Yoga in Modern India
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 On the book's cover, a yogi sits in meditation | |
| Author | Joseph Alter |
|---|---|
| Subject | History of modern yoga |
| Publisher | Princeton University Press |
Publication date | 2004 |
| Pages | 326 |
Yoga in Modern India is a 2004 book by the anthropologist Joseph Alter about the history and practice of yoga in the 20th century. It was one of the first scholarly studies of modern yoga. The book won the 2006 Association for Asian Studies' Coomaraswamy Book Prize.
Synopsis
In Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy, the anthropologist Joseph Alter examines three main themes in the history and practice of yoga in the 20th century: Swami Kuvalayananda's medicalisation of yoga;[2] naturopathic yoga;[3] and the influence of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) on the development of yoga as exercise.[4]
The book begins by setting yoga in its historical context, at once one of Hinduism's six schools of philosophy and a modern fitness activity. Alter discusses the way haṭha yoga in particular has been called a science in India, requiring it to be distanced from religion. This was accomplished by Kuvalayananda's investigations of medical effects of haṭha yoga, paving the way for yoga to be seen in the West as a form of exercise. Yoga was then, Alter argues, fitted into the western idea of a nature cure; Gandhi's ashrams offered this as a way of life. Meanwhile, the RSS fused the ideas of nationalism, Hindu culture, and what Vivekananda had called "man making", using yoga for fitness. In keeping with this, Dr. S.V. Karandikar and Dr. Kumar Pal ran centres teaching yoga as a therapy. Alter notes the practice of amarolī, the drinking of one's own urine, mentioned in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and advocated in 1918 by J.W. Armstrong and later R.M. Patel as a nature cure. This was vaguely linked to ayurveda, Indian alternative medicine. The book ends by arguing that yoga's view that thinking goes with misperception has been moved from a philosophical context to social history. Alter concludes by mentioning Dr. K.N. Udapa's experimental rats doing headstands, which Alter calls ridiculous, but also "the shadow form of the sage lost in the Himalayas".[5]
Publication
The book was published as a paperback by Princeton University Press in 2004, both in the UK and in the USA. It is illustrated with 10 monochrome figures, including photographs and drawings, in the text.[6]
