Kalpana Ram

Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body

This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, but because the structure of affect in the immigrant present resembles an earlier crisis of the emergent middle class under British colonialism. In this situation, the patriarchal universe of the immigrant requires wives and daughters to magically function as phantom limbs, providing an unstable and illusory impression of continuing to enjoy a grip on the world. The paper interrogates this impression from the perspective of young Indian women deeply involved in Indian dance.

Medical management and giving birth: Responses of coastal women in Tamil Nadu

Abstract This paper is an ethnographers attempt to present the experience of maternity among lowcaste Mukkuvar women of the coastal fishing belt of Kanyakumari district in Tamil Nadu in India and the womens responses to modern medical ‘management’ of pregnancy and birth. It argues that womens decisions whether or not to seek medical care during pregnancy, and where to give birth, are based on a finely tuned appreciation of the ways in which class and caste power shape their experience of medical institutions.

Book reviews and notices : MEENAKSHI THAPAN, ed., Embodiment: Essays on genderand identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. xiii + 340 pp. Plates, notes, gloss., refs., index. Rs 495 (hardback)

This edited volume, entitled Embodiment, comes close on the heels of a number of volumes, edited and co-authored, that have taken as one of their principal themes the social construction of the female body. These volumes have produced as a site for active discourse and discussion, the way in which the female body becomes sexualised as both the object and the ground of social identities of caste, class and religion. It is therefore fair to ask how this volume relates to the existing corpus. The thematic of the opening essays in Meenakshi Thapan’s volume (papers by Tanika Sarkar, Jasodhara Bagchi and Urvashi Butalia) marks a straightforward continuity with the preoccupations of previous work. So cohesive a corpus indicates that there is more at work here than Thapan’s assessment of Indian feminism would suggest:

Class and the clinic: the subject of medical pluralism and the transmission of inequality

This article, based on ethnographic work in rural Tamil Nadu, explores the relative invisibility of class and its characteristic modes of operation in the literature on medical pluralism in India. Using, as key concepts, habit, comfort, pre-familiarity and familiarization, the article suggests that we can shift the way we think of ‘pragmatism’, the term that is routinely used to describe subjects who follow pluralist strategies. In reconceptualizing pragmatism, we can allow ourselves to glimpse anew the workings of class within pluralist strategies. The article takes inspiration from Gramscis critique of the self-evidence of ‘common sense’, as well as from the phenomenological aspects of Bourdieus understanding of class and habitus. It explores the very different levels of comfort and authorization that different classes display in relation to biomedical spaces and practices, as well as towards non-biomedical discursive practices. 1

Modernity as a “Rain of Words”: Tracing the Flows of “Rain” between Dalit Women and Intellectuals in Tamil Nadu

Abstract In this paper I investigate the ways in which modernity in contemporary Tamil Nadu may be understood as something other than a purely exclusionary category. I enquire into the flow of language, imagery, music, resonant phrases and film dialogues that has allowed the values of the Self Respect movement in Tamil Nadu to move as a “Rain of Words” across social divisions of class, gender and caste. Egalitarian humanism and rationalism are here treated as part of a modern “tradition”, allowing us, in the process, to redefine what “tradition” might mean. The central place and reverence accorded to intellectuals in Tamil modernity is explored in respect to political party workers, NGOs, parish priests, and social workers in rural areas. I bring together two aspects of Tamil politics normally treated as separate, or in tension with one another: the egalitarian rationalism of the Self Respect movement, and the cultivation of language for its affective and non-rational elements in the politics of language nationalism. Arguing that it is the latter that has allowed the former to circulate as effectively as it does, I focus on the fresh meanings given to these values by young Dalit girls from agricultural labouring communities, as well as girls in coastal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu.

