Disguise, Revelation and Copyright: Disassembling the South Indian Leper[Note . Earlier versions of this article were presented at ...]

This article explores the ways in which physically deformed people with leprosy in South India conceptualize, experience, and use their bodies in distinctive ways. I consider how such an enquiry might be informed by existing approaches to South Asian personhood, such as those emerging from phenomenology and ethnosociology. Conversely, I ask whether ethnographic analysis of those with different bodies might open up new avenues of exploration and complement our existing methodological tool‐box. A focus on individuated body parts is one such approach that emerged from the latter enquiry. In looking at how leprosy‐affected people perceived, talked about, and made use of their bodies in radically different contexts – at home in rural Andhra Pradesh and out begging in urban Maharashtra – I demonstrate how they might order and/or disassociate themselves from different bodily parts in different social spaces. I also show how the lived experience of leprosy might create a community of the afflicted within which awareness of individuated parts dissolves.