Positioning Yoga

Balancing Acts Across Cultures

Sarah Strauss

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

What is yoga? Stereotypical images of people practicing this ancient art range from white-bearded Indian mystics chanting 'om' on mountaintops to urban fitness fanatics contorted into uncomfortable looking positions. We recognize the name, but may not realize how the set of ideas and practices known as yoga moved from its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent to become a global phenomenon. Positioning Yoga considers how the recent development of yoga, from its introduction to Western audiences by the Indian Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago through to the present day, has generated specific forms of modern practice. Strauss takes us on an illuminating journey from India to Germany and America, and back again to India. While acknowledging yogas point of origin, Strauss explores how yogic practices and ideas have been transformed when they cross cultural boundaries.Yoga can be defined in many ways as an attitude, a philosophic system, a set of practices, a way of being in the world but its definition is always located within a particular historical context. What makes yoga practitioners affiliated with Swami Sivanandas Divine Life Society of Rishikesh, India - whether they hail from India, North America, or Europe - unique? What values around the world have supported the surging popularity of yoga over the past century? This absorbing book considers how lifestyle values have made yoga a global industry and shows how culture is produced and disseminated across boundaries.

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Re-Orienting Yoga

Bombay, India – March, 1992

The train pulled out of the station. I was riding in the famed Rajdhani Express, on the way back from Bombay to Delhi. Across from me in the compartment, two middleaged, middle-class businessmen looked hot and uncomfortable in their standard Western style business attire – jackets, ties, the works. They wondered what a young, unaccompanied, non-Indian woman was doing dressed in salwar-kameez (women’s dress of long tunic and loose trousers) and studying a Hindi grammar book. When I explained that I was an anthropologist, and had come to India to study yoga in Rishikesh, they became quite attentive, and began to discuss the subject. Their primary sentiments were regret and amazement: regret that they knew so little of their heritage themselves, and what they knew derived solely from hearsay; amazement that I should travel so far from home, learn Hindi, and wear Indian clothing out of preference, all to study a subject they considered important to their own past, but not likely to loom large in anyone’s future. Nevertheless, they agreed that Rishikesh was an ideal place to carry out such a study, since it was well known as a site of great spiritual power. As was often the case when I mentioned yoga, the businessmen inquired whether I had met any “real” yogis in my travels, and speculated that there were very few left in the country. In the time of the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, the great epics of India, they mused, there had been many yogis across the land. Perhaps, one said, if I went south to Tamil Nad, where people were still in touch with the traditions, I could find some there. The other commented that he had once encountered a man lying on a bed of nails, unscathed: “Was that yoga?”

Locating Yoga

Yoga. The word evokes a range of images and ideas, from white-bearded Indian mystics on mountaintops to cross-legged hippies burning incense and urban business people at a lunchtime fitness class. Although there is no single “correct” version of yoga, a close examination of the variety of ideas and practices that is identified with yoga yields a common core. This book asks how the set of ideas and practices known as yoga has moved from its birthplace on the Indian subcontinent to become a global phenomenon, and how this transnationally produced yoga has come home to change the practice of yoga in India itself. What are the values, in India or elsewhere in the world, that have supported the popularity of yoga over the past century? Following a specific form of yoga developed in Rishikesh, India, by Swami Sivananda and his disciples, we will explore how ideas and practices are transformed as they traverse cultural boundaries; and how certain values, like those of “health” and “freedom,” have shifted in meaning over time, allowing them to be used in the service of such practices.

Yoga can be defined in many ways – as an attitude, a philosophy, a set of practices, a way of being in the world – but its definition is always located within a particular historical context. Although yoga has been studied extensively as a philosophical and religious system,¹ it has less often been researched ethnographically, as a system of bodily practices within a sociocultural context.² Yoga offers an excellent example of the inseparability of mind and body. The eight stages of Patanjali’s classical yoga begin with the practice of morality in social life (yama, niyama: universal and personal rules for living – see Iyengar 1979: 31–36), proceeding to physical practices (asana, pranayama: physical poses and breathing techniques), and then to different states of mental attention or consciousness (pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, samadhi: gradual removal of external sensory input, focusing attention on a single point, uninterrupted meditative state, and, depending on the school of thought, perfect isolation or union with the Absolute (Fort and Mumme 1996). Patanjali’s yoga takes as one of its primary goals the maintenance of physical fitness of the body, which is a preliminary requirement for eventual spiritual enlightenment (Varenne 1976). In contrast with one well-studied south Asian health system, Ayurvedic medicine (which also has a long-standing textual and popular tradition: see Langford 2002; Leslie 1976; Zimmerman 1987), yoga has received far less academic attention.³ Yet like Ayurveda, yoga has attracted attention in the West as an Eastern path to health and well-being.

