Showing posts with label yoga history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yoga history. Show all posts

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Celebrating Yoga in America

Saluting American Yoga! with thanks to YogaDawg (July 4, 2013)

[Note: This post was originally entitled "In Praise of American Yoga." I decided to change it in response to comments from several people who feel that the term "American yoga" is inherently offensive and objectionable. I see it as simply descriptive, and interchangeable with "yoga in America." However, titles form first impressions, which are important. So, I've changed that, but left the rest of the wording alone.]


I like to think of myself as a cultural critic. Flag-waving patriotism turns me off. Nonetheless, when it comes to the subject of American yoga, at the moment I’m feeling oddly cheerleader-prone. Why? Because while I’m all in favor of critiquing the commercialism, narcissism, and cultural shallowness that runs so rampant in American yoga culture, I’m also opposed to caricaturing the entire endeavor as the hopelessly corrupt offspring of an otherwise pristine yoga tradition.

Of course, it’s certainly true that the American yoga boom of the past 15 years has generated its own peculiar set of problems. Critical issues of commercialism, cultural appropriation, and cheapening a rich tradition absolutely need to be raised. From my perspective, the issue isn’t whether critiques of American yoga are warranted: they are. The question, rather, is how to levy those critiques constructively.

Trying to neatly separate “corrupt” American yoga from some supposedly “pure” alternative (whether Indian, Hindu, Tantric, traditional, countercultural, old school, 1990s, or whatever) is not constructive for two key reasons. First, it’s inaccurate and misleading. Real life is messy. This has always been true, both within the yoga tradition and beyond it. Second, splitting the complexities of life into all-good and all-bad categories is unnecessarily divisive, and generates unintended negativity.


Looking for Shangri-La?

Ironically, dichotomies of “pure” versus “corrupt” yoga encourage well meaning Westerners wishing to honor the yoga tradition to unwittingly reinscribe colonialist stereotypes of the “mystic East,” imagining India as a timeless, mystic land beyond the reach of modernity and even history itself. Even in the 21st century, the iconic image of Shangri-La continues to loom large in the American yoga imaginary. (A "mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery” featured in the 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, “Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.”)

For example, xoJane recently published an earnest article entitled "Like It Or Not, Western Yoga Is A Textbook Example Of Cultural Appropriation."  The author, s.e. smith (a self-described white atheist who rejects normal gender pronouns such as “she” in favor of the gender-neutral term “ou”) shares her (or rather, ous) reservations about practicing yoga, which ou describes as “an aspect of the Hindu faith with origins that are thousands of years past.”
until very recently . . . I did asanas and pranayama myself as a way of focusing, centering, and strengthening myself. I liked how these practices made my body and mind feel, but I also felt deeply troubled by my use of some of the eight limbs of yoga in a way that didn’t feel in accordance with the practice’s roots, and by my practice of yoga as an atheist.

If I wouldn’t dream of taking Communion at a Catholic Church if I was attending as a guest, why would I practice yoga? Aren’t there lots of explicitly fitness-oriented options for me to choose from that don’t require me to appropriate religious practices from former colonies?
This line of reasoning ignores the fact that the term “Hinduism” was a Western invention that lumped the disparate religious traditions of India into a single category modeled after our own monotheistic faiths. True, Indians quickly appropriated the term and used it means of building a unified national identity and fighting British colonialism. That shift, however, soon birthed a new, deliberately modernized variant of Hinduism – which, in turn, provided the cultural context for the development of modern yoga.

Given that modern yoga was intentionally crafted to speak to people of all faiths, nationalities, and cultures, ou’s feeling that ou should not practice it since ou is not Hindu is, in fact, a rejection of Indian tradition, not an affirmation of it! However, as long as India is implicitly assumed to be a land beyond history, it's impossible to imagine such a possibility, as it's based on a recognition that Indian spiritual practices (including yoga and Hinduism) evolve over time, just as they do in the West.

Image via Decolonizing Yoga (excerpt from Yoga PhD)

Similarly, in a recent Huff Post article, Yogi Cameron Alborzian denounces contemporary asana-based yoga on the grounds that “postures were never supposed to become the centerpiece of the entire practice, and it was only through the ego that people started to focus on them. As a result, more postures have been invented in the last few centuries.”

Again, while well intentioned, the assertion that the development of modern asana practice was solely driven by “ego” isn’t supported by historical fact. (The larger point of the article, that it’s good to move beyond a simple fixation on the body, is a good one, and particularly notable coming from an .) T.K.V. Desikachar, for example, once explained that his father, Sri T. Krishnamacharya (the most influential figure in the development of yoga as we know it today), “evolved very important principles in the practice of asana,” developing so many new postures and techniques so quickly that he was “unable to keep track of his new discoveries.”

