Epilogue 189
The Yogi mystic of the prewar era became increasingly abstracted in his popu-
lar instantiations. Universalization is a powerful tool of propagation, but it also
dilutes and erases.^24 In this case, the universalizing impulse had succeeded: the
Yogi had become the superhuman Everyman, but in doing so he was recognizable
as a Yogi only to those who knew to look for his mark in iconographic hints and
origin stories.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 changed all that. With the
lifting of immigration quotas, a new wave of teachers was able to enter the United
States, and American interest in yoga slowly began to reawaken. According to
Bender:
Yoga students and teachers alike heralded the arrival of Asian religious
teachers as authentic and knowledgeable practitioners from the 1970’s
on as avatars of true yoga, thus displacing earlier forms and expressions as
less than authentic and glossing over the longer histories of exchange that
shape yoga in both India and the United States.^25This assertion is insightful, if a little overstated. As Bender herself notes, modern
yoga practitioners, like most metaphysically inclined seekers, generally express no
significant inclination toward historical inquiry. Even the more committed view
their practice as the instantiation of a perennial wisdom, and thus questions of its
synthesis during the early twentieth century hardly ignite the imagination. And
yet the linkages are there, and today’s communities of spandex- clad Yogis would
hardly exist without the historical scaffolding that secured the yoga’s place on the
American landscape of therapeutic spirituality.
As Yogananda was propagating his updated form of haṭha yogic practice
geared at a metaphysical body beautiful, a parallel synthesis was likewise well
under way on the other side of the globe. Yogananda encountered one of the chief
denizens of the Second Wave Yogis during his single return to India in 1936. There,
while touring the south of the Indian subcontinent, he visited Krishnamacarya’s
Mysore Palace school and witnessed the postural acrobatics of one very young B.
K. S. Iyengar, whom he promptly invited back to the United States.^26 One won-
ders what would have happened if Iyengar had agreed. What if Iyengar had been
trained in Yogananda’s lineage of haṭha yoga rather than Krishnamacarya’s? What
if he had come to the West a full quarter of a century earlier? Would Bikram
Choudhury exist? Would his glimmering gangster suits, tiny Speedos, and novel
form of postural practice still have captivated America? One suspects so. After all,
as I have sought to demonstrate with respect to both Choudhury and Yogananda,
a man who has determined himself to be a Yogi will seek to prevail despite all
obstacles.