Epilogue
I’m beyond Superman. ... Because I have balls like atom
bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks
with me.
— Bikram ChoudhuryIt might be said that Yogananda’s death in 1952 marked the end of the first
wave of Indian- American Yogis. He arrived on Western shores in 1920 when
Americans were only beginning to recognize Yogis as anything more than cari-
catures in Oriental narratives. In some ways, the persona that Yogananda found
himself performing for his American audiences was profoundly consistent with
the persona of the Yogi as it had developed through millennia of Indian history.
The Yogi was still the man with superpowers. However, these superpowers were
increasingly articulated in ways that left behind ancient esoteric roots in favor of
a modern discourse of scientific rationalism. By the time that Yogananda took
up the title in America, the Theosophists and other Yogis like Vivekananda had
established a model of the Yogi as a universal ideal of superhumanity and the
exemplar of a natural process of human spiritual evolution.
Thus, not all Yogis of the time were Indian. However, Yogis who happened
to be Indian were far more vulnerable than their Western counterparts to the
negative racial stereotyping and exoticized expectations that the title evoked.
Yogananda, who had himself been fascinated since childhood by yogic super-
powers, took to performing these superpowers in vaudeville productions that
must have at times felt only tangentially related to his loftier spiritual aspirations.
He was exoticized, feminized, villainized, and apotheosized by his audiences,
detractors, and devotees. In the meantime, he managed to create a system of
psycho- spiritual development that syncretized with impressive innovation tra-
ditional yogic and emerging Western metaphysical techniques and worldviews.
Ultimately, Yogananda’s Autobiography is perhaps the best testament to the
deeply ambivalent nature of his identity and life’s work. It conceals as much as it
reveals. And yet, in concealing, it reveals still more. Yogananda’s conception of
the Yogi, problematized as it already was by traditional Indian folk conceptions