Modern asana-based practice, in other words, was not a corruption of an otherwise pure yoga tradition produced by out-of-control modern egos. Rather, it was a deliberate reformulation of what has always been a vast and diverse tradition, re-crafting yoga in ways designed to meets the needs of the modern world.


The Pure and the Impure?

In "Stepping into the Yoga Time Machine: Before the Yogamagedon,” Chris Courtney attempts to cut the yogic wheat from the chaff in a new way. Rather than rejecting modern or even American yoga as a whole, he limits the corruption of yoga to what’s happened with it during the past 15 years in the U.S.:
Imagine a time before ex-cheerleader mean girls and lecherous douchebags had taken over yoga studios. Imagine a time when classes were harder to find, but were also less likely to suck . . . Imagine a time before yoga became an 'industry.' When there was a genuine sense of community and collaboration, rather than competition. The time you’re imagining is the late 1990s in America.

 . . . When I think of what we’ve allowed yoga in America to become, it seems that instead of holding steady in our practice to consciously navigate our way through the Kali Yuga, we’ve doubled down on its worst aspects. With every new yoga fad, gimmick, or distraction from the practice, we’re moving farther from the divine and speeding our own degeneration.
While I appreciate the desire to lambaste the slavish commercialism that’s become more and more present in American yoga culture, neatly dividing recent history into the “good” yoga of the 1990s versus the “bad” yoga of today is absurd. I’ve heard enough stories about L.A. yoga culture in the 1990s to believe that this idyllic time of “community and collaboration, rather than competition” didn’t exist. My best guess would be that then, like now, the yoga world contained pockets both of cut-throat competition and inspiring cooperation. In most cases, however, I suspect that people found themselves spending a lot of time in that big, grey area in between.

Similarly, the idea that we’re speeding away from “the divine” and toward “our own degeneration” is a bit much. It's worth noting that there have been some positive developments that didn’t exist in the 1990s: the yoga service movement, the expansion of yoga into prisons and other major social institutions, the explosion of the yoga blogosphere, the development modern yoga studies, the integration of yoga with somatic psychology, the development of trauma-sensitive yoga, and the expansion of female leadership, to name a few.

Back cover image: 21st Century Yoga c. Sarit Z. Rogers / Sarit Photography

Problems of Polarization

Since I'm sympathetic to the critical project, I wouldn’t be harping on the need to be more balanced if I wasn’t concerned that the public conversation about yoga has started to become overly polarized. Not long ago, we had the opposite problem: except for a few lone bloggers, yoga discourse seemed firmly sealed in a big, pastel-colored bubble, in which no negative observations were allowed. Now, the bubble has clearly burst – and that’s a good thing. The question, however, is how to build an inclusive conversation that balances honesty and critique with respect for diverse experiences, commitments, and points of view.

While it takes a variety of forms, there’s a recurring tendency to try and divide the sprawling, vast, diverse world of yoga into fixed camps with clear boundaries separating the good from the bad, the commercial from the authentic, and the pure from the corrupt. I believe that it’s important to resist these tendencies toward neat categorization, which present an inaccurately simplified view of reality, and promote interpersonal division.

Of course, it’s tempting to pit “commercial yoga” against “authentic yoga" (or whatever) to dramatize a valid critique. Yet setting up such hard-and-fast categories carries a cost. Dividing the yoga community into a good “us” versus a bad “them” encourages self-righteousness on the “us” side by creating a stereotyped “Other” to measure one’s superiority against. At the same time, it tends to generate hurt, anger, resentment, and/or alienation among “them.” Once such dynamics are in play, the negative blowback overshadows whatever good may have been intended by the critique.

For Americans in particular, there are also big problems with the social ethics of such “corrupt vs. pure” paradigms. Writing off contemporary American yoga as hopelessly tainted provides an excellent rationale for immersing oneself in a yoga subculture that’s uninterested, if not actively resistant to connecting with others in our society. At the same time, it undermines faith in our ability to confront with the enormous challenges of our particular time and place.

Given the sorry state of our country at this time, I personally feel that those of us lucky enough to have received the gifts of an effective yoga practice would be better off seeking ways to share this knowledge with others. Doing this, however, requires accepting the realities of American yoga and the society it’s part of in all of its maddening messiness and contradictory complexity. This doesn’t mean dropping critique or embracing the lazy apathy of “it’s all good." It does, however, require tempering criticism with concern for others who may not share our perspectives or commitments, yet still in their own way love yoga as much as we do.


