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Editorial Review

Product Description
Yoga is so prevalent in the modern world--practiced by pop stars, taught in schools, and offered in yoga centers, health clubs, and even shopping malls--that we take its presence, and its meaning, for granted. But how did the current yoga boom happen? And is it really rooted in ancient Indian practices, as many of its adherents claim?

In this groundbreaking book, Mark Singleton calls into question many commonly held beliefs about the nature and origins of postural yoga (?sana) and suggests a radically new way of understanding the meaning of yoga as it is practiced by millions of people across the world today. Singleton shows that, contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence in the Indian tradition for the kind of health and fitness-oriented ?sana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the twenty-first century. Singleton's surprising--and surely controversial--thesis is that yoga as it is popularly practiced today owes a greater debt to modern Indian nationalism and, even more surprisingly, to the spiritual aspirations of European bodybuilding and early 20th-century women's gymnastic movements of Europe and America, than it does to any ancient Indian yoga tradition. This discovery enables Singleton to explain, as no one has done before, how the most prevalent forms of postural yoga, like Ashtanga, Bikram and "Hatha" yoga, came to be the hugely popular phenomena they are today.

Drawing on a wealth of rare documents from archives in India, the UK and the USA, as well as interviews with the few remaining, now very elderly figures in the 1930s Mysore ?sana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

5-0 out of 5 starsFresh and thought provoking
This is a really great book. I found it to be well-researched, intelligent and it makes a great case for the arguments it presents re:the origins of yoga. Highly recommend especially for those teaching yoga as it presents many fresh, thought provoking points.I really enjoyed reading it.

5-0 out of 5 starsIncisive and Brilliant
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!

4-0 out of 5 starsWonderful As Far As It Goes!
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

5-0 out of 5 starsA highly recommended scholarly book
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 generateda 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 numerousyoga 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."

5-0 out of 5 starsFascinating!!
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. ... Read more

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