ABSTRACT
Yogic breathing techniques, or prāṇāyāma, have received little attention in modern yoga research. This chapter thus presents an ethnographic study of prāṇāyāma at Swami Kuvalayanada’s (1883–1966) Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute in Lonavala, Maharashtra, while providing historical context for understanding India’s long history of colonial and post-colonial prāṇāyāma practices and pollution issues. The author considers two models of the yogic body at the yoga institute that sit hesitantly side by -side as asthma patients breathe polluted city air to treat their breathing ailments: 1) the self-purifying, self-sacrificing haṭha-yoga body and 2) the environmentally entangled social scientific body. Engaging scholarship from the field of Pollution Studies and allied fields of inquiry, the author demonstrates how two sacrifices are taking place at the institution simultaneously: one at the level of the yogic body and the other on the uneven pyre of necropolitical capitalism. The frictions between these two models produce this book’s third instantiation of engaged alchemy, and show how the field of Modern Yoga Studies must move beyond the analytical framework of neoliberal, biopolitical individualism in order to adequately understand yoga practices in contemporary India. It would instead be more accurate, as the chapter shows, to describe these practices as encouraging a distinctly necropolitical individualism.