Thursday, February 21, 2013

In Praise of Modern Yoga


Amanda Rocks the Urban Yoga by (2008)




The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of my new book, .


When it comes to the popular understanding of yoga history today, it seems that modern yoga just can’t get any respect.

This rankles me. Because as I’ve studied the history, tracing yoga as we know it back to its most immediate roots in late 19th-early 20th century India, I’ve come to believe that the modernization of yoga that occurred at that time was, in fact, a really good thing.

Yet from the tone of the discussion surrounding the publication of Mark Singleton’s groundbreaking (as well as, to a lesser extent, other recent historical studies) you wouldn’t think this could possibly be the case. Rather than seeing the modernization of yoga as a positive, creative, and even visionary response to a rapidly changing world, most practitioners view it with either indifference or hostility.

Of course, there’re always exceptions to the rule. But from what I’ve seen, the most common response to the compelling historical evidence that asana as practiced today only dates back to the early 20th century is either to 1) shrug off one’s initial disillusionment and not care, or 2) denounce this fact as evidence of the corruption and degeneration of an ancient spiritual tradition.

And this, I believe, is a shame. Speaking as a practitioner, I believe that there’s much wisdom and inspiration to be found in the short but pivotal lineage of teachers who were formative in the making of modern yoga, stretching from Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th century to Sri T.Krishnamacharya in the mid-20th.

Boiled down to essentials, I believe that these teachers revolutionized yoga by 1) democratizing asana and meditation by making them newly accessible to all, and 2) insisting that science and spirituality are complementary practices, and seeking ways to forge new accommodations between them.

Considered as a historical development, this synthesis of yoga, democracy, and science was new – deliberately modern, and culturally progressive. Most fundamentally, it embodied a commitment to evolving yoga in ways that would make it most relevant to a rapidly industrializing, globalizing world.

Realizing this vision required synthesizing ideas and practices drawn from both Eastern and Western cultures. This fact of hybridization is precisely, I believe, what enabled yoga to become such an important force in the world today. Yet, many serious practitioners remained wedded to the belief that any and all Western influences on the Eastern tradition of yoga are necessarily negative and corrupting.

This, I think, is simply wrong – both in terms of how yoga historically developed, and how it manifests in society today. When it comes to the needs and concerns of the contemporary world, synthesizing East and West opens up critical new space for creative synergy and change. In contrast, trying to keep cultural traditions separate, pure, and isolated is not only doomed to failure, but breeds insularity, defensiveness, and mistrust.



Particularly given the contemporary yoga community’s tendency toward binary East/West thinking, it’s important to emphasize that such processes of hybridization work both ways. Consequently, the development of modern yoga wasn’t as simple as merging a wholly Eastern tradition (yoga) with purely Western ones (democracy and science). Rather, as the process of integration unfolded, each of these categories was hybridized within itself. Concretely, even as yoga incorporated new ideas and practices drawn from the West, the understandings of democracy and science it embodied became partially transformed by the East.

If modern yoga is indeed a partially Westernized practice, in other words, it’s also one that’s played an important role in partially Indianizing the West. Rather than rejecting such syntheses as impure and corrupting, I believe we need to celebrate their creativity, and seek ways to keep them generative and meaningful.

Throwing Babes to the Crocodiles

Swami Vivekananda
When it comes to the history of modern yoga, it makes sense to start with Swami Vivekananda. An exceptionally important historical figure, Vivekananda more or less single-handedly succeeded in laying the philosophical groundwork for modern yoga, as well as generating a seminal wave of interest in it, both in India and the U.S.

Born in Calcutta in 1863, Vivekananda remains a revered figure in India, where he’s regularly referred to with such honorifics as the “Father” of modern yoga and Indian nationalism (a notably significant combination). In the U.S., however, Vivekananda is no longer well known. Although he caused a sensation in the late 19th century, most yoga practitioners today have never heard of him. This is a shame, as Vivekananda’s formative role in the making of modern yoga is a fascinating and revealing story . . . 


Yoga and Democracy

While rooted in ancient tradition, Vivekananda’s presentation of yoga was deliberately crafted to speak to modern concerns. His belief that everyone could benefit from yoga broke with traditional schools of thought that held that practices of mental training and concentration should be revealed to only an initiated few. Yoga, Vivekananda insisted, should be taught and studied just like any other body of knowledge. “There is neither mystery nor danger in it,” he wrote. “So far as it is true it ought to be preached in the public streets, in broad daylight.”

