YOGA BODY Praise for Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice Mark Singleton “Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice is an out- standing scholarly work which brings so much insight and clarity to the historic and cultural background of modern hathạ yoga. I highly recommend this book, especially for all sincere students of yoga.”—John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga “From the moment I started reading Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body I couldn’t put it down. It is beautifully written, extensively researched, and full of fascinating information. It stands alone in its depth of insight into a subject which has intrigued me for forty years.”—David Williams, the fi rst non-Indian to learn the complete Ashtanga Yoga syllabus “Mark Singleton’s book Yoga Body traces the evolution of the ever-expanding practice of a¯sana world-wide. His work offers a much needed historical perspec- tive that will help correct much of the mythology and group-think that is emerg- ing in the modern a¯sana based ‘yoga world.’ Any serious a¯sana practitioner who wishes to understand the place of a¯sana in the greater tradition of yoga will do well to read it carefully.”—Gary Krafstow, founder of the American Viniyoga Institute, author of Yoga for Wellness and Yoga for Transformation “Mark Singleton has written a sweeping and nuanced account of the origins and development of modern postural yoga in early twentieth-century India and the West, arguing convincingly that yoga as we know it today does not fl ow directly from the Yoga Sūtras or India’s medieval hathạ yoga traditions, but rather emerged out of a confl uence of practices, movements and ideologies, ranging from contortionist acts in carnival sideshows, British Army calisthenics and women’s stretching exercises to social Darwinism, eugenics, and the Indian nationalist movement. The richly illustrated story he tells is an especially wel- come contribution to the history of yoga, demonstrating the ways in which an ancient tradition was reinvented against the backdrop of India’s colonial experience.”—David Gordon White, professor of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. YOGA BODY THE ORIGINS OF MODERN POSTURE PRACTICE MARK SINGLETON 3 2010 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Singleton, Mark, 1972– Yoga body : the origins of modern posture practice / Mark Singleton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-539535-8; ISBN 978-0-19-539534-1 (pbk.) 1. Hatha yoga. 2. Posture. I. Title. RA781.7.S568 2010 613.7'046—dc22 2009014275 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1. A Brief Overview of Yoga in the Indian Tradition 25 2. Fakirs, Yogins, Europeans 35 3. Popular Portrayals of the Yogin 55 4. India and the International Physical Culture Movement 81 5. Modern Indian Physical Culture: Degeneracy and Experimentation 95 6. Yoga as Physical Culture I: Strength and Vigor 113 7. Yoga as Physical Culture II: Harmonial Gymnastics 143 and Esoteric Dance 8. The Medium and the Message: Visual Reproduction 163 and the A¯ sana Revival 9. T. Krishnamacharya and the Mysore A¯ sana Revival 175 Notes 211 Bibliography 225 Index 257 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments Many people have contributed to the development of the ideas in this book. I would like to thank Peter Schreiner for his thorough and insightful comments on an earlier version; James Mallinson for helping to clarify certain issues regard- ing contemporary Indian haṭha yoga practitioners, and for sharing his images of the murals of the Nātha Mahāmandir in Jodhpur; Gudrun Bühnemann for spot- ting some egregious errors in my Sanskrit diacritics; and Dagmar and Dominik Wujastyk for the discussions on the topic of modern yoga over the last fi ve years. Thanks also to Felicia M. Tomasko, editor of LA Yoga Magazine , for her contin- ued insights into current developments in yoga. I’m grateful to Gavin Flood and David Smith, who gave valuable feedback at the Ph.D stage of this project; and to Joseph S. Alter and Kenneth Liberman for their extensive comments and sug- gestions as OUP readers. Thanks also to Eivind Kahrs of Queen’s College, Cambridge, for reading and commenting on early drafts, and to Julius Lipner for his guidance on the research process throughout my time at the Faculty of Divinity in Cambridge. I am grateful to the participants at the Modern Yoga Graduate Workshop, organized by Elizabeth