Kalarippayattu: A Few Preliminary Caveats and Thoughts
The emphasis that only some traditional masters (like Drona and
Arjuna) foreground yoga in their practice of kalarippayattu should
alert the reader to the fact that this connection is only one
of several paradigms that shape practice of the martial art.
Other masters not discussed here follow other paradigms of teaching
and practice, like Bhima mentioned above. In an increasingly
heteronomous society in which traditional practitioners must
vie for students with karate teachers who often emphasize immediate
"street wise" results, the paradigms, beliefs, and/or
practices discussed in this essay are in a constant process of
negotiation with competing paradigms and practices, and, therefore,
are only more or less observed by teachers today.
Some of the concepts and phenomena discussed here, such as "meditation," "the sacred," "oneself," "power,"
or "purity" are neither transparent nor self-evident.
What is considered "sacred," "the self," "power," "pure" or "meditation"
is particular to each interpretive community, history, context,
i.e., what is "sacred" or "pure" to a brahmin
male Malayali born in 1924 will be different from what is "sacred"
or "pure" to a male Nayar kalarippayattu fighter of
the thirteenth century, a male Sufi Muslim of Kannur born in
1965, an American male born in 1947 who has never been to Kerala
or India, or a European woman born on the continent who has practiced
yoga since her youth and eventually turns to a study of kalarippayattu.
Historical, social, religious, gender, and ideological positions
constitute quite different frames of reference and interpretative
categories through which the "sacred," "self," or "pure" will be read and understood.
Under the influence of "new age" religious assumptions
or other potentially reductionist ways of thinking,[3] too often
in the United States there is a humanist tendency to erase cultural
difference, disregard history, participate and/or be involved
in romantically projecting onto South Asia an Orientalist essentialism
(Said, 1976; Inden, 1986).[4] Too often accounts reify the self
and the "spiritual" as if all experiences that might
be appropriately discussed as in some way "spiritual"
were singular and universal. Most problematic is our Western
tendency to project our hegemonic notion of the self as unitary
and individual onto "selves" in other cultures. As
anthropologist Clifford Geertz notes:
The Western concept of
the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational
and cognitive universea dynamic center of awareness, emotion,
judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set
contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social
and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to
us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's
cultures. . . [We need to] set that concept aside and view their
experience within the framework of their own idea of what selfhood
is.[5] - Geertz, 1983:59
As cultural theorist Richard Johnson asserts, "subjectivities
are produced, not given, and are therefore the objects of inquiry,
not the premises or starting points" (Johnson, 1986:44).
Following both Johnson and anthropologist Dorrine Kondo's thoughtful
ethnographic study of the "crafting" of selves in Japan
(Kondo, 1990), I assume here that "self" as well as
the "agency" and "power" which might accrue
from the practice of a martial art like kalarippayattu are context
and paradigm specific, i.e., that they are variable and provisional.
In this view, self, agency, and power are never "absolute,"
but rather are "nodal points repositioned in different contexts.
Selves [agency and power], in this view, can be seen as rhetorical
figures and performative assertions enacted in specific situations
within fields of power, history, and culture" (Kondo, 1990:304).
Kalarippayattu is a set of tech n iques of bodymind practice
through which particular "selves" are understood or
assumed to gain particular kinds of agency and/or power within
specific contexts. Consequently, a martial practice like kalarippayattu
becomes one means of "crafting" a particular self and,
therefore, is a "culturally, historically specific pathway
. . . to self-realization . . . [and/or] domination" (Kondo,
1990:305). The particular self crafted and realized in a Sufi
Muslim kalari in northern Kerala will be different from the self
crafted in a militantly radical Hindu kalari or the self crafted
by learning kalarippayattu in the United States from an American
teacher who might emphasize a "self-actualized self."
With these caveats in mind, I turn to a brief historical overview
of kalarippayattu and the nature of power for the martial artist(s)
of the past and then to a more specific examination of some of
the ways in which some of today's kalarippayattu masters understand
yoga, Ayurvedic, and power in interpreting their practice and,
therefore, in crafting their "selves."
Also Read: Kalarippayattu - A Study,
Some Preliminary Thoughts,
The Source of Kalari,
The Circumstances & Alliance,
Dhanurvadic Tradition,
Power in Antiquity,
System & Techniques,
The Concept of Sakti,
Conclusion