Abstract
Sevea explores discourses and practices of walking and spirituality that emerged in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Asia. Despite the expansion of modern forms of circulation—ranging from trains to steamships to printing presses—the body came to be the site of social, political and moral experimentation. Sevea shows how a new concern with walking, and its relationship to the senses, self-control and spirituality, emerged in this context of change. Walking, he argues, became a way of attaining ‘happiness, purity and wisdom’ that drew upon discourses emanating from both India and the West.
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- 1.
It is worth noting that the term samadhi can refer both to a tomb or shrine devoted to a spiritual figure and to an elevated meditative state having been achieved by the spiritual figure.
- 2.
Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, 1988), 18.
- 3.
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1986).
- 4.
Edward Davidson, The Railways of India: With an Account of their Rise, Progress, and Construction. Written with the Aid of the Records of the India Office (London, 1868), 1.
- 5.
See, for instance, ‘The Perils of Dawk Travelling in India’, Illustrated London News, 25 December 1858; ‘Modes of Travelling in India’, ibid., 19 September 1863.
- 6.
See discussion in Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Circulation, Piety and Innovation: Recounting Travels in Early Nineteenth-Century South India’, in Claude Markovits, Jacques Pouchepadass and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia 1750–1950 (New Delhi, 2003), 306–57; Kumkum Chatterjee, ‘Discovering India: Travel, History and Identity in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India’, in Daud Ali (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi, 1999), 192–227.
- 7.
Davidson, Railways of India, v, 2–4.
- 8.
Marian Aguilar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minneapolis, 2011).
- 9.
Quoted in Amit Sharma, ‘“Fire Carriages” of the Raj: The Indian Railway and its Rapid Development in British India’, Essays in History (2010). This article offers a succinct summation of political and military arguments made by colonial officials in support of the expansion of the railway in India.
- 10.
Quoted in Aguilar, Tracking Modernity, 15.
- 11.
For discussion, see ibid.; Sharma, ‘Fire Carriages’.
- 12.
Edwin Arnold, The Marquis of Dalhousie’s Administration of British India, 2 vols. (London, 1865), II, 241 (my emphasis).
- 13.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Railway: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa, 1986), xv.
- 14.
J. Talboys Wheeler, ‘Introduction’, in Bholanauth Chunder, The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India, 2 vols. (London, 1869), I, xvii–xix.
- 15.
Ibid., xix.
- 16.
Ian Kerr, ‘Reworking a Popular Religious Practice: The Effects of Railways on Pilgrimage in 19th- and 20th-Century South Asia’, in Ian Kerr (ed.), Railways in Modern India (New Delhi, 2001), 304–27.
- 17.
See Aguilar, Tracking Modernity, 31–3.
- 18.
See William Roff, ‘Sanitation and Security: The Imperial Powers and the Nineteenth Century Hajj’, Arabian Studies, 6 (1982), 143–60.
- 19.
‘India: Reports from Bombay. Cholera, Plague, and Smallpox. Preventive Measures Relative to Pilgrimage to Mecca’, Public Health Reports, Formerly Abstract of Sanitary Reports, Issued by the Supervising Surgeon–General M.H.S., Government Printing Office, Washington, XIX, no. 51, 16 December 1904, 2580.
- 20.
Chunder, Travels of a Hindoo, 140.
- 21.
See, for instance, Chunder’s discussion on the imagery of Kali: ibid., 31–9.
- 22.
This has been noted as an example of ways in which modern technologies were incorporated and adopted at an everyday level: David Arnold, Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago, 2013), 7.
- 23.
Muhammad Ilyas, Malfuzat-i-Hazrat Muhammad Ilyas Kandhelvi, compiled by Muhammad Manzoor Numani (Karachi, n.d.), 214. For an introduction to the history and theology of the Tablighi Jamaat, see Yoginder Sikand, The Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jamaat (1920–2000): A Cross-Country Comparative Study (Hyderabad, 2002).
- 24.
See Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Delhi, 1994).
- 25.
All translations are my own unless stated. In some instances, the term ‘Nanak’ is used instead of Waheguru.
- 26.
For the Dandi march, see Thomas Weber, On the Salt March: The Historiography of Mahatma Gandhi’s March to Dandi (New Delhi, 2009).
- 27.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 98 vols. (New Delhi, 1999), XLVIII, 498.
- 28.
