Bodily practice, performance art, competitive sport

Abstract

How are we to understand the meaning and politics of kalarippayattu in contemporary Kerala? This article begins by outlining the meaning of kalarippayattu in the mythohistorical landscape of feudal south India and its place in contributing to the development of cultural identity in the nascent state of Kerala. This provides a context for interpreting the different ways in which globalisation is reconfiguring kalarippayattu: a hitherto composite kalarippayattu is now being re-conceptualised as a bodily practice, a performing art and a competitive sport. Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and the work of Walter Benjamin, this article argues that while kalarippayattu as a competitive sport and performing art is ‘non-auratic’ by virtue of its assimilation into the capitalist logic of instrumental rationality and objectification, kalarippayattu as a bodily practice continues to have ‘aura’. Thus, the radical kernel of kalarippayattu as a martial art lies in its politico-phenomenological depth as a bodily practice, and in its capacity to act as a negative critique of dominant social trends.