The Turbaned Superman 47
as targets of racism and ethnic exclusion could be transformed into a form of
cultural capital.
A. K. Mozumdar arrived in Seattle from Calcutta in 1903 and set out to teach
what was arguably the first form of “Christian Yoga” on the market. Mozumdar
maintained a small following in Spokane for about sixteen years, lecturing to
the community and working closely with the local branch of the Theosophical
Society, New Thought group, and Unity Church, as well as publishing a regu-
lar periodical entitled Christian Yoga Monthly. After 1919, he relocated to Los
Angeles, from where he launched himself onto a broader lecture circuit along the
west coast and across the Midwest.^76
Mozumdar was also the first individual of South Asian descent to be granted
American citizenship in 1913, though it was later quite tragically revoked after
the landmark case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind (261 U.S. 204), in 1923,
which subsequently barred South Asians from citizenship until the passage of the
Luce– Celler Act in 1946. However, though Thind would come to be remembered
for this case, in which he valiantly tried and failed to contest the arbitrary nature
of racial categorization, he also left a legacy as a spiritual author and teacher.
Thind was a Punjabi Sikh who came to the United States in 1913 to pursue higher
education, and he did indeed ultimately earn his doctorate from the University
of California at Berkeley. He was deeply influenced by the Transcendentalists—
especially Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau— and wove their universalist spiritu-
ality together with Sikhism in his own teachings.
While some like Mozumdar and Thind focused their teachings on devotional
and philosophical themes, others, such as Yogi Rishi Singh Gherwal, Yogi Wassan
Singh, Yogi Hari Rama, and then- Swami Yogananda taught a more physically-
oriented practice. As will be further discussed in chapter 4, though Gherwal
was the only one to prescribe exercises that would today be recognizable as pos-
tural yoga, Yogananda, Hari Rama, and Yogi Wassan incorporated other forms
of calisthenics with distinctively yogic goals. Such Yogis often struggled to meet
the needs of audiences who were interchangeably looking for familiar images
of ascetics, magicians, mystics, and sometimes all three at once. They followed
a well- established lecture circuit, participated in vaudeville productions,^77 and
published a number of philosophical and instructive volumes on yoga. Such pub-
lications varied vastly in both quality and originality.
For instance, Yogi Wassan’s 1927 magnum opus, Secrets of the Himalaya
Mountain Masters and Ladder to Cosmic Consciousness, features a vaguely haṭha
yogic model, relying upon a system of plexuses opened along the principal
energetic channels, which constitute “The Secret Key of Opana Yama” or “the
System used by Householders to develop without excessive practice.” A combi-
nation of diet, basic calisthenics, and specialized exercises promises to produce