BODIES BEINGS AND GENDERS182 from the margins, February 2002 Soul’d Out and In: Representation of body, no-body, male, female etc. in the ‘Hindu’(?) philosophy Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay * ya srsti srasturadya bahati bidhihutam ya hovirya ca hoiri ye due kalam bidhattah sruti-visaya-guna ya sthita vyapya visvam. yamahuh sarvabhutahprkrtiriti yaya pranina pranavantah»... — abhijnana sakuntalam. © Before going on to discuss representation of “body” in the (what is perceived today as) Hindu texts, let us start with a comment from Foucault, because we cannot perform anything without a saheb — saheb is our prior- self, our ganapati, the holy starting point. Foucault said, “On the one hand, the societies ~ and they are numerous: China, Japan, India, Rome, the Arabo-Moslem societies - which endowed themselves with an ars erotica. In the erotic art, truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference toa criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself;” (1978/90:57). © I don't think that at least in (the politico-administrative and metaphysical totality called) India, as far as my knowledge is concerned, we can generalize like this. There is no absolute ars erotica as such which is drawn from pleasure alone without any reference to absolute law. Foucault is constructing an oriental space that is merged only in erotica without any violent (penetration of) science! It is, in fact, a softer version of old oriental discourse. It is almost saying like, “We (white) have science and you (blacks) have arts ...” @ Foucault differentiates between the two spaces of science and arts; he is not generalizing ... in fact he does not find any thing positive when he says that Western civilization possesses only science: “On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars erotica: In return, it is undoubtedly, the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret;” (ibid, 58). * The author is Linguist, Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Body in ‘Hindu’ philosophy 183 @ Incase of the meta-geopolitical entity called India as well, 1 must say or 1 may deploy the same statement: “the ently civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly {net} opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret.” Notice that I have erased the “only” and “not”, because western civilization is not the “only” civilization that developed such a thing and furthermore, there is ne dividing line between art and science in each and every space and time. We also have the procedures of telling the truth of “sex” (in the sense of Foucault) and techniques of self care in our own way in our literature, architecture, and in sastras like Kamasutra and Yoga darsana or in numerous treatises on sexual management (especially in smritisastras). Did Foucault-saheb have the knowledge of “our” way of telling the truth of sex through kala and vidya (cf. Bandyopadhyay, 2000) before commenting on “our” domain? Did he know how did “we” categorize “our” domain of knowledge(s)? How dare he taxonomize a vast world of China, Japan, India, Rome, and the Arabo-Moslem societies without apparently knowing anything about it? Furthermore, he found traces of ars erotica in the white space: “scientia sexualis versus ars erotica, no doubt. But it should be noted that the ars erotica did not disappear altogether from Western civilization; nor has it always been absent from the movement by which one sought to produce a science of sexuality.” (ibid, 70) Western civilization possesses both these two and we have only one. Foucault himself is constructing a grand-narrative and he is keeping up the art- science dividing practice without any hesitation. @ It must be noted here that Foucault rectified himself in an interview. When the interviewer questioned him regarding the difference between western science of sexuality and oriental ars erotica, Foucault said, “One of the numerous points where I was wrong in that book was what I said about this ars erotica. | should have opposed our science of sex to a contrasting practice of our own culture.” (Rabinow, 1984: 347-48). He then should give the title of the book as “The Western History of Western Sexuality”. However, it prevails that you are knowledgeable enough about the Indian/Hindu scientia sexualis. Please tell me about this in reference to absolute law, confessions, care of self as well as about act-pleasure- desire embedded in the concept of sex or srngara in the Indian context. @ India is not at all a homogenous space and I do not know the vast plurality of concepts, attitudes regarding sex(-uality) of the people(s) living within this geopolitical aréa. And that does not necessarily also tally with those components/atiributes of sexuality given by you following Foucault. Therefore, I may tell you something about (what is today termed as) “Hindu” concept of “sex” as per my limited knowledge. I'll start with the concept of body, but there are many bodies - and even184 from the margins, February 2002 ho-bodies! (sometimes subject to reincamation) in Hindu thought: medical body, vana or female and male body, darsanika-body, pouranika body, kama-body, bad body (sariraka) and many other bodies. The first question is: how these bodies are em-bodied? How did bodies take their shape? @ Even India is a body — a female body — Sati’s (Mother Goddess, Siva’s wife) body-parts are scattered all over India — these female organs are worshipped in different (almost 51) Indian tirthas. This proves our age-old integration as a body-state. However, | think, before going to discuss Hindu concepts