Homer Alexander Jack (ed.), The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His Life and Writings (London, 1958), 238.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ghandi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, LXV, 69 (my emphasis).
- 31.
See Gandhi’s expansion on his concept of swaraj (self-rule) in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge, 1997).
- 32.
See, for instance, Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000).
- 33.
Nile Green, ‘Breathing in India, c.1890’, Modern Asian Studies, 42(2–3) (2008), 283–315.
- 34.
See, for instance, Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 24–5.
- 35.
See, for instance, Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’ [1862], in Edwin Valentine Mitchell (ed.), The Pleasures of Walking (New York, 1979).
- 36.
Louis Kuhne, The New Science of Healing (Calcutta, 1892).
- 37.
Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan, 4th revised edn (London, 1911), 64.
- 38.
Ghandi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, XXXVII, 147.
- 39.
Ibid., II, 50.
- 40.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance (New York, 1961), 248.
- 41.
For an insightful analysis of the impact of the rise of bodybuilding and new conceptions of physical culture in South Asia, see John Rosselli, ‘The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Bengal’, Past and Present, 86 (1980), 121–48.
- 42.
See, for instance, Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995); E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, c.1800–1947 (Cambridge, 2001).
- 43.
Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 8 vols. (Calcutta, 1983–6), V, 116–17, 374–5, 434–6.
- 44.
For an excellent study of how the ‘rediscovery’ of yoga in the modern period resulted in fundamental changes in its nature, see David Gordon White, The ‘Yoga Sutra of Patanjali’: A Biography (Princeton, 2014).
- 45.
Aurobindo Ghose, The Complete Works of Shri Aurobindo, 37 vols. (Pondicherry, 2003), I, 508.
- 46.
Aurobindo Ghose, Records of Yoga, 2 vols. (Pondicherry, 2009), II, 50.
- 47.
See, for instance, Ghandi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, LXXXVI, 135.
- 48.
Ibid., LXXXXVII, 203, 291; LIX, 349.
- 49.
Ibid., LIX, 288.
- 50.
Ibid., LXXXXVI, 354.
- 51.
This is a theme related throughout much of Gandhi’s writings and reflects not only his position on hygiene and breathing, but also his view that it was difficult to maintain morality and equilibrium of mind in cities.
- 52.
Vivekananda, Complete Works, V, 490.
- 53.
See Aguilar, Tracking Modernity, 61–3.
- 54.
For a history of the Arya Samaj movement that compares it with contemporaneous reformist movements that arose in the Punjab, especially the Singh Sabha, see Bob van der Linden, Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: The Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (New Delhi, 2008).
- 55.
See Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab (New Delhi, 2006), 67–93, 224–52, 322.
- 56.
See the official website of the Shree Ram Vichar Ashram, http://shreeramvicharashram.org/index.html (accessed 6 August 2015).
- 57.
Details of the property held can be ascertained from legal records pertaining to a property dispute in 1968 between rivals who claimed to be successors to Tehal Dass. See http://indiankanoon.org/doc/123777/ (accessed 13 July 2015).
- 58.
For the history of the Singh Sabha movement, see van der Linden, Moral Languages; Harjot Singh Oberoi, ‘Bhais, Babas and Gyanis: Traditional Intellectuals in Nineteenth-Century Punjab’, Studies in History, 2 (1980), 33–62. The latter provides an interesting engagement with the ideology of the Singh Sabha movement in the context of competing strands of ‘Sikh’ religious practice.
- 59.
For an insightful discussion on the existence of canons marking status and precedence amongst ascetic groups, see Katherine Ewing, ‘Malangs of the Punjab: Intoxication or Adab as the Path to God?’, in Barbara Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley, 1984), 357–72.
- 60.
Babbu Maan, Baba Nanak, ‘Ek Baba Nanak Si’, from the album Singh is Better than King (Point Zero Music, 2009).
- 61.
See Ranjit Singh Dhadrianwale responding to Babbu Maan’s song during a religious lecture, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T-DzAx6Y4Y (accessed 25 August 2015). The statements by Dhadrianwale in this clip spurred further debate.
- 62.
Tarsem Singh Moranwali, in ‘bhai tarsem singh ji moranwali vs babbu mann’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEQ7J3ZrObY (accessed 25 August 2015).
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Sevea, I. (2016). The Saints Who Walk: Walking, Piety and Technologies of Circulation in Modern South Asia. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_10
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