This push to democratize yoga represented a radical move against the Hindu orthodoxy of the day. Indian traditionalists had opposed even Vivekananda’s presentation to the Parliament of Religions. “The Brahmanical priesthood raged and fumed against him as it is forbidden to a Hindu to cross the ‘Black water,’” recounts Bhupendranath Datta. “The educated Hindus . . . looked askance and criticized him as deviating from the orthodox representation of Samatama Dharma” (traditional religious teachings).

Yogic practices of meditation were even more closely guarded. Traditionally, yoga required an initiatory process in which carefully selected disciples committed themselves to learning at the feet of an enlightened guru. Even Ramakrishna, the Indian mystic who was Vivekananda’s own spiritual teacher, believed that meditative yoga was not suitable for “householders” – that is, ordinary people who aren’t monks. Vivekananda, in contrast, believed that if the great yogis of the past had been able to attain “super-consciousness,” then “you and I can get the same.” “Not only is it possible, but every man must, eventually, get to that state,” he wrote. “Experience is the only teacher we have.”

By writing and speaking about yoga, Vivekananda changed it from an esoteric discipline that could only be learned through a guru-disciple relationship into a spiritual technology available to all. Reflecting back on why he decided to speak at the World Parliament of Religions, Vivekananda replied:
First of all, to bring out the gems of spirituality that are stored up in our books and in the possession of a few only . . . I wanted to make them popular. I want to bring out these ideas and let them be the common property of all, of every man in India, whether he knows the Sanskrit language or not.
Similarly, in an 1895 letter to a friend, Vivekananda explained that he believed that “out of bewildering Yogi-ism must come the most scientific and practical psychology – and all of this must be put in a form so that a child can grasp it. That,” he avowed, “is my life’s work.”

If Vivekananda’s insistence on democratizing yoga ran counter to Indian tradition, it also shocked Western sensibilities that viewed Enlightenment rationalism as the height of human knowledge, and conventional Christianity as the only true religion. Western civilization, it was widely assumed, was the repository of humanity’s most important universal truths. Consequently, it shouldered the responsibility of exporting these truths to the rest of the (presumably benighted) world. From this perspective – which, at the time, seemed perfectly respectable – British dominion over India didn’t constitute exploitation and oppression. Rather, it was shining the light of Western civilization into the darkness of the heathen East. 

The British Raj in India (University of Cambridge collection)

Vivekananda attacked these assumptions on multiple fronts. And, his claim that yoga embodied a universal science of consciousness was central to them all. The “meditative state” attainable through yoga, he wrote, “is the highest state of existence . . . It is only the contemplative, witness-like study of objects that brings us to real enjoyment and happiness.” As such, yoga was deemed capable of accessing the universal ground of religious experience; one that the West self-servingly imagined attainable through Christianity alone. Yoga, consequently, demonstrated that both rational and extra-rational experiences were valuable capacities of the human mind.

Then-dominant Western conceptions of mind, in contrast, posited a sharp break between rationality and religion. Western science was presumed to embody the highest form of rationality, and Christianity, the one true religion. They were, however, separate realms. Vivekananda, in contrast, taught that yoga integrates the rational and the spiritual in ways that enhance our understanding of both. In this sense, Vivekananda’s description of yoga entailed a 180-degree turnaround in popular conceptions of the comparative achievements of Western and Eastern civilizations. Rather than the West being the sole possessor of universal truths, the East became the source of practices capable of integrating rational and extra-rational experience in ways that surpassed the limits of Western knowledge.

1886: "the sun never sets on the British Empire" - world map highlighting Britain & her colonies (in pink). Note dark-skinned heathens, wild beasts, & European worker, solider, and sailor all looking up appreciatively to the conquering Western goddess of Reason & Civilization, rightfully sitting on top of the globe - Indian man on elephant on left!

Given that Christianity and colonialism had been long intertwined in India, this claim carried significant religious and political repercussions. “Most of the men whom you send as missionaries are incompetent,” Vivekananda railed in an 1865 Detroit lecture. “I have never known of a single man who has studied Sanskrit before going to India as a missionary, and yet all our books and literature are printed in it.”
The Christian nations have filled the world with bloodshed and tyranny. It is their day now. You kill and murder and bring drunkenness and disease in our country, and then add insult to injury by preaching Christ and Him crucified . . . There is the same beauty in the character of Christ and the character of Buddha. It is not assimilation that we want, but adjustment and harmony.
Such contentions were radical – and influential. “True, perhaps only a thousand or so heard that lecture,” conceded Mary Louise Burke, looking back many years later. “But a handful of people with firm convictions . . . can slowly change the thought of a nation. Moreover,” she added, “Swamiji’s words were spread through the medium of the press, not only in reports, but in editorials.”

