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WORK TITLE: The Path of Modern Yoga
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1943
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CITY: New York
STATE: NY
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http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Elliott-Goldberg/1384435196 * http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/elliott-goldberg-rides-the-elephant-an-in-depth-review-of-the-path-of-modern-yoga/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC not working, worldcat used for bib
LC control no.: n 2015191036
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Goldberg, Elliott, 1943-
See also: Popov, Max
Birth date: 1943-02-10
Found in: The path of modern yoga, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Elliott Goldberg)
data view (b. 1943)
Weight-resistance yoga, c2011: t.p. (Max Popov, pseudonym
for Elliott Goldberg) data view (b. Feb.10, 1943)
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LC control no.: n 2011051301
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Popov, Max
See also: Goldberg, Elliott, 1943-
Birth date: 1943-02-10
Found in: Weight-resistance yoga, c2011: t.p. (Max Popov, pseudonym
for Elliott Goldberg) data view (b. Feb.10, 1943)
Popov, Max. The tempest, c2012 : t.p. verso (wordsmith, Max
Popov)
His website, Nov. 6, 2012 (Popov began developing
weight-resistance yoga in the late 1980s ; has
presented papers at the Modern Yoga Workshop at
Cambridge University and the American Academy of
Religion ; His graphic novel adaptation for modern
readers of Shakespeare's The Tempest (with illustrations
by Manikandan) will be published on January 24, 2012 ; a
fitness trainer and scholar of modern hatha yoga ; He
lives in New York City ; maxpopovyoga@gmail.com)
The path of modern yoga, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Elliott Goldberg)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born February 10, 1943.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, fitness trainer, scholar of modern hatha yoga, yoga instructor, and lecturer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born February 10, 1943, writer Elliott Goldberg also goes by the pseudonym Max Popov. He is a fitness trainer and scholar of modern hatha yoga who has written books on weight-resistance yoga, which he developed in the late 1980s by applying the teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar to the strength-training teachings of famed 1920s Indian bodybuilder K.V. Iyer. As Popov, he has presented papers at the Modern Yoga Workshop at Cambridge University and the American Academy of Religion. He lives in New York City.
A departure from his works about yoga, Goldberg created The Tempest, a graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare’s play for modern readers, in 2012. The book features illustrations by Manikandan. In the story, King Alonso of Naples and his entourage sail home to Italy from Tunis, Africa, and encounter a violent storm. They wash up on the shores of a strange island where the magician Prospero lives with his daugher, Miranda, the savage Caliban, and Prospero’s servant sprite, Ariel. Prospero created the storm to lure Alonso to the island. Goldberg enhances the romantic drama complete with themes of betrayal, retribution, domination, subjugation, friendship, repentance, and forgiveness.
Weight-Resistance Yoga
As Popov, Goldberg wrote Weight-Resistance Yoga: Practicing Embodied Spirituality in 2011. He offers instruction on creating a mindful, meditative practice through creating calmness, movement, breathing, and focus. Blending strength-training exercises and yoga flexibility practice, he combines weight resistance with the wisdom of hatha yoga. Strength can be achieved with machines, free weights, and the body itself. To this, he adds rhythmic breathing, stability, and stillness for a complete workout.
The author explains that the strengthening of neck, shoulders, arms, torso, hips, and knees both creates a state of tranquility and promotes calm and spiritual illumination. The book includes twenty-six illustrated exercises and twenty themed meditations. Reviewers praised the book for calling on practitioners to pay attention to honing a well-sculpted form in body and mind and to seeking self-liberation through mindful movements. He shows how hatha yoga and weight training complement and support each other to help practitioners enter a domain of embodied spirituality.
The Path of Modern Yoga
Goldberg’s 2016 The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice presents his interpretation of the history of modern yoga and its transformation from sacred discipline to exercise program to embodied spiritual practice. Offering historical background in four sections and thirty-five chapters, he explains that in the early twentieth century, yoga evolved from a sacred practice to a health and fitness regimen for middle-class Indians. In the later part of the century, as Western obsession with exercise took hold, yoga further transformed into an embodied spiritual practice for the modern era.
