The editors bring together some of the best new scholarship on physicality in modern India in a single volume and provide a balance of materials from colonial and post-colonial India. Included are new writings by established and upcoming writers in the social sciences and humanities, all based on original research.

The human body in modern South Asia is a continuous political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as well as to the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could construct an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defence of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Gandhi's use of his body as public experiment in discipline, as well as becoming a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality. This unique collection makes for fascinating reading.