22 Biography of a YogiThis assortment of terminologies is clearly regionally inflected and undoubtedly
reflects what was probably an extremely complicated social structure of various
sects with at times conflicting interests. In popular representations, the descrip-
tions and images of these groups largely melded together, with Yogi and Fakir
(often pronounced as “faker”) emerging as the most commonly used terms in
nineteenth- century and early twentieth- century America. The twentieth century
would see both of these terms nearly eclipsed by “Swami” due to the strong public
presence of Vedanta Society monks (taking up the organizational mantle estab-
lished by Vivekananda) and other figures like Yogananda who used the title.
However, even when Americans gained access to Yogis in the flesh, foreign
sights did not fail to capture the imagination. When Robert Ripley, founder of
the famous “Believe it or Not!” franchise, visited India to collect oddities for the
1933– 1934 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, he was expressly interested
in “ascetics and fakirs, men who hold up their arms, sit on beds of nails, gaze at the
sun, hang upside down, etc.”^4 In turn, American Yogis, especially those who could
not easily erase their exoticism due to being non- Western in origin, often capital-
ized on the perceived strangeness with which their personas were associated even
as they overwhelmingly pushed a Westernized universalistic spirituality.
Premodern Yogis
Questions of identity are complicated by the fact that the Yogis whom self-
proclaimed members of the tribe, like Yogananda, idealize are entirely different
from the Yogis whom they describe anecdotally and after whom they model their
behavior. For Yogananda, as for Vivekananda and indeed for most neo- Hindu
and modern metaphysical proponents of yoga, the prototypical Yogi is the Vedic
ṛṣi (often Anglicized in modern sources as “Rishi”) or seer.
From a purely typological perspective, the ṛṣi may certainly be identified with
the general category of the Yogi. Ṛṣis feature prominently in the Ṛg Veda, an
ancient text tied to India’s Brāhmaṇical ritual tradition, where they are portrayed
as divine or semi- divine beings who are “friends and companions to the gods, con-
versing with them about truths and assisting them in their creation and mainte-
nance of the cosmic order.”^5 The ṛṣis are not only able to cognize the basic material
and origins of the cosmos but are in fact complicit in the act of creation and the
revelation of cosmic truths. This role, which is characterized by the most funda-
mental model of superpower insofar as it intimately associates its agent with the
workings of the cosmos, is maintained throughout later epic and Purāṇic sources.
There is a measure of historical— rather than simply thematic— accuracy to
the association of the ṛṣi and the Yogi, insofar as Vedic discourse, authored by