The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  In hatha yoga, it’s the very functions of the body that are inverted. In his eccentric but fascinating study of yoga and Zen, Arthur Koestler points out that in hatha yoga, if “the function of an organ can be reversed, this will be done, whatever the effort.” Organs meant for excretion are instead trained to take substances in—Vajroli Mudra, described in The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, involves sucking released semen, or bindu, back into the urethra. (“The Yogi who can protect his bindu thus, overcomes death; because death comes by discharging bindu, and life is prolonged by its preservation.”) Meanwhile, organs meant for intake—the eyes, the mouth, the nose—“must be blocked, locked, sealed to the world. If this cannot be done completely, the functions will at least be partially suspended: breath, heart-pulse, pulse.”

  Pranayama, the control of the breath, is thus something much more significant than simple deep breathing. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika instructs in the practice of Khechari Mudra, in which the yogi cuts the tendon connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, then works, over time, to lengthen it. Eventually, the yogi can push the tongue behind the soft palate and use it to direct breath from one nostril to another, or shut the breath off completely. “He who knows the Khechari Mudra, is not troubled by diseases, is not stained with karmas, is not snared by time,” The Hatha Yoga Pradipika promises.

  Hatha yoga’s ultimate aim is the raising of sacred kundalini energy. Often envisioned as a snake that lies coiled at the base of the spine, kundalini energy represents man’s dormant (and sometimes supernatural) potential. Hatha yoga exercises are meant to awaken it and then force it up a channel that runs along the spine to the crown of the head. As it rises, the energy traverses the body’s chakras, or energy centers, activating latent powers as it goes.

  There’s an element of magic here that gets lost if you interpret the texts as simple guides to better health. Certain asanas are said to confer siddhis, or “supernatural powers.” The complex mystical physiology elaborated on in yoga texts—the subtle body comprised of chakras and nadis, or “channels”—does not necessarily correspond with the empirical, physical body. In other words, it’s a mistake to see the chakras merely as analogies to nerve plexuses. “ ‘Subtle physiology’ was probably elaborated on the basis of ascetic, ecstatic, and contemplative experiences expressed in the same symbolic language as the traditional cosmology and ritual,” writes Eliade. “This does not mean that such experiences were not real; they were perfectly real, but not in the sense in which a physical phenomenon is real.”

  When yoga is seen this way, mixing up mystical physiology and concrete human anatomy would be a category error akin to performing a blood transfusion with wine from the Eucharist. Yet this sort of categorical confusion about the difference between mystical, symbolic language and secular literalism would become hugely important in the development of yoga-as-exercise.

  Indian spirituality has long valued feats of asceticism, and asanas were involved in religious austerities as well as alchemical experiments. The seventeenth-century French physician and traveler François Bernier writes of naked, ash-smeared “Jauguis,” some dragging heavy chains, others spending hours in handstands and other postures “so difficult and painful that they could not be imitated by our tumblers.” The point of these exercises was devotional rapture and the destruction of individual subjectivity more than the enjoyment of robust good health.

  That said, there was an important physical fitness element in the lives of many hatha yogis. These men—and they were overwhelmingly men—were often far from the peaceable sages of the Western imagination. In fact, large numbers of them were fighters, akin in some ways to Shaolin monks. As the scholar Mark Singleton writes, from the fifteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century, “highly organized bands of militarized yogins controlled trade routes across Northern India.” Many formed mercenary militias. According to G. S. Ghurye, a leading Indian scholar, as many as seven thousand naked ascetics used to march, armed with spears, shields, bows, and arrows, at the head of the Jaipur Army.

  To prepare their bodies for fighting, these militant yogis adopted punishing exercise regimens that were, as Ghurye puts it, “almost the counterpart of the military drill that a regular regiment receives as a part of its training to keep it in trim.” It’s possible that some of the exercises now associated with hatha yoga had their origin in this sort of combat training, something separate from the yogis’ religious practice. That, writes Singleton, would help “explain the apparent discrepancy between postures described in medieval hatha yoga texts and the kind of postural practice ascribed to hatha yoga by modern innovators.”

  The British Raj was mostly able to pacify India’s yogin armies, driving the yogis to society’s margins. “No longer able to make a living by trade-soldiering, large numbers were forced into lives of yogic showmanship and mendicancy, becoming objects of scorn for many sections of Hindu society, and of voyeuristic fascination or disgust for European visitors,” Singleton writes. They became, in other words, like the yogis Eugenia saw on Chowpatty Beach.

  Such yogis were despised by orthodox Hindus and many modern reformers alike. The former reviled their impurity and disregard for caste. The latter saw them as relics of a superstitious, even barbarous, past they were eager to leave behind. Thus even as yoga philosophy enjoyed renewed international respect around the turn of the twentieth century, hatha yoga remained in disrepute—until the global craze for physical culture rehabilitated its reputation.

  If Swami Vivekananda wasn’t a hatha yogi, he nevertheless helped set the stage for the hatha yoga revival. A crucial bridge between India and the West, Vivekananda was the first Indian to turn the traditional missionary relationship on its head, bringing a modernized version of Hinduism to America. At the same time, he helped transmit back to India Western ideas about the spiritual value of physical fitness, ideas that would inform the reinvention of hatha yoga.