In the book, Goldberg explores the use and goals of yoga through the notable accomplishments of eleven key teachers and practitioners, including yogis Swami Kuvalayananda, Swami Sivananda, and S. Sundaram; Indian bodybuilder K.V. Iyer; Rajah Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi; American journalist Louise Morgan; Indian diplomat Apa Pant; and Russian-born yogi Indra Devi, who was trained in India. Goldberg puts these people’s achievements in the context of Western trends, the physical culture movement, commodification of exercise, nationalism, popular entertainment, quest for youth and beauty, and twentieth-century New Age spirituality.
For example, Goldberg refers to yogi Shri Yogendra, who believed that not adhering to rules in the profane world is necessary for reaching self-realization. Yogendra removed the religious aspect of yoga and commodified it so it could be bought and sold. Goldberg explains that this stripping of hatha yoga’s mysticism and inertia have helped it become more popular and applicable to modern life. In response to a globalizing feminism upon physical culture, a balance is struck between holistic exercise instruction and self-help.
Calling the book a richly detailed examination of modern yoga, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Practitioners and scholars alike will be fascinated by these yogin pioneers and their colorful stories.” The reviewer added that Goldberg’s book is a vibrant and accessible study of yoga’s history, adaptation, and adoption by East and West alike. According to a writer online at Spirituality & Health, the book “is an interesting and scholarly approach to a well-researched topic that many yogis might have wondered about. It shows how postural yoga has become part of health and wellness culture today.”
Explaining Goldberg’s contribution to the study and practice of yoga, reviewer Matthew Remski asserted on the Yoga Anonymous Web site: “Along comes Elliott Goldberg with a dozen years of dogged research, a sleuthing style metered out in engaging chunks, a deep appreciation for the embodied sensations offered by competing visions of asana practice, a sharp eye for human foibles and historical oddities, and no shyness around sharing his own aspirational definition of the yogic goal: To open up or attune to ‘Being.’” Remski asserted that Goldberg produced a book many practitioners have been waiting for, a body-aware cultural history of modern spiritual yoga, complete with richly realized characters.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, July 4, 2016, review of The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice, p. 59.
ONLINE
Matthew Remski, http://matthewremski.com/ (August 4, 2016), “Elliott Goldberg Rides the Elephant: An In-Depth Review of The Path of Modern Yoga.“
Spirituality & Health, http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/ (April 27, 2017), Jennifer Ball, review of The Path of Modern Yoga.*
Elliott Goldberg
Elliott Goldberg is one of the few scholars in the emerging field of modern yoga studies. He has presented papers at the Modern Yoga Workshop at Cambridge University and at the American Academy of Religion (AAR). He lives in New York City.
The Path of Modern Yoga
The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice
By Elliott Goldberg
A history of yoga’s transformation from sacred discipline to exercise program to embodied spiritual practice
• Identifies the origin of exercise yoga as India’s response to the mania for exercise sweeping the West in the early 20th century
• Examines yoga’s transformations through the lives and accomplishments of 11 key figures, including Sri Yogendra, K. V. Iyer, Louise Morgan, Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda, Indra Devi, and B. K. S. Iyengar
• Draws on more than 10 years of research from rare primary sources and includes 99 illustrations
In The Path of Modern Yoga, Elliott Goldberg shows how yoga was transformed from a sacred practice into a health and fitness regime for middle-class Indians in the early 20th century and then gradually transformed over the course of the 20th century into an embodied spiritual practice--a yoga for our times.
Drawing on more than 10 years of research from rare primary sources as well as recent scholarship, Goldberg tells the sweeping story of modern yoga through the remarkable lives and accomplishments of 11 key figures: six Indian yogis (Sri Yogendra, Swami Kuvalayananda, S. Sundaram, T. Krishnamacharya, Swami Sivananda, and B. K. S. Iyengar), an Indian bodybuilder (K. V. Iyer), a rajah (Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi), an American-born journalist (Louise Morgan), an Indian diplomat (Apa Pant), and a Russian-born yogi trained in India (Indra Devi). The author places their achievements within the context of such Western trends as the physical culture movement, the commodification of exercise, militant nationalism, jazz age popular entertainment, the quest for youth and beauty, and 19th-century New Age religion.
