10.13125/2039-6597/2654
application/pdf
2039-6597
2654
13
en
Sanghita Sen
Between
national narrative.
The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances: From Bodies of Resistance to Neoliberal Tourism Bodies
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
7
Identarian Images
2017-06-02
2017-02-22
2017-06-02
2017-06-02
1
Sanghita Sen
2017/06/02
10.13125/2039-6597/2654
University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
2039-6597
13
national narrative.
en
The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances: From Bodies of Resistance to Neoliberal Tourism Bodies
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2654/2501
7
The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as
Masculine Performances: From Bodies
 of Resistance to Neoliberal Tourism
                Bodies
                  Indrani Mukherjee, Sanghita Sen


       Knowledge is the result of not only intellectual awareness, but of
physical perceptions as well. From time immemorial, bodies have been
subjected to discipline, etiquette and surveillance for different reasons.
Michel Foucault has dealt extensively with disciplined bodies designed
to perform different masculinities, sexualities and other bodily moves
under military, gendered, clinical or surveillance gazes. 1 Yet, he shows,
bodies are at the same time endowed with epistemological agency
potential and offer other forms of experience which have often
transformed them into sites of subversion and resistance exposing the
politics of domination by power brokers. The body breaks away from
its material organic disposition and has a decolonizing effect as it plots
resistance through different kinds of counter-narrative moves in order
to reclaim lost terrains of belonging as well as being. While it
decolonizes, it also liberates the colonizer from dehumanization.2


  1
     This paper will mainly dwell on his book Discipline and Punish.
   2 That decolonization is about an arousing of human consciousness which

is not filtered through any racial categories or values is borrowed from
Frantz Fanon. The suggestion that decolonization also liberates the oppressor
is therefore a very powerful criticism of it being only a one-sided
phenomenon, as it argues how decolonization humanizes the oppressor as
much as the oppressed.


Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/ May 2017)
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



       This essay proposes to look at the emergence of embodied
narratives of two martial art forms from India and Brazil as tools of
resistance to the process of colonization, on one hand, while
comprising different kinds of masculinities in postcolonial national
narratives, on the other. The bodies of African slaves and Kalaripayattu
martial artists had become the spaces over which the contesting
colonial powers met and then wrote their violent histories of
dominance and power. These bodies, however, reacted violently
through their disguised or secret martial moves, thus creating a
counter-narrative with which to write back. Perceived as a threat, they
were banned by their colonial masters and independent India and
modern democratic Brazil welcomed them back and flaunted them to
accommodate them in a deserving space of dignity within their
national tourism industries. However, today they risk being
appropriated by neoliberal and global promoters of hyper-masculinity
or by conservative right wing ultra-nationalists. The struggle for
dignity and resistance continues.

                        Disciplining Docile Bodies
       Anthropocentric worldview of the Spanish Renaissance
coincided with the geopolitics of European and Catholic
expansiveness, leading thereby to the discovery, conquest and
colonization of what was to be considered the ‘New World’. Such a
situation also falls aptly in tune with the emerging commercial
interests of a new social class. Moreover, at the end of seven centuries
of Reconquista many soldiers had been left unemployed, thus making
Spain perfectly disposed for her overseas maritime ambitions of
exploring unknown lands. It is in this context that Michelangelo’s
David was no longer perceived as merely an imagined body carved in
white marble exhaling a radiant strength of mind and body, but a very
iconic reality of the post-Reconquista Spain. It was an adult man,
athletic in his bearing and poised, ready for combat now perfectly
equipped to spread out upon those lands and those peoples.