In sum, if Vivekananda upset Hindu traditionalists by injecting democratic values into formerly exclusive traditions of yoga, he also disturbed Western chauvinists who championed their culture as the sole repository of universal truths. In so doing, he effectively used yoga to democratize existing conceptions of human consciousness. The ability to attain higher states of awareness, he insisted, should not be limited by the cultural conceits and social restrictions of either the East or the West. By insisting that yoga represented a science of spiritual development universally available to all, Vivekananda democratized dominant understandings of religion and spirituality – and, in so doing, of the relationship between East and West as well.


 

You can read about the pre-modern roots of yoga, how Vivekananda's Raja Yoga resonates with neuroscience, why new forms of Hatha yoga blossomed in the early 20th century, how contemporary yoga is threatened by American culture's commodification of the body, and much more in Yoga Ph.D.: Integrating the Life of the Mind and the Wisdom of the Body. Copies are available via eStore and on Amazon ( and ). 

 And, if you haven't seen it yet, please also check out this book's companion volume, 21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, and Practice (co-edited with Roseanne Harvey) a collection of essays on contemporary North American yoga and its relationship to issues of spirituality, recovery, feminism, body image, community, activism, and more.


Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Roots of Yoga: An Interview with Mark Singleton & Jim Mallinson



Anyone interested in the history of contemporary yoga should be familiar with Mark Singleton’s (Oxford University Press, 2010). In addition to being the most sophisticated history of modern yoga yet written, Yoga Body succeeded in reaching the practitioner community in ways extremely rare for a scholarly work. In so doing, it played a pivotal role in shifting the reigning self-understanding of North American yoga community away from blithe assumptions of representing a “5,000-year-old practice” and toward important questions regarding what it means to practice yoga in our society today.

Seven yogis under a banyan tree (1630-31)

Now Mark is hoping to work with his friend and colleague, Jim Mallinson, on an edited volume of historic Indian texts tracing the evolution of yoga from the ancient through pre-modern periods. While grounded in scholarship, the book, entitled Roots of Yoga: A Sourcebook from the Indian Traditions, will be written for a general audience. Intended to be a resource for the English-speaking yoga community, Roots of Yoga will provide a source of original yogic texts (about half previously untranslated) unlike anything available today.

In order to produce Roots of Yoga, Mark and Jim need funding to cover their work and travel expenses. Given that the book will be aimed at practitioners, they can’t get academic grants. So, they’ve trying to raise $50K via Kickstarter. You can link to the campaign, which runs from July 11th  – August 10th, by clicking here.

I feel strongly that the yoga community should do everything that we can to support this project. Mark and Jim are world-class scholars with years of experience studying and practicing yoga. They are fluent in the art of translating Sanskrit, specializing in yogic texts. Between them, they have a deep knowledge of the histories of both medieval and modern yoga, as well as of contemporary practice in both India and North America.

R. Schmidt, Fakire und Fakirtum im alten und modernen Indien (1908)

But: If they can’t raise the money, they can’t do the project.

So please take a moment and contribute to the Roots of Yoga Kickstarter campaign. Then spend a few more minutes asking all your yoga friends to do the same. Talk the project up at your local studio. Get it out there on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever your favorite social media platforms may be. If you care about yoga, I honestly believe this will prove to be an exceptionally valuable investment of your money and time.
_______________________________________________________

Mark Singleton
A week or so ago, I interviewed Jim and Mark via Skype to learn more about the project. Before getting into that conversation, however, here’s a bit more info on who these men are:

Mark Singleton holds a Ph.D in South Asian Religion from Cambridge University. In addition to the path-breaking Yoga Body, Mark published the first-ever edited volume on modern yoga, (Jean Byrne, co-editor; Routledge 2008). Another co-edited (with Ellen Goldberg) book, Gurus of Modern Yoga, is in production with Oxford University Press. With Jim Mallinson, Mark is currently launching a five-year research project at Oxford University to edit and translate the five earliest texts to teach Hatha yoga.

