The Pātañjalayogaśāstra, i.e., the Yogasūtra, together with its oldest commentary called Yogabhāṣya, is the oldest preserved body of knowledge (śāstra) on Yoga that teaches a method to once and for all terminate human suffering by a specific meditation-induced insight. Like all human authors, Patañjali was indebted to the philosophical and religious thought of the culture and time in which he lived when he created his specific system of Yoga thought. Patañjali not only quoted numerous ancient works of Yoga and Sāṅkhya in order to support his positions with authoritative statements stemming from his own philosophical milieu, but he also adaptively reused philosophical and religious ideas of rival philosophical currents and schools to develop his philosophy. The presentation will focus on some significant building blocks that Patañjali reused to create his philosophical system. It will discuss Patañjali’s relationship to currents of Sāṅkhya thought and other early classical systems of philosophy, his attitude to Vedic Brahmanism, and his standing towards Buddhist ideas. The disentanglement of the numerous philosophical and religious threads that Patañjali wove together in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra leads to a better understanding of Patañjali’s teachings, his philosophical creativity and genius, and it provides a fascinating window into the philosophical and spiritual landscape of South Asia in the late fourth century CE.

Speaker Bio

Philipp A. Maas is a research associate at the Institute for Indology and Central Asian Studies at the University of Leipzig, following previous appointments at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University, Munich, Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the University of Bonn. He is a historian of thought interested in premodern South Asian cultural, religious, and philosophical history. In his teaching and research, he focuses on Sāṅkhya-Yoga, early classical Ayurveda, ancient Nyāya philosophy, and narrative literature in the Great Epic (Mahābhārata). Philipp sees the necessity to critically address the manuscript sources of Sanskrit texts to generate knowledge of what ancient authors and redactors thought and how and why their works were transformed over time. This attitude motivates his interest in text genealogy and textual criticism methodologies and has led him to establish the first critical edition ever of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Philipp published widely on the reception history of Pātañjala Yoga in premodern South Asia and in modern academic research, yogic meditation, Yoga philosophy, and the early history of South Asian religions.

Philipp is the author of Samādhipāda. The First Chapter of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra for the First Time Critically Edited). Aachen 2006. He is the co-editor of Yoga in Transformation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (together with Karl Baier and Karin Preisendanz, Vienna 2018), Suhṛdayasaṃhitā: A Compendium of Studies on South Asian Culture, Philosophy, and Religion Dedicated to Dominik Wujastyk (together with Anthony Cerulli, Halle an der Saale 2024), Adaptive Reuse: Aspects of Creativity in South Asian Cultural History (together with Elisa Freschi, Wiesbaden 2017), and Text Genealogy, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (with Jürgen Hanneder, Vienna 2010 = Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens 52–53 (2009–2010).

The Śivadharma corpus illuminates lay Śaiva beliefs and practices distinct from those of the professional Śaiva religions of the Atimārga (Pāśupata) and Mantramārga (Śaivasiddhānta, etc.). It is the focus of a project (ERC N°803624) led by Florinda Da Simini (Naples). As a contribution to this project, Dominic Goodall has been editing from manuscripts the tenth chapter of the Śivadharmottara. That text was probably produced in the 7th century and the chapter offers what may be one of the earliest accounts of Śaiva yoga.  A cursory read might suggest that it contains nothing unfamiliar, but the particular combination of the elements it involves is distinctive.

Being a theistic work, its yoga is not characterised by the suppression of activities of the mind (cittavṛttinirodha), as in Yogasūtra 1.2, but rather by one-pointed focus on Śiva (Śivadharmottara 10.2). Dominic Goodall will offer a summary of its teachings on this subject, highlighting both Mantramārga features that it includes (visualisations, an insistence on 6 aṅgas, the terms recaka, pūraka and kumbhaka), as well as features that it omits or fails to mention (any nāḍī of the yogic subtle body).

Speaker Bio

Dominic Goodall is a Sanskritist and historian of religion who has been a member of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO) since 2000.  He became Head of the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO in 2002, where he remained until April 2011. Then, posted in Paris from 2011 to 2015, he gave lectures at the École pratique des hautes études (Religious Sciences Section), principally on Cambodian inscriptions in Sanskrit and on the history of Śaivism from unpublished sources. He is now once again posted in Pondicherry, where he continues to pursue his scholarly interests, in particular in Sanskrit poetry and in the history of the Śaivasiddhānta.

Among his publications are editions and translations of works of poetry in Sanskrit and of hitherto unpublished Śaiva scriptures and theological commentaries. He is currently a professor (directeur d’études) at the EFEO, co-editor with Dr. Marion Rastelli of the Viennese dictionary of tantric terminology, the Tāntrikābhidhānakośa. In May 2016, he was elected membre correspondent étranger de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

The Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad is a composite work that blends ancient speculations on Vedic sacrifice with yogic ideas, terminology, and quotations (van Buitenen 1962). Although widely cited in modern scholarship as a key source for the history of early yoga, the work has only recently received attention in terms of practice and soteriology (e.g., Barois 2020). What is the yoga of the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad, exactly? Where does it fit into the broader genealogy of early yogic practice? And what does this tell us about the background and purpose of the text? In this talk I reconstruct the central praxis of what I shall call “Maitrāyaṇīya yoga:” meditation on OM supported by breath control, conceived as embodied ascent from sound to non-sound. I link this Maitrāyaṇīya praxis to the yogic soteriology of sound attested in earlier Upaniṣads and Brahmanical texts (Gerety 2021). I argue that Maitrāyaṇiya yoga is a distinctive and eclectic synthesis of Upaniṣadic, Pāśupata, Sāṃkhya, Pātañjala, and Epic-Purāṇic traditions—one that aims to update Upaniṣadic thought and practice in the light of yogic discourse in the mid-first millennium CE.

