Mark Singleton’s
Yoga Body is a cultural history of asana practice, concentrating on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Modern hatha yoga is only tenuously related to asana practice as described in the Sanskrit texts. Until the eighteenth century, real hatha yogins lived as itinerant petty criminals, despised and feared by Indians and British alike. Even Vivekananda, the great popularizer of Indian religion in the West, viewed hatha yoga as an inferior pursuit, and one that was perhaps not even a spiritual practice at all.
The sanitization of hatha yoga began with the European physical culture movement of the late nineteenth century. Gymnastics and bodybuilding became popular. A Christian man, it was held, should be a manly man. The movement was taken to India by the YMCA and by the British military, who included physical fitness in their training drills.
As Indian national pride developed in the early twentieth century, a desire developed to demonstrate that India had its own system of strength and fitness. Hatha yoga was then reinvented by grafting a careful selection of its elements on to the international culture of the body — though research has shown that many of its supposedly traditional postures look remarkably like ones from nineteenth-century European fitness books, and many were invented on the spot by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya in Mysore in the 1930s.
Mark Singleton’s well-documented research challenges the notion of the modern asana class as an ancient Indian tradition. The many period illustrations add charm to the book.
Mark Singleton. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford University Press, 2010. Paperback. 272 pages. ISBN 9780195395341. $17.95.
