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When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses, and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, A South Indian Martial Art. By PHILLIP A. ZARRILLI. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. xxii, 310 pp. $32.00 (cloth).
One among several recent scholarly works on the arts of Kerala, including Oh Terrifying Mother, Sarah Caldwell's study of mutiyettu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Zarrilli's own Kathakali Dance-Drama (London: Routledge, 2000), this book provides a noteworthy discussion of the process of "cultivating" the body in the tradition of Kerala's martial and medical art known as kalarippayattu. Excepting Joseph Alters work on wrestlers in northern India (The Wrestler's Body: Identity and Ideology in North India [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)), this is one of the first major contributions to the study of the martial arts of South Asia. Having said this, however, what sets Zarrilli's work apart is that is does not merely approach kalarippayattu as a "martial art." Zarrilli opens up the discursive fields of ritual, medicine, and psycho-spiritual experience around which kalarippayattu situates itself. One of the recurrent motifs in Zarrilli's work is...