Speaker Bio

Finnian M. Moore Gerety, Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, is a historian of Indian religions focusing on sound and mantra. He is a co-Principal Investigator for “Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia” (MANTRAMS), funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council. After earning a PhD. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music and then Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. Integrating the study of premodern texts with insights from fieldwork in contemporary south India, Finn’s research explores how sound has shaped religious doctrines and practices on the subcontinent from the late Bronze Age up through today. His current book project for Oxford University Press, All This is OM: Mantra, Yoga, and the History of the Sacred Syllable in Early India, is the first-ever scholarly monograph on OM, the preeminent mantra and ubiquitous sacred syllable of Indian religions.

In the Vivaraṇa, a commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra attributed to Śaṅkarabhagavatpāda, the author references yoga teachings outside the Pātañjalayogaśāstra on several occasions. Notably, the author attributes teachings on conquering the five breaths to Hiraṇyagarbha. These references raise questions about the existence of a Yogaśāstra ascribed to Hiraṇyagarbha, who is traditionally regarded as the first teacher of yoga. By examining these references in the Pātañjalayogaśāstravivaraṇa alongside related passages in various Sanskrit texts, a picture begins to emerge of a system of yoga teachings that was widely circulated among Brahmanical authors. In this system, yoga was defined as a means to attain the knowledge of the truth. Whether or not the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra had direct access to the definitive original Yogaśāstra taught by Hiraṇyagarbha—perhaps not—the partial reconstruction of this system of teachings of yoga might help us better understand the history of Brahmanical yoga before the Pātañjalayogaśāstra became overwhelmingly influential.

Speaker Bio

Kengo Harimoto began his study of Sanskrit in Japan and continued his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania. After completing his doctoral research, he has worked at universities in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Italy. His research interests are diverse, including the history of yoga, Indian philosophy, Purāṇic history, the history of Indian medical literature, Buddhist studies, and more. Among his contributions is the book God, Reason, and Yoga: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Commentary Ascribed to Śaṅkara on Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.23–28, published by the Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, University of Hamburg, in 2014.

The Qizil Yoga Manual is a lesser studied fragmentary manuscript from Central Asia, dated c. 5th-6th century CE, that describes Buddhist meditation practices termed 'yoga'. This paper explores the imagery of the meditation techniques, and analyses the grammar, specifically the syntax, of visual recollection in the Qizil Yoga Manual (QYM). It will examine various forms of vivid visualization that combine elements of both Sarvāstivāda and Mahāyāna meditation sequences in Buddhism.

Speaker Bio

Karen O' Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College London. She researches Asian religion and philosophy with a focus on early South Asian Sanskrit texts and culture on meditation, philosophy of mind, and mind-body practices. She has explored the early interconnections of Hinduism and Buddhism and the global transmissions of these religions. She is the author of Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (2021 Bloomsbury Academic), The Philosophy of the Yogasutra: An Introduction (2023 Bloomsbury Academic) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020 Routledge).

The cakras of yoga have fascinated interpreters ever since the tantric body entered Anglophone discourse and scholarship in the late nineteenth century. While multiple authors in this period advanced biomedical interpretations of the tantric body, the consensus of modern scholarship is that the tantric body is a ‘visionary’ body or mental construct without empirical basis. This essay seeks an interpretive space between these two views: interpretations of the tantric body couched in the idiom of science, and the view that it is purely an idealized product of visualization or imagination. Through a close reading of the early Śaiva tantra corpus, focusing on circa 7th–9th century sources, I argue that the tantric body was, in fact, closely aligned with the early-medieval medical body. This becomes apparent in tracing the history of two key concepts: the ‘lotus of the heart’ (hṛdaya-puṇḍarīka) and ‘wheel of the navel’ (nābhi-cakra), which feature in religious, philosophical, and medical literatures prior to their appearance in the tantra corpus. Close attention to this context reveals that discourse on the body in early Śaivism is rooted in widely-shared conceptions, many stemming directly from medical traditions. This paper will also trace some of the developments which led to more esoteric and visionary conceptions of the tantric body in the second millennium.

Speaker Bio

Shaman Hatley is an associate professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and chair of the Asian Studies Department. He studied Indology and Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Harunaga Isaacson, completing his doctoral thesis in 2007 and then teaching at Concordia University until 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of Śaiva tantric traditions in the early medieval period, goddess cults, and the history of yoga. 

The early history of kuṇḍalinī, as a creative, linguistic, and embodied power in classical tantric traditions, still awaits a comprehensive, text-critical study. By the late tenth century, Abhinavagupta’s corpus already betrays a sophisticated theological, yogic, and ritual vision of kuṇḍalinī, including reference to consort practice. This paper looks to earlier Trika scriptural sources that ground Abhinavagupta’s presentation of kuṇḍalinī. This includes the lost Kaula Trika texts he elaborates, his citation of extant Trika scriptures, as well as other Trika sources lurking in the background. This paper aims to provide a groundwork for future studies on the early history of kuṇḍalinī in the Trika tradition, and offers some preliminary insights on this Śākta lineage’s contributions to the history of this dynamic concept.

Speaker Bio

Ben Williams is an intellectual historian focused on Indian religions and the history of Śaiva tantra. He has received extensive training in Indian philosophy, literature, and aesthetics in Sanskrit sources. Ben received a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and completed his PhD in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He is an Assistant Professor of Hinduism at Naropa University, and currently serves as the program lead of Naropa's MA program in Yoga Studies. Current projects include a monograph on Abhinavagupta as well as two collaborative translations, which are also book-length projects.

In the seventh century CE, the Mālinīvijayottara, a revealed scripture of the Trika assimilated heterogenous Kaula yogic doctrines in its final chapters (Adhikāras 19 and 20). This material, together with a complex series of homologies given in the Mālinīvijayottara’s Adhikāra 2, forms one of the earliest sustained accounts of Kaula yoga. 

