of the body that can be found in the Hindu tradition itself. Michael Angot meanwhile discusses linguistic structures, especially noun-noun juxtapositions, and the making of meaning through mystical and ritual correspondence in early Sanskrit religious literature. The last article of this section is set in contemporary Kerala. Gilles Tarabout addresses the phenomenon of “double impurity”; in this case, that of an astrologer's body because of a birth in his family, and the resulting sympathetic pollution of the “body” of the local temple. The second section, ‘Univers esoteriques’, is opened by Andre Padoux with an essay titled ‘Corps et cosmos’, which discusses the yoga's body in history. Although largely descriptive, this article serves as a lucid, basic introduction for the other three in this segment and also stands in instructive contrast with Angot's preceding essay. David G White moves the conversation on to the specifics of textual description, his contribution being centred on a translation of the third chapter of a treatise, Goraksanātha's Siddhasiddhāntapaddhati. Richard A Darmon's essay deals with the intimate specifics of actual tantric practice, including a survey of the valorization of semen in classical texts and on into the tantric textual corpus, in which is found an explicit association of ejaculation with death. Finally, White's homologies between the human body and the macrocosm come alive in Bāul musical and poetic expression in France Bhattacharya's contribution. The third section begins with Gerard Colas's documentation of the few remaining araiyar families of traditional singers and actors, who recite and enact significant portions of the Divyaprabandham, a medieval Tamil text. Colas provides an engaging overview of the body's place in Vaisnava practice in South India. Sarasvati Joshi directs our attention to women's “self-regard, for their powers, their bodies, [and] in their relationships with their husbands and in-laws” (p. 315). Josiane Racine then documents bodily practices related to the god in the environs of Pondicherry. Turning to the world of Bollywood films, Emmanuel Grimaud describes the body of the actor as it is thrust in the midst of “multidimensional negotiations” (p. 371) that hinge on many factors of film production, such as certain types of close-up shots and dance. The book's final segment, titled ‘Constructions sociales’, begins with Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky's essay, in which she identifies three levels of stigma associated with the bodies of various castes of leatherworkers: dress, odour, and skin colour. She analyses the leatherworker's body in its mythological contexts. Veronique Bouillier then defines the body as “the medium where punishment is inscribed” (p. 424) and as an “object of the law” (p. 425). She focuses on an 1853 Nepali book of statutes, the Muluki Ain, which lists fines imposed for the crime of assaulting someone with chillies in various orifices of the body—the more intimate the orifice, the steeper the fine. Also on aspects of law, Livia Sorrentino-Holden's article is devoted to Indian marriage law, which has been “in a state of constant evolution since Independence” due to tensions between reformers and orthodox requirements (p. 435). Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella return us to Kerala, where they collected data on questions of “nature and nurture” in an administrative unit in that state's most important rice-growing region. Their analyses, which emphasize fluidity and interdependence in local ideas about identity, heredity, and personhood, are based on two terms that refer to the qualities of “what is stable and what changes in a person, janiccu or natural qualities, considered to be ‘fixed’—and samsa or worldly qualities, which are fluid and flexible” (p. 470). The volume ends, appropriately enough, with Gilles Grevin's empirical study of cremation in India and Nepal. Carefully measuring the changing temperatures of the burning bier throughout the process of combustion, he ponders the problem of “the absent body” in the archaeological record. Read as a whole, these essays interconnect to give the reader an excellent sense of what embodiment means in the Hindu world. We also gain an almost overwhelming sense of the body's changing history, as well as history's implications for the body. This volume has great potential as a basic teaching text—I can imagine its becoming a classic, in fact—and I urge the editors to investigate the possibility of publishing an English version, if one is not already in the works.