Yoga Body

The Origins of Modern Posture Practice

By: Mark Singleton

Narrated by: Benjamin Crow

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 (asana) 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 asana practice that dominates the global yoga scene of the 21st 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 asana revival, Yoga Body turns the conventional wisdom about yoga on its head.

©2010 Oxford University Press, Inc. (P)2022 Upfront Books

Compelling yet contrary scholarship

This brought great clarity to my perspective on the origins of yoga. As a generally skeptical, academic reader of religious histories, this work was interesting, relevant, and also modest in its assertions. Though there is some insinuation that the popular historical narrative was partly fabricated by a few key 20th century figures, the book is free of defamatory or condemnatory remarks. It also helped me square my knowledge of Patanjali and his western interpreters (esp. Crowley) with the modern, movement-based yoga I see all around me.

Much needed history lesson

Great overall historical look into a mostly mysterious spiritual practice. The transformation for century to century was quite fascinating and informative

I am pleasantly surprised

This book is one of the best books to bridge the gap of ancient yoga to modern yoga history.

Such a fun history

This is an eclectic and compelling history of yoga between the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It’s assigned in teacher training programs and university classrooms.

I found this book more concise than I expected, and much more fun. There were many new connections I hadn’t even considered. And there are so many interesting people in this history.

If you speed up the audio’s playback speed, the narration isn’t a problem.

Unforgiving mispronounciation

Because this is written by a scholar to people that care for yoga and or are interested in going beyond common knowledge, I find it hard to accept the mistakes the narrator makes. Even the key words like asana, Patanjali and Krishnamacharya are mispronounced. If you can over that, it’s a wonderful book and very valuable missing piece in the history of yoga.

Infuriating narration

3.5 stars for the content which was interesting, there were just too many disparate topics linked together with little transition, and that made it hard to stay focused on the book, let alone actually recall the information.

The narration was very distracting, and made the already dry writing style even drier. It was bad enough to hear the narrator mispronounce names and yoga terminology, but the narrator also mispronounced English words. If I had to do it all over again, I’d pass.