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Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

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A new book has just come out into the crowded yoga marketplace: Yoga Body by Mark Singleton. Unlike so many of the other yoga products this is neither full of glossy photographs (though the front cover picture is quite cute) nor making any particular promises. Instead this is a book that seeks to question some of the assumptions underlying our yoga practice.

It is written by an academic - but an academic who has been a highly dedicated practitioner for more than 15 years. Mark is not only very adept in the physical postures (practising third series Astanga) but a serious student of yoga - he is qualified in the Iyengar school as well as within the Satyananda system - and a long-term meditator. This book might be dismissed by some as a product of "modern scholars who barely dip their toes into the ocean of yoga" - but such dismissals reveal inabilities to honestly consider the circumstances of this yoga which is practised by so many people across the world. Yet although this is an academic book (there are detailed footnotes and the bibliography runs to more than 30 pages) it is without doubt readable and accessible. There is a skilful balancing between the maintaining of academic credibility while ensuring that a good story is told well.

This is a book that made me pause and think. Its subtitle is `the origins of modern posture practice' and the aim is to understand the forming of yoga postures. What so many of us spend so much time doing - where has this come from? What are the influences that structure the shapes that upon which we expend so much effort? This book doesn't unfortunately touch on why so many of us are doing these practices but this wasn't a topic of Yoga Body. Hopefully this will be a conversation that happens afterwards - as an example, there is an academic article soon to be published on why people in London do yoga. The points that are made within these pages of Yoga Body deserve serious consideration by all sincere yoga practitioners.

What is being suggested in Yoga Body is that the physical practices that we do today could owe more of a debt to people such as Eugene Sandow and Genevieve Stebbins than someone such as Swami Vivekananda. Sandow (1867-1925) was a world-famous bodybuilder who had an enthusiastic following in India and Stebbins (1857-1915) was influential in developing a system called `harmonic gymnastics'. It is clear that predating yoga's arrival there was an active culture of stretching and strengthening in the west - and intermingled within this culture were elements of what may be described as esoteric and mystical religious approaches. So the yoga being exported from India (ignoring the fact that this Indian yoga was already western influenced) was landing on ground that had been prepared. Like so much, what was happening - and is still happening - was a blending: a blending of different practices and philosophies to fit the requirements of particular times.

I highly recommend this book to all who are sincerely interested in examining this practice - if you would like read my own thoughts on `Yoga Body' go to
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Mark Singleton's Yoga Body is a cultural history of asana practice, concentrating on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Modern hatha yoga is only tenuously related to asana practice as described in the Sanskrit texts. Until the eighteenth century, real hatha yogins lived as itinerant petty criminals, despised and feared by Indians and British alike. Even Vivekananda, the great popularizer of Indian religion in the West, viewed hatha yoga as an inferior pursuit, and one that was perhaps not even a spiritual practice at all.

The sanitization of hatha yoga began with the European physical culture movement of the late nineteenth century. Gymnastics and bodybuilding became popular. A Christian man, it was held, should be a manly man. The movement was taken to India by the YMCA and by the British military, who included physical fitness in their training drills.

As Indian national pride developed in the early twentieth century, a desire developed to demonstrate that India had its own system of strength and fitness. Hatha yoga was then reinvented by grafting a careful selection of its elements on to the international culture of the body -- though research has shown that many of its supposedly traditional postures look remarkably like ones from nineteenth-century European fitness books, and many were invented on the spot by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya in Mysore in the 1930s.

Mark Singleton's well-documented research challenges the notion of the modern asana class as an ancient Indian tradition. The many period illustrations add charm to the book.

This is NOT just another yoga history book that focuses on the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita and "classical" yoga texts. This is an incredibly documented history of *modern* yoga practice - the practice you get at yoga studios and the JCC ~ or wherever the heck you practice in whatever city you live. Whatever the lineage you practice! Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Jivamukti, Anusara, Iyengar, they ALL owe their historical dues to ... well, to a history that you might not expect!

How much DID the ancient yoga texts discuss physical practice? Why IS it that when most people think of yoga today, they only think of pretzel poses?

I don't want to give much away, because the book is so fascinating to read. ALTHOUGH! CAVEAT: it's very academic and assumes at least some knowledge and understanding of what's been given to us as "yoga history" - e.g., the Sutras, Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and who the heck Patanjali, Pattabhi Jois, and Krishnamacharya are. So... not for beginners.

That said, I believe EVERY YOGA TEACHER should read this, and I'm not kidding. WHATEVER your lineage (or whatever you *think* your lineage is - ha!), it's super-important to understand this history and how modern postural yoga as we know it came to be.

Think: combine every incredible combination of physical training, postural training, **military** training, bodybuilding, gymnastics, plus Protestant New Thought, New Age, and mystical "women's" stretching... and you've pretty much reached a modern lululemon advertisement for yoga pants. NOT that there's anything wrong with modern physical yoga asana practice! Heck, it's how I make my living. But to really understand WHY we do the poses we do and HOW this all came to be... this understandably controversial book opened my eyes to modern yoga practice in ways that MY teachers probably never even knew or understood themselves.