De Michelis, Suzanne Newcombe, and me at the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge, in April 2006. Ongoing interaction with sev- eral of the participants has been invaluable in refi ning the ideas in this book, and in particular, I thank Elliott Goldberg, who was generous in sharing his refl ec- tions on physical culture and yoga both prior to and during this workshop. Thanks are also due to Vivienne Lo and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim of University College, London, for supporting me through the task of editing a special yoga issue of Asian Medicine, Tradition and Modernity in 2007, and to Jean Marie Byrne of viii acknowledgments Queensland University, Australia, for her collaboration on our collection of yoga scholarship, Yoga in the Modern World (2008). Editorial work on these projects has given me the opportunity to engage in sustained dialogue with many inter- national scholars currently working in the fi eld of modern yoga and has contrib- uted greatly to the shape of this book. I am much obliged to Laura Cooley of the Meem Library, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, for obtaining the many, sometimes obscure, interlibrary loan requests I made during the fi nal stages of this book, and to Paige Roberts of the Babson Library, Springfi eld College, Massachusetts, for going out of her way to provide material on YMCA physical culture programs in India. Thanks also to senior staff member and scholar of yoga at the YMCA College of Physical Education in Bangalore, Srı́̄ Vasudeva Bhāt, who was extremely helpful in directing my research in Karnataka in 2005. I am indebted to Srı́̄ M. A. Narasimhan and Dr. M. A. Jayashree of Mysore, India, for their good-humored support in reading Sanskrit yoga texts during 2005, and to Professor Lakṣmı̄ Tattācarya for his guidance in my reading of the Yogasūtrabhāṣya . Thanks to Dr. K. V. Karna of Bangalore for sharing his memo- ries of his father, K. V. Iyer and for providing otherwise unavailable textual and photographic material; and to Professor T. R. S. Sharma, who was so generous with his records and his memories of Mysore in the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks also to Srı́̄ K. Pattabhi Jois, Shankara Narayan Jois, Anant Rao and A. G. Mohan for the interviews they granted, and to B. K. S. Iyengar, for the free use of his library in Pune. Thanks to all my teachers of āsana , in particular,rı́ S̄ K. Pattabhi Jois, Sharat Rangaswami, B. N. S. Iyengar, Rudra Dev, Hamish Hendry, Barbara Harding, and Sasha Perryman; and to all those friends who have helped to sustain and inspire my practice, especially Louie Ettling, Norman Blair, Emma Owen-Smith, Nigel Jones, Tara Fraser, Romola Davenport, Louise Palmer, and Jennifer Morrison. Thanks also to Lorin Parrish, who never fails to see the funny side. This project was funded by a Domestic Research Scholarship from the University of Cambridge and by various travel scholarships made available by the Faculty of Divinity and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. I am grateful for the opportunity that these scholarships provided. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr. Elizabeth De Michelis, for her unfl agging support and friendship over the last six years. abbreviations GŚ: Gorakṣáataka S HR: Haṭharatna¯valı ̄ S ́S: Śiva Saṃhita¯ GhS: Gheraṇḍa Saṃhita¯ HYP: Haṭhayogapradıpikā ¯ This page intentionally left blank YOGA BODY This page intentionally left blank Introduction An Outline of the Project This book investigates the rise to prominence of asanā (posture) in modern, transnational yoga. Today yoga is virtually synonymous in the West with the prac- tice of asanā , and postural yoga classes can be found in great number in virtually every city in the Western world, as well as, increasingly, in the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, and Australasia. “Health club” types of yoga are even seeing renewed popularity among affl uent urban populations in India. While exact practitioner statistics are hard to come by, it is clear that postural yoga is booming. 1 Since the 1990s, yoga has become a multimillion dollar business, and high-profi le legal battles have even been fought over who owns a sanā . Styles, sequences, and postures themselves have been franchised, copyrighted, and pat- ented by individuals, companies, and government,2 and yoga postures are used to sell a wide range of products, from mobile phones to yoghurt.