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 RE-ORIENTING YOGA:

TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS FROM AN INDIAN CENTER

Sarah Strauss

A DISSERTATION

in

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Anthropology

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Presented to the Faculties o f the University o f Pennsylvania in Partial
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Fulfillment o f the Requirements for the Degree o f Doctor o f Philosophy

1997
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Arjun &ppadurai. Sup^nfisor o f Dissertation

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Gregofy Urban. Chairman of Dissertation Committee

Rebecca Huss-Ashmore. Graduate Group Chairperson/Dissertation Committee Member

Peter van derV eer. Dissertation Committee Member

Wilhelm Halbfass. Dissertation Committee Member

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 UMI N u m b e r : 9814918

Copyright 1997 by
Strauss, Sarah

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All rights reserved.

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 W
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Copyright ©
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Sarah Strauss

1997
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 ACK NO W LEDG M ENTS

This dissertation has been made possible through the help and support o f a number

of individuals and institutions over the last ten years; its strengths are a direct result o f this

support, and the deficiencies which remain are my own. Throughout the endeavor, Aijun

Appadurai has offered intellectual sustenance as well as the encouragement required to

pursue a research topic which often seemed untamable. The interdisciplinary community

of scholars linked through Aijun and Carol Breckenridge’s first Public Culture reading

group at Penn in the late 1980’s provided an incredibly stimulating environment for a new

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student with an un- (or perhaps trans-) disciplined mind to begin the transformative process
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that is graduate school. Peter van der Veer has constantly forced me to evaluate and

defend my ideas, and, though I may have been frustrated at times, his challenges have
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improved my thinking immensely. Rebecca Huss-Ashmore has provided a firm anchor in

the Anthropology department through all of my transnational traverses; she has offered

good humor, a place to stay, and solid reminders o f how to stay on track, both intellectually
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and emotionally. Wilhelm Halbfass has helped me sort out the tangled relationships

between European and Hindu Indian philosophy, and kept me honest. Greg Urban stepped

gracefully into a complex situation and has been instrumental in helping me complete the

task at hand. Five is a pretty large number when it comes to dissertation committees, but I

feel fortunate to have had such a supportive group to guide me; thank you!!

Linda Lee has helped in every imaginable way since I arrived at Penn in 1987.

Fellow Penn students and friends Carolyn, Amy, Mark, Sanjay, Margaret, Clare, Rachel,

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& . . . .

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 Cecilia, Ritty, Maneesha, Tim, Loa, Biju, Vicky. Siri. Brenda, Stuart, and on and on (I'm

sure I've forgotten somebody, and I'm sorry): Intellectual goals are well and good, but are

difficult to achieve without good colleagues, and those I have in abundance. Financial

support for in the form o f FLAS fellowships through the Department o f South Asia

Regional Studies and other departmental and university funding made graduate school

possible in the first place. Dissertation field research was funded by a Fulbright-Hays

Doctoral Dissertation Award for work in India in 1992 (Amiya Kesevan at USEF/I helped

my work in India go far more smoothly than it might have), and by a Travel Grant from the

School of Arts and Sciences at Penn for work in Germany in 1993. Visiting Scholar status

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granted by both the Swiss Federal Institute o f Techonologv/EAWAG (1993-94) and the

Center for Comparative Research in History, Society and Culture at the University of
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California at Davis (1994-95) gave me library and computer access as well as stimulating
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colleagues, all essential to my efforts to make sense of my data. Since arriving at the

University o f Wyoming in 1995,1 have benefited from both the extraordinarily supportive

working environment in the Department o f Anthropology, and the opportunity to

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participate in an interdisciplinary writing group whose members combine critical reading

with coffee, cookies, humor and angst— thanks to Susanna, Jean, Kathy, Cathy, Colleen,

and Beth for reading assorted chapters.

