Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

Detail of ‘The Feast of the Yogis,’ from theHindi Sufi romance Mrigavati, Allahabad,

1603–1604

March 6, 2014 Issue

Under the Spell of Yoga

William Dalrymple

Yoga: The Art of Transformationan exhibition at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C., October

19, 2013–January 26, 2014; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February

22–May 18, 2014; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 22–September 7,

2014

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Debra Diamond

Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Books, 328 pp.,

$55.00

The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha: A Critical Edition and Annotated

Translation of an Early Text of Haṭhayogaby James Mallinson

Routledge, 299 pp., $49.95 (paper)

Sinister Yogisby David Gordon White

University of Chicago Press, 352 pp., $29.00 (paper)

Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empiresby William R. Pinch

Cambridge University Press, 280 pp., $36.99 (paper)

Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in

Mughal art. The Mughal emperors of India were

the most powerful monarchs of their day—at the

beginning of the seventeenth century, they ruled

over a hundred million subjects, five times the

number administered by their only rivals, the

Ottomans. Much of the painting that took place in

the ateliers of the first Mughal emperors was

effectively dynastic propaganda, and gloried in the

Mughals’ pomp and prestige. Illustrated copies

were produced of the diaries of Babur, the

conqueror who first brought the Muslim dynasty

of the Mughal emperors to India in 1526, as well

as exquisite paintings illustrating every significant

episode in the biography of his grandson, Akbar.

Then, quite suddenly, at this moment of imperial

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climax, a young Hindu khanazad (or “palace-

born”) prodigy named Govardhan began painting images of a sort that had never been seen

before in Mughal art. They were not pictures of battles or court receptions. Instead they

were closely observed portraits of holy men performing yogic asanas or exercises that

aimed to focus the mind and achieve spiritual liberation and transcendence. The results of

Govardhan’s experiments in painting—along with a superbly curated selection of several

hundred other images from the history of yoga—were recently on view in “Yoga: The Art

of Transformation,” a remarkable exhibition at the Freer and Sackler galleries in

Washington, D.C., which will travel next to San Francisco and Cleveland.

Govardhan’s images of holy men are works of penetrating intensity. They use the same

skills of characterization and portraiture that the artist had learned from his close study of

the Renaissance gospel books brought to India by the Jesuits. These portraits are as

beautifully drawn and observed as anything Govardhan had painted before, with carefully

stippled faces and the artist’s characteristically precise delineation of the subjects’ noses

and cheekbones. But they are no longer the familiar courtiers or princes, seekers of power

or pleasure. Instead these humble sadhus outside their huts, hair matted, limbs entwined,

are engaged in a much harder quest: the long and arduous journey toward enlightenment.

The reasons behind this radical shift lay partly in geography and partly in politics. In the

early months of the seventeenth century Crown Prince Salim, the future emperor Jahangir,

had rebelled against his father Akbar. While the emperor was distracted by his attack on

the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar to the south, Salim came close to setting himself up as a rival

emperor in the north, making his own appointments and running his own imperial

administration. It was exactly during the period of Salim’s rebellion, from early 1600 to

November 1604, that Govardhan’s art underwent its transformation.

The place Salim chose as his power base was Allahabad, previously known as Prayag. This

was one of the most sacred places in India for Hindus: the point at which the two holy

rivers of the north, the Yamuna and the Ganga, come into confluence. Prayag has always

been a place of congregation for holy men, and in the seventeenth century it seems as if

the great ascetic gathering we know today as the Kumbh Mela took place there as

regularly as every five years, not on the current twelve-year cycle.

The Kumbh remains even today one of the most extraordinary sights on earth. Overnight a

provincial town is transformed into a heaving ascetic metropolis, larger than London or

New York. Hundreds of thousands of sadhus and yogis of the rival Hindu orders—Shaivite

seekers with their tridents, Vaishnavite Ramanandis, and Nath yogis—pour in, with their

dreadlocked hair and wild, often unpredictable behavior. Some are freelance wanderers,

moving from town to town; others live ordered monastic lives in ashrams, dividing their

day according to strict rules and performing severe penances. Most hypnotic of all are the

unruly and aggressive naga sadhus: the naked, ash-smeared warrior ascetics who have

always formed the shock troops of Hinduism.

