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Dil Das was a poor dalit farmer living near Mussoorie, in the Himalayas. As a boy he became acquainted with a number of American missionary children attending a boarding school in town and, over the years, developed close friendships with them and, eventually, with their sons. The basis for these friendships was a common passion for hunting. This passion and the friendships it made possible came to dominate Dil Das's life.When Joseph S. Alter, one of the boys ...
The Wrestler's Body tells us the story of a way of life organized in terms of physical self-development. While Indian wrestlers are competitive athletes, they are also moral reformers whose conception of self and society is fundamentally somatic. In order to elucidate the somatic structure of the wrestler's identity and ideology, Joseph Alter uses the insights of anthropology to write an ethnography of the wrestler's physique. Young men in North India may choose ...