673 Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg

Book Reviews 673 Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (eds.) Gurus of Modern Yoga. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 386 pp. ISBN 9780199938728 (pbk.) Many of the gurus treated in this book responded to a global spiritual market, developed their own personalized type of yoga, and ended up as world teachers with communities of followers in many countries. New technologies, new geographical contexts, and new scientific and democratic modes of teaching have led to the elimination of some practices and the invention of others. The stated aims of Gurus of Modern Yoga is to analyze how forces and themes that have shaped the modern world such as the ascendency of reason, seculariza- tion, democratization, the triumph of capitalism, and the rise of the modern state “play out through the figure of the modern yoga guru” (p. 3) and to “explore the contributions that individual gurus have made to the formation of practices and discourses of yoga in the modern, transnational world” (p. 1). The emphasis is on the “changing role and function of the yoga guru in non-traditional contexts” (p. 1). Modern yoga was from the beginning a hybrid that was shaped as much by Western influences as by traditional Indian ones. One of the features that distinguishes modern, transnational, postural yoga from ordi- nary gymnastics is the role of the guru. This feature is part of its Indian heritage. Since it is a distinguishing feature, it is of interest to understand the role of the guru institution in these hybrid, transnational traditions, and this book is an important contribution towards that goal. The book has an introduction by the editors and sixteen chapters divided into six parts. Part One, “Key Figures in Early Twentieth-Century Yoga,” deals with Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and Shri Yogendra. Dermot Killingley’s knowledgeable essay on Vivekananda makes a number of important points. For Vivekananda, all forms of spiritual striving were yoga, and “his yoga teaching is not clearly divided from the rest of his teaching” (p. 26), so in his view all great religious teachers could be called yogis. He was a guru in the modern sense, notes Killingley, with a large but ill- defined following. It is also important to note that for Vivekananda “scheduled teaching on yoga was for export rather than home consumption” (p. 24). The second chapter deals with Sri Aurobindo, whom the authors argue is an important but forgotten guru in the modern yoga “renaissance.” Aurobindo and the Mother (Mirra Alfassa) rejected postural yoga as a means of spiritual attain- ment, but did not prescribe any specific routine practice that should be used by their followers. They did favor sports as a way to occupy children and keep them healthy, but over time “physical culture came to the forefront of Integral Yoga as the Mother increasingly began to stress its evolutionary impact” (p. 45). In chapter 3 Joseph Alter deals with the paradoxes and contradictions that Shri © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi �0.��63/�5685�76-��34�40� 674 Book Reviews Yogendra (Manibhai Haribhai Desai) embodied. Yogendra, one of the central figures for the development of posture yoga, was one of the first persons to modernize and popularize it. His background was in sports, and as a boy he was fond of wrestling and gymnastics. He spent three years as a young man in the U.S. developing and promoting yoga therapy in a Western context as a form of alternative medicine. In the U.S., Yogendra identified, but also distinguished himself from, “spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought and Transcendentalism as well as naturopathy, gymnastics, and physical fitness” (p. 67). Yogendra illus- trates the global and transnational character of the development of modern yoga. He was just one among many Indian gurus and swamis who traveled on lecture tours in the U.S. in the early decades of the twentieth century. Part Two, “The Lineages of T. Krishnamacharya,” starts with an essay about Krishnamacharya by Mark Singleton and Tara Fraser. They assign to him the title of “father of modern yoga.” Of course, the validity of this judgment depends on what is meant by modern yoga, but it points to the fact that modern transnational yoga of the 1990s and 2000s is to a large degree postural yoga. Vivekananda, who is often championed as the father of modern transnational yoga, did not teach āsanas. Moreover, Vivekananda’s involvement in the technical yoga traditions was in response to his American audience who wanted him to lecture on the Yogasūtra, probably because of the Theosophists’ publication of English editions of this text (Vivekananda’s lectures were soon after published as the book Rāja-Yoga). Krishnamacharya was the teacher of famous yoga gurus such as B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and T. K. V. Desikachar, and the influence of the Krishnamacharya lineages of postural yoga is great, larger than any of the other lineages of postural yoga such as Sivananda’s (not included in the book). The chapter on Krishnamacharya especially deals with the many layers of facts and fiction in Krishnamacharya’s hagiography/biography. In chapter 5 Jean Byrne reflects on the prominent role of faith in a paramparā (succession of teachers) in the institution of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga founded by K. Pattabhi Jois. In chapter 6 Fredrick M. Smith and Joan White analyze the identity of guru B. K. S. Iyengar, whom they think is “the most paradigmatic yoga guru of the last seventy-five years” (p. 136). The next chapter, by Suzanne Newcombe, is about two gurus, Iyengar and Yogini Sunita, in the development of yoga in Britain. Her essay narrates how Iyengar’s teaching became the dominant postural yoga tradition in Britain. This was attained, as Newcombe argues, because Iyengar melded his yoga teaching in Britain with the state-funded adult education system with emphasis on safety and avoiding harm rather than on the personal transformation of the pupil. She concludes that “an important characteristic contributing to the success- Numen 6� (�0�5) 66�–676.

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