Modern Transnational Yoga

The Transmission of Posture Practice

Hannah K. Bartos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000367966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sport & Exercise Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

This is the first book to address the social organisation of modern yoga practice as a primary focus of investigation and to undertake a comparative analysis to explore why certain styles of yoga have successfully transcended geographical boundaries and endured over time, whilst others have dwindled and failed.

Using fresh empirical data of the different ways in which posture practice was disseminated transnationally by Krishnamacharya, Sivananda and their leading disciples, the book provides an original perspective. The author draws upon extensive archival research and numerous fieldwork interviews in India and the UK to consider how the field of yoga we experience today was shaped by historic decisions about how it was transmitted. The book examines the specific ways in which a small group of yogis organised their practices and practitioners to popularise their styles of yoga to mainstream audiences outside of India. It suggests that one of the most overlooked contributions has been that of Sivananda Saraswati (1887-1963) for whom this study finds his early example acted as a cornerstone for the growth of posture practice.

Outlining how yoga practice is organised today on the world stage, how leading brands fit into the wider field of modern yoga practice and how historical developments led to a mainstream globalised practice, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Yoga Studies, Religious Studies, Hindu Studies, South Asian History, Sociology and Organisational Studies.

1Introduction

Modern transnational yoga is the product of over a century of efforts to transmit yoga practices worldwide, during which time the presentation of posture practices was refashioned, blended and redefined by both householders and sannyasins (renunciates) as well as persons of different nationalities, faiths, ethnicities and genders residing in various cultural contexts. The convoluted nature of transmission has led to a yoga practice that today is a globalised mainstream activity, encompassing a range of universally recognised bodily practices that has been applied to meet the diverse objectives of spirituality, relaxation and fitness, or some combination thereof.¹ As interest in yoga practice outside of India climbed over the 20th century, definitive efforts were made to organise the practice on a grander scale by gurus and teachers originating specific styles or brands of yoga practice. At the forefront of these developments were Sivananda Saraswati (1887–1963), Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) and their leading disciples, many of whom may be considered as ‘followers, emulators, [or] intellectual heirs’ of Swami Vivekananda (De Michelis 2004:187). Both the Sivananda and Krishnamacharya Schools of yoga practice² were pivotal to the historical development of posture practice transnationally and the evolution of the field of modern yoga³ over the last 100 years, having been chiefly responsible for its popularisation.

What may be surprising to many is the balance of influence between the two schools. Based upon data collated in this study, for every single teacher that has been accredited to date in the Krishnamacharya School, no fewer than seven teachers have been accredited in the Sivananda School.⁴ Despite this seven-fold outnumbering of official teachers, the literature, however, has overwhelmingly been weighted towards key figures and posture practices of the Krishnamacharya School.⁵ One potential contributor to this bias may well be the higher visibility of its teachings, given that it is principally from teachings of Krishnamacharya and his disciples that a very long tail of entrepreneurial operators emerged from the 1990s onwards, to teach branded or unbranded styles in their localities and awarding their own teacher qualifications, often registered with external governing bodies, such as Yoga Alliance or the British Wheel of Yoga. Particularly in the US, this proliferation of independent teacher training courses has provided increased choice for consumers and, whilst most teaching initiatives were small scale, they accounted for the majority of individual course offerings on a numerical basis. This text aims to provide a counterweight to the imbalance of scholarship, by examining the histories of key protagonists within the Sivananda School alongside analysis of leading gurus and teachers in the Krishnamacharya School.

The recent momentum in yoga studies takes us to a point where we are gaining a greater depth of understanding into the key figures who transformed the packaging of posture practice and disseminated it transnationally. Standard explanations for the popularisation of yoga teachings have tended to focus on considerations such as the role of guru charisma, the re-interpretation of Hindu teachings to accommodate the ‘West’, disillusionment with established religions, acculturation, appropriation and assimilative processes, as well as the nature and directionality of cultural flows of information and processes of globalisation.⁶ Valuable work has been produced on several thematic perspectives, with analysis in the literature that seeks to analyse modern yoga in its wider contexts, tackling subjects such as the early role of Hindu reformers, the reformulation of hatha yoga influenced by European physical culture, the shift of non-Indians towards Eastern spirituality, the fitness craze of the 1980s, the emergence of consumer cultures, the rise of commodification, commercialisation and branding alongside discussion on certain social and economic perspectives and so on (e.g. Pechilis 2004; De Michelis 2004; Strauss 2005; Fish 2006, 2014; Singleton 2010; Jain 2012, 2014, 2015, 2020b). Most recently, Hauser (2018:512) has argued persuasively that one cannot reduce transnational flows on postural yoga to models of linear diffusion, nor can we assume a unilateral transfer from India to a single reference point but rather transmission is advanced in the form of global distribution networks.⁷ Along with a few correctives to pervasive theories that equate transnationalism (or globalisation) to Westernisation,⁸ this study rejects uni-directional arguments in favour of a more complex construction with a plurality of lines of transmission and interaction across a multi-cultural milieu; that is, to emphasise the interplay between multiple centres and peripheries.