Jim Mallinson
Jim Mallinson holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University, where he studied with the world’s leading scholar of Tantra, Professor Alexis Sanderson. In 2007, he published a critical, annotated translation of , a 14th century text detailing a traditional Hatha yoga technique called Khecarimudra. He has also translated many other Sanskrit texts, including the yoga classics, the Gheranda Samhita and Shiva Samhita, parts of which are available for free download on YogaVidya.com.

Jim is also a documentary filmmaker, producing “The Beginner’s Guide to Yoga” for British national television and an independent feature documenting his paragliding expedition to an ancient Hindu temple in the Himalayas (editorial note: how badass can you get?). Other creative work in process includes memoir of the eight years he spent studying with itinerant yogis and ascetics in India; a documentary on “The Original Yogis at the Kumbh Mela,” and a collaboration with photographer Cambridge Jones on an illustrated history of yoga.


Yogi in Kukkuṭāsana (1510) c. Rob Linrothe

Carol: The yoga tradition is vast and diverse. How will you draw the boundaries of “yoga” in your project?

Jim: There’s an ongoing debate over what yoga is and isn’t. Obviously, we have to delineate somewhere.

Mark: We’re planning to prioritize texts that explicitly identify themselves as being part of the yoga tradition. We’ll also include Tantric texts that have a yoga component, as well as Upanishadic texts that may not self-identify as “yoga,” but contain evident precursors to later practices.

Jim: Physical yoga practices weren’t really developed until the early medieval period. No text refers to “Hatha yoga” prior to the 13th century Dattatreya Yoga Shastra. Still, we can look back and see where the physical practices came from with the benefit of hindsight.

For example, the Buddha mentions physical practices that would definitely qualify as Hatha yoga in the Pali Canon, but he didn’t call them that.

Carol: So, are you going to focus on the development of Hatha yoga in particular?

Jim: Yes – but not in the sense that the term has come to be understood in the modern period.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the Theosophical Society and then Vivekananda posited a split between “Hatha” (physical) and “Raja” (mental) yoga, which is the framework that we’re familiar with today. I’d argue, however, that in the pre-modern era, this distinction between physical and mental yoga didn’t exist.

Mark: I agree. Hatha yoga was incorporated into lots of different yogic systems from 16th century onwards. Today, people assume that there’s always been a divide between physical and mental yoga – but historically, that doesn’t hold. 

Ascetic practicing various techniques of yoga and tapas (~1825)

Carol: As you know, the history of Hatha yoga has been whitewashed quite a bit, with practices that were disturbing to modern Western (and middle-class Indian) sensibilities erased out of the picture. How will you negotiate the cultural politics involved in representing the past? (Note: If you don’t get where this question is coming from, check out (for example) Sinister Yogis by David Gordon White.)

Mark: Yes, it’s true; that sort of sanitizing of history has gone on. Even in books about Iyengar yoga, all that stuff is cast to the side. But historically, it’s there and cannot be ignored.

Jim: It would be very disingenuous to ignore what’s discomforting to contemporary sensibilities – these practices are central to the tradition. To pretend they’re not there would be to misrepresent it.

Mark: We can’t stop people from being offended. I’m not sure how some of this stuff will be received. Some of the practices may be interesting and appealing for what practitioners might want to do in America today. Others are not. I don’t see that as a reason to hide any of it. 

Yogirāj Jagannāth Dās, Haridwar Kumbh Melā, 2010 (photo: Jim Mallinson)

In our commentaries on the texts, we can also help people understand what they may see as strange by explaining how it fits into the system as a whole. True, the Christian right will take it as more evidence of the Satanic nature of yoga, which is of course nonsense. But there’s nothing that can be done about that.

Jim: I’ve spent a lot of time with ascetics in India who do these sorts of practices –  Basti, Khecarimudra , and so on. (Note: Khecarimudra involves progressively cutting the root of the tongue so that it’s able to be inserted up into the soft palate at the back of the throat; Basti includes squatting in water, drawing it in through the anus, and expelling it.) I think that we can make it clear that when they’re understood in their indigenous cultural context, they take on different meanings. For example, some of the yogis I know would see Basti in very much the same way that we see colonic cleansing. 

Carol: How do you envision the structure of the book?

Mark: The book will be organized thematically, with sections on asana, pranayama, mudra, bindu, etc. Each will begin with a short introduction that provides historical context. We’ll also include notes to explain technical terms and other information that might useful to the general reader. We want make the book as user-friendly as possible.

Vivekamārtaṇḍa manuscript (1477)

Carol: Will the book include new, previously untranslated material? If so, have you already located it, or do you have more research to do?

Mark: While it remains to be determined, it’s probably going to be about half previously and half newly translated texts.

