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Introduction
Foucalt’s Biopolitics finds many examples in postmodern times
in the gender discourse of various Third World countries. Using the
physical bodies of women in nationalist politics is an oft-found theme in
postcolonial studies. Be it the issue of sati in India or that of clitoridectomy
in Kenya, women’s bodies have been fiercely used as puppets in the quest
of nationalism.
The colonial and postcolonial episodes concerning the bodies
of women have interesting (and sometimes inverted) connections to
those found in the medieval ages, especially in the latter’s culture of
law and violence. These relations serve to highlight the gendered nature
of punishment. For example, marital violence had varying degrees of
punishments. The domestic abuse of their wives by men was a fairly
normal order of the day; the reverse, however, was severely condemned.
A medieval wife accused of killing her husband was usually burned
alive (McGlynn 57). The concept of burning women alive finds itself in
renaissance in nineteenth-century India, where sati, the burning of widows
on the funeral pyres of their husbands, was practiced as an outdated ritual
in the modernized colonial times of the nation. However that’s where the
similarity ends, for the Indian woman suffered this gruesome death by
virtue of simply being the wife of a deceased Brahmin man.
Sivaraman | 165