Joseph S. Alter is professor and department chair at the department of anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US. His scholarly work explores South Asian concepts of the body, masculinity and medicine. In Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India, Alter investigates the Indian concept of brahmacharya (celibacy). Looking at yoga, kabaddi and traditional Indian wrestling, he studies the notion of masculinity in historical and nationalist rhetoric. He spoke with Lounge about his book and globalization’s impact on masculinity. Edited excerpts:

What drew you to India for your research on the male body?

Man overboard: Alter uses yoga and wrestling to examine masculinity.

I was born and raised in India and have lived in Mussoorie for most of my life, so my academic interest in questions of masculinity, sexuality and health were shaped by early experiences. I started wrestling when I was about 16 or 17. I was never a good wrestler, but the exercise regimen of akhara life took hold of my imagination—and my body—and became an intellectual obsession as well.

In other words, I guess, it is about a feeling of attachment and this draws me back to India through the akhara. This can give rise to a sense of nationalism—Fatherland, Mother India, and all that—but the physical experience of elemental intimacy with place brings one down to earth, and keeps flights of the imagination in check. It is a sense of masculinity that takes shape and is rooted in the soil of India.

In ‘Moral Materialism’, you dwell on the idea of the Indian male’s body in relation to the idea of India as a nation.

The body is an extremely powerful tool of nationalism precisely because it generates a profound sense of attachment to people, places and things. I have written extensively about Gandhi’s nationalism in relation to the struggle for independence, and his was clearly a kind of intimate nationalism that involved a struggle with the body, with masculinity and with sexuality. What is fascinating is that Gandhi’s embodied sense of being started out as nationalism but then “went global”—so to speak—and many of the seemingly strange things he did—fasting, being celibate, practising nature cure—were ways of connecting an embodied sense of self to all people, all places and all things everywhere. I don’t think that the significance of this idea has paled in the least.

Do you see any striking differences in attitudes towards the male body in India and the West?

There are profound differences in essence, but not in structure or form. If you grew up in Montana riding horses and fishing in mountain streams, that experience will form the essence of a sense of self that is deeply embodied. Cormac McCarthy has captured this essence of the fading American frontier in a number of his award-winning novels.

 What is happening in India is certainly changing attitudes towards what is happening to a sense of the body in India, but not in any way that is especially unique or different from the sense captured by McCarthy or Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie and—much closer home—Ruskin Bond. Fragmentation of the body is symptomatic of globalization, although remember what I said about Gandhi.

What sort of new conflicts does globalization bring into play ?

This is a question that provokes as much irony and humour as pathos and tragedy. When images of Lord Ram and Hanuman are cut in the mould of Mr Universe, the terms of masculinity are being twisted in ways that are not too difficult to understand. Similarly, there are ways in which the figure of the hero in popular cinema is increasingly derivative and two-dimensional. But I think it is equally true to turn things around and look at the impact of “the Indian body” in the world. Here, yoga is a fabulous case in point; not that it is simple or easy to say that the empire strikes back. Modern yoga came into being inspired by a global movement—loosely termed “Muscular Christianity”, and focused on athleticism, fair play and sportsmanship—in boarding schools throughout the empire.

Bikram Choudhury is the heir to this tradition and, as I point out in Moral Materialism, what Choudury has done in Los Angeles is to reshape yoga into a form of global athleticism that is almost more classical in its articulation of moral gymnastic values than the early Greeks could possibly have imagined.

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