In chronicling how the transformation of yoga from sacred discipline to exercise program allowed for the creation of an embodied spiritual practice, Goldberg presents an original, authoritative, provocative, and illuminating interpretation of the history of modern yoga.
Max Popov is a fitness trainer and scholar of modern yoga. He developed weight-resistance yoga in the late 1980s by applying the teachings of B. K. S. Iyengar to the strength-training teachings of famed 1920s Indian bodybuilder K. V. Iyer. He lives in New York City.
The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice
263.27 (July 4, 2016): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice
Elliott Goldberg. Inner Traditions, $39.95 (512p) ISBN 978-1-62055-567-5
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Fitness trainer Goldberg presents a richly detailed examination of modern yoga, beginning on the opening pages with Shri Yogendra and his experience of meeting his guru in 1916 at the age of 18. Goldberg divides the book into three major parts: "Divesting Yoga of the Sacred," "Making Yoga Dynamic," and "Making Yoga Sacred Again." In each section he explores some of the major players (11 in all) who shaped the development of modern yoga, including Yogendra, who eventually stripped hatha yoga of what he called its "mysticism and inertia" and ushered its conversion from intimate devotion to a single guru into the modern-day class session with a yoga instructor and fellow students. Other luminaries profiled here are Swami Kuvalayananda (who lived with a pet deer), T. Krishnamacharya (a bullying yet "brilliant innovator"), and the Russian-born Indra Devi (who used yoga to combat anxiety and exchanged her Western garments for a trademark sari). As Goldberg traces yoga's path from sacred ritual to physical exercise to embodied spiritual practice, yoga practitioners and scholars alike will be fascinated by these yogin pioneers and their colorful stories. Goldberg offers a vibrant and accessible study of yoga's history, growth, and transformation. 99 b&w illus. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice." Publishers Weekly, 4 July 2016, p. 59. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302940&it=r&asid=1585dedbac0dfccd773e5d5a3bd26fc0. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302940
Book Review: The Path of Modern Yoga
Cover image of The Path of Modern Yoga
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Book reviews
History
Through the stories of eleven key figures, ranging from Indian yogis to an American-born journalist, author Elliott Goldberg engagingly recounts the path of modern yoga. The approach is scholarly but interesting. For the person willing to learn about how modern yoga came to be, this book will not only accomplish that, but will also deepen one’s spiritual practice.
One of the six Indian yogis talked about in this book, Shri Yogendra, believed that “freewheeling experience” (not adhering to rules) in the profane world is one of the keys to self-realization. Yogendra was the person that commodified yoga. He brought it out of the religious space and into the marketplace as something that can be bought and sold.
This story of Yogendra is one example of how Goldberg tells the story of modern yoga, bringing it from an ancient religious practice to a modern spiritual one. The book creates an account of how yoga moved from mainly seated meditation to mainly physical postures. The transition was not a corruption of the practice but a successful growth into an embodied spiritual practice.
The book touches on a wide range of topics from yoga for anxiety to mixing yoga and bodybuilding, from contortionism to becoming a western, female yoga teacher. The treatment of the path to modern yoga is no doubt thorough and informative. It may serve as a great reference to you in your journey to learn more about how yoga came to be what it is today.
The book negates the idea that yoga is specific to one form or one religion. It has truly been brought to the masses for them to enjoy. The final chapter of the book discusses how the physical motions of yoga have deeper, spiritual meanings or realities as part of B. K. S. Iyengar’s lessons.
“The dynamic meditation that Iyengar created from his asana practice is new, brash, relevant, coherent, wise, and exalted,” Goldberg writes. “Not that it can’t be placed within a powerful religious and philosophical current that originated in the West: New Age Spirituality.”
The Path of Modern Yoga is an in-depth treatment of yoga with focus on some of the key figures who have shaped it. It is an interesting and scholarly approach to a well-researched topic that many yogis might have wondered about. It shows how postural yoga has become part of health and wellness culture today.
Elliott Goldberg Rides the Elephant in 'The Path of Modern Yoga'
Remski by Matthew Remski
August 4, 2016
This piece was written by Matthew Remski.