2
                                          Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



       Michelangelo’s adult David (rather than a boy David) is
symbolic in this sense and the figure of Quixote seems to be
reminiscent of this.3 Using bodies to take over control of the continent
was Spain’s unique and ingenious strategy. ‘Gobernar es poblar’ (to
govern is to populate) became a famous slogan of the Spanish crown to
encourage miscegenation, catholicization and hybridization of
indigenous populations and exploitation of the coloured women’s
bodies served as the key to such end. Indigenous men were brutalized
and enslaved as labourers in mines and plantations where they were
also vulnerable to European diseases. As they slowly died in large
numbers due to overwork and ill health, the Spanish colonizers
brought in African slaves to the continent. They were physically strong
and also resistant to diseases. In the Americas, the violence unleashed
on African people became more organized and using bodies to force
subjugation could be further refined. However, miscegenation with
African slaves was ruled out. Instead, the Africans’ bodies were not
only branded with hot-iron patterns burnt into their skins, but also
further marked by punitive whiplashes. Hence, these signs on the
bodies of the slaves bore testimony to extreme degrees of
dehumanizing violence. Such processes involved working at discursive
and ideological levels of engaging in various disciplinary strategies
that fix the colonized as savage and animal-like that needs to be
controlled. This elucidates a process of interpellation of the colonized
through the colonial gaze as structured through the European
imaginary (Yancy 1).
       The Capoeira is an eclectic dance form drawing from a range of
African dance forms and combat styles being recalled from the cultural
memories of slaves from different tribes of Africa. It can be said that
this Brazilian form emerged as a historical/cultural consequence of the

  3
    This is suggested by de Armas as he reads the contesting images of the
Florentine David and that of Hercules. “Are the political contexts of
David/Goliath and Herculed/Cacus at play in Don Quixote……? And, it may
be asked, when he kills Pandafilando, is he taking on the liberating role of a
new David or the imperial mantle of a new Hercules?”, 79-80.


                                                                                  3
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



enslavement of African peoples. The emergence of the Capoeira dates
back to the 16th century. It was initially born out of the Africans’
survival instincts in a hostile and unknown land. Slaves from different
tribes, even the ones that shared a mutual hostility had been herded
together, precisely in order to suspend any communication among
them, thereby curbing the possibility of rebellion. They often did not
speak the same language. The earliest bodily movements of the slaves
may consequently have emerged to communicate and unite through
their bodies in a disguised manner, in order to survive the terrible
abuses inflicted by the colonizers on them. The disguise served to
bypass the colonial master.
       In the Indian context, bodies had always been ‘disciplined’ along
caste and gender lines to establish social hierarchy. It is known that,
around the 9th century, Kalaripayattu became part of the education
programme of a warrior clan from Kerala along with other courses
such as Math, Sciences, Language and Astronomy, offered in schools
known as Kalaris. Kalari means a battlefield or a combat area in
Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, India. It was integral to a
general disciplining of bodies and minds within an indigenous
education programme. Later, around the 11th century, it was nurtured
by the local kings (Rajas) of the Chola and the Chera dynasties. Like
most martial art forms in India, these have their roots in Indian myths
that attribute the knowledge of these forms to the gods. It is believed
that the gods had offered this knowledge to members of particular
clans/race/communities for survival in order to fight off difficult and
wild terrains in South India. Over the years, these men went on to
become entrapped in caste hierarchies depending on varying local
histories. Their roles also turned political as they were deployed to
protect the lives of their kings. They were often patronized by the royal
families for taking part in combat battles. They were ‘disciplined’
bodies.4 A great amount of knowledge accumulated over centuries has
informed this performance. Techniques of the Kalaripayattu martial art

   The concept of ‘disciplined bodies’ is borrowed from Michel Foucault’s
    4

book Discipline and Punish.


4
                                          Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



have been passed on orally (though written documents on palm leaves
also exist) across generations.5
       What is interesting about Kalaripayattu is that, traditionally, it
was always practiced shrouded in deep mystery and mists of secrecy.
Hence, it was taught by the masters in total isolation, away from
prying eyes. This kind of secrecy was aimed at ensuring that only
carefully selected and responsible men and women (till their
menstruation began) from the warrior class (so that it would not be
abused by potential criminals) would be trained in this art to fight unto
death to protect the lives of the kings for whom they were trained. It
was a unique and privileged knowledge which the artistes were
greatly honoured to be associated with. Colonization had to undo this
relic of bodily knowledge of high-level, mostly masculine art in order
to domesticate the people through humiliation. The colonialists had
selectively labelled male bodies as laughably feminine or brutally
savage-like. Thus, these bodies converted into Europe’s Other, as a
mirror that reflects the colonialist’s self-image and a desired image of a
fixing of the colonized as subjugated. When the Portuguese landed in
southern India, they unleashed terrible violence on a land where
religious tolerance and gender parity among the higher caste peoples
was exemplary6. As far as Kalaripayattu was concerned, the
Portuguese had the most influential presence in Kerala. That is how the
earliest western account of Kalaripayattu comes to be that of the
Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa (1480-1521) who had lived in
Kerala for many years:


  5
     All information about the Kalaripayattu has been borrowed from the
cited websites and from A. Sreedhara Menon’s 1967 book A Survey of Kerala
History.
      6 Although this religious tolerance and intra-group gender parity

among the higher caste people did not impact the structural violence
perpetrated against the lower caste people in any way. The religious
tolerance was restricted only in terms of absence of active resistance from the
higher castes when conversion of the lower caste people to Christianity was
taking place.


                                                                                  5
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances




             These warriors are seven years of age when sent to schools
        where they are taught many tricks of nimbleness and dexterity;
        there they teach them to dance and turnabout and to twist on the
        ground, to take royal leaps, and other leaps, and this they learn
        twice a day as long as they are children, and they become so
        loose-jointed and supple that they make them turn their bodies
        contrary to nature; […] and when they are fully accomplished in
        this, they teach them to play with the weapon to which they are
        most inclined, some with bows and arrows, some with poles to
        become spearmen, but most with swords and bucklers, which is
        most used among them, and in this fencing they are ever
        practising. The masters who teach them are called Panikars.
        (Zarilli 40)

      This martial art became very popular and was eventually
adopted by Muslims, Christians and Jews for its ethics of valour and
strength which became symbolic of a unique kind of privileged
masculinity.
      Portuguese India under Spanish domain from 1580-1665 also
experienced the Inquisition. The Kalaripayattu continued to operate
from the underground. Yet, all European forces found it disconcerting
and a formidable martial art and hence were relieved when this art
form was banned by the British in 1793.7 They had always seen it with
suspicion primarily for its popularity while they also feared its use
against the colonial army in possible guerrilla attacks. Ironically, while
the colonizers branded the colonized Indian men as effeminate, the
bodies of the martial artists needed to be pushed into invisibility to


   . The Kalaripayattu martial artistes had also put up active resistance
    7

against the British on different occasions. As the kings of Travancore and
Cochin entered into alliance with the British (The East India Company–
Travancore Subsidiary Alliance Treaty of 1795), or when the Malabar
province was ceded to the British Raj in 1792, a series of revolts broke out
led by Nair soldiers who were also Kalaripayattu martial artistes.



6
                                        Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



hide their disciplined masculinity. It involved a process whereby the
colonizers applied their monarchical order to govern under the
imperial banner. Colonization had enslaved the Kalaripayattu bodies,
as the European gaze converted them into objects of curiosity, before
banning them. It is thus that two worlds meet, the Portuguese and the
British, over the body of the Kalaripayattu artiste. Kalaripayattu,
however, continued to be practiced from the underground under a
new agenda of decolonization. It is still a mystery how they could
“organize” themselves clandestinely to produce this kind of
knowledge of resistance with their body moves. It was also the case
with the Capoeira.
       The playful aspect of the Capoeira was meant to disguise the
practice as resistance to the injuries on their bodies as a result of being
marked with brands of ownership, bent and abused. Creative
corporeal faculties were used in search for new movements meant to
overcome the restrictions of tied limbs and bodies. This transformation
is significant in terms of how disguise and clandestine practice became
so important. Consequently, while they practiced this martial art in the
plantations, the Capoeira artistes had begun to adorn their movements
with music and rhythm in order to give the slaves’ cultural project the
appearance of a simple recreation. The Portuguese masters, however,
would soon figure out the power of alternative communication
through this form. They feared revolt as the numbers of slaves
practicing Capoeira were a lot higher than they could possibly manage
and, hence, they outlawed it until the 1930s. A similar colonial
paranoia had also worked behind banning of Kalaripayattu in India, as
already addressed earlier.

