Contextualizing the Body: An Indian Experience

The new cultural history has rendered the historical epistemology of the human body a privileged site for scholarly intervention in social anthro­pology and other related disciplines. As a cultural metaphor, as manifest­ation of lived experience, as medium of existential encounter with the outer world and as a surface of social calligraphy, the human body spans varied categories of the extant strands of contemporary hermeneutic discourses. The essays in the present volume regard the human body more as a social subject than a social object. The volume accommodates variegated encounters of the biological body with the exterior world mostly from an Indian standpoint. The authors have explored the varied experiences of being embodied – the social subject’s interactions with the surrounding context – as also its role as carrier of cultural, social and symbolical agents. While exploring the various contours of the ‘corporeal self’ the authors have captured fascinating glimpses of the ‘representative’ body. The present volume does not claim to represent a comprehensive account of body history. It is rather an incoherent bundle of scholarly conceptualizations of the human body discursively shaped to facilitate practices of knowledge production. About the Editors Sudit Krishna Kumar is Associate Professor at the Department of History in the University of Burdwan. His research interests are the social and economic history of nineteenth-century Bengal. He is currently working on a monograph on insolvency and the middle class in nineteenth-century Bengal. Suvobrata Sarkar is Assistant Professor of History at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Earlier he taught at the University of Burdwan. His area of research is the social history of technology in colonial India. He is the author of The Quest for Technical Knowledge: Bengal in the Nineteenth Century (212) and Let There be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity?in?Colonial?Bengal?188-1945?(22).