To the people o f Rishikesh, especially Arun Bhattacharya, Mohan Dang and his

family, Swamiji, Rudra Gowda, the Issars, Marcel and Pauline, and the many individuals,

including those associated with the Divine Life Society, both in India and elsewhere who

shared their understandings o f yoga with me— with special thanks to Sharon, Tom, Astrid,

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[
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 and Claudia— and helped me put them into practice, I say: It could not have been done

without your good graces and enlightening conversations, and I hope that I have

represented you well. My fellow Rishikesh researchers Lise McKean and Richard Castillo

both offered insights and commentaries I could not have done without. Joan appeared in

Rishikesh at exactly the right moment, giving me confidence to dive into interviews and

making me believe all the more that everything was unfolding as it should. Peter

Schreiner, Joanna Pfaff-Czamecka, Cornelia Vogelsanger, Christian Fuchs and Shalini

Randeria drew me into the Swiss/German south Asian scholarship network and helped in

numerous ways to make me feel at home. In Laramie, Susie Thomas and especially Anne

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Slater helped me pull it all together and get it out the door.

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My parents gave me unconditional support as well as a love o f reading and the

research process— all necessary for the completion o f this goal. My whole family has
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bome the weight o f a distracted daughter/wife/in-law/mother patiently— thank you. To

Carrick I can only say that I could not have made it through without your constant

presence; the knowledge that you were always with me in spirit made the years of
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commuting (Califomia-Pennsylvania-Ziirich-Rishikesh!) possible. But I’m sure glad we

don't have to do that anymore! And finally to Rory: being in your joyful presence is a

lesson in what’s really important— a cliche, perhaps, but true nonetheless.

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 ABSTRACT

RE-ORIENTING YOGA:

TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS FROM AN

INDIAN CENTER

Sarah Strauss

Aijun Appadurai

How has the set o f ideas and practices known as yoga moved from its birthplace on

the Indian subcontinent to become a globally recognized bodily idiom, perpetuated by a

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translocal community o f practice? In this dissertation. I focus on the development o f yoga

as both ideology and practice since its introduction by Swami Vivekananda at the 1893
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Columbian Exposition's Parliament of the World's Religions. Yoga has been understood to

have an exchange value predicated on perceived (and essentialized) scarcity of resources:

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spiritual lack in the West, material lack in India. To keep my arguments manageable, I

address primarily the yoga teachings of Swami Sivananda o f Rishikesh, India. Using

many different kinds o f data— ethnographic observations and interviews, photography,

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archival documents, and contemporary media— I move back and forth along the varied

pathways linking Rishikesh with other locales around the world. The purpose behind

presenting this research on yoga ideologies and practices from 1893 to 1993 is to

demonstrate the relationship between the transnational dissemination o f yoga and the

changing roles o f health and freedom in the ongoing project o f modernity. I begin with the

mythological and recent history o f Rishikesh, showing how this local history intersects

with both the wider history o f yoga in this century and the specific life histories o f Swamis

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 Vivekananda and Sivananda. Next, Vivekananda and Sivananda's ideological and

organizational legacies are viewed in relation to Indian nationalism and independence.

Moving into the present, I describe yoga practice in Rishikesh as well as methodological

problems inherent in doing multi-local ethnography in the transnational community o f yoga

practice, focusing on urban India as well as Germany and the United States. The

globalization of yoga leads to an analysis o f the media's constitution o f yoga as a desirable

health practice. Returning finally to the question o f how yoga has come to resonate with

the needs and experiences o f people across many different cultural and national contexts, I

reflect on the methodological shifts necessitated by such a diffuse body o f data.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................................................................ iii
ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................................................................... vi
LIST OF FIGURES...........................................................................................................................................................................ix
GLOSSARY AND ORTHOGRAPHIC NOTE..............................................................................................................................x
CHAPTER ONE: RE-ORIENTING YOGA................................................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER TWO: LIVES AND HISTORIES IN THE PRODUCTION OF TRANSNATIONAL PRACTICE................68
CHAPTER THREE: SIVANANDA AND THE RISE OF THE DIVINE LIFE SOCIETY.................................................112
CHAPTER FOUR: DOING YOGA IN RISHIKESH.............................................................................................................. 158
CHAPTER FIVE: YOGA FOR A TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE................................................. 210
CHAPTER SIX: YOGA, HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT............................................. 256
CHAPTER SEVEN: YOGA RE-ORIENTED.......................................................................................................................... 295

