Indian Clubs and Colonialism: Hindu Masculinity and Muscular Christianity JOSEPH S. ALTER Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh The man who uses the clubs diligently will never need to have his coats “built out” on the shoulder, or padded in front and rear. He will have the form of a man, as his Mak- er intended him to be. The club-exercise will do more, perhaps, than any other, to check the bad habits of body, so easily contracted by students, professional men, business men and all who have to bend much over books and desks. It will cure such habits more quickly and thoroughly than any other exercise. Like the wand of some kind of fairy, the Indian Club transforms all whom it touches. It makes the crooked straight, gives a manly fullness to the narrow chest, gives breadth and massive power to the rounded back, puts firm, knotted muscle in place of flabby, impotent matter, and fills every vein with bounding life (C. R. Treat, “Indian Clubs” The Riverside Magazine for Young Peo- ple, 1869: 4). introduction: orientalism, gender, and contextual disorientation Following Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), there has been considerable in- terest in studying gender images and engendered practices that emerged out of colonialism, both during the era of colonialism (Cooper and Stoler 1997; R. Lewis 1996; Stoler 1991; 1995; 2002), and subsequently (Altman 2001; Enloe 1993). Many of these studies have shown how colonized women were subject to the gendered and often sexualized gaze of Western men (Carrier 1998; Doy 1996; Grewal 1996; Yegenoglu 1998), and how colonized men were often re- garded as either effeminate or “martial” by virtue of their birth into a particu- lar group. Arguably, the latent ambiguity of regarding all colonized men as ef- fete, and yet categorizing some colonized men as strong and aggressively virile, points to one of the many complex contradictions manifest in the cultural pol- itics of colonialism. A similar point could be made with regard to nationalism, wherein women, and the image men want women to present of themselves, re- flects masculine ambivalence about modernity (Chatterjee 1993). In any case, even when colonial discourse essentializes the virile masculinity of various subject groups—in particular the so-called martial castes of South Asia (Hop- kins 1889; MacMunn 1977)—the putative masculinity of these groups is as- 497 0010-4175/04/497– 534 $9.50 © 2004 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History