of sex, you have to purify your body. You know that without purifying your own sarira or body, you can't open the file of Hindu sastras. First of all, you must initiate yourself through the process of upanayana(the holy thread ceremony of brahmin), the first step to caturasrama (four stages of life). You must have, as a brahmin, performed that holy thread ceremony before your adolescence as you know that without being a brahmin, you do not have the right to open the sastras. © Well, | remember that ceremony. After that ceremony, I was taught to think of three types of woman at the moment of silently chanting gayatrimantra (a secret psalm in the name of the mother Gayatri). This much I remember, as | was fully obsessed with the bodies of those women at the age of 12/13 itself. Kakar’ (1981:128) said Hindu brahmins suffer narcissistic wound as an after effect of this ceremony as it initiates a dependency on the supreme male or brahman. What Kakar does not notice, is this obsession with the figure of three types of women at the time of brahmacarya (a stage of life when sexual austerity is practiced). Secondly, it is also a puzzling question why we should imagine three types of woman, at the time of worshipping this supreme male called brahman. At one phase. He (Sanskrit sah as in so'ham, ‘he is I’) is male, and He is also a neuter (Sanskrit fat, as in tatuamasi, ‘It is also you') gender. ¢ O.K., Let’s start puja and the puja siarts with purification of the body of the worshipper. (I am writing a paper now. Writing “scientific (2) Paper” is also a ritualized puja and it is to be non-contaminated by the evil spirits, but that’s net a different story.) The male worshipper not only purifies himself but also purifies his habitat, his surroundings. Even he should protect himself from evil ghosts (bhuta-preta-pisaca-raksasa-danava-different types of no-bodies: demons, evil spirits, ghosts, the “other” non-Aryan inhabitants) by offering them masabhaktavali (a type of ritual sacrifice with a symbolic ted color that is to be poured into a clay dish). * When I am using the word “no-body”, I have many semantic conjectures in my mind. Nobodys (a) Brahman, who does not possess body (ct. “sarvatopanipadam tat sarvatohksi siromukham savato srutimatioke sarvamabrta tisthati” Gita); (b) bhuta (spirit or extra- terrestrial body), who does not possess physique, but possesses shadow of the physique. (c) the anyavratas (others), who, though they possess body, were categorized as non-humans (so-called non-aryans, the ancient inhabitants): pisaca, raksasa etc. Body in ‘Hindu’ philosophy 185 @ Iam curious about the term bhuta. I have to perform bhutasuddhi (purification of the five gross elements like earth, water, fire, wind and sky by which my body is constituted) after masabhaktavali. The word bhuta means “ghosts, spirits” in the masabhaktavali, but it also means “five gross elements” of sthulasarira or gross body in the bhutasuddhi and in the philosophical discourses. The simple interpretation is that bhuta is a polysemous word with two meanings. I think, initially this is not only a problem of polysemy. This word is differentiated in purana and darsana. You find bhuta in the sense of spirit (no-body) in the purana and the gross material elements of the body in the darsana, though puranas use bhuta in both the senses. But this problem of polysemy inaugurates the threshold between purana and darsana. @ Nirad C. Choudhury (cited in Sanyal, 1980:23) noticed this. He maintained that the main hindrance for understanding Hindu Philosophy is its contamination by purana. According to Choudhury’s positivism, if we look at darsana through purana, it would distort the darsana. That is, if we tead darsana by codifying it with the spectacular purana, we would misunderstand the basics of darsana. As for example, like bhuta, we have words like atman or atma which, means “self” in darsana and ghost in the Purana. In course of interpreting Hindu texts, we have to make this differentiation as clear as possible. @ I can't help but quote Nietzsche in this context of ambiguous ghost/ no-body or self. For Nietzsche, due to the coercive disciplinary technology of control and “normalization” (the reader may notice the Foucauldian rephrasing!) the instincts are blocked: “...all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly tur inward — this is what I call internalization of man first developed what was later called his ‘soul’”(1956:220,emphasis added). Nietzsche’s argument is that this gives birth to a masochist interpretation of self that resulted in the moral consciousness. My argument is not only confined to the moral question of the teflexive self, but the internalization of threat and violence, which constructs the authenticated “soul”. I want to mean that the concept of atman or soul was born out of internalization, the darsanika paraphrasing of this spiritual soul is context- free atman (that is beyond the control of smriti or constitution composed by Manufs}, i.e., to the Hindus, there is a smriti-controlled self in contrast with darsanika-construction of self) or self. And existence of this atman was also denied through the Buddhist doctrine of anatma or nairatma (it is a negation of no-body). @ And this philosophers’ construction of context-free atman or self was popularly paraphrased as atma or ghost. This darsanika-construction of self can be achieved through kurma-sadhana or tortoise-meditation of tantriks and bauls. One could withdraw oneself from the outside sociality and could take refuge in the shell of a tortoise by the way of meditation, i.e., taking