T here was nothing new about Prince Salim’s interest in this ascetic world. Far from

being excluded by the Mughals, Hindu mysticism and its affinities with the austerities

of Sufism had been a focus of Islamic interest in India since before the first Muslim

conquests of the twelfth century. Half a millennium earlier, the Central Asian Muslim

scholar Alberuni, who died in 1048, was the great pioneer of Hindu-Muslim interaction,

and translated into Persian what are often regarded as the foundational texts of yoga, the

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (second to fourth century AD). Two hundred years later, one of

the most important Indian Sufis, Mu’in al-Din Chisti (died 1236), was credited with the

authorship of an encyclopedic work entitled Treatise on Nature of Yoga, which again

stressed the compatibility of Islamic and Hindu mysticism.

By the sixteenth century, yoga and the secret bodies of knowledge that were associated

with it had become part of the science of government in Indo-Islamic courts. The interest

was as much practical as mystical: many sultans were convinced that extraordinary powers

could be accessed through the practices of yogis.

It was during the reigns of the enquiring emperor Akbar and his son Salim that this interest

took on a new urgency. Akbar had the Yoga Sutras and several other ancient Hindu texts

on asceticism translated or summarized. His biographer Abul Fazl wrote with wonder

about yogic asanas, remarking that “the writer of these pages, who has witnessed many of

these postures, has gazed in astonishment, wondering how any human being could subject

his muscles, tendons and bones in this manner to his will.”

In addition, a new work, Bahr al-Hayat (The Ocean of Life), was composed around 1550

by Muhammad Gwaliyari, a prominent Sufi shaykh who was close to Akbar’s court. He

wanted his disciples to learn hatha yogic practices. In the form that Salim commissioned

it, The Ocean of Life constitutes the earliest-known treatise to contain a systematic series

of images of yoga postures. Twenty-two different asanas—almost all seated postures

designed to aid meditation—are examined. It is clear from the images that the artists that

Salim had lured to Allahabad, Govardhan preeminent among them, must have been sent

down to the confluence of the holy rivers to talk to and interact directly with yogis

engaged in their austerities below the palace walls.

A portrait survives of Govardhan at this time: it shows an eager, sharp-eyed, and intelligent

young man with raffishly long sideburns and a carefully trimmed mustache, dressed in an

immaculate white robe and dashing black cape. Govardhan knew he was the crown prince’s

particular protégé, and in years to come proudly referred to himself as “the servant of

Shah Jahangir.” How this dapper young courtier got on with the dreadlocked holy men is

not recorded; but the result is a revelation, perhaps the most intense artistic interaction

that survives between Hindu and Islamic worlds. We are now far away from the idealized

world of court art. Instead the illustrations show ash-smeared holy men engaged in their

yogic austerities outside their huts with an almost photojournalistic accuracy.

The images are lightly colored, with translucent washes, showing every detail of the yogis’

daily lives, from their postures and pensive expressions through the form of their huts

*

T

down to their pet dogs and smallest possessions: their horn whistles, staffs, gourds, and

ewers, even the antelope skins they use for yoga mats. Most intriguing of all is the image

of one holy man whose body may be drawn from life but whose face is quite clearly

borrowed from that of Christ in some European gospel book.

So it was that seventeenth-century Allahabad/Prayag became the confluence not just of

two holy rivers but of several traditions of sacred art in a way that today might be

considered implausible to anyone who takes at face value the idea of a clash of

civilizations: a Hindu artist painting the first-ever systematic set of illustrations of yogic

asana positions, while working for a Muslim patron, and borrowing for the yogis the

features of Jesus Christ.

he yogic traditions that so intrigued these Islamic rulers, and that today represent the

most successful Indian export into the global marketplace of spirituality, have their

origins in the deepest roots of Indian civilization, predating by two thousand years the

revelations of the Koran. The Sanskrit word yoga means “union” and is etymologically

linked to the English word “yoke.” Its earliest occurrence in the Rig Veda, which dates

from the second millennium BCE when both the Pyramids and Stonehenge were still in

use, links the word to the rig with which war chariots were yoked to horses; by the early

centuries AD the same word is being used to convey the idea of the body and the senses

being yoked and reined in so as to move toward the Absolute.

