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Despite the end of colonialism in America, Australia and Canada, India continues
to suffer from internal imperialism since the beginning of civilization. In the graded
hierarchic caste structure of India, dalits form ‘the fifth discriminated caste’. Dalits are untouchables to the dominant castes of India. The bodies of dalits are considered as the appropriate site to perpetrate victimization by the dominant castes of India. The caste system meticulously employs discriminatory patterns of victimization and executes heinous atrocities on dalits considering them as pounds of flesh. Manusmriti, the earliest work of Dharmasastra of Hinduism translated as The Laws of Manu into English in 1794 by Sir William Jones (an English Orientalist and Judge of the British Supreme court of Judicature in Calcutta, India), presents the laws of slavery and victimization to be perpetrated on dalits and women with religious sanctioning. The Laws of Manu says, “(Sudras) Dalits are born to serve… The King shall pour burning oil in his mouth and ears if a Dalit preaches a religion… If a Sudra overhears Veda and ventures to utter a word of
the Veda, the King shall cut his tongue in twain and pour hot molten lead in his ear”
(pp. 39-50). The essence of Laws of Manu was only to consolidate the caste hierarchy which believes in flogging, mutilating, burning and shunning the bodies of dalits from public presence. Dalits were disallowed to cover their bodies. In ancient India, dalits were enforced to walk wearing earthen pot around their neck, tie a thatch (a palmyra leaf) around the waist to clean their footsteps. They had to shout and warn their entry into the village. Their presence, entry and even the shadow was considered as a sign of evil omen. They were forced to eat the flesh of the dead animals and depend on the
left-over food by the dominant castes. They were prohibited and discouraged to think on their own. Dr. B R Ambedkar (1891-1956) in his works, Revolution & Counter Revolution in India (1942), Annihilation of Caste (1944), Who Are the Sudras (1946) and The Untouchables (1948), clinically examined and exposed the formation and consolidation of unequal society and contested the social hegemony that perceived the bodies of dalits as the podiums for executing the tactics of disciplining the physical, mental and cultural mindset of dalits. From this perception, the history of ancient India is nothing but the history of disciplining and punishing the dalit bodies.
The very perception of the body has undergone a radical change in contemporary times. The body is redefined by the claims that the physical form is not a natural reality, but a cultural concept. The body is perceived as an encoding of society’s values. Body is defined in all its cultural functions as naked, clothed, healthy, diseased, diminished, muscular, heroic, sacrificial, cannibalistic, dead, possessed, supernatural, heavenly and geometric. Right from the ancient times, philosophers have defined body in its inferior relation to mind. Plato (5th century BC) opined that bodies are only second rate copies of the superior reality. To him material forms are flawed and truth lives in the pure or disembodied ideas. French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) emphasized the irrelevance of the physical existence of bodies with his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am”. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) contested the ideas of Descartes by recognizing body as the center of rationalism. He emphasized that the abstract concepts such as thought and reason are the functions of biology. He exposed the insistent repression of the body by civilization that resulted in the denial of bodily instincts and creativity. German philosophers, Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1753) have also criticized the repression of the bodies that transformed bodies into commodities. These perspectives have paved the way for the advent of psychoanalysis which altered the traditional ways of perceiving the body. The propositions of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari question the monolithic view of the body by favoring ‘body without organs’ and by its contrast ‘deterritorialized body’. The more radicalized version of post-modern cyber bodies is created by televisual prosthetics. Cyberculture proposed new forms of embodiment. Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) in a book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, establishes the interrelationship between machines and human bodies. The ultimate versions of the body are found in ‘Cyberspace’ connected with ‘Virtual Reality’ (phrase coined by Jaron Lanier in 1986), ‘Cyberpunk’ (first used by Bruce Bethke in 1983) and ‘Cyborg’ (put forward by Manfred E Clynes and Nathan S Kline in 1960), which describes self-regulating man-machine system. The notional body of Cyborg is appropriated by Donna Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) predicted the possibility of post-human understanding of the body. Haraway’s notion of ‘Cyborg’ is conceived to be a creature in post-gender world.
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