  Vivekananda’s arrival in the United States for the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 was a signal event in the history of American alternative spirituality. The parliament was held in conjunction with the Chicago World’s Fair, an unprecedented spectacle erected to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Pavilions—the Electricity Building, the Palace of Mechanic Arts, the Agricultural Building—celebrated the country’s innovation and abundance. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape designer who created Manhattan’s Central Park, turned the grounds into an American Venice, replete with canals, lagoons, and gondolas. The world’s first Ferris wheel conducted amazed visitors heavenward. On the Midway, sideshows and cultural curiosities beckoned: fortune-tellers, magicians, and the famous Cairo Street, with its bejeweled camels and scandalous belly dancers.

  The World’s Parliament of Religions partook of the fair’s universalizing spirit, its optimistic American assumption that all the world’s faiths could be gathered together, each contributing its own particular treasures. “Religion, like the white light of Heaven, has been broken into many-colored fragments by the prisms of men,” wrote the conference chair. “One of the objects of the Parliament of Religions has been to change this many-colored radiance back into the white light of heavenly truth.”

  Over two weeks in September, the parliament brought together representatives from most of the world’s religions—Jews and Christians, Hindus and Muslims, Buddhists, Parsis, Zen masters, Confucianists, and Shintoists. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, sent a speech to be read in absentia, and thousands packed the hall to hear it. Many attendees were Theosophists; even Mohammed Webb, an American convert who represented Islam, identified with the society. Altogether, one hundred fifty thousand people attended.

  The undisputed star of the conference was thirty-year-old Swami Vivekananda. Stout but handsome, with a regal, leonine bearing, he was “clad in gorgeous red apparel, his bronzed face surmounted with a huge turban of yellow,” as one attendee described him. With a sharp wit and a
delightful Scottish brogue courtesy of the mission school where he’d learned English, he was perfectly attuned to the parliament’s universalizing religious spirit.

  A devoted Indian nationalist, he’d been sent to the United States to plead for an end to the Christian missionary activity that was subverting his country’s religious traditions. (One of his patrons was the Maharaja of Mysore, whose son and successor would later have a major impact on Eugenia’s life.) Vivekananda was a devotee of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, an ecstatic mystic and worshipper of the goddess Kali. He was also dedicated to defending the reputation of Hinduism abroad, and to that end, he reimagined his master’s teachings in a way that was very much in line with Western liberal religious sentiments. His hybrid philosophy was deeply influenced by American transcendentalism, which was itself shaped by romantic conceptions of Indian thought, one of those cross-cultural Ouroboroses found throughout the history of yoga in the West.

  Vivekananda well understood how India (and he himself) could benefit from the veneration of searching Westerners. As he wrote in a letter to the Maharaja of Mysore, educated Americans had become “disgusted” by theories of “a big tyrant God sitting on a throne in a place called Heaven, and of the eternal hell fires.” His version of the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, which saw God not as a capricious father but as “our highest and perfect nature,” could speak to American intellectuals, filling the void left by religious disenchantment.

  Further, he believed, the more that sophisticated Westerners came to admire Indian religion, the more they would support Indian independence. “By preaching the profound secrets of the Vedanta religion in the Western world, we shall attract the sympathy and regard of these mighty nations,” Vivekananda wrote to one journalist friend, “maintaining for ever the position of their teacher in spiritual matters, and they will remain our teachers in all material concerns.” Elsewhere, he put it a bit more crudely. “As our country is poor in social virtues, so this country is lacking in spirituality,” he wrote. “I give them spirituality, and they give me money.”

  In Chicago, Vivekananda presented Vedanta as essentially an ancient, venerable antecedent to American New Thought, the popular mind-over-matter doctrine. He invited Americans to slough off Judeo-Christian ideas of sin and guilt: “Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name, heirs of immortal bliss—yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners…Sinners? It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature.”

  Americans embraced Vivekananda’s vision of salvation through self-realization. The New York Herald called him “undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions.” Following the parliament, he signed up with a lecture bureau and spent months traveling around the country for speaking engagements. Disciples began to collect around him; in 1895 he initiated his first two Western sannyasins, or “renunciants.” When his book Raja Yoga was published in 1896, it sold out in months.

  Vivekananda’s modernized version of Vedanta would have a huge impact on American New Age religion, particularly in Los Angeles, where the Vedanta Society that his followers opened would attract expat devotees such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley. Frank Baum, the Theosophist author of The Wizard of Oz, first heard Vivekananda speak in Chicago and was deeply affected by him; Baum’s biographer Evan I. Schwartz argues that the quests of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion are all allegories for the four yogic paths that Vivekananda elaborated.

  Almost as important as the ideas that Vivekananda brought to the United States, though, were the ones he brought home to India.