Jim: We’ve already identified the texts that we want to translate – if we had to identify them from scratch, the project would take at least 7 years. That said, we may, of course, discover something new.

Carol: If you already know what you want to translate, why do you need to go to India? Couldn’t you just get photocopies and do the translations at home?

Mark: (laughs) Yeah, that would be nice – but we do need to go to the libraries. There will be lots of material to go through, and getting our selections right requires going to India and looking at what’s available firsthand. It will definitely take a trip or two.

Jim: Plus, getting the materials out of the libraries is a complex, bureaucratic process – there’s loads of forms to fill out and so on. And, while many of the librarians are really helpful, there are always those that need to be goaded to stop drinking chai and get on with it.

Carol: How will Roots of Yoga build on Yoga Body?

Mark: While it’s sometimes misinterpreted, the thesis of Yoga Body is not that yoga as we know it is only 100 years old. Rather, it’s a cultural history of the modern period. But there’s always a history prior to the one in question. 

I don’t think that we should make a hard distinction between traditional and modern yoga. While it’s true that enormous new influences came in during the modern age – the Theosophical Society, yoga being exported from India, and so on – those boundaries are not hard and fast.

As soon as I finished Yoga Body, I wanted to extend my research back to the immediate pre-colonial period. This project will allow me to do that and more besides. I think it will complement Yoga Body well.

Carol: As yoga scholars, what motivates you to connect to the world of yoga practice – particularly when the North American yoga community is often (at least in my opinion) pretty non-intellectual, and sometimes even anti-intellectual?

Mark: It seems to me that practitioners today have only been exposed to a small part of the spectrum as to what yoga is and has been. The texts that we’ll compile in Roots of Yoga will point to many new possibilities.

There could be great benefit in entering into a conversation with the past through a collection like this. Hopefully, it will enable a depth of connection with it that hasn’t previously been easily available.

Jim with his guru, Bālyogī Śrī Rām Bālak Dās, Haridwar Kumbh Melā, 2010
Jim: Unlike Mark, I’ve had very little contact with the world of contemporary Western practice. Mainly, I’ve hung out with traditional yogis and ascetics in India.

I’m fascinated, however, by how important the idea of “authenticity” seems to be in the yoga community today. And I think that it’s clear that there needs to be some better grounding in that regard. Some of these crazy controversies that flare up – like the recent claim that “yoga started as a sex cult” – show that there needs to be better, and more accessible information on the yoga tradition available.

Mark: This book will provide easy access to the sort of texts that I would have liked to have had when I first started practicing yoga. It will give practitioners a resource they can use to negotiate the field. It’ll enable them to get reliable answers as to what yoga has been historically by connecting them to original, primary texts. 

Carol: Do you consider yourselves to be yoga practitioners?

Mark: Yes – I’ve practiced several schools of modern yoga. I started with Iyengar and Ashtanga, and later studied Satyananda, which is another modern tradition that’s more well-known in parts of Europe and Australia than the U.S. It’s also the method that’s represented in the largest teacher training school in northern India, and possibly in India as a whole.

So that combined with things that I’ve learned from various other places . . . whatever it means to be “a yoga practitioner” . . . yes, I do yoga of some sort.

Jim practicing Nauli on the beach in Kerala
Carol: To be clearer where I’m coming from with this question – it ties into the whole issue of authenticity, which, as you mentioned, is big in the yoga community. In practitioner circles, it’s very common to dismiss scholarly work (particularly when there’s disagreement with it!) on the grounds that scholars are not practitioners, and therefore don’t understand what they’re writing about in any meaningful way.

Mark: Yes, there is a strong discourse of bookish versus real knowledge. The very term “academic” is a term of abuse in certain practitioner circles.

I’m possibly prejudiced (and Jim is, too), but I believe that scholarship has enormous value in helping us understand what practice means – not just now, but what it has meant in the past. One fundamental way of pushing the boundaries of what the practice can be is through the process of serious inquiry provided by scholarship.

Carol: So, Jim: do you also consider yourself a yoga practitioner?

Jim: Yes. And I find it much easier to say I’m a “yoga practitioner” than to say I’m a “yogi.”

I spent most of my 20s wandering around India with yogis and ascetics, the sort that you’d see at the Kumbha Mela. Most of what they were practicing, I’d try. So, for example, I did the Khecarimudra practice, cutting my tongue away; I did Basti and all that – although it doesn’t actually float my boat that much. I learned asana, pranayama . . .

