The 'Effeminate' Buddha, the yogic male body, and the ecologies of art history in colonial India

• Autores: Sugata Ray
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 38, Nº. 5, 2015, págs. 916-939
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Internalizing colonial accusations of the "effeminacy" of the native male body, nineteenth-century Indian ideologues and reformers attempted to redeem the national body through a range of phallocentric body cultures. Anti-colonial art history, however, deliberately appropriated colonizing discourses of the effeminate native body to epistemologically challenge the hegemonic hyper-masculinity advocated by both the regulatory mechanisms of the British empire and a larger nationalist body culture in colonial India. The ingenious invention of a discursive intimacy between yoga and an aesthetics of demasculinization led to the strategic resignification of the male body in early Indian sculpture as both a sign and the site of an imagined national life. Through a close analysis of art writing and photography, art pedagogy and colonial archaeology, visual practices and sartorial cultures, the essay delineates the "fin-de-siècle" politics and aesthetics of demasculinization that had led to the establishment of anti-colonial Indian art history's disciplinary and methodological concerns.