The Turbaned Superman 21
disagreements into an ever more complex mosaic. Thus, what a Yogi is depends
largely on whom you ask.
For example, John Campbell Oman, Professor of Natural Sciences at
Government College in Lahore and author of several pseudo- ethnographic
works on Indian society and culture, observed in 1903:
Yo g i properly means one who practices yoga with the object of uniting
or blending his soul with the Divine Spirit or World- Soul... . Very curi-
ously, however, the practice of yoga is not undertaken by all Yogis, nor is
it confined to the professed Yo g i. The efficacy of the system is an article
of faith so universally accepted throughout India, that other sectarians,
including laymen, even married men and householders, resort to it when
so inclined.^1In Oman’s statement, we begin to see the emergence of a universalized yoga as
a meditative and ultimately salvific process that is simultaneously open to every
human being and not directly associated with its etymologically affiliated agent,
the Yogi himself. The fact that Campbell is able to claim that not all Yogis practice
yoga signals a widening gulf between the Yogi’s eclectic identity and the increas-
ingly metaphysical nature of the practice of yoga. Oman is ultimately ambiguous
about the association between yoga and his identification of the Yogi, whom he
views as an ascetic belonging to a specific suborder of Śaivism. He was writing at
a time when the philosophical system of the Yoga Sūtras, lifted up by Orientalists
as exemplary of yoga in its pure forms and codified as a universalistic “Raja Yoga”
by Vivekananda, was quickly gaining in prominence.^2 It is worth noting, how-
ever, that even the Yoga Sūtras— that bastion of classical meditative philosophy—
devotes the entire length of one of its four chapters to superpowers.
The clean cerebral universalism of yoga thus stands in direct opposition to
the chaotic narratives of Yogis and their ilk, often dirty, contorted, deceitful,
and occasionally armed to the teeth. Pinch, in examining premodern European
accounts of Yogis, observes:
Sixteenth and seventeenth- century authors tended to speak of yogis (or
jogi, ioghee) when describing these kinds of men, sometimes in a disparag-
ing manner. The eighteenth century saw the increased use of terms san-
yasi (sannyasi, sunnasee) and fakir (faquir, fukeer), particularly by British
officials in Bengal. To the west, toward Allahabad, Lucknow, and Delhi,
the term gosain (gossye, gusain, gusaiyan) prevailed. Further west still,
towards Jaipur in particular, the terms bairagi (byragee, vairagi) gained
prominence).^3