Mark Singleton > Quotes

“At the time of Vivekananda's synthesis of yoga in the 1890s, postural practice was primarily associated with the yogin (or, more popularly, "yogi"). This term designated in particular the haṭha yogins of the Nāth lineage, but was employed more loosely to refer to a variety of ascetics, magicians, and street performers. Often confused with the Mohammedan "fakir," the yogi came to symbolize all that was wrong in certain tributaries of the Hindu religion. The postural contortions of haṭha yoga were associated with backwardness and superstition, and many people considered them to have no place in the scientific and modern yoga”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“Yogi (or "jogi" /"ioghee") was the usual shorthand designation for haṭha practitioners of the Nāth and Kānphaṭa orders (Lorenzen 1978: 68), but the term acquired a far broader significance in colonial India. European visitors commonly had difficulty distinguishing between the various categories of mendicant orders, and would commonly conflate the (Hindu) yogin and the (Mohammedan) fakir. From the seventeenth century onward, indeed, European travelers to India rarely made much of a
"methodological or functional distinction" between them (Siegel 1991: 149). For these visitors, "yogi" tended to signify the social group of itinerant renouncers known for their disreputable (and sometimes violent) behavior, mendicancy, and outlandish austerities.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“A more valid and helpful way of thinking beyond such unproductive positions might be to consider the term yoga as it refers to modern postural practice as a homonym, and not a synonym, of the "yoga" associated with the philosophical system of Patañjali, or the "yoga" that forms an integral component of the Śaiva Tantras, or the "yoga" of the Bhagavad Gītā, and so on. In other words, although the word "yoga" as it is used popularly today is identical in spelling and pronunciation in each of these instances, it has quite different meanings and origins. It is, in short, a homonym, and it should therefore not be assumed that it refers to the same body of beliefs and practices as these other, homonymous terms.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“If new āsana forms began to gain popularity in the mid-1920s, it was as a result of the representation of Indian bodies in the kind of mass-produced primers and journals that flourished alongside comparable physical culture material. One perhaps rather obvious point to be made here is that modern postural yoga required visual representation in a way that more "mental" forms of modern yoga did not. To take but one example: Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, which openly shuns āsanas, does not lose much from a complete absence of visual images—the message is fairly effectively (if not always cogently) conveyed through the written word. On the other hand, Kuvalayananda's āsanas of 1931 would be a far duller, more difficult to follow book were the motions and postures it details not supported with clear, visual, photographic references.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“In sum, the Indian tradition shows no evidence for the kind of posture-based practices that dominate transnational anglophone yoga today. We should except from this assertion, of course, seated postures such as padmāsana and siddhāasana, which have played an enormously important practical and symbolic role throughout the history of yoga. And today, largely thanks to modern advertising, cross-legged yoga postures such as these have become powerful and universally recognized signifiers of relaxation, self-control, self-cultivation, a balanced lifestyle, good health, fitness, and spiritual urban cool.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“It is clear that the majority of popular āsana-based forms of transnational yoga today are profoundly influenced by the postural revivals that are the topic of this book. In some cases, such as the Ashtanga Vinyasa system—and its "Power Yoga" spin-offs—a direct line can be traced from modern urban health clubs and yoga studios to educational gymnastics institutions in India during the early twentieth century (the subject of chapter 9). The lucrative Bikram Yoga system, similarly, can be traced directly to the physical culture syntheses developed during the 1930s by the bodybuilder B.C. Ghosh (chapter 6).”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The āsanas of haṭha yoga were commonly, indeed routinely, compared with gymnastics in [early popular yoga] manuals. These interpretations of postural yoga were significantly divergent from those given by "classical" haṭha yoga texts, such as those translated by Vasu. Indeed, the whole somatic and philosophical framework of this new English-language yoga appeared to have been replaced by a modern discourse of health and fitness. An examination of the eighteenth- to early twentieth-century European gymnastics manuals in the British Library and Cambridge University Library showed without much doubt that anglophone yoga authors had grafted elements of modern physical culture onto haṭha yoga orthopraxy and seemingly excised those parts that were difficult to reconcile with the emerging health and fitness discourse.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The practice of āsanas within transnational anglophone yogas is not the outcome of a direct and unbroken lineage of haṭha yoga. While it is going too far to say that modern postural yoga has no relationship to āsana practice within the Indian tradition, this relationship is one of radical innovation and experimentation. It is the result of adaptation to new discourses of the body that resulted from India's encounter with modernity.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“Studies of modern yoga have tended to elide the passage from Vivekananda's āsana-free manifestos of yoga in the mid-1890s to the well known posture-oriented forms that began to emerge in the 1920s. The two main studies in this area to date, by De Michelis (2004) and Alter (2004a), have focused on both these moments in the history of transnational yoga, but they have not offered a good explanation of why āsana was initially excluded and the ways in which it was eventually reclaimed.