What relation does this material bear to the teachings transmitted in the earliest surviving Kulaśāstras, such as the Kulasāra, the Kulapañcāśikā, the Timirodghāṭa, the Kulānanda, the Kaulajñānanirṇaya and others? The present talk will focus on the various interpretations and later assimilations of the first (Ādya-) Mahākaula of the Kulasāra, the quartet of the piṇḍa, pada, rūpa and rūpātīta. In many works (e.g. the Nityādisaṃgraha of Takṣakāvarta) this sequence appears as the hallmark of Kaula (or Śākta) yogic practice. Of particular interest for our understanding of the Mālinīvijayottara’s yoga is the exhaustive exegesis of the sequence in Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka.

Speaker Bio

Somadeva Vasudeva received his PhD from Oxford University for work on the Yoga of the Mālinīvijayottara Tantra in 2000. Since then he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry in South India and has held Sanskrit teaching positions at UC Berkeley, at Columbia University in New York, and Kyoto University in Japan. He is currently  Professor of Indian Philosophy and Transcultural Studies at Kyoto University in Japan. His main areas of research are Theistic Yoga, Sanskrit Philosophy, Poetry and Aesthetics.

This talk will introduce a yoga practitioner audience to the genre of rasaśāstra literature, and give them a brief overview of the introduction of mercury into Indian medicine. I will then discuss the goals of rasaśāstra: the perfection of metals (lohasiddhi) and the perfection of the body (dehasiddhi). In defining this perfected body we fill find an alchemical patient who has attained a long, disease-free life so that he can then work toward the attainment of superhuman powers and enter into the transcendent states familiar to tantric and yoga practitioners. Additionally, I will consider alchemical goals such as youthfulness, especially the elimination of wrinkles and grey hair, which are not ambitions of vanity, but instead physical markers that one is able to participate in long-term practice aimed at attaining liberation. Finally, I will introduce the importance of initiation and a guru to Indian alchemy. This demonstrates that the alchemist must have not only deep pharmacological knowledge, but must be chosen for attributes such as purity, virtuousness, truthfulness, and devotion to the gods. In this talk I will introduce several texts from the 12/13th and 13-15th centuries to provide specific examples of recipes and textual narratives in order to demonstrate the connections between rasaśāstra, yoga, and tantric works.

Speaker Bio

Patricia Sauthoff is an assistant professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on explorations of death, medicine, health, anti-aging, sexuality, gender, and ritual in Sanskrit religious and religio-medical texts, with an emphasis on tantra and alchemy (rasaśāstra). She is the author of Illness and Immortality: Mantra, Maṇḍala, and Meditation in the Netra Tantra (2022 OUP).

My interest in yoga took hold on my first trip to India in 1988. I started to research its practice and history as part of my studies for my MA in South Asian Area Studies at SOAS in 1992–1993 and have continued to do so ever since. In this talk I shall discuss how my understanding of yoga has evolved over that period in the light of my own work and that of my colleagues. Topics I will cover will include the origins and development of the practices of haṭhayoga, the identity of its practitioners, the importance of multidisciplinary research, the limits of textual scholarship, the nature of samādhi, and the advantages and disadvantages of being a scholar-practitioner.

Speaker Bio

James Mallinson is Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Balliol College. Jim has spent many years living in India with traditional sadhus and yogis, and was honoured with the title of Mahant by the Rāmānandī Saṃpradāya at the 2013 Kumbh Mela at Allahabad. He was the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project (SOAS, 2015–2021) and the AHRC- and DFG-funded Light on Hatha Project (SOAS, Oxford and Marburg 2021–2024), and has authored several books and articles on the history of yoga and its practitioners, including the Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha (Routledge, 2007),  Roots of Yoga (with Mark Singleton, Penguin Classics, 2017), the Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla (EFEO, 2021) and the Dattātreyayogaśāstra (EFEO, 2024), as well as several volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry for the Clay Sanskrit Library series.

Yoga has become a global phenomenon, widely recognized for its significant benefits to both physical and mental well-being. As more people integrate yoga into their daily routines, its role in fostering a happy and productive life has become increasingly apparent. Consequently, yoga holds immense importance for the overall development of humanity. Historical evidence suggests that yoga originated systematically in ancient India and has evolved over millennia. Today, several ancient and medieval literary sources provide insights into the gradual development of yoga practices, revealing how these traditions once flourished and spread extensively across the Indian subcontinent. Recent research has shed new light on the history and evolution of yoga practices.

The Siddhas played a pivotal role in the development and dissemination of Hatha yoga practices. Over time, this Siddha tradition became widely known as the Nath tradition. Within this Nath Yogi lineage, prominent figures such as Matsyendra, Goraksha, Virupaksha, Chaurangi, Jalandhar, and Kanipha have gained significant recognition, as evidenced by the thousands of sculptures depicting them. These sculptures are predominantly found in temples, caves, forts, and structures like step wells. Additionally, some of these sculptures portray various Hatha yoga postures. This archaeological evidence underscores the profound impact of yoga practices on contemporary Indian society.

Given the limited availability of literary sources documenting the evolution and glory of yoga practices, sculptural evidence becomes crucial in understanding the spread and status of Hatha yoga during the medieval period. Considering the close relationship between Nath yogis and Hatha yoga, an in-depth study of these figures is essential. Through the examination of sculptures depicting Nath yogis, valuable insights into the development of Hatha yoga practices can be indirectly gleaned.