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APPENDIX A ................................................................................................................................................................................ 306
BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................................................................307
INDEX............................................................................................................................................................................................340
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 LIST OF FIGURES

Number Page

FIGURE I : YOG A WITH "PROPS"........................................................................................................12

FIGURE 2: THE H E A D ST A N D ................................................................................................................12
FIGURE 3: M AP OF RISHIKESH REG IO N ........................................................................................7 1
FIGURE 4: RISHIKESH T O W N ..............................................................................................................73
FIGURE 5: Y O G A WEEK POSTER, RISHIKESH, 1991................................................................ 80
FIGURE 6: YO G A AS A D VENTURE TOURISM IN R ISH IK ESH ............................................ 81
FIGURE 7: 100 YEARS OF YO G A IN AM ERICA PO ST E R ........................................................ 86
FIGURE 8: SIV A N A N D A ’S ALL-INDIA TOUR M A P ................................................................... 128
FIGURE 9: POSTAGE STAM P OF S IV N A N D A ............................................................................... 138
FIGURE 10: POSTAGE STAM PS OF Y O G A S A N A S ......................................................................139
FIGURE 1 1: THE GANGES A T RISHIKESH...................................................................................... 172
FIGURE 12: SIV A N A N D A ’S O BELISK ...............................................................................................216
FIGURE 13: S Y V A YOGA VACATION A D V E R T ISE M E N T .................................................... 233

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FIGURE 14: YO G A A N D ECOLOGY C A R T O O N ...........................................................................235
FIGURE 15: EXECUTIVE Y O G A ......................................................................................................... 268
FIGURE 16: YO G A ZUM ESSEN ........................................................................................................... 273
FIGURE 17: THE NEW Y O G A ................................................................................................................276

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FIGURE 18: U R BA N RENEW AL Y O G A ............................................................................................ 278
FIGURE 19: LIVING FREE, AVOIDING ST R E SS...........................................................................280
FIGURE 20: YO G A FOR THE H E A R T L A N D ...................................................................................303
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 G L O SSA R Y AND O RTHOGRAPHIC NOTE

I have not used diacritic markings for transliteration o f Hindi and Sanskrit words
throughout the text, but have provided them in the glossary below, along with definitions o f
all significant words and phrases.

ABHYAS practice
AD V AIT A non-duality o f atm an and brahman
AHIiyiSA non-violence
ASANA posture, position
ASTANGA YOGA Patanjali's eight-fold path to realisation
ATMAN soul, self
BHADRALOK ‘decent people' of Calcutta
BHAKTI devotion, worship
BHAKTI YOGA realisation through worship

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BHUKTI pleasure
BRAHMACHARYA 1st stage of Hindu life cycle; also a life of
celibacy
BRAHMAN
DARSAN
DARSANA
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seeing and being seen by god or guru
philosophy, school o f thought
DHARANA concentration/ Patanjali's 6th stage
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DHYANA meditation/ Patanjali’s 7th stage
DHARMA biomoral duty
GUNA quality or constituent o f nature
GURU-SHISHYA teacher-student pair
GURUBHAI students o f the same guru
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HATHA YOGA realisation through physical discipline

JAPA repetitive prayer
JIVANMUKHTI living liberation
JNANA YOGA realisation through intellectual knowledge
KAIVALYA isolation, release
KAMA lust, desire
KARMA fate, work
KARMA YOGA realisation through work
K W D A L IN l divine, cosmic force/energy
MOKSHA release, absolute freedom
MlMAMSA one o f the six schools o f Hindu thought
MUKTI ’ see moksha
NIYAMA self-purification/ Patanjali’s 2nd stage
prA n a breath, vitality, energy
PRANAYAMA breathing techniques/ Patanjali’s 4th stage
PRATYAHARA retreat from the senses/ Patanjali's 5th stage

