Author: Sofi Escobar (Page 2 of 2)

Chap 7 presentation.

Godna: Inscribing Indian Convicts in the Nineteenth Century

The chapter describes the detailed history of Godna (tattoos) in India from roughly the 15th to the 20th century. Anderson highlights the way in which Godna in India evolved from a cultural practice, associated with healing, fertility, masculinity sexuality etc. Unto a colonial punitive form of class control and vigilance.

The essay poses interesting questions about the long-lasting effects of colonialism on a given society’s cultural practices. What is the difference between a pre-colonial and a post-colonial world?

The third section of the essay focused on the attempts of regaining power made by the the convicted men in 19th century colonial India. The resistance made by the Bombay presidency particularly struck me while reading about all of the cruelty coming from the East India Company during the transition period between Colonial and post-colonial India. It is counterintuitive to me that a specific region under colonial control would be able to withstand such scrutiny when it came to such a conventionally applied immoral practice. In that sense, the application of humanistic principles, or moreover the urgency for the consideration of humanistic principles in a time of European enlightenment is curious. It seems to me that the only way for the British to recognize their own savagery has to be through their own means. They refuse to learn about morality at the hands of another culture. The Indians are condemned to the cruelty of the British until the British (through their own devices) learn better.

In the first two chapters of the textbook, Caplan reveals a pretty detailed and well-argued summary of the uses of tattoos in ancient civilizations and the development of the word stigma to what it is nowadays in the modern world.

I was not aware that the word stigma had anything directly to do with tattooing at all. Stigma could be anything, but the fact that it once exclusively meant tattoos and someone stigmatized was someone who was tattooed really makes one ponder about just how deep the anti tattoo culture is historically. Hatred, disdain, rejection for tattoos is Greco-Roman. For some of the most important western civilizations, who helped forge so much of our understanding of epistemology and culture and politics and math, tattooing was not something that started out as positive and was demonized throughout its existence, but rather something which had, for an extended period of time in these societies a direct correlation with criminal activity, slavery and poverty.

And yet it was the christians who turned this whole ordeal around by making a divine correlation between the role of the slave and a servant of God. It makes me wonder how different the views on tattooing would have turned out had it not been for the never-ending influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition on the western world. Admittedly the Constantinian approach to tattoos being a desecration of the body and therefore banning them from being implemented on the faces of slaves seems more in line with the modern day idea of what the notion of tattooing is for Christians, but I still think it interesting that religious tattooing was the first form of non punishment related tattooing found within Persian, Greco-Roman societies.