In this research paper, I have endeavoured to present key Nath Yogis and their associated sculptures, highlighting some significant asanas (postures) and their gradual development, as explored in my doctoral research. Furthermore, I have analysed prominent images of Nath-Yogis found across Western India and the broader region. This study aims to enhance our understanding of the significance of archaeological and sculptural evidence related to the Nath-Yogi tradition and Hatha yoga.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Vijay Sarde is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Archaeology at the Central University of Karnataka, Kalaburagi, India. His research primarily focuses on the archaeology and history of the Natha-Siddhas, as well as art and architecture. He earned his PhD from the Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute in Pune, where his thesis, titled "Archaeological Investigations of the Natha Sampradaya in Maharashtra (c. 12th to 15th Century CE)," provided significant insights into the historical and material culture of the Natha Sampradaya. He also holds a Master’s degree in History from the University of Pune and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Archaeology from Deccan College.

Dr. Sarde has been awarded a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) for his doctoral studies. Dr. Sarde’s scholarly contributions include over 22 research papers in international and national journals and numerous articles in English, Hindi, and Marathi. He is the author of the book ‘The Archaeology of the Natha Sampradaya in Western India, 12th to 15th Century’ (Routledge, 2023). He has also contributed thirty-four entries from the Early and Medieval periods to the Marathi Vishva-kosha (Encyclopaedia), Government of Maharashtra. His research notably explores the sculptural evidence of Nath yogis, yogic postures, and the architectural features of lesser-known temples in Maharashtra and beyond.

Dr. Sarde is an active member of several prestigious scholarly societies, including the Indian Archaeological Society (IAS) and the Society of South Asian Archaeology (SOSAA).

Within yoga's long and diverse history, Jain Yoga represents a significant and yet understudied tradition of yoga theory and practice. Initially conceived as the restraint (saṃyama) of one's conduct in line with the Jain principle of non-harming (ahiṃsā), “yoga” eventually connoted the activity of mind, body, and speech that attracted karma to one's soul according to Jain karma theory, and which therefore needed to be directed in an ethical manner in order to avoid karma’s consequences. 

Only after the writing of Patañjali's Yogaśāstra do we encounter Jain Yoga as a comprehensive spiritual path in itself in the work of Haribhadra and other Jain authors who would follow him. While these authors would transform Jain Yoga, they simultaneously retained a commitment to the Jain tradition’s vow to practice ahiṃsā as well as to the tradition’s unique theory of karma. 

Learn how Jain uses of the term “yoga” developed over thousands of years and how Jain yoga both informed, but also has been informed by, the broader development of yoga and other cultural phenomena both in the ancient South Asian past and all the way into the global present.

Speaker Bio

Christopher Jain Miller, the co-founder and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Arihanta Institute, completed his PhD in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Davis. He is Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute, Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut, and Visiting Professor at Claremont School of Theology. Christopher's primary fields of research interest are Yoga Studies and Jain Studies, and he currently serves as the co-chair of the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit at the American Academy of Religion as well as on the steering committee for the Yoga Darśana Yoga Sādhana conference. 

Christopher is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024) and the co-editor of Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement (SUNY 2025) as well as Beacons of Dharma: Spiritual Exemplars for the Modern Age (Lexington 2020).

In contemporary understandings of yoga the subtle body (sūkṣma śarīra) is often associated with the theory of the five sheaths (kośas) ‘ascending’ in subtlety from the gross food sheath through breath, mind, consciousness and bliss. The sūkṣma śarīra is also associated with esoteric energetic wheels (cakras) and channels (nāḍīs). The haṭha corpus does not use the term sūkṣma as a typology of the body (though Yogabīja 53 describes the body as more sūkṣma than sūkṣma). Ondračka (2015) finds no evidence for a transcendent body in the Nātha-Siddha tradition and locates this language in the secondary literature. In light of the absence of sūkṣma śarīra in the haṭha corpus Mallinson and Singleton use the term ‘yogic body’ rather than ‘subtle body’ (2017:171ff). Though important scholars such as Holdrege (2008, 2009) and Wujastyk (2009) disaggregates the body into different typologies to aid analysis, I argue for a simplified approach, using simply the term ‘body’. 

In this presentation I précis conceptualisations of the body and sketch how the early haṭha corpus articulates the body. The body is variously described in material and esoteric terms, and the practices of yoga attenuate the body’s materiality. Yet the sources do not always or consistently separate the ‘yogic body’ from the body. Contra Mallinson and Singleton I avoid the term ‘yogic body’ to avert, on the one hand, fabricating a conceptual consistency across the sources, and on the other, impute an ethereality at odds with the materiality of the body that I wish to foreground (the sources do also include ethereal accounts of the body). For the body as yet unrefined through the process of yoga I prefer the term ‘saṃsāric body’. For the body variously refined through the processes of yoga I prefer simply ‘body’.  

Speaker Bio

Dr Ruth Westoby is a yoga practitioner and academic researcher in yoga and Asian Religions. She studies yoga through Sanskrit textual sources and interviews exploring, amongst many topics, the materiality of the body and sexuality from a critical theoretical perspective. Ruth holds a PhD from SOAS University of London on ‘The body in early haṭha yoga’, supervised by Dr James Mallinson and Dr Richard Williams. Ruth is working on two book projects from her doctoral thesis that passed without corrections.  Ruth has published early research findings in the peer-reviewed Religions of South Asia and numerous public articles. Ruth is Visiting Lecturer in Asian Religions at Roehampton University, teaching postgraduate Theory and Method in the Study of Religion and undergraduate courses on Asian Religions, Cultures and Ethics, Contemporary Issues in Global Religions and Religion, Ecology and Politics. Ruth collaborated with the Haṭha Yoga Project’s ‘embodied philology’, interpreting postures from an 18th-century text teaching a precursor of modern yoga, the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, in 2016 and 2017. Ruth serves on the steering committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit of the American Academy of Religions. In 2010 she received an MA in Indian Religions from SOAS, University of London, with Distinction. See www.enigmatic.yoga.

