The Turbaned Superman 29
Yogis, such as Vivekananda and his successors, that American audiences began
to recognize the flavor of meditative mystics that had historically been associ-
ated with a much less socially visible kind of practice. Nevertheless, most human
Yogis who achieved any kind of success in attracting American audiences would
ultimately come to embody all three faces, at least to some extent and at times in
spite of themselves.
Yogi AsceticsGratuitous descriptions of the Yogi’s various ascetic acts, such as seen in
Bernier’s account, are a generally uniform feature of the travel account genre
where India is concerned. Such accounts translate with great consistency— no
doubt in large part because the sources routinely plagiarize their predecessors
rather than gathering any additional ethnographic data— into late nineteenth-
and early twentieth- century European and American texts, both scholarly and
popular.
Of course, textual sources were not the sole source of such Western impres-
sions. Photographs of Indian ascetics were wildly popular during the colonial era.
As with the verbal accounts, they were clearly crafted to invoke a kind of morbid
fascination— a voyeuristic indulgence not unlike the allure of the freak show—
that focused on the ascetic Yogi’s various mortifications. Earlier travel accounts
and colonial news media often included sketches, but with the popularization
of photography in the mid- nineteenth century Yogis came to life for Western
audiences in an entirely new way. Commercial photographic studios began to
churn out volumes of photographs of foreign lands and peoples for the exoticism-
hungry eyes of British consumers.
With the introduction of the carte- de- visite format (a small photo print
roughly the size of a modern business card) in 1854, collectible images of Yogi
portraits became particularly popular.^22 Individuals, who may or may not have
been actual ascetics, would appear posed against increasingly elaborate (but
almost always artificial) backdrops with a wide variety of props. By the twenti-
eth century, the ascetic Yogi reclining on his bed of nails would become a uni-
versally recognizable image across Western books, newsprint, photographs, and
postcards.^23 A 1913 National Geographic article entitled, “Religious Penances and
Punishments Self- Inflicted by Hindu Holy Men” featured a particularly extensive
photographic representation of the various austerities undertaken by such figures
(see fig. 1.1).
This anthropological exposé arrived on the heels of Oman’s pseudo-
ethnographic account of India’s ascetics in 1903. In addition to its extensive
description of the identities and activities of India’s many ascetic groups, along