  Vivekananda had come to America at the height of the craze for what was then called physical culture. It started in the mid-1800s, when experts in both Europe and the United States grew worried that sedentary lives born of industrialization were making people weak and neurotic. An evangelistic passion for the wholesome, curative powers of exercise and health food was thus born. The idea of “muscular Christianity” infused the quest for bodily strength with religious valor.

  American newspapers and magazines hailed men such as doctor and homeopath Diocletian Lewis, a feminist, temperance activist, and abolitionist who promoted a gymnastic-based “movement cure” for female invalids. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, ran the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, which treated famous patients such as President William Taft and aviatrix Amelia Earhart with a regime of vegetarian food, breathing exercises, gymnastics, massage, and enemas.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Prussian strongman Eugen Sandow became an international celebrity and sparked the modern bodybuilding movement. While Vivekananda was in Chicago for the World’s Parliament of Religions, Florenz Ziegfeld, then an unknown impresario whose father ran a struggling Chicago nightclub, made his name by putting Sandow onstage, to awed reviews: “Sandow looks and feels more like a steel machine than a human being,” wrote the Chicago Tribune. “[W]hen he holds three horses on his chest, to say nothing of a teeterboard on which the animals stand, people forget to applaud, they hold their breaths and wonder.”

  Vivekananda was strongly affected by the physical culture movement, even if he didn’t do much exercise himself. If Westerners had pioneered muscular Christianity, he sought to create a muscular Hinduism, believing that Indians needed physical strength to gain their independence. After all, British domination was often justified in terms of physical superiority over sickly, effeminate subalterns, and Indians had internalized this hierarchy. One popular children’s chant from the Indian state of Gujarat went, “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian small / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall.”

  For Vivekananda, as for others who followed him, becoming strong was a crucial step toward becoming free. Indeed, he was even willing to jettison the most profound Hindu taboos in the name of bodybuilding. An unrepentant beef eater, he told one disciple, “The entire country has become crowded with sickly, dyspeptic, vegetarian ascetics…Now we have to make our countrymen enterprising by feeding them fish and meat.” Vivekananda also made a crucial link between controlling the body and controlling the mind, asking in one dialogue, “How will you struggle with the mind unless the physique be strong?”

  Physical culture spread rapidly in turn-of-the-century India, closely linked to Indian nationalism. When the bodybuilder Sandow traveled to India in 1905, as part of a triumphant world tour, he was a sensation. As he stepped off the train at Calcutta’s Howrah Station, he found hundreds of people waiting to greet him, and when he appeared in theaters and tents around the country, the standing-room-only crowds were “electrified,” in the words of the Times of India. Local newspapers heaped praise on him, and one wealthy Parsi businessman offered him ten thousand pounds if he stayed on in the country. The Maharaja of Baroda displayed a life-size plaster cast of Sandow in his personal museum.

  Sandow assured his Indian audiences that with proper training, they, too, could become strongmen. “The native Indians have a fine foundation for the building of large, physical men,” he wrote in the Indian Sporting Times. This was a message that they were eager to hear, since it suggested that British physical superiority wasn’t innate.

  At the same time, as the Indian independence movement gained strength, Indian nationalists turned away from the accoutrements of the Raj. People who had once worn Western clothes donned garments made from khadi, India’s homespun cotton cloth. It’s not surprising that they would seek an authentically Indian form of physical culture as well. In hatha yoga—or a modernized, hybrid form of it—they found it. Thus, starting in the nineteenth century, a new, rationalized kind of hatha yoga was born, one that would reach full flower in the twentieth.

  In the mid-1930s, Eugenia, finally cured of her long malaise, asked a friend of hers, a Nepalese princess named Buba, if she knew where she could find a yoga teacher. Buba referred Eugenia to her brother, Prince Mussoorie, who credited the discipline with transforming him from a heavy and unhealthy child int
o a lithe and vivacious man. The prince, in turn, directed Eugenia to Swami Kuvalayananda’s new yogic health center on Bombay’s Charni Road, one of the centers of the hatha yoga renaissance.

  Kuvalayananda was a charming, solicitous man with a white walrus moustache and corkscrewing white hair that reached his shoulders. “He reminded me of Einstein because he had the same peculiar look in his large brown eyes: speculative, puzzled and naïve at the same time,” Arthur Koestler wrote of him in the 1950s.

  A dedicated nationalist and yoga revivalist, Kuvalayananda had been at the forefront of hatha yoga’s transformation from a mystical, tantric practice into a modern health regimen. Yoga, he believed, could serve as the basis for an authentically Indian kind of physical culture. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, praised Kuvalayananda’s work, saying, “He opened out an entirely new field of research and has shown that the different aspects of Yogic Culture Therapy could not only stand the fierce light of modern sciences but are well in advance of all that has so far been discovered in the West.” Yoga became proof of Indian greatness.

  Born Jagannath Ganesh Gune in 1883, Kuvalayananda became deeply interested in both Indian nationalism and physical culture while a young man at Baroda College. He read the works of Bernarr Macfadden, an American muscleman and publishing tycoon, and studied with Rajratna Manikrao, a revolutionary who developed mass gymnastic drills to prepare young men for the anticolonialist struggle.