Unlike its Tantric and Āgamic scriptural predecessors, where mantra plays an elevated role within the doctrinal systems of Mantramārga praxis, in most medieval Yogaśāstras that feature Haṭhayoga, teachings on mantra are largely absent or assume a lesser status. The Dattātreyayogaśāstra states that Mantrayoga can be “mastered by anyone” and that the “weak are entitled” to practice it. Likewise, mantrasādhana is listed as one of the obstacles to yoga practice. In the Śivayogapradīpikā, mantra is reframed more positively, however, is interiorized within a prāṇāyāma environment, specifically in the form of the ajapā, the “unuttered” mantra—that is, the natural sound of the inhalation and exhalation. This type of interiorized yogic mantra thus holds a more positive soteriological value within the context of prāṇāyāma than does traditional mantra japa on its own. As has been argued, this ajapā can also been seen as a yogic appropriation of the principal Vedic Gāyatrī mantra (Mallinson and Singleton 2017, 134).

This paper will introduce and analyze the Śivayogapradīpikā’s unique teachings on the ajapā within the context of its Haṭhayoga. I show that the unuttered mantra of the breath, comprised of the disyllabic haṃsa, is first reversed to so ’ham, and then in turn is fashioned into the monosyllabic oṃ. Through the success of yogic praxis, the all-important Vedic Gāyatrī mantra is thus re-interiorized within the yogic body in the form of oṃ—ultimately leading the yogin to the highest prāṇāyāmic state of kevalakumbhaka.

Speaker Bio

Dr. Seth Powell is a scholar of Indian religions, Sanskrit, and yoga traditions, who earned his PhD in South Asian Religions at Harvard University. His dissertation comprised a critical edition, translation, and detailed study of a 15th-century Sanskrit yoga text from south India known as the Śivayogapradīpikā—which uniquely combines yoga, ritual, and devotion. He also works on the visual and material culture of yoga in premodern India, uncovering yoga's past through temple sculptures. Seth is the founder and director of the online educational platform, Yogic Studies, which provides extensive courses and training in Yoga and South Asian Studies to students worldwide.

For centuries, Muslim observers have been aware of the ascetics and wonder-workers of India, commonly known as jogis. Sufi mystics took note of yogic breath control and other practices found among jogis, though their reactions ranged from enthusiastic acceptance to skeptical caution. This presentation will examine several examples of Sufi attitudes to yoga, including three different versions of a text on hatha yoga practices, divination by breath, and summoning yogini goddesses: the Fifty Kamarupa Verses(Persian; also called the Amrtakunda), which was revised and translated into Arabic as the Pool of Life, and then translated into Persian and expanded as the Ocean of Life. This complicated process basically appropriated particular yogic practices and experiences and interpreted them in a sophisticated framework of philosophical and scientific categories derived from Islamic and Greco-Arabic schools of thought. This is an important demonstration of the way in which yoga has been juxtaposed with different religious traditions while retaining distinctive elements in recognizable forms.

Speaker Bio

Carl W. Ernst is an academic specialist in Islamic studies, with a focus on West and South Asia. He has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and he has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture. He studied comparative religion at Stanford University (A.B. 1973) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1981). He has taught at Pomona College (1981-1992) and has been on the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1992-2022), where he is William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus (http://carlwernst.web.unc.edu/home/).

His most recent publication is Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath, from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (co-authored with Patrick d’Silva). Richmond VA: Suluk Press, 2024.

The Gurpratāp Sūraj Granth (1843), also known as the Sūraj Prakāś, was the magnum opus of the poet Santokh Singh (1787-1843), a court poet of the king of Kaithal, a city state in the region of modern-day Haryana. This voluminous text, 60,000 in total verses, composed in Brajbhasha, extolled the feats and history of the ten Sikh Gurus and became a foundational source text for later Sikh writings. Utilizing Sikh source material from the 18th century, Santokh Singh integrates this material with discussions on Yoga and Vedanta throughout the text. This paper seeks to ask the question: How does Santokh Singh frame Yogic practice with Sikh teachings? In answering this question, the paper will explore a story within the text wherein Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, expansively details two types of Yoga, kaśaṭa yoga and bhakti yoga. Santokh Singh’s viewpoint on the matter will add an important precolonial perspective to the discussion of Sikhi and Yoga. The paper will conclude by connecting this perspective with modern scholarship exploring the connections between Sikhi and Yoga.

Speaker Bio

Jvala Singh is a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley, for Punjabi and a sessional instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, teaching courses on religion in India and Sikh history. He completed his PhD (2024) at the University of British Columbia, where he explored pre-colonial Sikh historical narratives. This examination explored literature in Punjabi and Brajbhasha from the 18th and 19th centuries, building off his previous M.A. research completed at the University of Toronto, where he focused on Sikh Brajbhasha versions of Sanskrit epics, such as the Ramayana.

While the "Madras Yogi" Sri Sabhapati Swami's (ca. 1828–1923/4) English works attracted some degree of global attention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were just as much if not more instructions on yoga provided in his relatively unknown vernacular works, including in a Sanskritic form of Tamil. One especially notable instruction is his "Secret Teaching on the Four Types of Temples" (caturvita ālayaṅkaḷiṉ rakaciya upatēcam), published in 1889, which included four illustrated diagrams that are intended to depict four kinds of "temples" or "dwellings": 1) an Unfragmented-Cosmic Principle-Universal Temple, 2) a Fragmented-Embryonic-Cosmic Principle-Bodily Temple, 3) an Outer-Established Temple of Mental Ritual Worship, and 4) an Established-Vision-Meditation-Temple. The first two temples create an analogy between a universal form of Shiva's linga and the human body, with the fourth temple establishing this analogy in physical and architectural space. The third temple, however, describes a practice of mental ritual worship (māṉasapūjai) that in this instruction is uniquely framed within the broader context of yoga. This third temple, a projection to be performed by the yogin "using the mind," can be used not only for consecrations, burning incense, lighting the lamps, food offerings, salutations, worship, hymns, and mantra meditation, but also for more complex yogic goals like unity with or dissolution into the absolute and for concentration on a single shape. This paper begins by providing a details description of these four temples, including the unique ways they weave deities and temple architecture into the human body and its inherent nature (svarūpa). The second part of the paper analyzes this teaching's connection with other physical and mental methods of yoga that Sabhapati Swami teaches elsewhere in his literature, both in English and vernacular languages, and attempts to place it in the social and historical context of his life and times. 

