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Chapter 4 Surya Namaskar-Salute to Village Democracy The sovereignty of the people should be based on moral authority which presupposes self-discipline ... self-government implies self-control and self-sacrifice. - Bhavanrao Srinivasrao Pant Pratinidhi, rajah of Aundh, 1938 The State of the Body, the Body of the State Ostensibly, surya namaskar-prayer or salutation to the sun-is an ancient Indian exercise routine that is nominally structured on the principle of Vedic ritual and is even said to hark back to the earliest prostrations performed by the Indo-Aryan participants in a preVedic solar cult. Today, surya namaskarroutines are an integral part of most yoga regimens practiced throughout the world. Apart from the putatively ancient origins of this modern exercise, the history ofsurya namaskars can be traced precisely to the small princely state of Aundh, in what is now Maharashtra, and the concern of the rajah of Aundh, Bhavanrao Pant, with disciplined bodies, the creation of a uniquely Indian form of civil society, and within this a distinct kind of embodied and "in-stated" anticolonial nationalism. The rajah of Aundh reinvented surya namaskars as a form of both personal self-discipline and public sociopolitical reform in a context where the connection between health and politics was intimate and important. The rajah's concern with the health of his and his subjects' bodies must be understood in the context of transnational 84 Nationalism and the Embodied Self culture, international politics, and a concern for building a grassroots , Gandhian democracy based on the embodiment of swaraj. In the previous chapters I sidestepped the question of governance and formal politics in favor of a concern for the body as such and various forms of embodied power and knowledge. The analysis in Chapter 1 of Gandhi's preoccupation with diet reform and sexuality showed how body discipline was an integral feature of the Mahatma's visionary politics. Similarly, in Chapter 2 Gandhi's fasts showed how he put this vision into practice as a form ofprotest that was at once profoundly metaphysical and concretely and intimately political. For Gandhi, however, personal self-discipline and heroic forms of embodied protest against injustice were of little significance unless they could be translated out of private practice-no matter how charismatic and influential unto themselves-and into the public sphere ofcommon social experience. Hence, in Gandhi's view, the importance of the ashram as a kind of staging ground and local laboratory for experimentation in large-scale sociopolitical reform. One could look to these ashrams, and the various practices Gandhi instituted to regulate daily life, in order to study the way in which he imagined perfect self-government. Gandhi's ideas on the subject of health and politics were, however, to say the least, idiosyncratic and sharply delineated. In some sense one could say that he disciplined his own body and vocally advocated the discipline of all bodies, but he did not institutionalize the means by which disciplinary practices could become regimented. Nor did he define the critical links between body discipline and the apparatus of the state. Arguably, one could say that he was extremely successful on a personal and national level, but that on the middle ground of village India his ideal of swarajic self-government was not very successful. And so it is useful to expand outward, both to define the broader and less delineated political framework within which his ideas about the body fit and also to look at ways in which other leaders and other followers engaged the question of selfgovernment and the problem of disciplining selves to civilize society and create, thereby, a uniquely Indian form of democracy. One of Foucault's most significant contributions to the study of culture was his articulation of how power is manifested in the public sphere in ways that transcend and, indeed, cut against the grain of formal politics and regulated political economies. Foucault is Salute to Village Democracy 85 quite clear that he does not want to be misunderstood as saying that power is hierarchical or that it works through institutionalized structures from the top down. "I don't claim at all that the State apparatus is unimportant, but it seems to me that ... one ofthe first things that has to be understood is that power isn't localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatus, on a much more minute and everyday level...

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