On Yoga in Modern Times
Hello, Folks!
I hope you are all having a great summer.
Last week I commented on an Instagram post about ideas on “modern yoga” that have been put forward by yoga academics over the past ten to fifteen years. In particular, I was commenting on the work of Mark
Singleton, who wrote a book called Yoga Body that was published in 2010. Though Singleton claims his book was misunderstood, his thesis was unclear, and the prevailing takeaway from his book for many people was that yoga as we know it today is a combination of Western bodybuilding, Swedish and other gymnastics, and British military exercises.
From the back of his book:
Singleton's surprising--and surely controversial--thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and
early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition.
From the BBC:
Dr Mark Singleton, a senior researcher in the modern history of yoga at SOAS, says Swedish and Danish gymnastic drills were particularly influential on Indian yoga practices.
From the New Yorker:
The system that Krishnamacharya created there drew on hatha yoga, as well as traditional Indian wrestling and gymnastics, British Army calisthenics and, according to the scholar Mark Singleton, the Danish educator Niels Bukh’s “primitive
gymnastics.” ... In his 2010 book, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Singleton concludes that Krishnamacharya’s
method was “a synthesis of several extant methods of physical training that (prior to this period) would have fallen well outside any definition of yoga.”
A PhD candidate from Oxford, Seth Powell, responded to my post and brought up the point that different yogis have suggested different meanings for the word yoga, and it is difficult to come to a pointed
conclusion about what yoga is. I don’t think it is quite so difficult to find an underlying theme to yoga, but more pointedly, my comment was one that was more research oriented, and the problem that I wanted to discuss was the inclusion of Krishnamacharya within the purview of “modern yoga.” While perhaps we can put Core Power Yoga and Goat Yoga into those categories, Krishnamacharya doesn’t belong there for many reasons, and I am sharing my comments with you below so you can read two of them.
I’d like to preface the post with a quote from Krishnamacharya’s 1934 book, Yoga Makaranda:
We have been heavily paying, by falling prey to the advertisement of foreigners who have stolen much of the knowledge which was indigenous to us, and now claiming that it is their own
discovery. Perhaps in future they may also sell back to us the Yoga Vidya. The reason for all this is that most of us have neither studied nor brought into practice the texts of Yoga. If we are to keep quiet hereafter, foreigners will become our Yoga Vidya gurus. It is a tragedy that we are throwing away our golden vessel and drinking out of a foul-smelling leather container brought from abroad. We hope that such a bad fortune will not fall on our future
generations.
Sri Krishnamacharya, Yoga Makaranda, p.51
For all those who hold the position or warn of cultural appropriation when they see Westerners saying namaste or selling yoga products, you can be consoled: Krishnamacharya
was calling it first!
Here is the original version of my post, which was too long for the comments section of Instagram:
Hi Seth, I just want to give a quick response to some of the specific reasons for finding Mark Singleton’s inclusion of Krishnamacharya in the time frame of “modern yoga” problematic. I am fully aware that
he says his thesis of Yoga Body has been misunderstood. That may be so, but there are many people reading his words and having the same “wrong” take away, and amplifying that message. Philip Deslippe does exactly that in Yoga Studies 102 [Seth's online yoga course] when he says “What is understood as
yoga today is not necessarily ancient, nor Indian, nor traditional, but has recent origins and is combinative and transnational…” and further that “What we understand as yoga is a product that is about 100 years old combining asanas with Swedish Gymnastics and body building.” I have a file of quotes pulled from a wide variety of online and textual sources where someone says that yoga as we know it today is really a combination of Swedish Gymnastics and British military exercises. Even if this is
not what Mark Singleton meant, he was unclear enough for it to be what people have heard. This is a factual outcome of his book and cannot be denied. We can discuss more that has come out from that at another time. While this may be a possibility for some Yogis, such as Dhirendra Brahmachari and Swami Kuvalyananda, I will share two reasons below why I think it is inaccurate in regards to Krishnamcharya.
