‘The Story of Yoga’ Review: More Than Striking a Pose

Unable to go to her Brooklyn gym due to closures forced by the pandemic, my wife turns to YouTube every morning and follows a routine advertised as yoga, performed by a woman with malleable limbs. To my Indian eyes, these exertions look nothing like the practice whose name they invoke, but as Alistair Shearer observes: " 'Yoga' has become an extremely elastic term these days." He notes that the phrase "stretch and relax"—"the slogan of many a postural class"—now applies "to the word itself, which has become as saggy as any unworked midriff."

A...