But now, I’ve got small children. And like many yogis in India, who tend to go through a period of intense practice for several years, and then rest on their laurels for awhile – I now just do a short practice everyday, and longer bouts periodically when I can.

Coat of Arms: Oxford University
Carol: You’re both English, and trained at the most elite universities in Britain. Do you consider yourself to be part of the lineage of British scholars that’s been studying yoga and related practices in India since the 18th century?

Mark: To some extent. There has been a lot of Orientalist bashing, and much is well justified. But there’s also a tendency to extend Said’s diagnosis of the violent, dominating, colonial gaze to include the work of European scholars who were studying Indian religions and making translations of texts in significantly different ways. (Note: If this reference doesn’t make sense, you can read about Edward Said’s seminal critique of “Orientalism” here.)

To some extent throughout my career, I have looked to this early European scholarship on India. And while its often quite flawed, I don’t necessarily see it as representing an Orientalist gaze. There is enormous benefit in cross-cultural study and exchange. And I don’t believe that there’s necessarily a hard and fast separation between cultures. Historically, there has always been learning across regional boundaries. There has always been intercultural exchange.

R. Schmidt, Fakire und Fakirtum im alten und modernen Indien (1908)

Jim: I don’t see myself in a direct lineage from Oxford scholars of the past. I do, however, see myself as part of the tradition of study developed by my thesis supervisor, . His work revolutionized study of Tantra, really opening the field up. To a certain extent, I feel that that’s what I, along with several of his other students, are starting to do with yoga – Hatha yoga in particular. 
 
Remember – Roots of Yoga can’t be published without YOUR help!
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Additional info on images: 

Seven yogis under a banyan tree. Mughal, dated 1630-31, in the collection of the British Museum (1941,0712,0.5).

R. Schmidt (1908), Fakire und Fakirtum im alten und modernen Indien: Yoga-Lehre und Yoga-Praxis nach den indischen Originalquellen (Berlin: Hermann Barsdorf). The āsana on the left is guptāsana, the one on the right is paścimattānāsana.

Yogi in Kukkuṭāsana on the prākāra wall of the Mallikārjuna temple at Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, c. 1510. The oldest known image of a yogi in a non-seated āsana. Copyright Rob Linrothe. 

Ascetic practicing yoga and tapas: Andhra Pradesh, in the collection of the British Museum (2007, 3005.4). 

The first folio of a manuscript of the Vivekamārtaṇḍa dated to 1477 CE and in the Baroda Oriental Institute Library. This text was expanded to become the Gorakṣasaṃhitā/śataka.

Jim with his guru, Bālyogī Śrī Rām Bālak Dās: photo credit - Chris Giri.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Yoga in the News! 100 Years Ago

Thought I'd share some fun and interesting historical images and news reports from my online files with you today. I LOVE this kind of stuff.

Swami Vivekananda
Here's Swami Vivekananda. He introduced the American public to Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where he was an unexpected sensation.

As someone who wishes that contemporary yoga were more socially conscious than it is, I'm very taken with the fact the Vivekananda was also an outspoken, radical social critic - both of India and the United States.

The 1893 Chicago Daily Tribune article, "Hindoo Criticizes Christianity," for example, reports on what was for the time really quite an amazing attack on the then-championed conceits of "White Man's Burden":


  
KA-BLAM! Take THAT, you intolerant self-righteous missionaries and colonizers!

( . . . and, perhaps, our wimpily apolitical notions of "ahimsa" today?)

On a lighter note, it's also true that the press loved to make fun of yoga back then just as they do today. Here's The Milwaukee Journal's take on Vivekananda's work teaching asana and meditation in New York City:


Then, as now, women were the main practitioners of yoga in America. Here's a nice pic of Vivekananda picnicking with the ladies:


Once the racist anti-immigrant backlash of the early 20th century got into full swing, however, yoga's popularity with women became Exhibit A of its depravity. Here's a typical report on that era's anti-yoga hysteria from The Washington Post (1911):

Yes, dark skinned Swamis were corrupting America's white women right and left, sending them straight to the insane asylum! Evilly preying on the weakness of our fairer sex! Clearly, it was time for the government to take action. Here's another report from The Washington Post (1912):


If you're interested in learning more about this weird period in American yoga history, Robert Love, author the The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, wrote an excellent (and very funny) article about it back in 2006 that you can access here.

In case you're not familiar with them, two other excellent recent books on the history of American yoga are Stephanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, and Philip Goldberg's American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West.

If any of you readers have any good American yoga history links, I'd love it if you could share them here! It's a fascinating story that we're still very much in the middle of writing . . .
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