ABSTRACT
Transformation and Continuity in Modern Yoga The recent scholarship of Norman Sjoman (1996), Joseph Alter (1992; 2000; 2006), and others has brought to light a number of issues relevant to the process of the formation of “modern” forms of yoga in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 These studies have demonstrated that the roots of the contemporary phenomena regarded in conventional usage collectively as “yoga” are deeply situated in the soil of Indian modernism, tied to emergent forms of cosmopolitan religiosity, Indian nationalism, and various types of bodily culture. It has become clear that many of the key formulators of modern yoga in twentiethcentury India, such as the South Indian guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, consciously integrated native Hindu discourses on yoga from varying historical periods together with intellectual and bodily cultures of Indian and European origin, including wrestling, gymnastics, and the martial arts. Though the practice of yoga is often portrayed by its adherents and advocates as fundamentally nonsectarian and nondenominational, a degree of orthodoxy persists within contemporary traditions of yoga, rooted in part in the principles of the “Hindu Renaissance” and the formulation of Hinduism under the rubric of an all-embracing universalism. Questions regarding the authenticity of yoga and the authority of its proponents have developed as a subtext in the contemporary discourses that frame the practice of yoga. These questions are most pointed with regard to the distinctions between sectarian divisions or schools of yoga and between communities professing affiliation with particular Indian lineages versus those that do not. An important element of these discourses of authenticity and authority is the question of what the particular goals or teleology of a tradition and teacher are. These goals exist on a scale that ranges from mundane concerns such as beauty, health, strength, and so on to those that are founded on esteemed “spiritual” truths and realizations, the latter in the form of knowledge of the nature of reality and liberation from worldly attachments and afflictions.