Remember that old Indian fable of the rajah who blindfolds his pundits, asks them to grab onto different parts of an elephant, and then report on what the object is?
The guy grabbing the leg announces that the elephant is a pillar. The one touching the ear says it’s definitely a woven basket. The pundit touching the head is convinced it’s a big clay pot. The rajah compliments each confident answer, and then reveals what they’ve missed.
It’s an apt metaphor for the recent explosion of modern yoga research in English. So many pundits, so many hands on the elephant. But who’s the rajah in this parable?
In 1996, Norman Sjoman uncovered the influences of South Indian wrestling exercises on modern vinyasa sequences. In 2004, Joseph Alter detailed the tensions between esoteric and scientific aspirations amongst early Indian yoga modernizers like Swami Kuvalyananda. Mark Singleton bootstrapped these and other findings into 2010’s groundbreaking Yoga Body. Singleton’s thesis boils down to this: The modern yoga we know today in studios and gyms from Boston to Mumbai developed from a turbulent early 20th-century collision of Euro-American physical culture movements and older Indian practices of embodied spirituality. It found expression through a tangle of colonial tensions, technological shifts, and the identity crises of actors negotiating “modernity” from either side of a blurring West-East divide.
These academic bones have been wrapped in more journalistic flesh: William Broad’s brusque tour through the dodgy medical claims of yogapreneurs, Stephanie Syman’s history of America’s peculiar romance with yoga’s “subtle body”, and Elizabeth Kadetsky’s poetic account of her ambivalent romance with BKS Iyengar, his yoga, and his family.
The rajah in my comparison here is yoga culture en masse. It’s praised each of these reports in varying degrees. But there are always reservations. In reading about their cosmopolitan yet private religion, modern practitioners yearn for something both more intimate than scholarship and more precise than the confessional. They want books that grasp beyond the trunk and tail.
Along comes Elliott Goldberg with a dozen years of dogged research, a sleuthing style metered out in engaging chunks, a deep appreciation for the embodied sensations offered by competing visions of asana practice, a sharp eye for human foibles and historical oddities, and no shyness around sharing his own aspirational definition of the yogic goal: To open up or attune to “Being.” With his weighty tome The Path of Modern Yoga: The History of an Embodied Spiritual Practice, Goldberg makes a bold attempt to ride the elephant. As blindfolded as everyone else, he wobbles a bit, but hangs on for long enough to produce something that a lot of people have been waiting for: A penetrating, body-aware cultural history of a modern spirituality, written through richly realized characters. Ken Burns should option it for PBS.
A penetrating, body-aware cultural history of a modern spirituality, written through richly realized characters.
The Path spins its tale through the works and days of a diverse cast of 20th-century yoga evangelists: Nine Indian men, one American-British woman, and the woman from everywhere and nowhere—Indra Devi. We have the romantic earnestness of Sri Yogendra, the forbidding austerity of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, and K.V. Iyer, the strutting bodybuilder. We catch the infectious enthusiasm of Louise Morgan, ghostwriter for the imperious Rajah of Aundh, Bhavanarao Pant Pratinidhi, injecting his public-health teachings on Suryanamaskar with early-feminist self-help values for her bourgeois British readers. We moon along with Bhavanarao’s son Apa Pant, a landless prince after the nationalization of his kingdom, a melancholic mystic in the shadow of his father’s sun worship. We puzzle over the traumatized pathos of BKS Iyengar.
Goldberg lets his Indian subjects confess how scintillated they were by an emergent Western muscularity, even as they resented its colonial sourcing and overtones. He lets their Euro-American followers show their orientalist longing for an antiquity lost to industrialization. Together, he lets their voices reveal the shifting meanings of physical movement in yoga: From religious ritual to the machine-like productivity of group exercise, to movements that are therapeutic/functional, stripped of both “mysticism and inertia," as Sri Yogendra asserted they should be.
Building on previous scholarship, Goldberg presents an elegant arc across three balanced sections and thirty-five tight chapters. Early modern yoga first saw itself as “desacralized” from its liturgical roots. It could then be transformed into a health and wellness discourse, and finally surreptitiously “resacralized” through the athletic non-dualism of teachers who, like Iyengar, “erased the distinction between the physical and the spiritual in yoga.”
