Introduction 3
science of becoming mentally serene, and, being an avowed celibate, never
keeps a harem.The piece profiled three local Swamis— Yogananda, Dhirananda, and
Paramananda— and though the author employs the term “Swami,” largely due to
the fact that all three of the figures in question do belong to a monastic order
and therefore make use of the title themselves, his clarification of popular opin-
ion could have just as easily applied to the term “Yogi.” Indeed, just three years
prior, Yogananda published a similar passage in his East- West magazine under
the title “Who is a Yogi?” wherein he likewise specified that a “Yogi” is “not a
sword- swallower, crystal gazer or snake charmer, but one who knows the scientific
psycho- physical technique of uniting the matter- bound body and soul with their
source of origin, the Blessed Spirit.”^1 Of course a careful reader might quickly
notice that both of the above sets of statements deal not so much with what a Yogi
is, but what a Yogi does, or does not do, as the case may be.
In the ensuing pages, I submit that what a Yogi does— or rather, the popu-
lar cultural understanding of what he does— relies on several key narrative ele-
ments or tropes. Even further, these narrative elements and tropes are in many
ways the key to understanding the development of transnational postural yoga
practice during the twentieth century. Specifically, we will examine the figure
of the Yogi as he appears to us in the imagination of early twentieth- century
America and Europe, the period that gave birth to yoga’s modern- day popular-
ity in the West. This will mean focusing both on the stories that people tell
about Yogis and the dialectically related story that the Yogi tells about him-
self. To give grounding to what would otherwise be a very vague and scat-
tered account, I adopt Paramahansa^2 Yogananda as a case study representative
of a crucial moment in the ideological encounter between Indian and Euro-
American thought and culture. The persona of the early transnational Yogi,
of which Yogananda is a particular instantiation, stands at the intersection of
complementary and internally conflicting narratives that draw on traditional
Indian thought but simultaneously show marks of colonial and Western ele-
ments stemming from Romantic Orientalism, post- Enlightenment dialogue
with popular science, and no small amount of xenophobia. By the middle of
the twentieth century, these various currents would coalesce into a vision of
the Yogi— and of his practice— that blended the mystical with the scientific,
the particular with the universal, the body with spirit, and the human with the
superhuman. And he would do much of this through what would otherwise
look like good thoughts and exercise.
Chapters 1 and 2 are to a large extent parallel histories— one of agents and
the other of ideas— that bring us up to speed in understanding the context in