Café Dissensus

By Elwin Susan John

This collection, Epidermal Metaphors and Narratives in India, intends to curate a set of essays on the representation and discussion of the epidermis in Indian narratives (literary, visual, and performative forms in the Indian context). The epidermis is not only studied in Medicine, as one can find its presence in the disciplines of Humanities and Social Sciences. The timeworn discussions on gender, ethnicity, fashion, identity, medicine etc echo the cultural scrutiny of the body’s periphery – the skin. The metaphors used in language, historical forms of punishments and adornments, visual enactments of skin as a powerful canvas (paintings and cinema), debates on race and gender, production of knowledge in medicine and the technological invasion illustrate the pervasiveness of the skin. It is crossing over disciplines and its presence is felt and seen everywhere.

In the Indian context, there might be a tendency to infantilize the cultural study of the skin into a politics of the diversity of our skin colours. There is a significant amount of research on this discourse, and they are a pertinent contribution to understand our own situatedness. Therefore, without alienating myself completely from this register in which the skin performs, I would also like to incorporate some of the other theoretical possibilities and registers in which the epidermis can be in Humanities.

At present, skin can be perceived as a subject and an object of a cultural imaginary. However, before reaching this phase, historically, the epidermis has undergone several ontological and epistemological changes: the way we understand the epidermis, the identity given to it, its uses, so on and so forth. The essays in this issue of Café Dissensus do not intend to follow a linear historical trajectory within the medical cultural history of the skin, but proposes to collate the most emphatic associations and representations of the epidermis in the Indian context.

In the classical and medieval periods, skin was understood as a covering of the body and not essentially a part of the body. It was more like an unrecognised veneer of the body. Skin was seen as a protective covering of the sacred body or flesh beneath. The ancient practice of embalming also thrust on the belief that skin is a covering that protects the inside of the body. Steven Connor, skin scholar suggests, the integrity of the body is maintained by the skin. Through embalming, when the insides of the body are removed, it remained as a function of the skin to continue preserving the body. The only difference being that after death, the skin must preserve the integrity of the soul. Since the skin was endorsed with a heavy responsibility like this, the person who makes the first cut for the embalmer to do the rest of the work was looked down upon in that society because somebody who applied violence on their own tribe was considered as a fiend.

Another perspective to understand the skin was to call it as a membrane. A layer that is permeable and hence makes the body (which is beneath) susceptible to diseases. This is where the history of dirt and hygiene comes in. French sociologist and historian Georges Vigarello’s studies on Europe in the Middle Ages show that to be clean meant not to have dirt on the visible areas of the skin. In other words, cleanliness was only attributed to the external layer of the body. Thus, to strengthen the body, the pores on the surface of the body were closed by applying skin coatings and women wore tightly woven clothes to prevent the entry of bad air. By eighteenth century, this belief also changed. Bathing became popular and there was a keen interest in opening the pores which will free the skin by removing dirt and sweat from the body. This is a significant shift from the otherwise popular representation of the skin.

In the next phase or a more contemporary understanding of the epidermis, scientific developments and knowledge creation contributed to a considerable change in our perception of the epidermis. If we take the case of hygiene alone, the notions of cleanliness have adapted to the changes in science and medicine. There is an obsession with cleanliness and it is reflected in the advertisements of vaccum cleaners, disinfectants, and other house-hold cleaners. The cleanliness of the body and maintaining its vigour has attained whole new meanings with the revival of spa resorts and rejuvenation therapies. Consequently, the functions of the skin have multiplied. This is just the case of cleanliness. If we look at medicine, dermatology as a separate discipline got established only in 19^th century because till then, skin was regarded only as a covering to protect the true self beneath the skin.

To expand this current situatedness of the skin, I borrow the term that Michel Serres has conceptualised to deliberate on the skin, that is skin is a milieu – the skin becomes a place of minglings, a mingling of places. The skin has become a space where multiple, interconnected incidents happen, and its representations are inscribed. It is the meeting place of the body and the world. The skin negotiates this meeting in the form of a boundary line. Skin with its contemporary associations, mediates medicalization, commodification, demystification, and governance of the body.

In Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man, the skin is caricatured to explain the dilemma and hardships of diaspora. It is the story of an elderly Brahmin man Srinivas. He has leprosy and his immigrant condition is compared to the diseased state of his body. His expatriate life in London and the progress of the problems associated with it are compared to the growth and decay of his leprosy-affected body. The novel can be read as a narrative on marginality as it is fused with the marginal existence of an expatriate and a man affected with leprosy. In other words, Srinivas is doubly marginalized. Throughout the novel, there are recurring images of his skin to speak about the diseased state as well as his marginalised existence in London. He is alienated in the same society when he believes that he is a London citizen by adoption.