The Path’s heroes are caught up in the modern anxieties they aim to calm with their evolving art. As entrepreneurial outsiders to both traditional and academic economies, they’re always on the lookout for new patrons and markets. Wary of the traditional guru’s role, they must carve out new spaces for transcendent expertise between holistic exercise instruction and self-help. Self-consciously, they test drive the new paradigm of photography, in which yoga practice can suddenly be “seen” and therefore must be performed (not to mention both delocalized and eroticized, as we see in the beefcake shots of K.V. Iyer that could well have been taken by Leni Riefenstahl). They struggle to understand the first impacts of a globalizing feminism upon physical culture. And they straddle centuries in their attempt to embellish their medieval art with scientific respectability.
This last task often sees auto-didacts nervously banking their charisma into credentials, while producing assertions that can go unquestioned for generations. The finest example emerges from Goldberg’s revealing chapters on Jagannath Ganesh Gune, who gave himself the pen-name of Swami Kuvalyananda when writing poetry in his thirties. Expanding upon the work of Joseph Alter, Goldberg shows that Gune largely succeeded in legitimizing yoga as a viable indigenous health care practice, equipped to supersede the colonial intrusions of biomedicine. But he did it—believe it or not—with little if any formal scientific training. Ardent, celibate workaholism was all it took to attract nationalist patronage and propel Gune to the top of India’s premier yoga research institute.
At his Kaivalyadhama Ashram, Gune worked as a lab-coated shaman-in-reverse, transmuting the esoteric into the scientific. He forged speculative links between chakras and nerve plexuses and waxed poetic about the effects of shoulder stand on the endocrine system. But his expertise was as precarious as that of today’s yoga-therapy pioneers, as Goldberg illustrates in one of his numerous set piece stories, told from personal letters:
Mahatma Gandhi himself once came to the “Swami” for relief from his poor circulation and high blood pressure. Kuvalyananda prescribed corpse pose and shoulder stand. The Mahatma’s blood pressure continued to climb despite earnest practice. Gandhi bailed. The Swami begged him to keep mum about the failed treatment.
Goldberg later shows how Kuvalyananda’s exuberant medical claims for shoulder stand were uncritically borrowed, chapter and verse, by his contemporary Sundaram, and then propagated down the years by the likes of Iyengar and the American yoga therapist Gary Kraftsow. In his analysis, Goldberg avoids the quicksand between empirical and experiential evidence on which the yoga tent is staked. He also refrains from commenting on how deference to authority figures might reframe what seems like endemic poaching between authors as homage. But on the whole he honors the Swami with a studied balance between skepticism and enthusiasm. “[Kuvalyananda’s] claims for the beneficial effects of yoga on health were largely inflated,” Goldberg notes. “But his prescriptions for yoga as fitness were inspired.”
As an elaboration on the work of Alter, Singleton, and others, Path fills in welcome detail. But where Goldberg uniquely shines is in the interpersonal sphere, poking away at the intense homosocial relations, both loving and brutal, between teachers and students. He pulls back the curtain on the culture’s paternalistic patterns to show that almost every tumultuous discipleship is preceded by a father’s neglect or untimely death, which the guru is positioned to either heal or exploit. Yogendra’s father was “forbidding,” Kuvalyananda was orphaned at 14, Sundaram’s family fell apart when he was 8, Krishnamacharya was sent off to a monastic school at the age of 10 after his father died. Iyengar’s father perished when he was 9. All of these men were likely yearning for love, support, and confidence in their bodies.
Early on, Goldberg marshals the (perhaps-too-broad) insight of psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar to suggest that these luminaries were already primed for complex devotional relations by their abrupt “second birth” at the age of 4 or 5 from the Indian mother’s indulgent love to the father’s world of absolute obedience. “Indian men,” Goldberg writes, quoting Kakar, “have a heightened narcissistic vulnerability, an unconscious tendency to ‘submit’ to an idealized omnipotent figure, both in the inner world of fantasy and in the outside world of making a living; the lifelong search for someone, a charismatic leader or a guru, who will provide mentorship and a guiding worldview, thereby restoring intimacy and authority to individual life.’”
