The ubiquity of yoga is difficult to overstate. The art form is no longer the preserve of hippies or hip millennials, but an international multibillion-dollar industry with varieties including hot yoga, naked yoga, beer yoga and "doga". Amid a sea of guidebooks, historian Alistair Shearer has produced a worthwhile counterpoint.
From the start, Shearer emphasises the importance of rebutting lazy and sometimes Orientalist ideas about yoga that have built up over the decades. He is sceptical of claims that yoga is 5,000 years old, for example, seeing in them a romanticised western vision of "ancient India".
Instead, he demonstrates a complex and at times contradictory tradition. A simplistic reading of yoga sees it as two halves: the meditative "mind-yoga" of scriptures such as the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita, and the poses and asanas of "body-yoga" which became prominent in the 9th and 10th centuries. Yet in practice, this division has often been fluid, forming instead what Shearer calls a "mind-body complex" key.
The story only grows more complicated as Shearer traces changing political and cultural trends. Today's yoga practitioners may find little in common with the "magico-sexual practices" prevalent in early yoga (although odd beliefs around "semen retention" have re-emerged in men's health groups). A general emphasis on the supernatural — including claims of immortality, enhanced strength and psychic abilities — was widespread in ancient texts, but has largely been lost due to the rationalist ethos of 19th-century Hindu revivalists.
Akharas — open-air gymnasiums in which ascetic yogis trained in martial arts — seem just as alien today. The tradition of such militant yoga dates back, at least, to the Hindu epic the Mahabharata (around the 4th century BC), with yoga referred to in both philosophical and heroic terms. Shearer writes that the East India Company's capture of Delhi was only possible because a yogi-warlord had weakened the forces of the powerful Maratha empire — a far cry from the modern practice.
The interactions of yoga and outside forces are equally significant and just as nuanced. The Mughal empire's approach to non-Islamic faiths could be draconic. Shah Jahan, responsible for the building of the Taj Mahal, razed temples in the holy city of Varanasi. Yet his grandfather, Akbar the Great, a ruler of the Mughal empire, had yoga texts translated for his court and espoused admiration for the rigorous exercises yogis performed.
The East India Company and later the Raj had a similarly nuanced relationship. British officials saw the stasis of mind-yoga as unmanly, and sought to use "muscular Christianity" — a combination of rigorous exercise and religion — to change that. Yet yoga's physical elements were exported to the British Isles and elsewhere. During this cultural transmission yoga became increasingly female-dominated in the west, adapting to changing fitness norms.
The most important figure in this stage of the book is Swami Vivekananda, whose travels were crucial to popularising Hinduism worldwide. His visit to Chicago in 1893 helped to impart an image of a philosophical and meditative art form which remains relevant today. Among his admirers were John D Rockefeller, Gertrude Stein and Leo Tolstoy.
Yet Shearer is equally clear that yoga, with its eastern mystique, provided convenient cover for con artists. Among them was the Omnipotent Oom — an American yogi called Pierre Arnold Bernard — accused by his young female followers of holding magic powers over them. Tabloid outrage over a sexual scandal involving Bernard contributed to an atmosphere of Indophobia in the early 20th century.
In his introduction, Shearer calls his book a "how come" rather than a "how to". Yet in his conclusion, he stresses the limits of what yoga can do, advice as important as any guru's techniques. The boundaries of the art can be physical. The injuries sustained in poorly regulated studios are testament to a relentless drive in some modern interpretations.
Yet the threshold of yoga's abilities is also mental. For many practitioners, a side effect is self-knowledge and calm. But Shearer is clear that sacred knowledge is not designed to solve the travails of the modern world or clear up anxiety. Believing it can single-handedly change lives smacks of a return to the magic of ancient days.
The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West, by Alistair Shearer, Hurst, RRP£25, 384 pages
Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan is an FT leader writer
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