It is possible that the oldest image in Indian art shows a yogi in meditation: one of the

Indus Valley seals dug up at Mohenjo Daro by Sir John Marshall in 1931, dating from

between 2600 and 1900 BC, shows a cross-legged figure that Marshall interpreted to be

Shiva as Mahayogi and Lord of the Beasts. This interpretation has been questioned by

some scholars, but the Vedas, which date from maybe five hundred years after the Indus

Valley seal, already contain references to flying long-haired sages that indicate even then

the presence of a mystical tradition related to the world of the yogis.

Between the third and fifth centuries BC, yogic techniques and goals spread so as to

become practiced across northern India, and were eventually codified in the Yoga Sutras

of Patanjali that date from the fourth century AD. By that time, yoga was being used by

men and women across South Asia who sought by perfecting their bodies to transcend

suffering, renouncing the world and devoting themselves to breath control, meditation, and

austerities. Their radical insight was to realize that they had within them the potential

correctly to perceive reality and stabilize their minds and bodies through the use of

esoteric yogic techniques.

The Sackler exhibition explores the visual culture of yoga in all its rich variety, aiming,

according to its curator Debra Diamond, to show “yoga’s rich, protean diversity—its

varied meanings for both practioners and those who encountered and interacted with them

—over the last 2,500 years.” For as the exhibition makes clear, while the use of

meditation, posture, and breathing techniques has been widespread in India since remote

antiquity, yoga was never a unified construct and has clearly meant quite different things at

different times to different people, whether Jain, Buddhist, Sufi, or Hindu.

Moreover, there has always been a clear duality visible in the objectives of the yogis.

Some were focused entirely on the interior: on breathing exercises and mastery of the

body as a route to self-understanding and spiritual liberation. Others, however, were

clearly searching for the magical tantric powers that they believed yoga could unleash.

There are hints of this tension already in the Yoga Sutras where Patanjali outlines the

route to union with the Absolute, while making it clear that an accomplished yogi can

perform all sorts of useful tricks in this life: flying, transmigrating, reading other people’s

minds, and even defying death itself.

The Khecarividya of Adinatha, an early hatha yoga text that dates from 1400 AD, which

has recently been translated into English for the first time by James Mallinson, goes

further and explictly promises to give the adept magical powers and ultimately

immortality. “One becomes ageless and undying in this world,” writes Adinatha, “all

obstacles are destroyed, the gods are pleased and, without doubt, wrinkles and grey hair

will disappear.”

This is not all:

Success in sciences such as finding buried treasure, entering subterranean realms,

controlling the earth and alchemy arise for the yogis after five years…. With a body

as incorruptible as diamond [he] lives for one hundred thousand years. With the

strength of ten thousand elephants,…he has long-distance sight and hearing. Capable

of punishing and rewarding [people], he becomes powerful.

If he so wishes he can “associate at will with great ghouls, ghosts, snakes and demons.”

The text also promises attainment of “absolutely all the magical powers that are found in

the three worlds,…power over zombies…and power over male and female genies.” Finally

the adept can gain “dominion over the highest gods.” It is in many ways closer to the world

of Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort than to the New Agey yoga of modern Western gyms,

moving across a line from the search for spiritual liberation to a quest for dark and

possibly demonic powers for use in this material world.

This sense of shifting meaning and elusiveness of definition, around both the concept and

practice of yoga over two millennia, is a difficulty that the exhibition embraces with

creativity. As you enter, the first hall has on one side a white marble image of ice-calm

tranquillity: a Jain Jina, or Victorious One, sitting in a lotus position, lost in peaceful

meditation. Opposite it, however, is a no less fabulous image that is all sound and fury: a

full-breasted and slim-waisted Hindu yogini, arriving on the back of an owl, armed to the

teeth, brandishing a sword and a shield, while making a piercing wolf whistle: not for

nothing does her name translate as “She Who Makes a Loud Noise.”

