The phenomenon of international posture-based yoga would not have occurred without the rapid expansion of print technology and the cheap, ready availability f photography. Furthermore, yoga’s expression through such media fundamentally changed the perception of the yoga body and the perceived function of yoga practice. These propositions rest on the assumption that photography (and the text that accompanies it) is by no means an objective medium reflecting what is simply “there” but an active structuring process through which society and “reality” are themselves endowed with meaning (Barthes and Howard 1981 ; Burgin, 1982 ). They are based also on the observation that postural yoga came fully into the public eye only when it was visually represented, most significantly through photography. I take this chronological coincidence less as a process of post factum documentation (i.e., a “transparent” setting down in images of what was already there) than as a bringing forth of the modern yoga body. Technologies are never simply inventions people use but means by which they—and their bodies—are reinvented (McLuhan 1962 ). The yoga body was not an apparition ex nihilo, of course, nor without precursors, but in a very clear way the photographic and naturalistic representation of the (generally male) physique performing yoga postures facilitated the creation and popularization of a new kind of body, culturally located within the Hindu renaissance and world physical culturism.
Photography, in brief, was part of the apparatus of commercial and cultural
domination that defined Empire. It could operate simultaneously as a mode of
control and power over the colonial “other” and as an expression of personal
and collective identity set in opposition to that other. As a vital locus of power,
then, photography was to become a hotly contested medium for those colonial
subjects who would assert their own identities and their own vision of their bod-
ies against the demeaning visual narratives of foreign ethnography and casual voyeurism. As Narayan (1993) puts it, such photographs remind us that what is
supposedly objective “in fact derives from a positioned gaze that highlights,
circumscribes, and is implicated in a system of power-laden social relations”
(485; see also Pinney 2003). In India, one of the key forums in which this struggle took place was the area of physical culture. The international physical culture movement was itself only possible thanks to mass produced, mass circulated images of the predominantly male body. Physical culture in India was no exception. Photography lent an unprecedented primacy to the imaged body, resulting in an overt, widespread concern for its cultivation. The body was brought to the center of public attention to a degree that had not been possible before. In this way, photographs of Indian bodies became powerful documents with which to refute the Western ethnographic case for Indian degeneracy and to assert the powerful, immediate and self-evident spectacle of national strength. The pages of Indian periodicals such as Vyayam, the Bodybuilder and books by physical culture luminaries like Ghose, Bhopatkar, and Ramamurthy are crammed with such images, which bespeak the nationalist project of citizen building. Often, as in Bhopatkar’s book of 1928, yogāsanas are a component part of this project.
Postural yoga was construed, popularized, and made possible within this
visual context. If new ā sana forms began to gain popularity in the mid-1920s, it was as a result of the representation of Indian bodies in the kind of mass-
produced primers and journals that fl ourished alongside comparable physical
culture material. One perhaps rather obvious point to be made here is that modern postural yoga required visual representation in a way that more “mental” forms of modern yoga did not. To take but one example: Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga , which openly shuns ā sanas , does not lose much from a complete absence of visual images—the message is fairly effectively (if not always cogently) conveyed through the written word. On the other hand, Kuvalayananda’s ā sanas of 1931 would be a far duller, more diffi cult to follow book were the motions and postures it details not supported with clear, visual, photographic references.
The coda to this point is that, conversely, the new visual culture gave popu-
lar primacy to what could be represented through images—a book with pictures was simply more appealing (and accessible) than one without. As Partha Mitter emphasizes, print technology and processes of mechanical reproduction effected profound shifts in Indian sensibilities, “turning urban India into a ‘visual society,’ dominated by the printed image” (1994: 120). Guha-Thakurta ( 1992 : 111) similarly notes the “general preponderance of photographic, realistic values in the visual tastes of the time.” One of the main reasons that postural yoga itself gained popularity is the simple fact that it had visual appeal within this society and imparted an immediacy to what could otherwise be (when confined to textual exposition) an opaque, perplexing subject. The yoga body was brought into the light. These specular representation of yoga postures in mechanically reproduced, modern photographic primers laid the “yoga body” out for objective scrutiny (and emulation) in an unprecedented way. The yogic body, as it shifted from the private into the public sphere, was thus transformed from the conceptual, ritual, “entextualised” body (Flood 2006) of tantric haṭ ha to the perceptual and naturalistic body of scientifi c modern anglophone yoga. Yoga—or rather a particular, modern variant of haṭ ha yoga—began to be charted and documented through photography with something like the “objective stance of thepathologist” (Budd 1997 : 59), much in the same way that Dayananda set out to investigate the body of ( haṭ ha ) yoga through the dissection of a corpse. Both projects start out with the assumption that modern and “traditional” ways of knowing conduce to a single, unitary reality and that the former can therefore be used to prove (or disprove) the validity of the latter. In this way, the rise of the modern, photographic yogic body effected the illusion of continuity with the haṭha tradition while in fact constituting an epistemological break from it.