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“In spite of the immense popularity of postural yoga worldwide, there is little or no evidence that āsana (excepting certain seated postures of meditation) has ever been the primary aspect of any Indian yoga practice tradition—including the medieval, body-oriented hat haṭha yoga—in spite of the self-authenticating claims of many modern yoga schools.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The haṭha yogin had always been an agent of ritual pollution for caste Hindus . . . This status is a key factor in the exclusion of the yogin from the Indian yoga renaissance.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“Today yoga is virtually synonymous in the West with the practice of āsana, and postural yoga classes can be found in great number in virtually every city in the Western world, as well as, increasingly, in the Middle East, Asia, South and Central America, and Australasia. "Health club" types of yoga are even seeing renewed popularity among affluent urban populations in India. While exact practitioner statistics are hard to come by, it is clear that postural yoga is booming.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“Quasi-religious forms of physical culture swept Europe during the nineteenth century and found their way to India, where they informed and infiltrated popular new interpretations of nationalist Hinduism. Experiments to define the particular nature of Indian physical culture led to the reinvention of āsana as the timeless expression of Hindu exercise. Western physical culture-oriented āsana practices, developed in India, subsequently found their way (back) to the West, where they became identified and merged with forms of "esoteric gymnastics," which had grown popular in Europe and America from the mid-nineteenth century (independent of any contact with yoga traditions). Posture-based yoga as we know it today is the result of a dialogical exchange between para-religious, modern body culture techniques developed in the West and the various discourses of "modern" Hindu yoga that emerged from the time of Vivekananda onward. Although it routinely appeals to the tradition of Indian haṭha yoga, contemporary posture-based yoga cannot really be considered a direct successor of this tradition.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“From its earliest stages, modern āsana was perceived as a health and hygiene regime for body and mind based on posture and "free" movement (free as it is performed with the body only, without the constraints of equipment, and also as it doesn't require any expenditure on apparatus).”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“In the late 1800s, a mainly anglophone yoga revival began in India, and new syntheses of practical techniques and theory began to emerge, most notably with the teachings of Vivekananda (1863–1902). But even in these new forms the kind of āsana practice so visible today was missing. Indeed, āsana, as well as other techniques associated with haṭha yoga, were explicitly shunned as being unsuitable or distasteful by Vivekananda and many of those who followed his lead.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“In the 1960s, the rise of "flower power" brought yoga to the attention of a generation of young Americans and Europeans. The wholesale embrace of Indian metaphysics and yoga by many countercultural icons (such as The Beatles' spiritual romance with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) reinforced the position of yoga in the popular psyche and inspired many to join the "hippy trail" to India in pursuit of alternative philosophies and lifestyles. Increased media attention brought yoga closer to the mainstream, and printed primers and television series throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as Richard Hittleman's Yoga for Health (first broadcast in 1961), encouraged many to take up posture-based yoga in the comfort of their own homes.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The phenomenon of international posture-based yoga would not have occurred without the rapid expansion of print technology and the cheap, ready availability of photography.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The new, English-language yogas devised by Vivekananda and others emerged in a climate of opinion that was highly suspicious of the yogin, especially the practitioner of haṭha yoga. Yogins were more likely to be identified by their critics (both Indian and European) with black magic, perverse sexuality, and alimentary impurity than with "yoga" in any conventional sense (see White 1996: 8). Scholars of the period tended to admire what they saw as the rational, philosophical, and contemplative aspects of yoga while condemning the obnoxious behavior and queer ascetic practices of the yogins themselves. This situation resulted in the exclusion of haṭha yoga from the initial stages of the popular yoga revival.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“I have sought to avoid a methodological approach that negatively contrasts "modern yoga" against presumably more authentic, older forms of yoga. Of course, this is an appealing way to structure a study of modern yogas because it provides a ready-made framework for comparison and contrast: we hold up aspects of "modern yoga" against the template of "classical" forms and determine to what extent they converge with or diverge from the latter. For example, we might easily and convincingly demonstrate the discontinuities of logic, method, and soteriology between modern, international "hatha" yoga and the "classical" texts from which it claims to derive, such as Haṭhayogapradīpikā, Gheraṇḍasaṁhitā, and Śivasaṃhitā. Implicit in this approach, however, is the sense that such divergences are errors and that modern yoga is flawed precisely to the extent that it departs from the perceived tradition.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

“The 1970s and 1980s were a period of consolidation for yoga in the West with the establishment and expansion of a significant number of dedicated schools and institutes. The period also saw a further, and enduring, rapprochement of yoga with the burgeoning New Age movement, which in many ways represents a new manifestation of yoga's century-old association with currents of esotericism. By the mid-1990s posture-based yoga had become thoroughly acculturated in many urban centers in the West. The 1990s "boom" turned yoga into an important commercial enterprise, with increasing levels of merchandising and commodification.”
― Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice