Even more ubiquitous in the West than mindfulness meditation, and for a longer period of time, is yoga: specifically meaning the practice of postural stretching exercises, with names like “sun salutation” and “downward dog”. They can be supplemented by breathing exercises and perhaps occasionally meditation, and there is often some element of Sanskrit or philosophy involved, but to a normal English-speaking layperson, the core of what yoga means is the postures. This is the sort of yoga that is sometimes even a competitive sport. Its health benefits are rarely contested; as my own aging body gets less naturally flexible, it’s probably only a matter of time before I sign up with a local yoga studio myself.

Meanwhile, in the classical Sanskrit from which the term is derived, yoga refers to a variety of spiritual practices in which postures play a minor role, if any. Śāntideva uses the term “yogin” to describe people with a greater understanding of reality, with postures never being mentioned in the text. The most famous and influential yoga text, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, says that posture (āsana) is one – just one – of the eight limbs of yoga, and the only thing it specifies about posture is that posture should be “firm and pleasant” (sthirasukham) (YS II.46). There’s no stretching involved here; indeed the text suggests the opposite, that one should be comfortable, likely for meditation. The Yoga Bhāṣya commentary – traditionally included with the original – names several kinds of posture without explaining them; when Vācaspati Miśra’s subcommentary does come to explain them, it shows that they are postures for meditation, ways of placing your feet while you sit. Meditation, in general, plays the largest role in this classical yoga; stretching plays none.

So it’s natural to ask: how exactly did we get from one to the other, from a meditative classical yoga in which stretching plays no role, to a modern yoga in which it plays the primary role? I’ve seen this question asked in surprisingly few places. I wanted to get a deeper understanding of that question, so I thought it would be worth reading Elizabeth De Michelis’s 2005 work with the very promising title A History of Modern Yoga.

Sadly, it turns out the title of A History of Modern Yoga is a false promise. Little of the book is actually a history of the postural yoga that we know as yoga in the 21st century. Wikipedia claims the book was based on De Michelis’s dissertation, and it shows, with far more time spent providing context for the history than actually discussing it. The first four chapters (of eight) are explicitly identified as the prehistory of modern yoga, recounting the by now very usual story of the creation in the Bengal Renaissance of the traditions we now know as “Hinduism”. Even once we get to chapter 5, where the book claims we are actually talking about modern yoga, we just get an account of what Swami Vivekānanda considered to be yoga – in which, as De Michelis herself notes (p. 164), postures (āsanas) play very little role. Vivekānanda’s so-called “modern yoga”, like the classical yoga of Patañjali, is a theoretical philosophical system; neither of them look much like what you’ll find when you walk into the Namaste Yoga Studio down the street.

Then, as we finally begin to approach modern postural yoga on page 183 – already two-thirds of the way through the book – in a bizarre twist we hear “Space constraints prevent us from looking at the first fifty years of Modern Yoga in detail”. A reader is well entitled to ask at this point: what kind of an excuse is that? If it’s space constraints preventing you from talking about the actual history of modern yoga in a book entitled A History of Modern Yoga, then what possessed you to waste literally half the book’s space talking about a prehistory that has already been told before, and has only a tangential relationship to the modern yoga any of us know? That’s fine in a dissertation, where the point is just to say something new and the readership is secondary – but to spend half of a book talking about something tangential to the title and then plead space constraints to avoid its actual topic, well, that indicates an editor asleep at the switch. You had plenty of space to talk about the thing your book’s title advertises, you just created a “space constraint” by choosing to use that space on something else entirely.

And so, while in the end we do get some amount of a history of the most influential school of modern yoga – the school of B.K.S. Iyengar – it’s treated as a “case study”, not set in the context of the other schools that made postural yoga the phenomenon it is.

The sections on Iyengar are the most interesting (and relevant) parts of the book. Even those parts, though, are more textual analysis than history per se: they explore in detail what Iyengar believed, but not how or why he came to believe it. They note that Iyengar drew on “Western physical fitness and training techniques” (197) but don’t elaborate or explain why. Some of De Michelis’s historical comments just leave the reader tantalized. We learn that for Iyengar “āsana practice changed the course of his life by transforming him from a sickly youth into a healthy and strong young man” (200), with a citation of commemoration volumes attributed to him. That tells us something very important about what motivated Iyengar to create much of what is now familiar to us as postural yoga. But how did this happen? How was it that Iyengar was already doing āsana (posture) practice in his youth, when that practice wasn’t a significant part of even Vivekānanda’s yoga, let alone the Yoga Sūtras?

Moreover, if you are going to focus on the prehistory of modern yoga, then surely that prehistory needs to include the premodern works that the modern yogins were drawing on. But we don’t hear what those are either. On p232 she quotes Iyengar using the tantric anatomy of channels (nādīs) in the body, an anatomy that’s not in the Yoga Sūtras – and, from her footnote on p166, not in Vivekananda either. Where did that come from? De Michelis gives us no answer, and doesn’t even seem to ask the question.

One of the themes De Michelis hits frequently is that the influence of Western esoteric traditions, like Theosophy, has been repeatedly underestimated in the study of modern Hinduism. I think she’s right about this (or at least she was when the book was written); the problem is that you don’t pick up a book with the title A History of Modern Yoga looking to better appreciate the influence of esotericism on modern Hinduism in general. You want to learn about modern yoga! If the book had been called The Esoteric Roots of Modern Hinduism or something to that effect, I imagine it would have gotten a much smaller readership – for a good reason, that the people who did read it would actually have wanted to read about its topic. But it would at least have been truth in advertising.

We still really need a history of modern yoga. It would have been great if that’s what A History of Modern Yoga was. Fortunately, there have been some other such books published since then; I hope some of them do the job better. From its blurb, Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body looks more likely to give us the history we need – but I’ll reserve judgement on that, since from the cover I would have thought the same about A History of Modern Yoga too.