CRASSH

“Fashioning British Yoga: 1900-1950” examines the expansion and evolution of literary formats that discussed yoga in Britain, arguing for the primacy of rhetoric in the creation of a spiritual institution before the physical one we know today existed.   While yoga’s role in the Indian nationalist movement has garnered some historical research, historians of yoga in the West have generally skipped from the late 19th century to the 1950s, overlooking the first half of the 20th century entirely.  Perhaps the fact that yoga in Britain at this time was largely practiced in the privacy of middle and upper class homes and generally discussed in semi-exclusive theosophical and occult meetings rather than public forums has led modern scholars to believe that yoga was peripheral to interwar British culture.  Yet, although yoga was not institutionalized in Britain until after the Second World War, it began to attract popular appeal much earlier, as an antidote to the strain of modern western values at the same moment in which Britain’s relationship to its Imperial crown jewel was unraveling.  My examination of three genres of sources –– occultist-inspired tracts and lectures, popular travel narratives and yoga self-help manuals –– demonstrates that as yoga became integrated into new literary formats, it was transformed from an elite and somewhat esoteric occult mental exercise into a learned, physical practice that comfortably jibed with Western values.  Yoga, in this way, was institutionalized as a genre before it was institutionalized in practice.