Disguise, Revelation and Copyright: Disassembling the South Indian Leper

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool-box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy-affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts -at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra -I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

“…16 16 See Vincentnathan (1993) for Untouchable concepts of the person. For a new perspective on the concept of the person in India, see Staples (2003) and Osella & Osella (2004). …”

At the intersection of disability and masculinity: exploring gender and bodily difference in India

“…While Western persons tend to be characterized as stable, self‐contained individuals, their South Asian counterparts, by contrast, are regularly characterized in the literature as fluid ‘dividuals’ (Marriott 1989: 17). As such, the South Asian ‘dividual’ is substantially connected to other people and things in ways that Western ‘individuals’ are not, literally transformed through his or her transactions – concerning, for example, food and sex – with others (see, for examples, Busby 1997; Daniel 1987; Das 1979; Marriott 1976; 1989; Staples 2003 b : 296‐7). This positioning of Western and South Asian models of personhood at polar extremes does, of course, overstate the absolute differences between the two (Staples 2003 b : 296; see also Fuller 1992: 12; Parry 1989: 494‐512).…”

“…As such, the South Asian ‘dividual’ is substantially connected to other people and things in ways that Western ‘individuals’ are not, literally transformed through his or her transactions – concerning, for example, food and sex – with others (see, for examples, Busby 1997; Daniel 1987; Das 1979; Marriott 1976; 1989; Staples 2003 b : 296‐7). This positioning of Western and South Asian models of personhood at polar extremes does, of course, overstate the absolute differences between the two (Staples 2003 b : 296; see also Fuller 1992: 12; Parry 1989: 494‐512). Rural Brahmans (Lamb 2000) might fit the dividual model very well, for example, while my own informants – converted Christians, low‐caste Hindus and Muslims affected by leprosy, and urban South Indians from a range of caste and social backgrounds with different disabilities – were less inclined to accept a view of personhood as substantially transformed through their interactions.…”

“…While the hardened, fingerless hand of the untreated leprosy‐affected person might in itself denote a diminution of personhood, for example, the same deformed body part might also be used to enact different qualities. Shaken threateningly in front of another's face, the leprosy‐deformed hand was something to be feared, particularly when it belonged to an angry man (Staples 2003 b : 305). In such contexts it suggested a surfeit of masculinity – of ‘muscular strength’, in Banerjee's terms (2005) – rather than a lack of it.…”

“…6 6 See my extended discussion elsewhere of how meaning might be concentrated in particular body parts (Staples 2003 b : 300). …”