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The book's thesis is that modern yoga progressed in three stages from its pre-1900 state to what is observed today. Before 1900, haṭha yoga was the despised religious practice of a small minority on the fringes of Indian society. In the first stage, pioneers such as Yogendra and Kuvalayananda treated yoga as the subject of medical inquiry ...
De Michelis argued that modern global yoga has its roots in Vivekananda's Raja Yoga adaptation of yoga for a Western audience.. Harold Coward, reviewing the book in Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, notes that De Michelis distinguishes between Patanjali's account of yoga in his classical Yoga Sutras and Vivekananda's personal reinterpretation of yoga for the modern world in his 1896 Raja Yoga.
A few decades later, a very different form of yoga, the prevailing yoga as exercise, was created by Yogendra, Kuvalayananda, and Krishnamacharya, starting in the 1920s.It was predominantly physical, consisting mainly or entirely of asanas, postures derived from those of hatha yoga, but with a contribution from western gymnastics (Niels Bukh's 1924 Primary Gymnastics [6] [7]).
The anthropologist Thomas Hauschild reviewed the book for Current Anthropology, noting that before it and Joseph Alter's 2004 Yoga in Modern India there had been a "striking" absence of detailed studies of "non-Western movements" such as modern yoga. [9] The anthropologist Olga Demetriou reviewed Positioning Yoga for Social Anthropology. [10]
The physical asanas of modern yoga are related to medieval haṭha yoga tradition, but they were not widely practiced in India before the early 20th century. [8] The number of schools and styles of yoga in the Western world has grown rapidly from the late 20th century.
[12] Yoga teachers of South Asian heritage like Nikita Desai have stated that yoga has been "colonised" [12] by wealthy white society, putting it out of reach of many people. [12] The same article, however, quotes Gilani as saying that "I don’t think claiming yoga back as an Indian practice for only Indians is the way", [ 12 ] since the ...
The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West [S 1] is a cultural history of yoga by Alistair Shearer, published by Hurst in 2020. It narrates how an ancient spiritual practice in India became a global method of exercise, often with no spiritual content, by way of diverse movements including Indian nationalism, the Theosophical Society, Swami Vivekananda's coming to the west, self ...
This involved the dropping of many traditional requirements on the practice of yoga, such as giving alms, being celibate, studying the Hindu scriptures, and retreating from society. [79] From the 1970s, yoga as exercise spread across many countries of the world, changing as it did so, and becoming "an integral part of (primarily) urban cultures ...