To underscore the point, Goldberg opens The Path with the stunning account about how the intimate side of this dynamic played out for the young Yogendra in relation to his teacher, Paramahamsa Madhavadasaji: “the unfolding of Yogendra’s relationship with his guru,” he writes, “while ultimately being a chronicle of the quickening of his soul by the soul of another, more nearly resembles a mad love affair.”
In short order we’re told of Ramakrishna’s tearful doting on Vivekananda, Yoganananda’s trembling love for Yukteshwar Giri, how Kuvalyananda would lay his head in the lap of his martial arts teacher, Manikrao, and how Seetharaman Sundaram, years after concluding his close apprenticeship with yogic body builder K.V. Iyer, had a brief and entranced connection with Swami Sivaprakasa Ananda Giri, who spent much of his waking hours in ecstasy. Over several hundred pages, we begin to hear a subtle counterpoint to the logistics of how the postures spread, or how suryanamaskar itself flowed through a vinyasa of transcultural changes. The technical scholarship quietly points at a non-academic mystery: That yoga is always communicated between bodies in relationship.
Goldberg seems so entranced by the student-teacher love stories, however, that he almost falls off the elephant when he bumps up against the troubling specter of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, whose influence upon global yoga today outshines that of every other figure combined. After a brief biographical sketch—and out of nowhere—Goldberg virtually diagnoses Krishnamacharya as a sociopath, suggesting that he enjoyed “mistreating others” and “bullying children”. Later, Goldberg writes that “he saw the children as extensions of himself" ... and taught them “in order to glorify himself.” He seems triggered by this patron saint of modern yoga, and the research suffers.
There’s no shortage of data that casts shadow on the behavior and scholarly pretensions of the famous curmudgeon of Mysore. Both Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois report that Krishnamacharya physically beat them and his other students mercilessly. Iyengar reports that he was driven to the edge of suicide by the guru's violence. "My sister also was not spared from such blows", he writes, referring either to Jayalakshmi, who Krishnamacharya trained in asanas, or to Namagiriamma, who was given to the guru in marriage at the age of 11.
Further, yoga scholar David Gordon White has shown that the Krishnamacharya biographies written by his children and close devotees are mutually contradictory, and his central claim to authority—that he studied for seven years with a yogi in Tibet that no one else knows anything about—is likely a complete fiction. Unfortunately, Goldberg overlooks White’s work and asks readers to accept a single elliptical paragraph from Kadetsky that throws the Tibetan pilgrimage into doubt. (But not completely in doubt, as he goes on to treat the guru as if most of his self-reporting were simply true.) Then he makes the reader wait for 150 pages before backing up his character attack on the guru with citations from Iyengar’s memoirs. He misses Jois’ account of Krishnamacharya’s savagery, which could have supported his angle, if not his speculations into the guru’s internal state.
The “nastiness and volatility” of Krishnamacharya’s Mysore reign, as Goldberg calls it out, was real. Yoga historian Eric Shaw posted on it last year. It’s a deep stain on a culture that fancies itself as progressive, pious, and nonviolent. It’s also cognitively dissonant with modern yoga marketing, which is built on the living memory of Krishnamacharya’s surviving family and senior Western students, who don’t describe a tyrant. They cherish a little old man in semi-retirement in sunny 1970s Chennai, clad in a spotless dhoti, teaching shlokas and mantras and ministering to clients with a punctual discipline they took as austere kindness. If Goldberg reported on the conundrum of Krishnamacharya as delicately as he does his other subjects, we might gain insight into how tyrannical behavior gets erased in the name of yoga, why difficult fathers are so often forgiven, and perhaps what could lie beneath the surface of Iyengar’s ramrod-stiff tadasana. Such nuance could be especially useful when Krishnamacharya’s family and zealous devotees of all things guru-like can easily red-ink a few paragraphs to discredit 500 pages of otherwise careful work.
My only other reservation about this engaging book is either niggling or grave, depending upon your perspective and politics. I offer it here not as a critique of The Path’s research nor the heroic effort behind it, but of its scope and the position of its authorial voice. This critique is about blindfolds, and wonders whether yoga writers can ride this elephant in a different direction.
