Left to right: Debra Diamond, David Gordon White, Birad Rajaram Yajnik, Mark Singleton, Sir James Mallinson
(photo by Neil Greentree)
Cathryn Keller, senior advisor and producer for external affairs, is writing a book on yoga in Europe during World War II.
Summer is the ideal time to add some yoga reading to your practice. Review your yoga summer reading list below, and read on for details about what you’ll learn.
Alongside the global yoga boom, there’s been an exciting explosion of insights into yoga’s past and present. Scholars are tracing yoga’s origins, meanings, and changes through history, anthropology, sociology, and religious studies—and now, for Yoga: The Art of Transformation, through art history and visual culture. Before the exhibition opens on October 19, we can delve into fascinating reads by authors who are contributing to its catalogue—the first art book to provide a visual context for contemporary yoga—and who will share new research at the Freer|Sackler’s public symposium in November.
As the body is central to both yoga and Indian art, Mark Singleton’s fascinating and accessible Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice is a great place to start. For lighter reading, check out this interview with Singleton and catalogue author James Mallinson, and Modern Yoga Research, a website Singleton maintains with his teacher Elizabeth De Michelis and emerging scholar Suzanne Newcombe.
Yoga is an embodied practice, a means to transcend physical and metaphysical suffering. We can preview the themes of nationalism, health and the body in South Asia, in the forthcoming catalogue essay on “Metaphysical Fitness” by Joseph S. Alter, an anthropologist of medicine who was born in India, in his book Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Philosophy and Science.
The exhibition will provide new views of places where yoga has been practiced, portrayed, and researched, from medieval temples to the caves and forest huts of ascetics to early twentieth-century gyms and clinics. Worth contemplating: the yogic landscapes in curator Debra Diamond’s award-winning Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur and the temple sculptures in her teacher Vidya Dehejia‘s many books on Indian art.
You can also visit the Freer|Sackler this summer to preview one of the treasures that will be on view in the exhibition. Watch Diamond interpret its representation of the paradox of the yoga body in our latest video.
On the beach or on the way to work, yoga reading is a relaxing and stimulating way to prepare for Yoga: The Art of Transformation.
Yoga Summer Reading List
Joseph Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Philosophy and Science (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Vidya Dehejia, The Body Adorned: Sacred and Profane in Indian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)
Debra Diamond (editor), Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010)
James Mallinson (translator), The Shiva Samhita: A Critical Edition and An English Translation (Woodstock, NY: yogavidya.com, 2007)
Elizabeth de Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004)
Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
David Gordon White (editor), Yoga in Practice (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012)
Birad Rajaram Yajnik, The Great Indian Yoga Masters, Tracing 2500 Years of Yoga (Hyderabad, India: Visual Quest Books, 2009)
Want to contribute to the exhibition? Donate to our “Together We’re One” crowdfunding campaign or email us at yoga@si.edu to see how you can get involved.