                 Colonized Bodies Write Back
      The occupants of Kalaris had been shunted out of their places,
not just literally but also symbolically. As they went underground,
they had also lost all their privileges of social honour and political
clout. It was for this very reason that these bodies invented another
agenda, which was that of anticolonial resistance and subsequent


                                                                                7
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



decolonisation. They had lost their honours and their patrons as the
kings had also fallen to the foreign powers.8 This situation made them
face great indignity and humiliation leading the narrative of their
performances towards a new kind of coordinated choreography of
confrontation. They were determined not to become mute victims and,
hence, responded by different kinds of moves of their martial art
involving a new sense of identity and brotherhood bonded by similar
goals of defiance against their colonial masters. Such brotherhood
revolved around their masculine Malayali identity cutting across
different religious groups as a united front against a common enemy.9
During the freedom movement, a whole range of Indian martial arts
from the underground found resistance groups based on the
masculinised body of the artiste, which often included women
artists/warriors too.10



    8 India also, like the Americas, was colonized by the Portuguese and the
Spanish, the Dutch, the French and the British. But there was nobody to act
as an arbiter to resolve issues of conflicts among these forces. Colonization of
India was therefore very complicated as often they were competing for
maximum influence in establishing alliances with powerful upper caste
peoples.
   9 A Malayali is a person from Kerala who speaks Malayalam.

   10
       The most popular forms were Raibenshe from Bengal, Lathikhela from
Punjab and Bengal, Gatka from Punjab among others, Kusti from Northern
India. Thus, for example, Anushilan Samity, an Indian anti-colonial
organisation of Eastern India that was established in 1902 to put an end to
the British Rule in India used to run Akharas (a dedicated open air space) as
their cover to execute body building activities using the indigenous forms of
martial arts to prepare their activists for anticolonial resistance. Though
members of this society were by and large men, some women members also
joined the group and learnt and mastered these martial arts. See
http://radhikaranjanmarxist.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/history-of-armed-
revolution-anushilan_01.html,
http://indianmotherland.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/anushilan-samiti-embodies-
martial.html


8
                                       Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



       In Brazil also, it was this sense of bonding which emerged as the
word spread of the Quilombos created by many rebel slaves who had
fled the colonizers’ plantations across the country.11 Theirs were black
settlements in the deepest and most inaccessible of the Brazilian
terrains. As they went out and settled, word of these Quilombos
spread out. Thereafter, many more slaves dared to run away and, thus,
the strength of these settlements grew, and they became formidable
organisational terrains of black resistance in Brazil. Here, the Capoeira
was practiced and perfected freely as a unique form of martial art by
the slaves who had earlier worked in Brazilian plantations, where it
used to be performed clandestinely in small groups in order to face
and encounter possible physical violence by the masters. Later, it was
perfected in the Quilombos to a form meant to be used for war. The
elements of surprise and ambush were important aspects of the art of
disguise. Performing together also helped build a comradery among
them which established an African-American slave identity and
countered the dilution of original, ethnic and tribal differences.12
       As these bodies of slaves performed, often with their limbs tied
or injured, they translated their writhing pain and humiliation into
meaningful body-narratives. They built up resistance as these body
moves archived their experiences and equipped them to become a
united front against their colonial masters. The slaves of the Palmares,
the biggest and most organized of all Quilombos, had already begun to
rebel by burning plantations and killing their white masters. When the
Dutch invaded Brazil (1830), the slaves took advantage of this situation
to run away from the plantations and join forces with the Palmares to
fight the Portuguese Army. The Dutch won, but the slaves also felt
more confident. The Dutch attempted to attack the Palmares in 1644 in
an expedition organized to try and retrieve the escaped slaves.

  11
    Quilombos were runaway slaves’ settlements in deep jungles of Brazil.
  12
      The Quilombos also included Brazilian-Indians (who helped the
runaway slaves to survive inhospitable terrains) and Whites who did not
support the abuse of the slaves. To explore further how nineteenth-century
Brazil dealt with Capoiera, see Chapter 1 of Talmon-Chvaicer’s book.