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 RAJA YOGA '‘kingly” yoga/ Patanjali’s 8-stage yoga
RAJAS mobility, activity/one o f the three gunas
SADHAK seeker, aspirant
SADHANA spiritual practice, quest
SAMADHI highest altered state o f consciousness
SAMSARA the endless cycle o f life
SAMKHYA one o f the six schools o f Hindu thought
SAMPRADAYA tradition, sect
SANNYAS 4th stage o f Hindu life cycle;renouncing of
samsara
SATTVA clarity, purity/one o f the three gunas
SATYA truth, truthfulness
SVASTHYA health
TAMAS darkness, dullness/one o f the three gunas
TAT TV AM ASI ‘that thou art’
VAIRAGYA absence of worldly desires

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VANAPRASTHA forest-dwelling 3rd life stage before sannyas
YAMA moral observance/ Patanjali's 1st stage
YUJ to yoke or join/root o f yoga
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 Chapter One

Re-Orienting Yoga

Bombay. India—March, 1992

The train pulled out o f the station. I was riding in the fam ed Rajdani Express, on

the way back from Bombay to Delhi. Across from me in the compartment, two middle-

aged, middle-class businessmen looked cpiite 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 and studying a

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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
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subject. Their primary sentiments were regret and amazement: regret that they knew so

little o f their heritage themselves, and what they knew derived solely from hearsay:
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amazement that I should travel so ja r from home, learn Hindi, and wear Indian clothing

out o f preference, all to study a subject they considered important to their own past, but not
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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 to be a place ofgreat

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 o f the Mahabharat and the Ramayan, the great epics o f

India, they mused, there had been many yogis across the land. Perhaps, one said, i f I went

south to Tamil Nad, where people were still in touch with the traditions, I could fin d some

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 there. The other commented that he had recently encountered a man lying, unscathed, on a

bed o f nails: "Was that yoga? "

Locating Yoga

Yoga. The word suggests a host o f meanings, from the essence o f the "mystical

East" to the noontime activities o f harried executives. The complex trail o f associations

differs according to whom one asks, o f course, but a number o f themes recur. This

dissertation asks how the set o f ideas and practices known as yoga has movedfrom its

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birthplace on the Indian subcontinent to become a globally recognized bodily idiom,

perpetuated by a translocal community o f practice. More specifically. I am concerned with

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how the values o f health and freedom are implicated in yoga’s popularity. Research for

this project took place over a thirty-one month period, from September 1991 to April 1994:
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most o f 1992 was spent in Rishikesh. India, and most o f the rest o f the time was spent

carrying out research in Europe and North America from a home base in Switzerland.

Yoga can be defined in many ways—as an attitude, a philosophic system, a set o f

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practices, a way of being in the world—but its definition is always historically situated. In

addressing the question posed above, I examine not only the shifts in how yoga itself has

been understood, but also the particular constellations o f peoples, values and practices

encountered by those who sought to disseminate such versions o f yoga in India, Germany

and the United States, in order to evaluate the special appeal yoga seems to have had for

these disparate groups. In the late 19th century, knowledge o f yoga began to circulate

among mass audiences in the United States, western Europe, and India as a physical,

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 mental and spiritual health commodity. From its initial presentation to the Western public

by Swami Vivekananda, yoga was understood to have an exchange value which was

predicated on perceived (and essentialized) scarcity o f resources: spiritual lack in the West,

material lack in India. Such a process became possible because o f certain changes in the

way people in these places related to the world around them. At one level, these changes

can be attributed to the evolution o f what has been called “modernity,” taken in its broadest

context as the post-Enlightenment shift in attitude toward notions o f freedom, progress, and

the rational quest for knowledge. Along with the history o f modernity we must consider the

