ABSTRACT
Introduction The Divine Life Society (DLS) is a spiritual organization founded by Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India. Sivananda’s DLS, including associated centers across India and abroad, has figured prominently in expanding the role of yoga as a tool for the development of modern India.1 The DlS presents a well-defined example of the transformation of yoga’s place in Indian society. In addition to contemporary ethnographic data, I use Sivananda’s own poetry and the many pamphlets and books produced by both Sivananda, his contemporaries, and his successors through the twentieth century in India to understand some aspects of how the promotion and practice of yoga has contributed to the ongoing Indian nationalist project, as well as the transnational or global forces that became dominant in the latter half of the twentieth century. A comparison with the yoga institutions founded by a few of Sivananda’s contemporaries highlights general trends and specific differences in the uses to which yoga has been put during the twentieth century.