My review, in essence: Wow. WOW. WowowowowOWWWWW!!!

Bonus: incredible, awesome old photos

Yes, extreme-yoga-geekism. Yes, fascinating historical stuff.

Yoga Body is an important tool for every yoga scholar, well written and well documented. It is the author's PhD dissertation at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, where he worked as Research Assistant to Elizabeth De Michelis. Mark Singleton teaches at St. John's College, Santa Fe (NM), and was one of the main contributors to the recent Encyclopedia of Hinduism (Routledge, 2007). Singleton is a fervent yoga practitioner and has yoga teaching diplomas in the Iyengar and Satyananda traditions. He concentrates on the transition from the classical conception of yoga as a philosophical system to the version we know today as postural yoga. Without denying that some Asanas were mentioned in classical texts (around 450 AD, Vyasa's comments on Patanjali's Yoga Sutra named 12 poses, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, around 1350, included 84), Singleton examines in detail why Asanas did not initially receive the same attention that they have in modern times.

This book goes further in the analysis of modern yoga than three previously published outstanding scholarly books: Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), Silvia Ceccomori, Cent ans de yoga en France (Paris: Edidit, 2001), and Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga (London: Continuum, 2004).

After presenting a brief summary of the development of yoga since its origins to the first contact with Europeans, Singleton explains that postural yoga is a recent development with many sources, particularly from the physical education taught in the British Army. He traces many of the European roots of British gymnastics, including the German "physical revivalism" of J. F. C. Gutsmuth (1793), the "British Manly Exercises" of Donald Walker (1834), "Muscular Christianity" (1857), the Swedish gymnastics of P. H. Ling (1766-1839), and "bodybuilding" of Eugene Sandow (1867-1925). He then examines how physical education began to flourish in India as `drill mastering' with Manick Rao and K. Ramamurthy (early 20th century), Captain P. K. Gupta (Mysore in the 1920s), and H. C. Buck (the American who was YMCA director in India in the 1930s). Further developments were done by K.V. Iyer (1897-1980), and the Rajah of Aundh (aka Pratinidhi Pant, the creator of the modern sequence Suryanamaskar -`Sun salutation' in the 1930s) and many others. Singleton pays particular attention to Shri Yogendra and T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989), including his students B.K.S. Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and T. K. V. Desikachar. The author gives particular attention to the role played by the expansion of print technology and the availability of photography in the rapid dissemination of postural yoga.

Because of its iconoclastic approach, this book has generated a large variety of opinions. Singleton studied in detail the European and American reception of yoga, examined rare documents from Indian, European and American archives, reviewed numerous yoga manuals written before 1940, and interviewed many of the major figures in yoga today. One of his major conclusions is that "to a large extent, popular postural yoga came into being in the first half of the twentieth century as a hybridized product of colonial India's dialogical encounter with the worldwide physical culture movement."

Many yoga aficionados have found his analyses unexpected and irreverent. Many readers will be surprised and upset by Singleton's findings as he puts into question many of the commonly held beliefs about the origins of modern yoga. While Pattabhi Jois, for example, had many discussions with the author, B. K. S. Iyengar refused to be interviewed on these topics but allowed the author to make use of his library in Pune. For a happy ending, Singleton concludes his survey by emphasizing that many of the yoga masters were innovators and always tried to adapt their "teaching to the cultural temper of the times while remaining within the bounds of orthodoxy."

Nice Book! After reading Mark Singleton's book, Yoga Body, I agree that what is presented as an un-interrupted lineage of asana practice, is in reality, far more of a hybrid practice the current form of which is less than a hundred years old, or so. And also, that the supposed source texts for current Asana practice are either non-existent or have but scant references to poses currently in extant. That being said however.... I have no doubt that some forms of Asana ARE going back thousands of years.

After all, what about the physical practice of the mendicant/warrior/mercenary yogis referenced, who were outlawed by the British, and whose traditions then morphed into exhibitionist beggarism, which spawned the revulsion that led to the nineteenth century swing against hatha and towards raja yoga, by the educated Hindu? What of the legends of the Indian founder of the Chinese Shaolin Temple who taught physical poses and exercises to Chinese monks as prefaces for meditation a thousand years ago? What of the Sun Salutation series incorporated into current Asana practice that is tied to a different tradition than Raja Yoga, (that of Ancient Sun Worship) but is nevertheless known to be stretch back far further than the Mysore Palace years. Or the similar histories of other physical practices that have also experienced rises, falls and mutations, but nonetheless always had a narrative thread running through them that was never quite severed? Such as japanese jiu-jitsu through to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu... Ancient greek wrestling, boxing, and pankration, now all reborn today in their current sport formats.

