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Book Review: Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 23 Article 17 January 2010 Book Review: "Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice" Harold Coward Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Coward, Harold (2010) "Book Review: "Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice"," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 23, Article 17. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1469 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Coward: Book Review: "Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice" 62 Book Reviews There is much to be learned from and seem to reflect a presumed position of privilege appreciated in Schouten's Jesus as Guru. for Caucasian, WesternlEuropean, Christian However, I was frustrated by phrases such as contexts. "Whoever explores the religion and culture of While dialogue between "East" and "West" India comes fact to face with a different world," sets the context for the book in the introduction, (1) or " ... Since then, it is no longer possible to in the Postscript Schouten acknowledges, " .. .in i imagine Indian society and culture without the past quarter of a century the voice of Hindus i I Christ." (4) Following an informative in the dialogue has grown silent." (260) Perhaps intermezzo on Frank Wesley's depiction of future work can assess why this might be so and Jesus as a blue hued child like Krishna, I wonder work to build a new conversation. why he felt the need to say, "The representation of Jesus is certainly not very (accurate Swasti Bhattacharyya historically." (127) These examples, alld others, Buena Vista University Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Mark Singleton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. viii + 262 and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Edwin F. Bryant. New York: North Point Press, 2009, pp. lxvii + 598. BEFORE tackling· Mark Singleton'S Yoga emphasized mental practice and tended to shun Body, one should first read Elizabeth De the as ana or posture side as being unsuitable, Michelis' A History of Modem Yoga Singleton notes that by the 1920s posture (Continuum, 2004) where she sets the context oriented forms of yoga began to re-emerge and for the various forms of modern postural or dominate. This then is the focus of Singleton'S asana yoga in Vivekananda's lectures on Raja Body Yoga, namely to offer a good explanation Yoga in 1896 delivered just after the Chicago of why as ana or postural yoga was initially Parliament of Religions. While Vivekananda excluded, and to describe. the various ways in purports to be presenting Patanjali's Yoga, he is which it was eventually reclaimed. Body Yoga, actually basing his version of Yoga on says Singleton, "aims to indentify the factors Keshubchandra Sen along with Theosophy, that initially contributed to the shape that William James, Krishnamurti and others, and transnational yoga has taken today, and ends up emphasizing mental practice over the constitutes in some ways a 'prehistory' of the physical. Having identified the intellectual root international asana revolutiop. that got into full of Modern Yoga as Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, swing with B. K. S. Iyengar and others from the De Michelis shows how in the twentieth century, 1950s onward." Singleton supports this two developments arise out of Vivekananda, contention by noting that in doing the literature namely Modern Postural Yoga and Modern review for Yoga Body, the English language Meditational Yoga. Mark Singleto~ studied yoga manuals from the late 1800s to about 1935 these historical developments pf yoga together largely follow Vivekananda's mental yoga in with De Michelis (also his phD: supervisor) their approach. In surveying the holdings of when the two of them plus Suzanne Newcombe Cambridge University Library and the British organized the Modern Yoga Graduate Workshop Library in London, as well as Stanford at the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge University'S Green Library and the University of in 2006. Singleton's attention came to be California, Berkeley 'library, Singleton found focused on a gap in the development of the that the as ana or practice oriented Anglophone Postural Yoga side arising from Vivekananda. yoga manual begins to emerge as a genre only While Vivekananda's 1890s Raja Yoga during the 1920s. It is these manuals that Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 2010 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 23 [2010], Art. 17 Book Reviews 63 provide the focus for Singleton's very detailed culture. Although in practical Anglophone yoga study. Although Singleton acknowledges that in primers of the. first decades of the twentieth the post World War II years there was an century asana r6mains largely absent, Singleton I explosion of interest and publications on yoga, finds that through these experiments