Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world--practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim?\ In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (?sana) and suggests...
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Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world—practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls—that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim?In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (?sana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented ?sana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising—and surely controversial—thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today.Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore ?sana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction 31 A Brief Overview of Yoga in the Indian Tradition 252 Fakirs, Yogins, Europeans 353 Popular Portrayals of the Yogin 554 India and the International Physical Culture Movement 815 Modern Indian Physical Culture: Degeneracy and Experimentation 956 Yoga as Physical Culture I: Strength and Vigor 1137 Yoga as Physical Culture II: Harmonial Gymnastics and Esoteric Dance 1438 The Medium and the Message: Visual Reproduction and the Āsana Revival 1639 T. Krishnamacharya and the Mysore Āsana Revival 175Notes 211Bibliography 225Index 257