                                                                               9
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



However, they were unsuccessful as they encountered the power of the
slaves’ combat skills. Subsequent attempts by the Dutch were also
unsuccessful, although these expeditions were formed by very
experienced, trained and well-armed soldiers. The main reason for the
success of the slaves was this aspect of disguise and clandestine
performance of the Capoeira which had translated into a system of
fighting called “jungle war” or ambush. Many such experiences of
defeat of European colonizers by the Capoeiristas give evidence of how
in the free spaces of the Quilombos, this martial art was perfected, to
the extent that many attempts at raiding them were foiled as the
Capoeira warriors took the raiders by surprise (A Brief History of
Capoeira).
       At this point, the question of the Kalaripayattu ‘secrecy’ and
Capoeira ‘disguise’ converge, partially. In colonial India and Brazil, the
Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira work from the shadows, from
underground. The artistes’ bodies become a site of subversion and
political strength. Alternate masculinities challenging European
imaginations of savage bodies were being consciously constructed in
both these parts of the world; they realized the new-found strength of
their body powers to perform a sustainable counter-discourse, a new
pedagogy of decolonizing bodies enmeshed in historically different
racial and ethnic frames.
       Literature and popular cultures in both these parts of the world
have remembered these historical experiences of decolonization.
Cinema is an interesting form of popular culture as it is easily
accessible across languages and digital technologies. The film Urumi
(Santosh Sivan, 2011) explores this history as it weaves real historical
figures with some fictional ones in its cinematic narrative. It juxtaposes
two stories from two periods, one situated in contemporary neoliberal
times and the other in colonial times. The contemporary story is set in
the conflict zone of a group of tribal people fighting a mining industry.
The owner of the property which is soon to be sold to the miners is
reminded of his past life when he had fought the Portuguese people.
This takes us back to the colonial story of a martial warrior of the
sixteenth century, Kelu, who wanted to avenge his father’s death by


10
                                         Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



Vasco da Gama. He is assisted by his Muslim friends, Vavvali and a
warrior princess, Ayesha. Globalization, here, is seen as another layer
of the colonial discourse.
       Similarly, Cordão de Ouro (Antonio Carlos da Fontoura,
1977) explores a time warp in which the ancient colonial situation is
juxtaposed with a dictatorial one. It tells the story of the regime in
Brazil and Jorge (Mestre Nestor Capoeira), who is a runaway slave
from the Eldorado goldmines. In his battle with the local dictator, Jorge
meets different elements of the Afro-Brazilian culture, including
capoeira, maculelê, and candomble.13 Matthias Röhrig Assunção’s Body
Games (2014) is an award-winning documentary film which retells the
history of Capoeira in very interesting ways. Disciplined bodies had
unlearnt their situations of victimhood and had become conscientious
subjects of their own moves, their own histories and their own futures.

             Post-coloniality and Accommodation
                     of Colonised Bodies
      Colonization either suppressed martial art knowledge systems,
as in the case of Kalaripayattu in India, or became the reason for
organizing new ones, like the Capoeira in Brazil. It was during the
period of anticolonial struggles that members of the colonised societies
went back or resorted to their own cultural resources of using their


  13
     Maculelê was a common dance in Santo Amaro da Purificação, Bahia, at
festivals commemorating the saint of the city, Nossa Senhora da Purificação.
It had almost been forgotten until 1943 when Paulínio Aluísio de Andrade,
got together family and friends to teach them how to dance Maculelê. This
was     also    a    kind    of   fight    disguised     as   art.   See   in
http://www.capoeirabesouro.com/about_maculele.html.
   Candomble is an Afro-Brazilian religious practice of African origins where
dance and music are integral rituals. In colonial Brazil, they practiced this
religions in secrecy. Thus, when the catholic priests suddenly appeared, they
would       pretend     to    be     practicing     Catholicism.    See    in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnQfOXUFHws


                                                                                11
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



bodies as the only available instrument of combat, resistance, and self-
defence. Post-coloniality, thereafter, had to first discover, acknowledge
and finally tame this performing body into a national narrative of
culture and history in order to decriminalize it, as in the case of the
Capoeira, or to legitimize it, as in the case of the Kalaripayattu, in order
to eventually accommodate it within a neoliberal tourism industry. The
taming took some time, though, as the practitioners refused to submit
to any fixed and monolithic nationalist agenda. The martial artistes
negotiated and contested any prescribed ways of belonging, as they
also went global and hybrid; the Capoeira and the Kalaripayattu were
to be performed across linguistic, religious, racial/ethnic and caste
boundaries.
       In Brazil, these bodies performing the Capoeira had to be
retrieved from criminality and embedded in a disciplinary and
institutional     genealogy     of    national     discourses   to    flaunt
multiculturalism which, in turn, enabled a space for the survival of the
people of Afro-Brazilian descent. In independent India, the
Kalaripayattu emerged once again from the underground, but it had
lost its royal patrons to a socialist, secular and democratic new State.
Under the circumstances, it had to be assigned a new niche in a
different kind of national narrative. Kalaripayattu’s role in anti-colonial
struggles slotted it into a highly valued and special kind of belonging
in this new positionality in the newly independent modern nation-
state. This attempt of adjustment of an ancient martial art form into a
modern nation structure can be clearly seen in the renaming of
institutions to teach these martial arts in Kerala. For example, the
Rajkumar Kalari (meaning Prince Kalari) was renamed as Bharat Kalari
(meaning Indian/National Kalari) by Sreedhar Nair who was its
founder in independent India. The same could be said of the role of
Mestre Bimba who is considered as the founder of the Capoeira schools
in modern Brazil. Either way, in both cases they served to give
visibility to the most marginalized communities of the modern nations,
to ease conflicts of class as well as caste and enable decolonization of
the oppressed and the oppressor.



12
                                             Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



       After hundreds of years of fighting, it was on May 13, 1888, that
Brazil finally abolished slavery which made it the last nation in the
Western world to abolish the institution of slavery. Newly
emancipated slaves were uneducated and were still not accepted
amongst the working classes of Brazilian cities. Capoeira was
criminalized in the new nation. Capoeiristas would join gangs or form
gangs searching for a means of survival, roaming the streets, keeping
themselves busy with Capoeira and often also criminal activity.
Because of this, Capoeira was banned once again in Brazil in 1892.
Capoeiristas, in order to sustain this art, continued their practice
clandestinely. They would also disguise their identities by giving
themselves apiledos (Capoeria nicknames) so that they would not be
easily identified by the police. In 1937, the work of Mestre Bimba and
his Capoeira School favourably attracted the attention of the then
president of Brazil, Getúlio Vargas. Consequently, the ban on Capoeira
was lifted and Capoeira has since been recognized as a national sport
in Brazil. Mestre Pastinha also helped to preserve the original forms of
Capoeira tremendously by opening his school, the Centro Esportivo de
Capoeira Angola in 1942. Mestre Pastinha and Mestre Bimba are seen
as the fathers of Capoeira today. Once, the Capoeira was a kind of
marginal popular culture, used to invent a shared past in order to form
a nation of imagined communities (Schelling 176). Ironically, while the
martial forms of the Capoeira survived and surfaced once again, the
very social and political ethos of the form had to shift instead to the
showcasing of a hybrid Brazil belonging to the spectacle of a global
tourism industry. This display is not exploitative, but rather liberating,
as it is addressed to new audiences whose gaze is not aggressively
colonial. This type of public viewing can also be participative when it
allows viewers to exercise their right to choose as they physically
navigate their individual experiences through the event, by performing
themselves or by feeling a unique pride and empathy with the
performance.14 The body of the Capoeira performer became the image
of an idealized Brazilian masculinity, the opposite of the hardened and