in synthesis these works were not included in his study - but asana or postural yoga gradually becomes the he does say that they continue to privilege most prominent practice component in postural over mental yoga. mainstream modem yoga. Chapter 6 focuses on In the first half of Yoga Body, after a brief the contributions of gymnastics and overview of. yoga in India (especially Hatha bodybuilding to this nationalist man-building Yoga), Singleton examines the figure of the process, while chapter 7 examines the female yogin as he appears in travel writing, contributions of spiritualized methods of scholarship, popular culture, and the literature of movement and dance common in women's popular practical yoga in the 1890s. Chapter 2 physical culture classes of the early twentieth examines early European encounters with yogins century. Chapter 8 identifies the major influence and notes their inferior status during colonial that· photographic realism contributed to rule, especially hatha yoga practices. In chapter reversed perceptions of yoga of the body. 3, the author shifts focus to the hatha yogin Finally, in chapter 9 Singleton examines the street performer who does this to earn a living. influential postural forms developed by T. With the advent of photography, the contortions Krishnamacharya as a yoga teacher in Mysore of the hatha yogin became grist for the Western during the 1930s and 1940s. Here Singleton conception of "exotic India". This along with the agrees with much of Norman Sjoman's earlier downgrading of the posture-practicing yogin by analysis which argues that the "godfather" of Vivekananda, Blavatsky and others in the late today's global asana boom is T. 1800s led to the distaste for and exclusion· of Krishnamacharya, who evolved his influential asana practices in early Western Anglophone postural forms out of .the royal gymnastics yogas. In this way Singleton convincingly tradition of the Mysore Palace. l Singleton's explains how postural yoga comes to be so conclusion does not focus on the derivation of undervalued and little practiced in the anglo specific yoga postures (as Sjoman does) but world during the years immediately following rather on the powerful synthesis of Western and Vivekananda's Raja Yoga lectures. Indian Modes of physical culture, contextualized Part II of Yoga Body (chapters 4-7) provide within traditional hatha yoga. a careful· and very detailed analysis of the For readers of this journal, a sidelight in particular modifications hatha yoga had to Singleton's detailed scholarly analysis is the role undergo to escape from being· seen as a blight that some esoteric forms of Christianity played .. and instead regain a positive perception in the in all of this. Singleton finds, for example, that modem West. Chapter 4 examines the late Mary Eddy Baker's Christian Science ideas of nineteenth and early twentieth century the power of positive' thinking to actuate the influences of Western physical culture diversity in the world found their way into (gymnastics and bodybuilding techniques) practical yoga manuals during the first half of introduced into India by organizations such as the twentieth century (p. 130). New Thought the Indian YMCA. Chapter 5 shows how during together with movements like theosophy and the same period as ana yoga traditions began to New England Transcendentalism also played a be combined with Western physicai'~cl!.lture role in bridging between institutional practices into a reworked "indigenous" man­ Christianity and the development of popular building that could support the recovery of postural yoga. Indian national pride and counter the colonial -,Yoga Body, with its focused and careful perception of Hindu Indians as weaklings. scholarship, is an excellent contribution to our Chapters 6 and 7 consider early twentieth­ und~rstanding of how asana yoga evolved in the century developments of these first experiments decades after Vivekananda and became the basis in synthesizing yoga and European physical for much of the postural yoga experienced in https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol23/iss1/17 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1469 2 Coward: Book Review: "Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice" 64 Book Reviews Anglophone culture today. It will be a mass-produced consumerisms - the indulgence particularly valuable resource for graduate of the senses and the mind - as the highest and students wanting to do research on today's most desirable goal of life." (p. xvii) Yet as the modern yoga in relation to its Indian roots. I Gita tells us, desire is never satisfied and burns especially appreciate Singleton's careful like fire - it is the internal enemy that destroys avoidance of the temptation to treat Patanjali's people. This insight, says Bryant, is found in the Yoga Sutras or classical hatha yoga texts as the ancient Hinou; Buddhist and Jaina thought.
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