Somacoloniality : Three figures of embodied postcolonial affect (Indian Clubs, Gadas, and Heavy Clubs)

Bowman, Paul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9311-2391 2026. Somacoloniality : Three figures of embodied postcolonial affect (Indian Clubs, Gadas, and Heavy Clubs). Asian Journal of Sport History & Culture 5 (1) , pp. 1-19. 10.1080/27690148.2025.2577434

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Abstract

This work engages the embodied and affective afterlives of three forms of British Imperial era ‘Indian Clubs’. Indian clubs are a broad family of exercise tools: some are of ancient Indian and Persian origin, others modified and modernised by the British military in India through the 18th and 19th centuries. The work focuses first on the pairs of small clubs that the British standardised; second, on the gada (or mace), a long staff with a weighted end; and third, ‘heavy clubs’, which can take many forms and have many different names (mugdar [Sanskrit], meel [Persian], karla kattai [Tamil], etc.). The work explores these three different tools and traces three different ‘figures’: 1) the coloniser; 2) the anticolonial-precolonial; and 3) the mythic transhistorical ‘noble savage’. The work analyses both the visual semiotics and embodied affect (or soma-semiotics) of each of these figures/practices and argues that they each activate different affects and hence different immanent postcolonial ideological trajectories.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Journalism, Media and Culture
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/, Start Date: 2026-04-17
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	2769-0148
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	27 April 2026
Date of Acceptance:	15 October 2025
Last Modified:	01 Jul 2026 14:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186638

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