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Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice is a 2010 book on yoga as exercise by the yoga scholar Mark Singleton. It is based on his PhD thesis, and argues that the yoga known worldwide is, in large part, a radical break from hatha yoga tradition, with different goals, and an unprecedented emphasis on asanas, many of them acquired in the 20th century. By the 19th century, the book explains, asanas and their ascetic practitioners were despised, and the yoga that Vivekananda brought to the West in the 1890s was asana-free. Yet, from the 1920s, an asana-based yoga emerged, with an emphasis on its health benefits, and flowing sequences (vinyasas) adapted from the gymnastics of the physical culture movement. This was encouraged by Indian nationalism, with the desire to present an image of health and strength. The book attracted wide interest, both among scholars and among yoga teachers and practitioners. Its argument has largely been accepted by scholars, and it has encouraged further research into the nature of modern yoga and its origins. The book was attacked from two sides: saffronising Hindu nationalists wanting to reclaim yoga as a single thing, distinctively Indian; and modern global yoga marketing wanting to wrap its product "in the mantle of antiquity" to maximise sales. Book Publication Yoga Body was published by Oxford University Press in paperback in 2010. A Serbian translation came out in 2015 with a new preface. Purpose The author, Mark Singleton, sets out the book's purpose as follows: The book targets an essential, but hitherto largely ignored, aspect of yoga's development. Studies of modern yoga have tended to elide the passage from Vivekananda's āsana-free manifestors of yoga in the mid-1890s to the well-known posture-oriented forms that began to emerge in the 1920s. The two main studies in this area to date, by Elizabeth De Michelis and Joseph Alter, have focused on both these moments in the history of transnational yoga, but they have not offered a good explanation of why āsana was initially excluded and the ways in which it was eventually reclaimed. Contents Yoga Body begins by describing traditional yoga in India, including hatha yoga. It then covers the negative image of fakirs and yogins in the European mind in the period up to the 19th century, leading to the asana-free yoga that Vivekananda adapted and presented to the West. Next it explores in detail the impact of the international physical culture movement on India in the early 20th century, at a time of rising Indian nationalism, in reaction to British colonialism. It explores, too, the relationship of yoga and Harmonial Gymnastics and esoteric dance. The book then looks at the importance of visual reproduction of images of yoga, through halftone engraving and photography, on the revival of āsana practice. Finally, it examines in detail how Krishnamacharya developed a new approach to āsana practice, with flowing movements (vinyasas), in his Mysore yogashala. Singleton notes that "yoga" has become almost synonymous with the practice of āsanas, something not true of any pre-modern yoga. Illustrations The book is illustrated with numerous monochrome photographs of yoga pioneers, asanas, and historic images which set modern yoga in its context. There are images of Indian fakirs, Western contortionists, bodybuilders in the physical culture tradition, and pioneers of modern asana-based yoga such as Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar. Reception In favour Harold Coward, reviewing Yoga Body for the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, writes that the book provides a "very detailed analysis" of how hatha yoga changed "from being seen as a blight" to regaining "a positive perception in the modern West." In his view, the book is "an excellent contribution to our understanding of how asana yoga evolved in the decades after Vivekananda and became the basis for much of the postural yoga experienced in Anglophone culture today", offering "user friendly, but serious scholarship" on the history of modern yoga. The historian Jared Farmer, in Reviews in American History, writes that the book does a great service in enabling study of "this creolized tradition", he neither provides a single clear narrative, nor states which of the many causal factors he identifies are the most important. He notes that Singleton is a scholar-practitioner, "and he adopts a tone of respect even as he skewers sacred cows." Farmer suggests that Singleton may, by looking towards factors in British India, have overlooked some American contexts, and states that "Yoga Body deserves controversy, which I mean as a sincere compliment." The author and yoga teacher Matthew Remski, writing in Yoga International, called the publication of Yoga Body "a watershed moment in the history of global asana culture." He agrees that the book is "uncomfortable" as it raises many questions about what yoga is and challenges popular assumptions about its age. In Remski's view, the book gently deconstructs terms like "original" and "authentic", pointing instead to the student-teacher relationship. He finds the book strongly "yogic", weaving together "the cultural and the personal", and suggesting that "when you are doing surya namaskāra, your sensation of internal oneness might be vibrating with the conjunction of cultures and histories." The yoga instructor Timothy Burgin, reviewing the same book for Yoga Basics, calls it "fascinating and remarkable", both well-documented and likely to "ruffle a few yogis' feathers", noting that before the modern yoga transition, "Hatha Yogis were considered to be derelicts and ruffians and were avoided by both native Indians and Westerners alike." The yoga teacher Jill Miller, reviewing the book on Gaiam, observes that Singleton showed how many modern asanas were "derived during an environment of Indian neo-nationalism and infused with doses of European gymnastics, bodybuilding and the Christian agendas of the YMCA." She records that this agreed with a feeling she had long had, that many of the poses were very similar to those used in martial arts, and that authenticity in yoga was not what it seemed. Singleton's thesis has launched an academic discourse on what "authenticity" means with respect to modern yoga, as seen for instance in Cristina Renee Sajovich's 2015 graduate thesis Decolonizing Yoga: Authenticity Narratives, Social Feelings & Subversion in Modern Postural Yoga, which endorses Singleton's arguments. Discussion In 2011, the yoga scholar and philologist James Mallinson published "A Response to Mark Singleton's Yoga Body", thanking Singleton for "a wonderful piece of work" that explained "how sūrya namaskār had become so integral to yoga when it is nowhere to be found in the [medieval hatha yoga] sources I work with", and recording his eureka moment near the end of the book with Singleton's suggestion that "the modern Aṣṭāṅga yoga gets its name not from Patañjali's eight-fold yoga but fro.... Discover the Anya P Foxen popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Anya P Foxen books.