Speaker Bio

Dr. Keith Edward Cantú is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian Religious Traditions at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, where he is also a research associate for a new multiyear initiative called the Transcendence and Transformation Database. As a budding historian of religions, his interdisciplinary research especially focuses on South Asian yoga, tantra, and the interface between Sanskrit and Indic vernacular languages, especially Bengali andTamil, and on the global occult movements Thelema and the Theosophical Society. Keith was previously Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at St. Lawrence University and is in the process of preparing a third course for Yogic Studies.

Keith’s first monograph Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. He has also co-edited a volume of Baul songs and translations, published as City of Mirrors: Songs of Lālan Sā̃i, and has authored numerous other articles and chapters on yoga- and esotericism-related topics. Current projects include reprinting and translating several previously unknown or largely forgotten Tamil and Hindi works of Sri Sabhapati Swami and of his gurus, and a second monograph that analyzes the history of and contexts for yogic and magical practices in the Thelemic librae or instructional books of Aleister Crowley.

A three-year collaboration between researchers at SOAS University of London and the University of Marburg has produced a new critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā (“Light on Haṭhayoga”), a definitive work on Haṭha and Rājayoga that was composed in the 15th century. The project consulted nearly 200 manuscripts and gathered a large amount of testimonia from earlier texts that were used by the author of Haṭhapradīpikā and subsequent works that borrowed or quoted from the Haṭhapradīpikā. This talk will present some of the new insights into the text and its transmission, including several examples that show how radically the work changed over the centuries.  

Speaker Bio

Jason Birch (DPhil Oxon) is a co-Director of the Yogacintāmaṇi project at the University of Massachusetts Boston and an associate of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. His recent publications include Āsanas of the Yogacintāmaṇi: The Largest Premodern Compilation on Postural Practice, The Amaraugha and Amaraughaprabodha of Gorakṣanātha: The Genesis of Haṭha and Rājayoga, a critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā (with colleagues of the Light on Haṭha project) and On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose: The Nepalese Version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā (with colleagues of the Suśruta Project). At SOAS University of London (2015–2023), he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Light on Haṭha project and a Post-doctoral Research Fellow of the Haṭha Yoga Project. He is a founding member of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the peer-reviewed Journal of Yoga Studies.

Yoga has an enormous range of meanings, but two spheres dominate its most common uses: yoga as a psychophysical activity and yoga as philosophy. In this talk, we trace a third sphere for yoga as political thought and practice that intersects with the other two yet retains a distinct genealogy in text and history. This political idea of yoga names the strategies of control used by kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes political stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance that follow victory. Yoga here names routes to sovereign self-rule under the yoke of foreign power and defines righteous action amidst the grime of politics and even war. Our talk draws on our book,The Yoga of Power, which will be published by Columbia University Press in November 2024. We'll lay out the book's key arguments and empirical subjects from India’s earliest textual history to its bureaucratic forms in contemporary India.

Speaker Bios

Sunila S. Kalé is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her previous publications include Electrifying India (Stanford 2014) and Mapping Power (Oxford 2018) and numerous essays in the fields of yoga studies, politics and political theory, development studies, energy studies, and South Asia Studies.

Christian Lee Novetzke is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle. His prior publications include Religion and Public Memory (Columbia 2008), Amar Akbar Anthony (Harvard 2016), The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia 2016), and many essays in the fields of yoga studies, religious studies, history, and South Asia Studies.

In this presentation, after a brief introduction to yoga in ascetic contexts, I examine āsanas as part of ascetic practices (meditation and tapasyā), as well as ascetics’ physical performances. My aim is to establish a theoretical framework that incorporates  the concepts of performative act, performativity, and performance. In this context, where, ‘performative act’ refers to the acts that transform the reality of the performer, ‘performativity’ pertains to how religious rituals, practices, and discourses actively construct religious identities, experiences, and social realities, and ‘performance’ denotes the conscious intent and purpose behind the physical execution of patterned movement. I argue that āsanas can be considered as manifestations of cultural values and beliefs—symbols of asceticism, austerities and powers—that have been “manipulated” and adapted over time, leading to the performativity of meditative āsanas being incorporated into modern yoga.

Speaker Bio

Daniela Bevilacqua is an Indianist specialized in Hindu asceticism, investigated through an ethnographic and historical perspective. She received her PhD in Civilizations of Africa and Asia from Sapienza University of Rome and in Anthropology from the University of Paris Nanterre. She worked as a post-doc research fellow at SOAS, for the ERC- funded Haṭha Yoga Project (2015–2020). She is currently a researcher at CRIA (ISCTE-IUL) in Lisbon as PI of the project “Performing the Sacred: Ethnographies of Transgender Activism in the Kinnar Akhara”. She authored Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India (Routledge 2018), From Tapas to Modern Yoga. Sādhus’ Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox 2024), edited volumes, and written several articles and book chapters on topics related to Hindu religious tradition, gender, and embodied practices.

Patañjali is credited with significant contributions to Sanskrit grammar, yoga philosophy and the medical system of Āyurveda. He is venerated as an incarnation of Anantanāga and devotee of the Dancing Śiva in the tradition of the Naṭarāja temple in Cidambaram, Tamilnadu. Another Tamil tradition includes Patañjali among the Siddhas—physician-alchemists believed to possess tantric attainments or perfections (siddhi). Some authorities also regard him as a patron of music and dance.