How is Afflictive Possession ‘Learned’? Gender and Motility in South India

This paper examines forms of affliction that are understood as a kind of possession, all the more afflictive because they are experienced as ‘coming out of nowhere’. It is easier to specify the kind of learning associated with valued forms of possession, which occur in the context of ritual performances that entail informal apprenticeships. The sense in which afflictive possession is ‘learned’ is far more diffuse, and occurs much earlier than the point at which diagnosis occurs. This paper traces such learning to early forms of socialisation into gender, focusing on motility and bodily comportment, as central to the way in which the lived body of gender moves between different practical environments. In an environment that includes spirits and deities, female movement acts as guarantor, not only of social stability, but of cosmological order and disorder.

‘I now have ar_ivu [knowledge] which dispels fears’: Instabilities in What it Means to ‘Know’ and the Effects of Tamil Political Party and Civil Society Intellectuals on Rural Women's Discourses

During the 1980s and 1990s, I developed a familiarity with a very specific subculture in Tamil Nadu—the Catholic fishing communities of Kanyakumari, who live in a string of sandy villages stretching from the Cape itself, up to the border with Kerala. I was at this point particularly interested in popular religion and its construction of the female body. Following on from that interest, and set off against the backdrop of a familiarity with the social life of these villages, I began a series of wide-ranging sets of interviews with women I already knew on the ways they framed their experiences of puberty and maternity. The interviews threw up, as I had suspected, an intersecting range of discursive frames. And the book I will eventually bring out on this topic will be as much about the relationship between different kinds of intellectuals and rural people as it will be about female experiences per se. The interviews were deliberately conducted with those active in non-government organisations (NGOs) run by Catholic organisations in the district, as well as with school teachers, priests, midwives and healers of different kinds, with doctors, as well as with ordinary women from different age sets.

Na shariram nadhi, my body is mine: The urban women's health movement in India and its negotiation of modernity

Abstract This article explores the Indian women’s health movement for productive insights into current debates on the “travelling” meanings of modernity. Taking the feminist demand for bodily autonomy as a starting point for the exploration, the article traces the trajectories described by some of modernity’s central concepts: choice, freedom, autonomy, rights, and [developmental versions of] progress. The journeys described here take place not only between the “global” and the “local,” but between metropole and colony in the colonial period, and between the nation-state and the women’s movement in the postcolonial period. As the case example of the controversy over amniocentesis (used in India in the identification and abortion of female foetuses) illustrates, terms such as choice and development have become central to contestations between the women’s movement, the state, and the professional middle classes.

Re-activating modern traditions of justice: mobilising around health in rural Tamil Nadu, South India

This paper uses empirical material from health activists in Tamil Nadu to show that the health discourses that enjoy the greatest continuity and reach in India are also those that presume a radical connection between the health of the individual body and mobilising for a more just social order. The forging of this tradition is traced back to early anti-colonial forms of mobilisation. The transmission of this tradition is then ethnographically traced through various organisations that relay a characteristic set of orientations of thought and action to new generations and groups. The freshness of the synthesis of the tradition effected by each activist is emphasised. Arguing along phenomenological lines, these capacities to synthesise and renew a tradition are located in the capacities of the body. By attending to the unique place of the body in human experience, we may be in a better position to also understand the way in which health discourses that are embedded within wider experiences of injustice are able to circulate with renewed affective force.

Sacred Genealogies of Development: Christianity and the Indian Modern

The term “development” is by now indelibly associated in much critical social theory with “discourse,” in the sense that Michel Foucault made his own.1 Writing in the wake of an earlier decade’s work on colonialism as discourse, Arturo Escobar celebrates the possibilities of extending Foucault’s method to development.2 But—like any method—discourse analysis brings with it characteristic preoccupations and orientations that foreclose certain possibilities while opening up others. Once a methodological stance is adopted, certain consequences are set in motion. Escobar wishes “to show in detail how development works.”3 But his enterprise now becomes identical with setting out “to show how a corpus of rational techniques—planning, methods of measurement and assessment, professional knowledges, institutional practices and the like—organises both forms of knowledge and types of power, relating one to the other, in the construction and treatment of specific problems.”4