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effects o f industrial capitalism, which encourages the commodification o f everything a

society values. Changes also resulted from the combined effect o f increasing literacy for
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the middle-class public and heightened dissatisfaction with the effects o f industrialization

on quality o f life, especially in urban areas. Together, these created a fertile climate for the
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transmission and reception of alternative systems of thought and practice, particularly in

relation to what Lears (1981) calls the therapeutic worldview, that way o f seeing the self as

a project for infinite development in the face o f an ever more complex Iifeworld (Habermas
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1989). In most specific terms, the appearance o f particular charismatic individuals well-

versed in both Western and Indian forms o f discourse, whether in person or through the

medium o f printing, allowed for a comfortable transfer o f knowledge which demanded

neither the total loss o f one lifestyle nor the total acceptance o f a new way o f being in the

world, but rather a compromise, sometimes happy and sometimes uneasy, between the two.

I am here concerned with the development o f "yoga" as both ideology and practice

over the century since Swami Vivekananda came from India to Chicago for the 1893

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 Columbian Exposition's Parliament o f the World's Religions. Vivekananda's presentation

o f yoga to the Western public, and his subsequent re-presentation o f yoga to his

countrymen in India four years later1 marks a turning point in the way this ancient system

o f ideas and practices has been understood. Poised between worlds, Vivekananda drew on

both his experiences as a privileged child of the Calcutta bhadralok (“respectable people"),

a well-educated son o f a judge, and his commitment to Sri Ramakrishna, devotee o f the

Goddess and Hindu exemplar-saint for the alienated middle-class youth of Calcutta (Sarkar

1992). Since Vivekananda's time, the term yoga has taken on a life o f its own, coming to

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signify everything from the "Wonder that was India" (Basham 1954) to a method for

universal salvation. While I do discuss the range o f meanings attributed to yoga over this
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century, the starting point for my ethnographic research centers on yoga as bodily practice.

Rather than trying to represent every version o f yoga practice now existing, an impossible
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task, I instead focus on the sampradava. or ideological community, deriving from the

teachings o f Swami Sivananda o f Rishikesh. Bom in 1887, Sivananda left his body2 in
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1963, but his writings and disciples continue to transmit the version o f yoga practice he

promoted. Sivananda used Vivekananda’s division o f the yoga tradition into four major

orientations—Raja. Bhakti. Jnana. Karma—as the basis for most o f his own writings about

yoga, and Vivekananda’s organizations, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and the

Vedanta Societies in the West, as models for his own Divine Life Society. The orientation

with which this dissertation is most concerned is known as Raia Yoga, the “kingly” yoga,

which comprises both moral and physical practices. Raia yoga is also known as “classical”

yoga, the yoga o f Patanjali, about which more later.

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 Both proponents o f yoga in the global context, Swamis Vivekananda and

Sivananda were well aware o f contemporary Western scholarship as well as traditional

Hindu thought (Raychaudhuri 1988: 229; Divine Life Society 1985a), but they were also

inescapably immersed in the colonial context o f the nationalist struggle in India. The

particular combination o f ideas used initially by Vivekananda in his presentation o f yoga

reflects an eclectic mix o f various traditional Hindu texts ranging from the Bhagavad Gita

to Tantrism and Buddhism, from Advaita Vedanta to the more dualist classical yoga o f

Patanjali, as well as Western ideas about rationality, charity, equality, and individualism.

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The metaphor o f oneness, deriving from Vivekananda's primary reliance on Advaita

Vedanta, permitted a reading o f yoga in both India and the West which was most easily
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allied with the kind of non-dualistic "counter-discourse...within the general outlines o f

Enlightened scientific thought” (Reill 1994:347). This counter-discourse can be seen in

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both Spinoza's response to Descartes's dualistic separation o f spirit and substance, which.

according to Spinoza, was logically insupportable", as well as in the work of the von

Humboldt brothers—Wilhelm, the linguist and Indologist, and Alexander, the ecologist.
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Reill argues that this counter-discourse sought to avoid the reductionist dualism o f both the

mechanists and the animists by proposing a “vitalist” paradigm which

defined matter as a complex conjunction o f related parts.

