Spatial Pathologies: The Biopolitics of Disease, Death, and The Caste-Body In Ananthamurthy’S Samskara: A Rite For A Dead Man

Abstract

This essay explicates the narrative and symbolic value of triangulating caste, disease, and death in enabling a spatially informed sense of the caste-body and the diseased body politic. Through a reading of Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, this essay argues that the plague functions as a narrative landscape to foreground the body politics of the community. Samskara is an important interjection into our present times especially highlighting the intersectionality of disease. The novel, known for its radical perspective of caste and rituals that inscribe and legitimize caste positions, is a pertinent narrative that also foregrounds the community’s body politic located in the caste proscriptions of the body. This biopolitics is central to the negotiation of disease, death, and caste in this essay. The production of disease, as well as defilement, alongside the contours of a diseased and outcaste body, become crucial vectors of investigation here. Therefore, Ananthamurthy creates a narrative world that generates a movement away from a single pathological pathway to understanding disease and locates it within a Brahmin space to bring home questions that have been cast(e) away until then. Using the frameworks of understanding caste and disease through the prism of biopolitics, the essays seeks to explore the following questions: Which bodies are legitimized as bodies-in-death? Which of them are cast out of the body politic of the community? How does disease intersect with the cast(e)-out body and the dead body? By closely analyzing spatialization of the diseased dead body in the community through the conceptual lens of “autoimmunity,” and the diseased body politic of the community, the essay argues that the inscriptions of caste, disease, and death on the body enable an embodied engagement with the spatial dimensions of life, living, and dying. Samskara functions as an illustrative representation that expands the textual geographies of the body-in-disease, the caste-body, and the body-in-death. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.