The first is his comparison of Neils Bukh’s book Primitive Gymnastics to Krishnamacharya by saying there are many positions in the Primitive
Gymnastics books that are identical to what Krishnamacharya was teaching, by virtue of the book showing standing asanas where no other yoga text speaks about them. I have PDF’s of Primitive Gymnastics vol 1 and 2. Volume 1 has 63 plates. Of these, there are 214 different gymnastic positions shown; of those, 30 positions include two people, with one person applying pressure or support to their partner. The last 11 plates are excluded because they are
group photos either on gymnastic equipment or in a group demonstration. Volume 2 shows 60 plates, with 76 different bodily positions. There are only two positions that require a partner, and the last 12 plates that show group demonstrations have been excluded so as to not double count. The total variety of unique positions in these two books totals 290. Of these, 15 are similar to poses we find in Krishnamacharya’s practices, for a total of 2.75% of similar bodily positions, which is
statistically insignificant in comparison to the range of bodily positions that are demonstrated. At the time I made the list I only included the first four sequences of Ashtanga Yoga; the postures from Light on Yoga; Yoga Rahasya, and then the overlapping postures from
Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika,
Yoga Yajnavalkya, Sivananda Yoga and Bikram Yoga. Had I included the asanas listed in Vyaasa’s commentary on 2.46 and the 112 asanas from
Hathabhyasa Paddati the percentage of similar positions would have dropped even further, closer to 1.5%. This is far from correlative. I sent this list to Jason Birch in 2014 and he replied that because he had seen a pictures of 20th century gymnasts holding their bodies in positions that looked “similar” to ardha chandrasana and trikonasana, that “It’s likely they derived from systems of Western physical culture.” This is a wild
assumption to make, and not at all an acceptable answer on a research level. Jason and Mark are suggesting that even though the Hindu Yogis somehow came up with hundreds if not thousands of asanas over several centuries, for some reason the idea to do standing asanas evaded them. From a practical perspective, there are only so many things that you can do with your body, and there are bound to be crossovers from culture to culture, and time period to time period. There are simultaneous arisings
of knowledge and ideas on either side of the globe that have spontaneously come to different people at the same time: the invention of physics, the light bulb, the theory of evolution - the list goes on. Anyone who has experimented with movement will find a variety of ways they can hold their bodies. I was standing on my head and doing other movements that you could identify as “postures” when I was five - many kids do. Nobody told us to do them. They are spontaneous expressions of movement. If
I were to challenge these assumptions that the SOAS yoga scholars are making with another assumption, I would say that there is no reason to presume that a yogi and a gymnast cannot discover the same bodily positions at any given point in time. What they do with those positions is determined by their intent. Lack of textual proof of an asana does not equal proof of non-existence. It means you haven’t found it yet.
The second issue to share here is the accuracy of the influence that KV Iyer had on Krishnamacharya is also problematic. Singleton and Elliot Goldberg suggest that because Iyer’s vyamashala was next to Krishnamacharya’s yogashala at the
Mysore Palace, it is perhaps where Krishnamacharya picked up surya namaskar and vinyasa from. The reason that this is not factually correct is twofold: 1) Krishnamacharya opened his shala in 1933, and palace records list him as having his first year of operations in 1934. KV Iyer is listed in the palace records for the first time in 1938, and he himself never taught in Mysore, but sent his assistants and I believe his cousin to teach. Iyer and Krishnamacharya were in all likelihood not going for
those mythical cups of coffee that Goldberg suggests because Iyer was in Bangalore. By the time the vyamashala opened Yoga Makaranda had been written and Krishnamacharya’s style documented. Another problem with this assumption is a date lapse that Mark misses, from 1927 to 1933. Pattabhi Jois began his practice in 1927 in Hassan, when Krishnamacharya was working at a coffee plantation (actually a better place for them to have had coffee) and teaching in the mornings and evenings. This is when
Pattabhi Jois began learning the vinyasa krama. They were reunited in Mysore in 1932/33. Lastly, it has already been documented that Krishnamacharya did not teach sun salutations as part of his practice!! Pattabhi Jois added those in, and readily admitted to it. So the entire argument that Mark is trying to put forth is a moot point. Krishnamacharya never taught the thing that Mark is trying to pin on him, and somehow, with all of his research, he was not able to glean this very simple, basic
fact that many people already knew. So, these are just two examples of some problems in Yoga Body. There are many, many examples, some that have already been pointed out by others, including Mallinson. Just so you know, I am not a traditionalist. I believe in growth, change and innovation; I am all for creativity. My disagreement with Mark Singleton is strictly on factual evidence and either incomplete research, assumption making, or elision of information. I’m sure he’s a very nice guy. But the
misconceptions he has let loose on the public need to be corrected. His work, misunderstood as he claims it may be, has become embedded in the general public’s consciousness, and frankly I do not think that he nor the rest of his supporters at SOAS have done much to correct this. A new forward to the Serbian edition of his book is not only not enough, his forward didn’t really address the many problems his research and book actually have in it. My 2015 email to him on this has remained
unanswered.
While there is quite a lot more to say on the topic, that is where I left it for now. Seth and I will, I am sure, resume this conversation, and I’ll continue to share what we speak about. The purpose of the discussion is not to necessarily win this argument or be
"right," it's to try to help insure that information that is actually wrong is corrected and not propagated.
In other news, for those who are local to NYC or would like to come here to practice, here is my upcoming NY schedule:
- Classes at Sky Ting Yoga: September 3rd-9th; October 13th-18th; November 1st-7th. Sign up here.
- Free class at Rockefeller Center, Saturday, August 31st, 9am, no registration necessary.
Jocelyne and I have a full schedule of workshops in the US and abroad that can be found here. Workshops through
the end of the year include New Jersey, London, Manchester, Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Oxford, LA, San Antonio, Mexico, Salt Lake City, Hong Kong, and Mumbai.
That’s all for now and thank you!
With love,
Eddie and Jocelyne