In recent decades, Patañjali has gained increasing attention as the authority and figurehead in the realm of yoga. Traditionally believed to be the author of the Yogasūtras, a text that has achieved canonical status in many yoga traditions, Patañjalihas been appropriated by various contemporary authorities, yoga centers and Āyurvedic institutions. This development has led to the creation and installation of diverse visual representations, a process that continues to evolve. The modern engagement with Patañjali’s visual form appears to have begun in the 1980s in South India, encompassing statues and paintings.

Yoga guru Swami Ramdev has significantly popularized Patañjali’s name as an authority on Yoga and Āyurveda across India. He adopted the name for a line of products marketed as Patanjali® and Patanjali Ayurved®, and he also named a network of educational institutions in India after the sage. In 2006, he installed a large statue of Patañjali at the Patanjali Yogpeeth, one of these institutions. This statue is one of several public representations of Patañjali in contemporary India, with the Patañjali shrine in the Dhyānaliṅga temple complex at the Isha Yoga Centre, inaugurated in 1999, being one of the earliest. 

This paper surveys the visual representations of Patañjali in various parts of modern India and examines their function and significance.

Speaker Bio

Gudrun Bühnemann is a Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Religions in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. She received her Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies and Indology from the University of Vienna. Following her doctorate, she conducted extensive post-doctoral research at Savitribai Phule Pune University and the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in India, as well as at Nagoya University and Kyoto University in Japan. 

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Religion, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the German Research Council, among other organizations. She has published extensively on Tantric iconography and ritual. Her work on Yoga includes the book Eighty-four Āsanas in Yoga: A Survey of Traditions (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2007; 2nd edition, 2011) and several research papers. Currently, she is working on a monograph on the mythology and iconography of Patañjali. She regularly teaches courses on the history of Yoga. For more information, please visit her website: https://buhnemann.ls.wisc.edu/ 

This paper investigates the role of 'scholar-practitioners' within the context of yoga studies and its intersection with the social scientific study of religion. The concept of the scholar-practitioner, extensively discussed in fields like conflict resolution, counseling, and social work, is relatively underexplored in the domain of yoga studies. This paper examines the complexities and implications of combining academic research with practical yoga experience, highlighting the challenges and opportunities that arise from this dual engagement. By analyzing the balance between theoretical inquiry and practical application, the paper explores how scholar-practitioners navigate their roles and how their personal practice influences their scholarly work. The discussion addresses the broader issues of theory and practice, reflexivity, and the integration of academic and practical knowledge. It aims to contribute to the evolving understanding of the scholar-practitioner relationship, offering insights into how this dynamic can be utilized to enhance both academic and practical approaches in yoga studies.

Speaker Bio

Ass-Prof. Borayin Larios is a scholar in Religious Studies and South Asian Studies, with an M.A. from the University of Fribourg and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. His research focuses on Vedic traditions, material religion, and the anthropology of mantras, exploring both contemporary and classical practices in India. Dr. Larios has held important positions at the French Institute of Pondicherry and the EFEO.

In addition to his academic work, Dr. Larios is a scholar-practitioner of Yoga. He has presented and co-organized international Yoga conferences and is currently a main investigator in the Yoga in Latin America (YoLA) project. He also serves as a Principal Investigator for the ERC Synergy project MANTRAMS - Mantras in Religion, Media and Society in Global Southern Asia. This interdisciplinary project delves into the global history and cultural significance of mantras, including their roles in Yoga and Tantra traditions. His research bridges historical and contemporary perspectives on South Asian religious practices, and he has authored the book Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra (2017).

Before the turn of the 21st century, there was very little academic attention on yoga as a subject of study in any discipline. Yet in the last 25 years, Yoga Studies has become a vibrant interdisciplinary sub-field. This talk will explore the breadth and depth of contemporary academic studies of yoga. It will begin its reflections with Elizabeth de Michalis’ establishment of ‘Modern Yoga’ as a heuristic category of thought, considering both the limitations as well as the creative inspirations that this framing has enabled. It will go on to explore other questions including:

• To what extent and how has Yoga Studies been incorporated into the academy?
• Has Yoga Studies led or followed academic trends pushing away from an emphasis on religious texts and towards a study of lived, embodied practices? 
• What are the relationships between academic scholarship and practitioners of yoga?
• Does yoga scholarship transform communities of practice?
• How has popular interest in studying yoga has impacted the academy?
• How does yoga relate to other categories such as the ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR)?

Speaker Bio

 Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at The Open University (UK) and director of Inform, an educational charity based at King’s College London. Suzanne has been studying contemporary and modern yoga since 2002 and undertook her doctoral study at the University of Cambridge collaborating with Elizabeth de Michelis and Mark Singleton in workshops and events between 2003-2008. As a postdoctoral researcher, she focused on the modern entanglements between yoga, āyurveda and rasaśāstra (longevity practices) as part of a European Research Council-funded project AYURYOG (2015-2020). She has a long-term interest in overlaps between religion, health and healing as well as a broader engagement with new and minority religions. 

Recent publications include Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (2019) and the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020), co-edited with Karen O’Brien-Kop. She is currently preparing another edited collection together with Karen O’Brien-Kop entitled Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

The field of Modern Yoga Studies has been blooming enormously in the last years. While it has uncovered fascinating links in the chain of modern yoga, the field still needs to further widen the scope to include other regional stories as significant for the trajectories of modern and contemporary formations of yoga as Anglophone yoga is.  A wide and very rich terrain for this is the Hispanosphere and Latin America. A vast region, Latin America encompasses multiple episodes of unsuspected transmissions and fascinating innovations. It has also become a very prolific and active focus for yogic activities. In other words, there is no ‘Latin American Yoga’ or ‘Mexican Yoga’, but rather a variety of yogas that have competed and thrived in the region.