Here, I explore not only the shifts in how yoga itself has been understood, but also the factors that have contributed to changing the demographics of yoga practitioners. Although there were a few scholars outside of India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who were interested in the classical yoga texts, it was only in the late nineteenth century that wider audiences of people in the United States and Western Europe began to learn about yoga. Much of this exposure derived from a series of public lectures given by the Indian Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda developed his ideas about yoga while he was traveling in the United States and Europe, and later promoted them in India from his home base in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Previously known to his friends and family (but few others) as Narendranath Datta, the young swami had taken the new name of Vivekananda for his voyage west. Young Narendranath/Vivekananda, child of a judge and trained in European-style philosophy and law, had overcome his extreme skepticism of religious power through his interactions with Sri Ramakrishna, one of the most famous figures of the nineteenth-century Hindu world, and still one of the most revered spiritual teachers in all of India. Although Ramakrishna was himself an untutored mystic, in his foremost disciple, Vivekananda, he acquired an eloquent spokesman.

Yoga, described in Vivekananda’s lectures as well as printed pamphlets, became a commodity, something of value that could be acquired and circulated among the literate middle class people of both India and the West. Swami Vivekananda presented yoga as a spiritual commodity that had an explicit exchange value for people in America and Europe: he said that India had an abundance of spiritual wealth, and that yoga was a method that could help people to achieve spiritual well-being. In return, the West – well known for its material resources – could pay cash for the privilege of learning yoga. Vivekananda reasoned that the West lacked spirituality, and so a fair trade could be made (Raychaudhuri 1989; Vivekananda 1990c). Vivekananda influenced many other middle-class people like himself (not only in India but also around the globe) to pursue an ascetic lifestyle, or at least to incorporate aspects of classical Hindu religious philosophy and practice in their daily lives (Joshi 2001). One of those strongly influenced by Vivekananda’s teachings was Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India. As we will see, Sivananda, formerly a secular medical doctor from south India, left his successful career to become one of India’s best known twentieth-century religious figures. This book traces a path out from Sivananda’s Divine Life Society in Rishikesh, through Germany and the United States, and back to Rishikesh, to explore how the practice of yoga – though clearly of Indian origin – has come to embody the values of health and freedom in a transnational context.

The Historical Context of Yoga – in a Nutshell

The Sanskrit root of the word yoga, yuj, means to yoke or join together; the most common English translation is “union,” usually referring to the union of the individual self with the Absolute or Universal Self. I use the general term “yoga” to refer to the broad philosophical perspective (yoga-darsana) normally considered to constitute one of the six darsanas (philosophies) of Hinduism (Eliade 1973 [1958]). One way to begin a discussion of yoga would be to review the ancient Indian texts. Of these, the most famous are the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, dated tentatively to the period 200 BC to AD 200 and considered to be the master text for “classical” yoga. The yoga sutras are somewhat cryptic verse forms, easy for the disciples of the yoga masters to learn, but difficult to analyze. The critical/interpretive tradition which developed around the original texts continues to the present day. The verses outline what are considered the eight basic stages of the yoga system, including guidelines for moral living, physical postures, breathing techniques, meditative practice. Much has been said about this textual tradition (see Aranya 1983; Das Gupta 1989[1920]; B.S. Miller 1996; Werner 1977, among others); here, I will discuss elements of such textual theories of yoga only as they apply to the specific teachings of Swamis Vivekananda and Sivananda.

The original goal of classical yoga, kaivalya, or isolation of the self, is a far cry from the contemporary goals of health, stress reduction, and flexibility that are frequently encountered within both Indian and non-Indian communities. There are numerous other Upanishadic and Puranic treatises that also discuss some facet of yoga philosophy and practice within the confines of “orthodox” Hinduism,⁴ and generally fall within the 400 BC to AD 400 period. In addition the divergent paths of Buddhism and Jainism have generated a substantial body of early literature.⁵ These ancient writings are certainly important; in this chapter, however, they will be considered only in so far as they paint a backdrop for the events of the past century.

Before I delve more deeply into the theoretical concerns of this book, a few clarifications and definitions are in order. The most common usage of the term “yoga” – as seen in Government of India tourist brochures or local television guides, or heard around college campuses – has typically referred to the eight-fold or astanga path of Raja yoga, the classical yoga of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, described previously. In recent years, however, a proliferation of different yogas have appeared on the scene, from Beryl Birch’s Power Yoga to various styles labeled Flow Yoga and beyond. Many, if not most, of these styles are associated with a particular teacher – B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Swami Vishnudevananda – though others are framed primarily in terms of a broader emphasis or style, such as astanga or kundalini. Raja yoga includes moral guidelines, meditative techniques, and the asanas, or poses, of hatha yoga, whose purpose is to discipline the body and mind through physical postures; some consider hatha yoga to be a category unto itself. Raja yoga, the yoga of self-control, is one of the four paths of yoga into which Swami Vivekananda distilled the multiplicity of yogas in the Hindu tradition when he presented these philosophies and practices to the West in 1893.

