Another quick book review:
Some 300 million people worldwide practice yoga. It's an industry worth an estimated $106 billion. It's also, as the authors of Conspirituality argue, one of the main vectors for conspiracy theories and misinformation (health-related or otherwise).
It's from that book that I learned of Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Mark Singleton. Published by Oxford University Press, the book is over a decade old now, but the author's thesis — that "posture-based yoga as we know it today is the result of a dialogical exchange between para-religious, modern body culture techniques developed in the West and the various discourses of 'modern' Hindu yoga that emerged from the time of Vivekananda onward. Although it routinely appeals to the tradition of Indian hatha yoga, contemporary posture-based yoga cannot really be considered a direct successor of this tradition."
That "dialogical exchange" coincided with the bourgeoning Hindu nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but also with other distinctly Western movements at the time, particularly those associated with Physical Culture — the bodybuilding initiatives of Eugen Sandow, the gymnastics of Pehr Henrik Ling, and the spread of "muscular christianity." The YMCA was particularly influential: "No organization had a greater influence on the international diffusion of physical culture than the YMCA. Indeed, it was in the creation of a hybridized but distinctly Indian culture of sport and exercise that the YMCA offered its most significant contribution 'to the making of modern India.' Its physical culture programs were explicitly intended to function as a somatic tool of moral reform, whose core values were those of the Christian West, and in particular Christian America." Yoga was an integral part of the YMCA physical education program in India.
Also key to the development and spread of modern yoga was photography — a technology that privileged the physical posture over the spiritual text. But, as Singleton argues, it was key to the spread of Empire and of physical culture — to and from Europe, to and from North America, to and from India. "Photography lent an unprecedented primacy to the imaged body, resulting in an overt, widespread concern for its cultivation. The body was brought to the center of public attention to a degree that had not been possible before. In this way, photographs of Indian bodies became powerful documents with which to refute the Western ethnographic case for Indian degeneracy and to assert the powerful, immediate and self-evident spectacle of national strength." Modern yoga, thus, has always been inseparable from mass culture.
The book, no surprise, has many critics within the yoga industry, particularly those who view yoga as an ancient practice (rather than one that's about one hundred years old), largely unchanged since its deeply spiritual and distinctly Indian origins (rather than a practice with roots that are deeply intertwined with the politics of imperialism and nationalism). The author, a white Englishman who did his doctoral work at Cambridge — work upon which the book is based — is accused by many in the online yoga community as needing to "do his research," funnily enough. Or not funny at all, all things conspiracy theory considered.