  14
       For more on this, see Mitra (2016).


                                                                                    13
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



rigid body of their former colonial masters.15 As this iconic Capoeira
body was exposed to international gaze, what stood out mostly was
the sight of a unique powerful male body which performed a rhythmic
dance style with martial moves framed in a sensuous Brazilian
blackness. This body was no longer doing resistance, rather it was
performing another kind of masculinity to the gallery. The gallery
could comprise of nationalists, tourists, liberals, feminists, subalterns,
sports fans and so many other kinds of viewership. What was disguise
once, was now a display of humanized and therapeutic exercise. The
aura of the martial art form was lost. Instead of Walter Benjamin’s
famous ‘mechanical reproduction’, we could now contend with
touristic reproduction. Thereafter, Capoeira has been performed by
people of all origins and of all genders across the globe. The Brazilian
black male body became an interesting option of soft and sensuous
masculinity to ex-colonizers and all kinds of global citizens.16
       While the Capoeira went global as a stylishly sensuous and
therapeutic performance, the Kalaripayattu had to contend with
another kind of identity struggle in neoliberal India. It had to
encounter a nationalist backlash trying to appropriate this tradition as
a monolithic Hindu practice which compensates for its anxieties of
economic and political ‘lack’ of prominence among the more powerful
nations. Kalaripayattu, however, had always been a socio-cultural
performance of masculinity, rather than a competitive one. Thus it was
very different in its ethos and spirit to the exclusivist and aggressive
stance of the Hindutva forces.17 Moreover, it had always been practiced


      Many thinkers have dwelt on hardened masculine bodies of colonizers
     15

such as Foucault’s disciplined body, Ashis Nandy’s hypermasculinity or
Anibal Quijano’s white supremacy while referring to the colonizer’s body as
against the colonized feminized one.
   16 For more on this, see Hedgard (2013) and Stephens and Delamont

(2015). The point of ‘softness’ may also be attributed to its inclusive and
therapeutic ethos rather than a violent and exclusively competitive one.
   17 Hindutva is a transformation of multicultural Hinduism into a

monolithic one by V. D. Savarkar, who proposed the concept of a Hindu


14
                                       Between, vol. VII, n. 13 (Maggio/May 2017)



by Hindus, Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. Women also perform
and practice this martial art form (McDonald 1573-1574). Post-colonial
and post-globalization epochs would have marginalized them even
more as they would have been subsumed to a pan-Indian, Hindutva
discourse unleashed from outside, mainly Nagpur in North India. This
political rivalry only ensured that social multiculturalism and
secularism were reinstated with determination, as the Kalaripayattu
masters refused to submit to any monolithic Hindutva claims by the
nationalists. Thus, like the Capoeira which celebrated hybridity and
performance of differently embodied masculinity, the Kalaripayattu
community continued to stick to its secularist nostalgia of a Malayali
identity as its idealized embodied masculinity. This has had greater
success as the Hindutva nationalists have failed to make serious
political impact in Kerala. The Kalaripayattu is playing to the gallery a
unique Malayali masculinity, and like the African-Brazilian example, is
humane, inclusive and therapeutic. Tourism has thus far neutralized
and prevented the appropriation of this martial art into the Hindutva
nationalist agenda as it has come to be appreciated by all kinds of
peoples of all religious, linguistic and ethnic groups, castes and
genders. It has also internationalised Indian multiculturalism in all its
manifestations, thus also highlighting its secular and democratic
traditions (local histories) prevailing amidst global designs.
       Both Afro-Brazilian and the Malayali masculinities have
intertwined patriotism and a process of unique bodily movements to
choreograph an identarian memory overloaded with eventful
decolonization as they convert from being mere objects of colonial gaze
and disciplining into agency-laden subjects of wilful defiance. It is
interesting that, while the Capoeira flaunted a Brazilian blackness to
the world as an alternative flexible inclusive masculinity, the
Kalaripayattu also had to flaunt its Malayali identity directly to the


Nation. This was institutionalized in Nagpur as an organization called the
Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS). For more, see K.N. Panikkar.