There was no such thing as an isolated entity or a simple
substance. Rather, everything was related to everything else,
everything was joined. zusammengesetzt...This conception
o f matter dissolved the strict mechanistic distinction between
observer and observed, since both were related within a
much larger conjunction...The world consisted o f a circle of
relations, which looked at from the human vantage-point
radiated out to touch in varying degrees all forms o f matter
(1994:350).

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 Such an alternative perspective has been instrumental in the development o f ecological

thinking over the past few centuries (Bramwell 1989; Naess 1989; see also Grove 1992 and

Halbfass 1988 on the parallels between the biological and humanistic paradigms,

particularly as supported by the work o f the von Humboldt brothers), and for this reason,

the conflation o f yoga ideology and practice with environmentally-conscious thought and

action has been easy to achieve. Vivekananda himself also linked the advaita notion of

oneness with evolutionary theories, presumably o f Haeckel and Darwin (not named here,

but certainly the most popularly known scholars associated with these ideas at that time;

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see Bramwell 1989; Kelly 1981; Weindling 1989), pointing out the similarity between

these concepts to the people of Lahore:

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You have heard o f the doctrine of physical evolution
preached in the Western world by the German and the
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English savants. It tells us that the bodies o f the different
animals are really one; the differences that we see are but
different expressions of the same series; that from the lowest
worm to the highest and most saintly man it is but one—the
one changing into the other, and so on, going up and up,
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higher and higher, until it attains perfection. We had that

idea also. Declares our yogi Patanjali:...One species—the Jati
is species—changes into another species—evolution;
Parinama means one thing changing into another, just as one
species changes into another...

Vivekananda continues,

The European says, it is competition, natural and sexual

selection etc. that forces one body to take the form o f
another. But here is another idea, a still better
analysis,...[Patanjali says] ‘By the infilling o f nature.’ What
is meant by this infilling o f nature? We admit that the
amoeba goes higher and higher until it becomes a Buddha;
we admit that, but we are at the same time as much certain

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 that you cannot get an amount o f work out o f a machine until
you have put it in in some shape or another. The sum total
o f energy remains the same, whatever the forms it may take.
If you want a mass o f energy at one end, you have got to put
it in at the other end...Therefore if a Buddha is the one end o f
the change, the very amoeba must have been the Buddha
also. (Vivekananda 1990a: 354-55)

Not only does Vivekananda create a link between the Advaita tradition4 and Western

evolutionary thought, but he also manages to introduce another key tenet o f Enlightenment

scientific rationality, the law o f the conservation o f matter. Such juxtapositions are

common to both Sivananda and Vivekananda’s writings (but see also Dasgupta

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1989[1920j), as I will discuss further in chapters two and three.

In addition to having specific theoretical agendas relating to universal spirituality.

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Vivekananda and, to an even greater extent Sivananda, focused attention on the notion o f
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"practice" (abhvas in Hindi). Practice is indeed central to understanding the role yoga has

come to play in the lives o f its advocates; it entails both the bodily enactment o f yoga

ideology as well as the specific physical postures and methods for breathing described in
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the many texts3. The first question I was asked by nearly everyone, male or female, Indian

or non, practitioner or not, was "What is your practice?"6. For yoga practitioners, the

benefits gained through yoga practice can only be fully understood by someone who shares

those practices; although there are a plethora o f classical texts on the philosophy o f yoga,

and countless popular "how-to" guides for all levels o f aspiring yogis, yoga remains a form

o f embodied knowledge, which no amount o f reading or telling can impart7. Indeed, I

argue that yoga provides a "technique du corps" (Mauss 1973 [1936]) for coping with the

stresses o f everyday life under the terms o f late modernity.

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 As a way o f approaching the world, modernity directs our attention to certain key

values, among them freedom and health. The pursuit o f these values occurs, especially in

what have been termed “late” or “reflexive” modernities, between two poles: the seemingly

opposed trends toward individualization and globalization (Giddens, Beck and Lash 1994).

