Sinister Yogis.

• Author: Nicholson, Andrew J.
• Position: Book review

Sinister Yogis. By DAVID GORDON WHITE. Chicago: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2009. Pp. xxii + 352.

In his previous two books, The Alchemical Body and Kiss of the Yogini, David Gordon White established himself as an Indological provocateur, one of the few scholars writing today who has both the language background and breadth of imagination to push the study of pre-modern Indian intellectual history into the post-modern age. White describes his latest book, Sinister Yogis, as the final installment of a trilogy, and it is both his most accessible and in some ways his most innovative book. He sets out to rescue the study of yoga from those scholars who view its entire history though the distorting lens of "classical Yoga," the relatively recent Indological formulation that puts Patanjali's Yoga Sutras at the center of the history of yoga and pushes earlier and later yogic developments to the margins. To correct this distortion, White directs our attention to the figure of the yogi, the practitioner of yoga. In doing this he de-centers the "philosophical" yoga texts that have been the primary concern of modern scholars and takes up to the many different genres of text that portray the yogi: epics and puranas; stories in Sanskrit, Persian, and Hindi that depict the extraordinary and sometimes villainous activities of yogis; accounts of yogis by travelers from outside of India; and so forth. Employing this method, White produces a history of yoga from its early origins to the modern period unlike any that has been written before.

The early twenty-first century is a watershed moment in the study of yoga, a time when many scholars from diverse backgrounds are seeking to re-assess the conventional understanding of yoga as enstasis, the withdrawal of the yogi into the self, suggested by Mircea Eliade's enormously influential Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. White fully acknowledges these other scholars, noting in particular that Sinister Yogis was inspired by James Fitzgerald, who has spent decades teasing out the meaning of yoga in the Moksadharma Parvan of the Mahabharata. The historical scope of White's book is vast. He argues against the likelihood of the so-called Pasupati seal discovered at the archaeological site of Mohenjo-Daro being a depiction of the god Siva sitting in lotus position. He includes a discussion of Swami Vivekananda's influential re-definition of the term raja (royal) yoga in the late nineteenth century. (But, perhaps wisely...