Yoga Body

Abstract

Yoga Body charts the rise of postural yoga (āsana) in popular imagination and practice from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Second World War. This period saw the forging of a postural canon that gave shape to what is today popularly accepted as the practical substance of “yoga.” Prior to these modern innovations, yoga was rarely (if ever) conceived primarily in these terms. How did this situation come about? How did yoga become the health‐ and fitness‐oriented phenomenon we see today? This book offers explanations of the genesis, status and function of yoga in the modern world. This history has remained largely hidden in popular and scholastic accounts, but the phenomenally successful yoga forms we see in the world today simply cannot be understood without it. Drawing on rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the United States, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly actors in the 1920s and thirties postural yoga renaissance, the book investigates the predecessors of today's āsana systems. It also presents fresh evidence for the origins of the twenty‐first century's most popular forms, including material from two hitherto untranslated texts on āsana by the “godfather” of modern postural yoga, T. Krishnamacharya.

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