Such a vision o f modernity acquires its shape through both the reflexive project o f the

individual self and the increasing tendency toward globalization, or seeing the entire planet

as a single unit, without implying complete homogenization o f either ideological or

material forms within that entity. Over the course o f the last century, that is. during the

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transition from early to late modernity, concern with personal health and freedom shifts

direction, from serving the interests o f the nation to fulfilling the more universal or global
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agenda which develops in the aftermath o f World War II. But for an ordinary person-in-

the-world (as opposed to the idealized “rational actor” described by many economic
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models; see Daly and Cobb 1994), health and freedom must always be understood in terms

o f culture and community, that is, in light o f their ideational, experiential and social

contexts. Classical social theory (Marx, Weber. Tonnies, Durkheim et al.) described the
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distinction between traditional and modem societies, and analyzed the social, economic,

and political structures which constituted them. But this stark opposition fails to explain

much of what we encounter in the contemporary world, where “modernization” projects

have been seen to both succeed and fail beyond the expectations o f their architects (Justice

1984; Wamier 1995), leaving in their wake entirely different modernities for which the

dichotomy o f the modem and the traditional has outlived its utility. Instead o f examining

yoga from the perspective o f a “traditional” set o f ideas and practices being adopted by

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 “modem” societies, I choose to view the situation as one o f alternative modernities sharing

different visions of health and freedom with each other, with the actual results in each case

dependent upon the particular constellation of participants and histories for a given locale

over a specific period o f time. Yoga is both a way o f being in the world and a system of

practices. Reproduced by individual actors, yoga has also been perpetuated by means of

written and photographic records. Yoga provides one very good method for achieving the

goal of self-development in a global world. Through yoga, the individual attempts to take

charge of both his/her own body and consciousness, simultaneously focusing the mind and

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flexing the body.

As I begin to explore the historical and theoretical importance o f the these ideas
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and practices, I use a series o f vignettes to convey a sense o f how different people

experience and understand yoga, whether as part o f this translocal community of practice,
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or as outside observers. These 'snapshots' will give the reader some sense o f the

interconnections between individuals in India, Germany, and the United States that I found

during the course of researching yoga practice among the followers and associates o f
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Swami Sivananda in (and out of) Rishikesh, India. In this first chapter, I discuss some of

the basic theoretical issues which make yoga a particularly cogent topic for anthropological

analysis in the 1990’s, as well as the methodological shifts required to capture the ever-

changing aspects o f the transnational production o f yoga. This project addresses theoretical

questions important to the anthropologies o f the body, South Asia, and modernity. The

remainder o f the dissertation traces a path out from Rishikesh, through Germany and

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 America, and back to Rishikesh to explain how the practice o f yoga, though clearly o f

Indian origin, has come to embody certain values shared by people around the world.

Rishikesh, India—April, 1992

It's 4:30 a.m. and my alarm has ju st sounded. In the small dark room, I begin to

hear others moving about the ashram courtyard. I reach fo r my clothes and begin to dress.

Time enough fo r a cup o f tea and a quick wash before walking down the road to the Yoga

Study Center on the banks o f the Ganges. Sixteen o f us converge on the large cement

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structure at 5:15 a.m.— a dozen non-Indian students, mostly women; a couple o f Indian

students, both men; the instructor and his assistant, again Indian men. Some are sitting in
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silent meditation, while others begin to stretch and twist, warming up their bodies in the

cool ofdawn, while staring into the mist rising up o ff the Ganges, the glint o f the river
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barely visible beyond the wire mesh windows. At 5:30, the instructor begins to chant; he

invokes the aid o f the god Siva, exemplar ofyogic practice, as we prepare to spend 2-1/2

hours in vigorous pursuit o f the perfect pose. As the instructor barks out the names o f
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asanas (poses), follow ed by detailed explanations, I am called upon to translate fo r the

numerous German students in the class. Although most o f them speak English fa irly well,

the heavily accented, staccato Indian English o f the instructor is too difficult fo r some to

comprehend, and so I try to help.

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