Rishikesh, India – April, 1992

It’s 4.30 a.m. and my alarm has just sounded. In the small dark room, I begin to hear others moving about the ashram (monastery) courtyard. I reach for my clothes and begin to dress. Time enough for a cup of tea and a quick wash before walking down the road to the Yoga Center on the banks of the Ganga (Ganges River). Sixteen of us converge on the large cement structure at 5.15 a.m. – a dozen non-Indian students, mostly women; a couple of Indian students, both men; the instructor and his assistant, also Indian men. Some sit in silent meditation, while others begin to stretch and twist, warming up their bodies in the cool of dawn, while staring into the mist rising up off the Ganga, the glint of the river barely visible beyond the wire mesh windows. At 5.30, Sumit, the instructor, begins to chant; he invokes the aid of the god Siva, exemplar of yogic practice, as we prepare to spend two and a half hours in vigorous pursuit of the perfect pose. As he barks out the names of asanas, followed by detailed explanations, I am called upon to translate for the numerous German students in the class. Although most of them speak English fairly well, Sumit’s heavily accented, staccato Indian English is too difficult for some to comprehend, and so I try to help.

From History to Practice

Styles of contemporary yoga practice vary from the gymnastic to the sublime. Most people who see a photograph of the yoga class described above (Figure 1), with its members twisted and stretched on various types of equipment, view it as a variant of a medieval torture chamber. Another typical example (Figure 2), this one of a man standing on his head on an oriental carpet, seems to agree with more people’s idea of what one ought to be doing when practicing yoga. Yet both photos were taken within minutes and meters of each other. They reflect the diverse range of yoga practices available to students worldwide. There are, however, many Hindu textual and popular traditions other than yoga whose fame has never reached beyond the borders of the subcontinent. While the term “yoga” has widespread name-recognition, the words Vedanta or Mimamsa will probably draw only a blank stare from any non-Hindu (other than a Sanskrit scholar). But these three together make up half of the six classical schools of Indian philosophy. Of these six philosophical frameworks, why has yoga alone made it to the status of a major “cultural export”? What makes yoga different?

The title of this chapter, “Re-Orienting Yoga,” points to three major reasons for yoga’s surge in popularity that I shall outline. We will revisit each of these major points in detail, but for now I simply want to lay out the keys to understanding how yoga has developed over the past century. First, we can think about the shift in the orientation of yoga that began with Vivekananda in 1893, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair. Originally, yoga was a philosophically grounded set of practices designed to facilitate spiritual enlightenment, and it was mostly considered the domain of Hindu men. The practice of yoga in ancient India was geared primarily toward the male gender and had as its purpose the control of the body in service of the release of the spirit. Vivekananda’s later reinterpretation shifted the focus of yoga toward the promotion of two specific values of the modern world: health and freedom. Health, as Jackson Lears (1981) and others have shown, is a primary goal of the self-development process, which is itself a key feature of the modern world. While all people have always enjoyed being healthy and suffered when health is compromised, not all populations see health as a specific end in itself; that is, while illness is always a marked category, “health” is not. Health is not only a central value of modernity (Dubos 1965; Herzlich 1995), but also a marker for modernity, in the sense that development of nations is measured in part by a series of “health indicators” such as morbidity and mortality rates. A second indicator for national development, as established by the United Nations, the Commonwealth of former British colonies, and such private groups as Amnesty International, is the degree of individual freedom available to private citizens. In order to participate in one of these alliances of theoretically equal and free nation-states, a government must ensure a minimal level of human rights, with personal freedom the most fundamental of these. The presentation of yoga in the Western context was seen as a way to reconnect with the spiritual world, reduce stress, and regain health and freedom – all without having to lose the productive capitalist base upon which Americans and Europeans had staked their futures. As the transformed versions of yoga from Vivekananda and others became popular in India, they fostered similarly transformed notions of the values of health and freedom within the context of global modernity.

Figure 1 Yoga with “props” (author photo)

Figure 2 Sumit: The Headstand (author photo)

Second, the title “Re-Orienting Yoga” refers to the continuing debate on “Orientalism” begun by the Palistinian critic Edward Said (1979). In his book of the same name, Said discusses the problem of a Western colonial power, such as Great Britain or France, reducing members of a colonized Asian society to a stereotypical or “essentialized” character. The tendency to reduce an Oriental or Asian “Other” to a singular essence (e.g. “Spiritual India”) is not new. However, I suggest that the study of yoga ideology and practice provides an excellent example of how essentialized images have been used by the colonized people themselves, as a way of literally re-forming the physical body and ideological make-up of both colonizer and colonized.⁶ Yoga offered an indigenous strategy for both the physical training to generate the bodily strength necessary to reclaim India after centuries of colonial rule, and also a model of the mental fortitude needed by anyone who wanted to effect change in his or her world. The power and flexibility of the yoga philosophy itself allowed Vivekananda to turn one simplified set of ideas and practices to two very different ends: the spiritual awaking of the Western public, and the spiritual rejuvenation of the Indian people.

The third way that this volume demonstrates the re-orientation of yoga can be seen in the literal fact of recirculation of ideas and practices from one place on our planet to another, and back. The modern period is increasingly characterized by the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary and Orthographic Note
• "Lineage" of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh
• Preface: A Note to Anthropologists and Interested Others ...
• 1 Re-Orienting Yoga
• 2 Lives and Histories: Rishikesh, Sivananda, and the Divine Life Society
• 3 Balancing Acts: Doing Yoga in Rishikesh
• 4 Moving Out: Yoga for a Transnational Community of Practice
• 5 Yoga: A Global Positioning System
• Afterword: Virtual Yoga
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index