Engendering the Material Body: A Study of Sanskrit Literature

The most basic form of existence for all living beings is through body, yet this material fact has been ignored for long by historians among social scientists. This was because body was seen as a biological entity and hence a preserve of anatomists. But now historians are waking up to the possibility of body as a cultural artifact. Foucault in particular showed how body as a site of both pleasure and punishment had a history. For historians of gender relations the nature of sources themselves have made the history of the female body a viable subject of analysis, as scholar Culianu puts it pithily: ‘Where indeed women speak little with words, their bodies are the most spoken of because they have the most to tell.’