Understanding the changing backdrop and prevailing currents in 20th-century yoga brings us to a missing piece of the puzzle; namely, the disconnect in scholarship between these contextual factors and precisely how these factors translated into actual action or, indeed, inaction. To properly explain transnational popularisation, I argue that one must account for the highly differentiated ways in which posture practice was transmitted and a full analysis cannot be divorced from a clear and nuanced understanding of the historical development of organising the practice and practitioners. Whilst essential groundwork has been carried out to date in the study of modern postural yoga, references to features of organisation in the literature have been largely incidental rather than part of any systematic examination. One finds that the social organisation of posture practice has been somewhat taken for granted in discussions of gurus and practice in modern yoga; that is, the patterned arrangement of institutions, networks, social groups and individuals in the field. Its importance for the development of transnational posture practice has been neglected in the literature although Newcombe’s (2014) paper on the 1970s routinisation of guru charisma in Iyengar Yoga in the UK is a welcome step. Recognising the intractable nature of the task at hand, following Gorringe (2010:120), a focus on charisma alone may actually ‘hinder analysis and obscure the complex processes, mechanisms and relationships that constitute leadership’ in hierarchical organisations. Or as Deslippe (2019:31) contends, it is necessary to deemphasise ideas of individual charisma and move towards a focus on structures and organisation to understand why some Hindu teachers succeeded. The necessity of founding a formal organisation as a consciously coordinated social unit was keenly felt by many ‘second-wave gurus’ in the US (circa 1960–1980s) who believed, as Williamson (2013a:111) identifies, that ‘their ideas and the practices they taught must be tightly contained within a system and the container was a legal organisation…’.

To make steps towards remedying such paucity of attention, this text is uniquely orientated towards examining the diffusion of posture practice from the perspective of its social organisation. The idea of looking at the historical dissemination of postural styles of yoga practice from the angle of their organisational structures and processes is a novel, albeit quite a challenging, task. Doing so draws upon a body of scholarship on social movements, new religious movements and modern guru organisations that engages with this subject matter.⁹ As the history of transnational yoga over the last century remains only partially understood, a fertile area of inquiry asks what forms of organisation were produced and how did they help or hinder efforts at diffusion. One of the findings of this study centres on how the most successful and enduring proponents of posture yoga practice in the mid to late 20th century were those who efficiently developed systems of practice, organised practitioners and built institutions in a manner more akin to multi-national businessmen than religious teachers. As part of this process, a fundamental premise is that before individuals could be attracted to a practice, it needed to be presented in the first place (e.g. tours, literature, centres) and the methods employed to do so can be studied. Naturally, a yoga practice needed to be appealing to induce practitioners to take it up. However, no matter how appealing a style of posture practice was to the public, without concerted efforts to provide ongoing access to teachings (e.g. via classes taught by trained teachers), no individual could successfully master the practice and the proliferation of practitioners would have been constrained.¹⁰

A corollary of this is that the absence of certain organisational structures and functions may be associated with inhibiting transnational dissemination and a tendency towards non-persistence of a particular approach or brand. Two possible counter-examples include American TV yoga star, Richard Hittleman (1927–1991), and English yoga teacher, Yogi Sunita (1932–1970; née Bernadette Cabral), who proved to be transient phenomena by experiencing great fame during their lifetimes yet suffered from vastly diminished popularity thereafter. The very presence of certain types of institutional features was a necessity for long-time survival and analysis in this area helps us understand why certain schools of yoga practice successfully transcended geographical boundaries and endured over time, while others have dwindled and failed. It is important to recognise that not all efforts to organise modern yoga practice were equal and a wide range of outcomes have been observed, linked both to the type of strategies pursued by leaders as well as the quality of its implementation, often ...