                                                                              15
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



world in order to bypass the stiff-bodied, nationalist discourse of
Hindutva fundamentalists. Both rejected the aggressive and
competitive ethos of Western White or Hindutva mind-sets. They
challenge aggressive, monolithic hyper-masculinity which they see as
rigid, dogmatic and regressive. Instead, while endorsing a global ethics
of peaceful and dignified co-participation, both artistic forms
foreground multicultural, hybrid and secular masculinities framed in a
humane and inclusive national narrative. Representations of the
colonizer and the colonized are thus transformed by the ethics of a new
discourse of coloured, ‘softened’ bodies.
        Significantly, before the Capoeira was exported to the United
States and Europe, the Kalaripayattu had been carried over to Indo-
China and elsewhere by Buddhist monks, centuries ago, and translated
itself into Kung Fu. However, both Capoeira and Kung Fu, in their
respective versions of exported matter to the West, have also had to
reckon with real and serious issues appertaining to their marginal
identities (Latino and Chinese, respectively), such as being exoticised
as objects by a very patronizing and condescending kind of a
neoliberal gaze. Capoeira and Kung Fu have borrowed from each other
in recent times and have had to resist such gaze, while playing on its
fixation over hybrid masculinity. In Kerala, Kalaripayattu has become
an item of spectacle in ‘God’s Own Country’, a caption which packages
Kerala for tourism as it sells its ancient knowledge of naturopathy and
body pleasures. In Brazil, the Capoeira also struggles within a
discourse made of health and leisure concerns.

                                      Conclusion
      A martial art body as knowledge-potential is performative by
virtue of its sheer skill in slithering disguise, secrecy of strength as of
its intelligent manoeuvrings or its flaunting of grace and violence. It
can be liberating, empowering and highly sensitive to identarian issues
of longing and belonging to produce another kind of embodied
knowledge. It can therefore render irrelevant any prescriptive
grammaticality of dominant and hegemonic normativity, and be


16
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irreverent of such ethics of monolithic exclusivity which might sustain
them. These bodies work in unique rhythmic moves of humane steps
which produce both individual and collective knowledge, and a
unique kind of community energy emerging thereof which bonds
hybrid identities, cutting across class, caste, race, gender, nationalisms
and religions. The artistes reject the monolithic rigidity of white bodies
to propose, instead, another kind of maleness around black/coloured
soft sensuous bodies. Such masculinity, therefore, is not merely about
male bodies, rather about contesting and conflicting ways of embodied
counter-narratives to hegemony, humiliation and conflicts. Such
bodies perform another kind of masculinity which decolonizes
democratizes, secularizes and decriminalizes scripted and prohibited
ways of embodied masculinity.



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                            The authors
      Indrani Mukherjee

Indrani Mukherjee is Professor at the Centre of Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian and Latin American Studies, JNU. She is a second generation
Hispanist from India who wrote the first ever PhD on Latin American
Literature from any Spanish Department in India. Her publications
include Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies and Pedagogy of
Literature. Apart from teaching post-graduate and research courses,
she is also working on two research projects on Comparative Gender
Studies from India and Latin America. She is in the Advisory Board of
Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial
Studies. She is a life member of the European Network for Comparative
Literary Studies as well as the Forum on Contemporary Theory,
Baroda (India) which is in academic collaboration with the
International Lincoln Center at the Louisiana State University,
Shreveport, USA and University of North Texas at Denton, USA. Her
last published book was Transcultural Negotiations of Gender: Studies in
(Be)longing. Springer, 2016.

      Email: indrani.manshobhat@gmail.com;

      Sanghita Sen

Sanghita Sen is an Associate Professor of English in West Bengal
Education Service, India. She has a Ph.D in Comparative Literature
from Jadavpur University, India. Her research project was on Indian
Nationalisms and popular aesthetics in the post-1992 Indian audio-
visual and print advertisements. She is currently pursuing her second
doctoral project at the department of Film Studies, University of St
Andrews researching the representation of Naxal Movement (a Marxist
revolutionary movement that started in 1967) on Indian cinema. Her
research interest includes post-colonialism, Marxism, Gender, Indian



                                                                             21
I. Mukherjee – S. Sen, The Kalaripayattu and the Capoeira as Masculine Performances



culture, and Indian cinema. She also curates film programmes and
does subtitling for Indian cinema

        Email: sanghitasen@gmail.com



                                       The paper
Date sent: 31/01/2017
Date accepted: 15/04/2017
Date published: 31/05/2017



                           How to quote this paper
Mukherjee, Indrani – Sen, Sanghita, “The Kalaripayattu and the
Capoeira as Masculine Performances: From Bodies of Resistance to
Neoliberal Tourism Bodies”, Longing and Belonging/ Désir et
Appartenance, Eds. Massimo Fusillo, Brigitte Le Juez, Beatrice Seligardi,
Between, VII.13 (2017), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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