In this paper, I will provide a general comprehensive sketch of some key cases in the early development of yoga in Mexico in particular. By discussing these cases from a broad perspective, I will provide theoretical tools that can help us understand modern yoga in a more truly global way. The incidents to be discussed cover roughly the first half of the twentieth century. Even though they are quite close in time, they do not belong to a same dynamic or tendency, but rather reflect different actors, motifs, and global trends at stake.  Sometimes, a form of yoga was heralded as a means for spiritual growth, another as a means for political action, and still another one as a synthesis of all transcendental paths prophesied for Latin America. The theoretic perspective of this paper tries to give equal importance to the regional and the global by establishing the influence of international agents and by pointing out the unique adaptations to specific locations and periods.  

Speaker Bio

Dr. Adrián Muñoz is a Historian of religions, a poet, and tenured Faculty member at the Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de México. He is interested in interdisciplinary work, with special emphasis on South Asian religious movements. Some of his work has been focused on South Asian yogic traditions and hagiography.

He has written—in both Spanish and English—a couple dozen of academic articles, has authored three monographs, co-edited three volumes of essays, and contributed with over a dozen chapters to academic edited volumes. Some of his publications are: Yogi Heroes and Poets: Histories and Legends of the Naths (co-edited with David Lorenzen, 2011), Radiografía del hathayoga (2016), and Historia minima del Yoga (co-authored with Gabriel Martino, 2019).  A translation from Sanskrit to Spanish of two texts of hathayoga (the Gorakṣaśataka and the Yogabīja) has been released by a Barcelona publisher in 2024. Dr. Muñoz is currently heading Proyecto YoLA©, an ambitious collective research enterprise devoted to studying the history and reception of yoga in Latin America from a Global history and interdisciplinary approach.

In his Brajbhasha poem celebrating the life and career of the Saiva warlord Anupgiri, the late 18th-century Man Kavi described his subject’s martial asceticism in terms of “rājayoga.” By contrast, in his Bengali novel Anandamath (1882), written nearly a century later, Bankimchandra Chatterjee looked to “karmayoga” to project a new understanding of martial asceticism for the nation. An important difference between the two texts is that Man Kavi purported to be describing a historical fact, whereas Bankim was conjuring up a kind of historical fiction. The former, it might be said, sought to describe the way things were, whereas the latter sought to describe the way things ought to be. Much else separates these two authors, but what they have in common is their recourse to the rich and varied meanings of yoga to make a political point. With Man Kavi and Bankim as his points of departure, William Pinch will reflect on three streams of yoga discourse that inform the emergence of the modern political yogi.

Speaker Bio

William R. Pinch works on the intersection of military, social, and cultural history, especially in early modern and modern India. His interests range widely and include historiography, theory and philosophy of history, and historical representation. He is the author of Peasants and Monks in British India (University of California Press, 1996) and Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and editor of Speaking of Peasants: Essays on Agrarian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (Manohar, 2008). He has taught at Wesleyan University since 1991, where he is professor of history. He serves as consulting editor for the journal History and Theory.

Rishi Singh Grewal (1889-1964) can be considered the first teacher of yoga as it is understood today in the United States. Directly informed by the hatha revival in India, he taught a posture-based practice buttressed by medical science and transmitted it to a popular audience through print and direct instruction in the early-Twenties. Grewal was also an anti-colonial activist who fought against British rule in India and waged a legal battle in America after his citizenship was revoked.

In November, an eight-part podcast on the life of Rishi Singh Grewal will be released by Axis Mundi media. This paper will focus on the process of researching the life of Grewal and recounting it to a popular audience. It will describe the many historical sources available for figures like Grewal such as archives, online databases, and interviews with relatives and descendants, as well as the process of contextualizing a figure from a century ago when India, American society, and yoga itself were all seen very differently.

Speaker Bio

Philip Deslippe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara with a focus on Asian, metaphysical, and marginal traditions in modern America. His work on Yogi Bhajan’s Kundalini Yoga and the early history of yoga in the United States has appeared in academic journals such as The Journal of Yoga Studies, Sikh Formations, and Ameriasia, and in popular venues including Yoga Journal, Air and Space Smithsonian, History, and the Indian news site Scroll.

In this talk, I draw on work from my recent book Flexible India: Yoga’s Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), to explore how yoga is imagined in twenty-first-century fiction, art, and performance from India and the West. In particular, I investigate how yoga has been used to negotiate competing ideas of Indianness. I will discuss some of the general cultural forces that have shaped these representations of yoga and then focus on how members of the Indian diaspora have reinterpreted the practice through fiction, art and poetry. While these visions sometimes align with the way in which the Indian state promotes yoga to the world, they also introduce new perspectives on yoga that are informed by complex experiences of living as ethnic minorities in diasporic contexts. The flexibilities that have been demanded of India’s diaspora, I suggest, offer us a new and useful way of thinking about the flexibilities attributed to yoga. 

Speaker Bio

Associate Professor Shameem Black (she/her) was raised in a multiethnic Indian American family in the U.S., served as an assistant professor of English at Yale University, and now heads the program in Gender, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National University. Her research brings together analytical and creative approaches to explore literary, gender, and cultural studies with a focus on India and its diaspora. Her most recent book, Flexible India: Yoga’s Cultural and Political Tensions (Columbia University Press, 2024), explores yoga within a wide and sometimes wild body of imaginative twenty-first-century art, fiction, and spectacle. From murder mysteries to art installations to mom lit, yoga has gained new social and political significance through its encounters with popular culture. Shameem is a co-editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies and a co-convener of the MemoryHub@ANU. More detail about her work is available at www.shameemblack.org and https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/persons/shameem-black.