ABSTRACT
Although the following pages fall into the field of classical Indian studies and the author has access to Sanskrit sources, they are not directly concerned with Hindu representations of the body as developed before the days of British colonialism. This is an attempt to put into a historical perspective the knowledge gathered over two centuries, a construction of the knowledge about the representations of the body in the Hindu world. In view of the critical history of Orientalist disciplines that has developed over the last few years we make a clear distinction between two periods in the construction of this knowledge. The representations of the body that emerged from reading, translating and interpreting classical writings of Hindu India, became the subject of two successive reinscriptions beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. Our analysis of these reinscriptions is presented below.
