YogaMCA

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:41 pm by Peter Leithart

YogaMCA 2017-09-06T22:41:43+06:00 Peter Leithart

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Hindus often claim yoga as their own ancient practice, and non-Hindus accept the claims. Mark Singleton ( Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice ) sets out to debunk these claims. It’s true that the word “yoga” appears in some ancient texts, and it’s true that there are a few ancient depictions of people sitting in what may be (or may not be) “yoga” positions. Singleton argues, however, that the roots of modern yoga are not found in ancient India.

Modern yoga is about bodily postures, but the word is used in a few passages of the early Upanishads to refer to a kind of meditation that “yokes” (yoga) the senses to control the spirit. In the Bhagavad Gita, the word doesn’t refer to a set of postures but to different religious paths “the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion.” At times, the word does take on a physical sense, but that is hardly the central meaning.

Besides, the ascetics who trained for extreme physical postures were considered fringe figures in ancient India. As the TLS reviewer says, “Yogis were often regarded as ritually polluting or downright dangerous.” No wonder:

“Some later yogic traditions cultivated ‘the aversion to one’s own body’ in more extreme ways. Texts from the early centuries of the Common Era deconstruct the body (particularly but not only the female body) into its disgusting components of shit, piss, pus, and so forth, while others tell of men and women who, going after a kind of god one could find only by breaking away into madness and horror, subject themselves to extremes of heat and cold, fasting, and other forms of physical mortification, going naked, sometimes eating out of human skulls, or eating carrion or faeces, generally demonstrating their indifference to both physical pain and social conventions.” Postural yoga was an embarrassment for Hindus.

Where did modern yoga come from? What the TLS reviewer calls Singleton’s “most provocative assertion” is that modern yoga was invented in the nineteenth century, and that Brits had as much to do with it as Indians. Gripped by a muscular Christianity that made bodybuilding a religious imperative, the British in India adapted some traditional Indian practices, mixed them with Western gymnastics, and then treated the mongrel as an exotic Oriental import. As the reviewer says, yoga was “compounded of the unlikely mix of British bodybuilding and physical culture, American transcendentalism and Christian Science, naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics, and the YMCA, grafted on to a rehabilitated form of postural yoga adapted specifically for a Western audience. The Swedish gymnastics came from Pehr Henrik Ling, the physical culture from a number of people including Eugen Sandow, Bernard MacFadden, Harry Crowe Buck and Charles Atlas. Most influential was the YMCA, in the hands of which physical culture was eventually elevated to a position of social and moral respectability.”

The British considered the Indians physically weak, and so they wanted to make them muscular Westerners. It was an effort to “inscribe English physical culture on the Indian body. YMCA leaders in India had made the postures part of the physical programme in service of Christian goals (leading some people to regard yoga as a variant of Christian Science), but the European poses were then reabsorbed into Hindu culture. The British passion for physical culture, spilling over into the Hindu world, rescued physical yoga from the opprobrium into which it had fallen and made it once again respectable.”

Indians in turn tried to reclaim yoga: “Hindus reacted against these new European versions of yoga and brought yet another form of yoga to America. In 1896, repulsed by the physical contortions and twisted bodies of the yogic postures, Swami Vivekananda said that he rejected Hatha Yoga because it was very difficult, could not be quickly learned, and did not lead to much spiritual growth, and because the goal of making men live long and in perfect health was not as important as the spiritual goal represented by Raja Yoga, which Vivekananda claimed to be reviving. Yet he believed that physical culture, of the European variety, was essential for Indian youth.”

Later, Indians promoted a new form of yoga: “T. Krishnamacharya, between 1930 and 1950, [invented] a novel sequence of movements, partially derived from a royal gymnastics tradition in Mysore; and from B. K. S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, published in 1966. Other techniques that we now recognize as yoga were, by the 1930s, already a well-established part of Western physical culture, particularly that intended for women, but were not yet associated in any way with yoga.”

Postural yoga had to be purged of some of its traditional associations in order to be palatable to the West: “They replaced the unpalatable ancient Indian material with more attractive ancient material, as well as much new material, and claimed that that was what yogis had always used. Ultimately new combinations of Western and Eastern physical culture methods were naturalized as ancient Hindu practices.”

The reviewer is not completely convinced by Singleton’s argument. “The Europeans did not invent [modern yoga] wholesale,” yet he acknowledges that “they changed it enormously . . . from an embarrassment to an occasion for cultural pride, and from a tradition that encouraged the cultivation of ‘aversion to one’s own body’ to another, also rooted in ancient India, that aimed at the perfection of the body.”

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