“Skin” is a macabre short story written by Roald Dahl. It is about a tatoo artist Drioli who owns the painting of a famous artist Soutine, which apparently is on his body itself. Drioli and Soutine were friends during the war period in Paris and somewhere in the past they lost touch with each other. It was Drioli who taught him the technique of tatooing. So, he merged his skills of painting with tattooing and out came a unique piece of artwork not seen ever before. Now in the present, the gallery owner, collectors etc wanted to possess this unique piece. In fact, they suggest several ideas like surgically removing the skin, paying Drioli for the artwork etc. Eventually Drioli agrees with one of the collectors to stay in a hotel where he will be kept safe for the rest of his life. And the concluding lines of the short story reveal that it was more like a Faustian deal where there was no hotel and maybe no more Drioli either. This narrative speaks about the consumption of trauma (war period, the economy, tattooing soldiers as a profession, loss of a beloved, etc). The main part of the narrative is a recollection, where he is reliving the trauma of losing his wife, war time in Paris and some good memories like tattooing his wife’s image on his back, the camaraderie he had shared with Soutine. The skin becomes a site of creativity. It also reflects capitalistic consumerism, highlights museum culture, and culminates with a flayed skin that becomes a piece of exhibit. The poor man’s body which was repulsive to the gallery owners suddenly transformed into an art piece worth hundreds of dollars. It is a curious short story where there is a splicing of multiple perspectives on skin: trauma, memory, and consumerism.

The French artist Orlan uses skin as a medium to express her art forms. She utilizes extreme body modification surgeries as an artistic procedure on her skin canvas. She questions the status of the body in a society with her radical body transformations. Orlan claims that narcissism is important and there is no stable all-time beauty. And in all these modifications, we find the skin accommodating or rather transgressing and being elastic to find space for the body modifications.

Within the postcolonial context, it is interesting to look at how an internalisation of colonial oppression occurs through the epidermis. Fanon’s work shows that racial oppression becomes an embodied experience. It is embedded on the surface of the body and the bodily schema narrate the violence undergone by the colonial subject. By extension, the bodily schema is the epidermal schema here.

In Indian academia, the works of Gopal Guru, Arjun Appadurai and Sunder Sarukkai provide a poignant merging of affect studies with skin studies. This is yet another quality of skin studies, that it acts as an interface with several other fields of inquiry like trauma studies, memory studies, affect studies, etc.

All three of them makes a distinction between touch and contact. Skin is the surface that enables the experience of touch. It is the largest sensory organ. Skin is both an organ and a medium. Sarukkai suggests that the moment of contact is also the act of erasing the distance between us and the object. Appadurai talks about how contact is relational whereas touchability is a permanent bodily property. Their discussions are about caste system, hierarchies, untouchability etc.

In an essay by Gopal Guru titled, “Aesthetic of Touch and the Skin: An Essay in Contemporary Indian Political Phenomenology”, he has discussed the hierarchies of touchability using the interface of leather workers, their object of experience which is raw hide and the consumers who might not be essentially from the lower caste. At an initial stage of production, the leather ball does not evoke aesthetic pleasure for the ones, where raw hide is a signifier of ritual pollution. The raw hide is a physical substance that carries foul smell, which is transferred to the Dalit leather worker. That is, the Dalit skin is analogous to the skin as a physical substance with a porous surface that emits foul smell through sweat, for example. This is the smell of untouchability, according to Guru.

These examples on the epidermal schema in literary and cultural experiences have been discussed to make connections with diaspora, subalterity, health humanities, art history, affect etc. They are different entry points to help us make sense of all mortal beings, to include the human and the non-human, and I have used the omnipresent epidermis to illustrate this case. The essays in this collection will present different modalities of understanding the epidermis in the Indian context.

References

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Haptic and the Phatic in the Era of Globalization.” Glocalism 1 (2022).

Connor, Steven. The Book of Skin. Cornell University Press, 2004.

Dahl, Roald. Skin and other stories. Penguin, 2002.

Fanon, Frantz. “Black skin, white masks.” Social Theory Re-Wired. Routledge, 2023. 355-361.

Guru, Gopal. “Aesthetics of Touch and Skin: An Essay in Contemporary Indian Political Phenomenology.” Chakrabarti, Arindam, ed. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and The Philosophy of Art. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

John, Elwin Susan. “Marks and Identity of the Disease: What the Skin Screams out Loud.” Research and Criticism, BHU, Department of English, 2018

John, Elwin Susan. “Pustuled Sufferer and Pitted Survivor”: A Decolonial Reading of Smallpox Narratives in India” Ed. Sayan Dey Histories, Myths and Decolonial Interventions, Routledge 2022

Markandaya, Kamala. The Nowhere Man. Penguin UK, 2012.

Sarukkai, Sundar. “Phenomenology of Untouchability.” The Cracked Mirror. New Delhi: OUP, 2012. 157-199. Print

Serres, Michel. The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2008.

Song, Seunghyun. “Bridging epidermalization of black inferiority and the racial epidermal schema: Internalizing oppression to the level of possibilities.” DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 4.1 (2017): 49-61.

Bio:
Dr. Elwin Susan John, Assistant Professor of English, Sophia College (Autonomous), Mumbai, India.

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