Body Language: The Somatics of Nationalism in Tamil India

Abstract

“Body Language” explores the rhetorical and figurative deployment of the female body within the regimes of the modern nation in Tamil India. As I hope to show in this paper, this deployment suggests that the nation is not merely a political, economic, and ideological entity; it is also, crucially, a somatic formation in which the body of the woman, and the vulnerable, violated woman in particular, is critically implicated. Entangled in nationalist claims about abstractions such as fraternity, solidarity, and unity are bodily fluids and visceral entities that remind the citizenry of the bonds of birth, of the sharing of substances, of the very commonalties that emerge from belonging to what Benedict Anderson has persuasively characterized as the “imagined” community of the nation. In Anderson’s well-known formulation, the nation is an “imagined” community because its citizenry “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the very image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983, p. 15). Yet, what are the mechanisms by which this “communion” is imag(in)ed by the citizen? I propose that images of the shared womb, blood, milk, and tears of the female embodiment(s) of the nation were circulated in Tamil India to enable the forging of the community, and the communion of the citizenry. These were, in essence, the somatic building blocks with which the nation and its constituency were constructed in this part of the subcontinent. But in making this argument for nationalism in southern India, this essay points to the fact that not just there but in other parts of the modern world, the nation resides, literally and symbolically, in the bodies of its citizenry; these bodies in turn constitute the national body politic. The female embodiment of the nation is frequently the ground on which the two bodies, as it were, intersect. I explore this intersection here through the analytic of the “somatics of nationalism” with examples drawn from Tamil prose and poetry texts, primarily produced between the late 1930s and mid-1960s.²

This essay of Sumathi Ramaswamy is a much-abbreviated version of “Body Language: The Somatic of Nationalism in Tamil India”, which appeared originally in Gender and History, 1998: Vol. 10 (1), p. 78-109. It is reprinted here with the permission of Blackwell Publishers.