The nation's body

Joseph Alter, an American anthropologist, claims to study not Gandhi's words but his body, the many things he did with and to it. He also looks at the body as providing a skeletal structure for an alternative history of nationalism, says SUNIL KHILNANI.

"WE Indians made Gandhi into a Mahatma, now it is time to bury the old man. There is enough pigeon shit on his statues in any case". These words, cited by Joseph Alter in the conclusion to his book, were spoken to him in 1999 by a young computer technician, an active member of the militant right-wing Hindu organisation which is propping up the current Indian government (and in the past inspired Gandhi's assassins). Inadvertent irony apart (bury?), it is true that such encrusted figurines of the Mahatma's body are pretty much the extent of his tangible presence in India today. But, if one ought to be alarmed by the enmity Gandhi now provokes in India, on the evidence of this book one should also be concerned about those who are turning up to befriend him. Alter, an American anthropologist interested in Indian body builders, wishes to resuscitate Gandhi in all his physicality: he claims to study not Gandhi's words but his body, and to take seriously the many odd things he did with and to it. Why did Gandhi advocate, practice and continually experiment with vegetarianism and strict diets, fasting (sometimes unto death), cold water friction baths, and celibacy (famously sleeping naked with his grand niece in order to train himself in this)?

The embarrassments of Gandhi's body have been viewed as harmless weirdness, as the acts and gestures of a great and noble soul, upholding universal values, or as the tactics of a canny political and moral blackmailer. Alter, rightly, is discontented with these responses. Affirming, like every author of a new book on Gandhi, "that Gandhi has been misunderstood", he claims that Gandhi's bodily performances are the key to what Gandhi meant. Like a scientist and inventor, Gandhi experimented with and analysed his self and body - "experiment" was indeed a critical word in his lexicon, signalled in the title of his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth.

In fact, though, most of Alter's book is not really about Gandhi at all. Like many American academics of a certain age, Alter has ingested a good deal of Foucault (and a little Nietzsche), and fortified with this he sets himself a grander and vaguer theme: to examine the fate of the body during the colonial period, and to chart the efforts of nationalism to make the body a field on which to resist colonialism and stage the nation, creating a community of healthy, self-governing citizens (or, as he puts it: "on account of the complex referentiality of somaticity in India, the body provides a kind of skeletal structure for an alternative history of the nation"). To this end, Alter's larger project is to write a history of yoga and its meanings.

Some insights are to be had from situating Gandhi in this context. As was pointed out by historians like David Arnold, Gandhi rejected Western medicine because he saw it as an instrument that made colonised Indians dependent on and subject to colonial policy: instead he advocated self-cure - diet, exercise - as the basis of a public health policy which returned agency to Indians. Alter tries to develop this, though for someone who claims to be interested in Gandhi's practise rather than writings, Alter's approach is studiously textual - throughout the book, we are given little evidence of what Gandhi did, but plenty of citations from his writings. Alter is right to draw attention to Gandhi's Key to Health, the most popular of all his books (but unread by academics). Here Gandhi outlines a theory of the elements and their relation to bodily health - in addition to earth, water, sun and air, he adds a fifth, the untranslatable Akash. Struggling to render its sense (ether, vacuum, nothingness), Gandhi produced perhaps his most startlingly beautiful literary writing. Akash is the key to Gandhian health, a hyper-ecological notion which describes man's relationship to his atmosphere. Fasting is precisely the creation of Akash, a healing vacuum, within one's own corporeal self.

Alter's interest in Gandhi soon lapses, as we move on to chapters on wrestling and the up-take of yoga in India towards the end of the 19th Century. Like so much of what Indians came to see as distinctively Indian about themselves, yoga in its modern form came to India via the West, and Alter has some interesting remarks on this. Until the 20th Century, Indians had not practised yoga as a health aid: it was the translation into Indian languages of books by German naturopaths - especially Kuhne, with his doctrine of the Unity of disease - which from 1894 onwards prompted a fashion for yoga as an everyday self- cure. The "reinvention of yoga as therapy" was an attempt to find an alternative to Western medicine: it had therefore to be presented as a precise science, and this also was a way of affirming the superior sophistication of Indian civilisation.

Alter inclines towards the anthropological technique of bricolage rather than argument, but his use of it is wooden and forced. No overall argument ever takes off - instead we get a lot of Foucauldian wing-flapping and stumbling between the portentous and the pretentious ("the body is a site of power, and it's my view it is that precisely because it articulates, on the level of the anatomy and physiology, muscles and morals, elements and erotics, the tension between 'me' and 'us' and the struggle therein, over what 'we' is in terms of both local action and global vision"). We wait in vain for the promised "alternative history of nationalism" or "Third World critique of modernity", and along the way we are treated to some rather worrying errors in a book that purports to be a study of Gandhi (contrary to the assurance of the glossary, swadeshi was certainly not "a term coined by Gandhi in the context of the freedom struggle"). The first sentence of the author's Acknowledgements states: "This is a curious book in the sense that I did not know it was being written as such until all of its various parts had been completed". It is curious in other senses too, not least in that even with all the parts ostensibly completed, it remains unclear to what extent they constitute a book - a connected piece of thinking on a specific subject.

Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism, Joseph S. Alter, University of Pennsylvania Press, p.216, £26.

Sunil Khilnani is Reader in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and author of The Idea of India (2nd edition 1999). He is writing a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru.

This article was first published in The Times Literary Supplement, March 2, 2001.

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