Introduction 5
This is with good reason, since the origins and nature of yoga are hotly
contested commodities. As I am writing this sentence, daily practice of sūrya
namaskār— a popular sequence belonging to modern postural yoga also known
as the sun salutation— has just been made compulsory in almost 50,000 schools,
government and private, across the Indian state of Rajasthan. On the other side
of the earth, the Hindu American Foundation is still nominally promoting its
“Take Back Yoga” campaign, which made national news in 2010. Postural yoga,
due to its rising cultural (what to say of economic) capital, has been adopted as
a fundamental aspect of Hindu religious identity and touted as India’s universal
gift to the world.^4
This transformation, however, would not have been possible without the very
actors whose cultural specificity is now slowly disappearing into the universalist
deluge that they themselves created. Alter, De Michelis, and Singleton all address
Yogis insomuch as it is patently impossible to speak of the development of a prac-
tice in isolation from the individuals who developed it. However, they do so pri-
marily in relation to activities that can on some level be recognized— or, more
accurately, have come to be recognized through the processes detailed in these
studies— as yoga. Yet, as we have seen from the Los Angeles Times editorial cited
earlier, there are quite a few things that the popular imagination has conceived as
being within the purview of a Yogi that have ostensibly nothing to do with yoga
as such. The present study will consider these habits and practices of the Yogi and
the ways in which they have shaped his image and representation in American
culture.
This disjunction between the person of the Yogi and the practice of yoga is
not an entirely modern phenomenon. David Gordon White circumvents (or
rather subverts) this issue by referring to “descriptive ‘yogi practice’ ” rather than
“prescriptive ‘yoga practice.’ ”^5 For White, “yogi practice” in its quintessential
form entails yoking oneself to— taking over, entering into, even merging with—
another, whether the other is an individual or the entire cosmos. Working from a
theoretical perspective, White arrives at what is arguably the most complete pos-
sible definition of pre- modern yoga by isolating its core phenomenon:
the yoga of yoking and the yoga of clear and luminous vision coalesced,
from the time of the Vedas onward, into a unified body of practice in
which yoga involved yoking oneself to other beings from a distance— by
means of one’s enhanced power of vision— either in order to control them
or in order to merge one’s consciousness with theirs. When those other
beings were divine, even the absolute itself, this sort of yoking was cast as
a journey of the mind across space, to the highest reaches of transcendent
being.^6