ABSTRACT
Body and its attendant values of corporeality, physicality and embodiment have long been verbalized as potent sites of political and personal subjectivity. Read as one of the central sites of socio-cultural inscription, body has functioned as a material signifier defining the nation-state. This discourse of body politics became hugely popular in India in the twentieth century with Gandhi’s idea of embodiment. The various discourses surrounding the Gandhian body located in a world of mutating values will be employed in this chapter to address the miscarriage of justice and to focus on the corruption inherent in India’s newly born postcolonial nation-state, encapsulated in the award-winning novel of Raag Darbari (1968), written by Shrilal Shukla.