This critique is about blindfolds, and wonders whether yoga writers can ride this elephant in a different direction.
The Path of Modern Yoga is a great work for what it is: An English-language account of the invention of “modern yoga,” told from an exclusively Western perspective, using mainly English-language resources, in which the relevance of an Indian yoga innovation is usually framed through several pages of the Western cultural history with which most of its readers will already be familiar. The voice of this book, however, does not position itself as perspectival. It speaks in an unapologetic third-person omniscience, looking Eastward from the tower of progress-oriented history. Its reach is limited neither by formal academic framework nor any prefatory remarks from Goldberg explaining how and why his interests have been focused, and what he's leaving out. Its scope is encyclopedic, and with 75 pages of end-matter, The Path presents itself as conveying a complete story. Echoing the period of its focus, it speaks with a high-modernist authority that’s rare for a book published today. There’s a lot at stake when you try to ride the elephant.
Such a voice can foreclose interest in what lies beyond its reach. The Path is reporting on the evolution of an art form that originated within an indigenous, largely oral culture, in which Sanskrit provides the bedrock of embodied contemplation. But the book’s framework largely footnotes an Indian cultural and spiritual milieu so intrinsic to the lives of the early yoga modernizers it may never have made its way into the English texts they wrote for international export and to secure late colonial dignity.
What we don’t learn from The Path is what the ethnographic arm of the Hatha Yoga Project is trying to find out—precisely because it’s hidden from bookish Anglophone researchers and readers, and because the very event of “modernization” erases it. What was Indian physical yoga prior to the colonial collision? Who were its practitioners? How were its wellness ideals informed by Ayurveda before they were “scientized”? How were its aesthetics determined by Vastu? How were its ideas about manly beauty and courage informed by the literature of Ayurvedic elixir, religious iconography, Indian wrestling, or martial arts like kalaripattayu—long before photographs of Eugen Sandow began to circulate? (And how did those photographs—and photography itself—erase former ideals and ways of being?) How were its timings and rhythms informed by Jyotisha (astrological practice) and religious ritual, long before the fascist influence of coordinated group exercise?
In a few instances, Goldberg fills these absences with shaky claims. Like when he misses the ancient and ongoing influence of astrology upon Indian conceptions of the sun. “Although the therapeutic effect of sunlight may have been known to Indians in ancient times,” he concedes, “sunlight—or, rather, the burning concern with the curative value of sunlight—was rediscovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West.” Or here: “The claim that a mere sound can have an effect on the internal organs wouldn’t have been made before the late 19th or early 20th century. Chanting mantras had long been held to be a technique of mystical physiology used to awaken a divine manifestation through the chakras, centers in the body where aspects of spiritual consciousness and physiological functions merge.” This occludes the animistic mantra practices of Ayurveda, prescribed for millennia to heal specific tissues and cure specific diseases. The Path also claims that the systematic relaxation technique developed by Sundaram for Savansana has “no precedent in yoga literature or practice.” But Indologist Jason Birch has actually compiled several possible precedents.
Goldberg’s blindfold isn’t so tight, however, that he can’t peak around it to regularly honor the sublime yoga of the cultures he’s exploring. Consider this gem of a sentence about K.V. Iyer: “An Indian enthralled with the bodybuilding systems of Europeans, yet proud of and indebted to the centuries-old Indian practice of hatha yoga, Iyer forged a dynamic West-meets-East physical exercise system, in which movements to resist opposing forces are coupled with movements to surrender to opposing forces.”
The Path of Modern Yoga should be read and studied by every serious yoga student, with this caveat: Big books cast long shadows. But if shadows can be inviting, we can someday expect a response to this powerful volume from a more Indian perspective, privileging oral history over library stacks and continuity over newness. Such a response might dig into Iyengar's homeland and childhood for the roots of his fascination with alignment, rather than correlating it with Cubist painting and Bauhaus theater. It might unearth what Kuvalyananda—or his mother—knew about alchemical medicine before geopolitics encouraged him to stuff the round peg of yoga into the square hole of science.
It could be a response that shows we can ride the elephant of yoga against the modernizing narrative, towards the memory of what modernism has erased.
4.5/5 stars: Highly recommended. One bump, and some questions about framing.