I refuse to believe there isn't a strong, native Indian element stretching back for a very long time, within Asana practice, and I would be interested in a deeper delving, well-researched book that neither oversimplifies the connection to tradition to give some sense of mystical authentication, nor swings too far in the other direction, pointing out only the inconsistencies in the previous argument while not speaking from a place of true authority and knowledge. (Difficult to do, doubtless, without the texts to back it up, but perhaps, somewhat possible...) jack

Singleton presents an interesting view of asana and the so-called growth of the "yoga business," but his analysis and presentmenet of the topic is selective and ultimately fails. Hs analysis seems centered on two issues: One, how hatha yoga ascetics were viewed at the time as opportunistic cons and two present day yoga practice is an outgrowth of social movements in the early 1900s of nationalistic, physical and hygenic forces in India and the rest of the world. Regarding the first facator there is no doubt that there exists documentation about the wierd practices of hatha ascetics. For more information a reader is directed to the excellent and frankly better documented book by White, The Sinister Yoga. As White explains in this and his other books, Hatha Yoga evolved as a movement to reform even more heinous practices of certain Tantric cults and was very much conceived as a reform movement. In place of the questionable Tantric practices, emphasis was placed on asana. Hatha yoga ascetics looked to the eight limbs of Patanjali, and the goal of oof the postures and poses was to encourage the ascending of kundalini and the attainment of siddhis or powers. Ths leads to the second factor, Singleton's discussion on asana.

Singleton creates the impression that the asana postures and poses that we all know now is a modern creation of the social forces present in the early 1900s. He creates this impression by emphasizing that asana in Patanjali was primarily seated positions for meditation. This is wrong. A Hatha yoga tract of the 1660s, Hatharatnavali, lists a partial list of 89 postures, some of which are well-known to present day practitioners. Asaba plays an important part in yogic practice. It is fortuitous that the world re-discovered these postures in the early 1900s, and other leaders have built on these core postures, but they've always been around, and yoga enthusiasts know that they've been around. Thus, while there is no doubt that numerous social forces and movements took place in the early 1900's as Singleton so brilliantly describes in the book, the fact that asana was the focus of those forces and movements is incidental and in no way detracts from the vital importance asana plays in yoga practice. Singeltgon is all too ready to downplay asana's role.

The great mistake many yoga practitioners make is that they treat asana as only a health regimen. Singleton makes the same error. It is much more. The steps in the Yoga Sutras must be treated as a whole. As Patanjali states, in asana all duality ceases to exist. It is a necessary step to dharan, dhyana and samadhi.

Anyone deeply attached to the idea that the postures practiced in modern yoga have their roots in ancient India is going to resist this book's thesis. However, the author presents a scholarly, rich and densely written argument that makes complete sense. He doesn't reject that yogic philosophy has ancient roots, but he says many, not all, of the postures and breathing styles that people practice in studios and gyms represent an amalgamation of east and west. He argues that many of the postures come out of the physical culture movement of the late 1800s, which thrived in Europe and North America and was also embraced by Indian nationalists.

The history of modern yoga is just beginning to be written, and I'm sure there's more research to be done, but this is a cornerstone text.

I am very impressed by Singleton's book.

Contentwise it verifies, what my yoga-teacher in India in his eye-twinkling way always said about other forms of yoga: "That's not Yoga, it's Gymnastics!" ... and I am happy to wholeheartedly be able to feel safe in repeating precisely that with full conviction. Asthanga? Flow? Power? Ain't no Yoga.
But Singleton's book goes way beyond that ... and frankly, I have no idea anymore what to call what I myself practise ... ;-/
So, be encouraged & warned at the same time:
This will rock your boat.

And, that is the factor I need to stress here:
Singleton unmasks modern "Yoga" with the preciseness of a surgeon, scientifically there seems no blind spots, everything he concludes is based on seamlessly connecting facts, supposedly the reason, why the book hasn't been challenged by the "physical" styles, you'd need to unearth quite a library to challenge Singleton's brilliant work.
And all that Singleton does with no trace of sarcasm, no appearent intention to put anyone down, to be the wisecrack, simply he is the scientist wanting to find out what can be brought to light about the "origins of modern postural yoga". His comments are SO balanced, this probably impressed me most.

I am looking forward to read his next book, hopefull named: "What IS traditional Yoga", for, as mentioned above, I definitely lost orientation here and whatever it is I practice, does not seem to go back 5000 years as it so selfrighteously claims ... despite it being very efficient, but that is two different points.

Thank you, Mr. Singleton, your book will be a classic, ten copies in each university library, standard literature in still 100 years, a landmark.

Addresses yoga postures from a strict historical perspective untangling historical inquiry of yoga posture development from acquired and embedded mythology. A must for yoga enthusiasts who desire to more accurately and intelligently discuss the genesis of their practice and enlighten its evolutionary direction.

Mark Singleton's book has succeeded in laying bare the origins of modern yoga culture in his scholarly endeavor. Yoga is a wide reaching term which has long been used in India to describe practices that bear minimal resemblance (if any) to those promoted by many of the contemporary "schools" of hatha yoga. Apart from his thorough and exhaustive research, and his personal capacity as a highly trained scholar with years of field experience in India and elsewhere around the globe, Dr. Singleton is an accomplished practitioner of yoga in a variety of styles and forms; as such, his is an authoritative and refreshingly authentic voice to expound upon the ever expanding and changing body of yoga, worldwide. An excellent and engaging read!