Today in modern India a yogini is understood to be a female yogi, a seeker after peace and

enlightenment. But in ancient India yoginis were understood to be the terrifying female

D

San Antonio Museum of Art

‘Yogini’; sandstone statue, Kannauj, UttarPradesh, first half of the eleventh century.William Dalrymple writes that ‘in ancientIndia yoginis were understood to be theterrifying female embodiments of yogic

powers who could travel through the sky andbe summoned up by devotees who dared to

attempt harnessing their powers.’

embodiments of yogic powers who could travel

through the sky and be summoned up by devotees

who dared to attempt harnessing their powers.

They were also the policewomen of the yogic

world, who Adinatha says will quickly eat up “he

who makes this supreme text public to all…at the

order of Síva.”

This dual world of the yogi is there throughout the

show: for every ivory of a gentle Buddha

mortifying his flesh and starving himself in the

quest for inner peace and Enlightenment there are

other more unsettling images of wild-looking

yogis and the fearsome blood-drinking deities

they sought to worship sitting amid the smoking

pyres of cremation grounds, both draped with

skull necklaces and brandishing weapons as they

sit astride headless corpses. Some deities bring

this duality into a strange union: one Himalayan

image of the God Bhairava in yogic attire is

wearing a belt of human arm and has a necklace,

bracelets, anklets, and earrings all made of human

skulls—but he is smiling as sweetly and alluringly

as a baby Krishna. As one of the contributors to

the catalog, David Gordon White, asks: “If these

be yogis, then what is yoga?” It is something that

the contributors to the exhibition catalog have

clearly agreed to disagree on.

ebra Diamond, the curator of this most striking show, had as her last major project an

equally wonderful exhibition of Jodhpur painting entitled “Garden and Cosmos.” That

exhibition told the story of the Naths, a sect of wandering ash-smeared followers of Shiva

mystics who codified hatha yoga in the twelfth century, claiming that their practices gave

them superhuman powers: the ability to fly, to see into the future, and to hear and see over

great distances.

By 1803, the Nath yogis were nearing the height of their influence across northern India,

when they became the effective rulers of the desert kingdom of Jodhpur, advising their

faithful disciple, Maharajah Man Singh, on all matters of state. In an extraordinary coup

d’état, one of the greatest kingdoms in pre-colonial India had fallen into the hands of an

order of esoteric yogis.

It didn’t take long before the Naths began flexing their muscles and abusing their new

power: they kidnapped women and forcibly inducted men into their order, seizing property

for themselves. A folk song from this period expressed the growing swell of disgust:

“Nathji,” begins the chorus, “your glance is poison.” Nevertheless, it did represent a brief

but astonishing golden age in the history of Rajasthani painting, and has provided some of

the highlights of both the “Garden and Cosmos” show and this exhibition.

As the story of the Naths shows, yogis sometimes took very different forms from the

peaceful sages the West has loved to imagine as archetypically Indian since Gandhi

succeeded in presenting Hinduism to the world as the religion of ahimsa, nonviolence.

This complexity is something several interesting books have recently grappled with.

In 2009 David Gordon White, a professor of religious studies at the University of

California, Santa Barbara, published a provocative and controversial book entitled Sinister

Yogis, which took the story further. White emphasized that there is a whole tradition in

South Asia of violent, frightening, and even cannibalistic yogis, many of whom had a

developed taste for kidnapping children and human sacrifice. The same rites that could be

used to remove the individual from his body and join it with the formless Absolute were

also believed to give yogis the ability to enter another’s body, or to shift shape at will.

White made the case that medieval yogis were primarily interested in occult techniques to

project the self outward in order to overcome death, enter other bodies, and effect all

manner of sinister wizardry. As White shows in a book full of entertaining stories of yogis

behaving badly, there is in fact a whole body of South Asian literature and folk tales where

yogis are not peaceful meditators but instead archetypically wicked sorcerers.

White may well overstate his case, and James Mallinson, another of Debra Diamond’s

contributors, has written critically of his work, stating that he “leaves no room for nuance,

…in particular the elephant in his room—the huge body of Indic texts written over the last

two thousand years which teach a meditation-based yoga.” This may well be the case, but

there can be no disputing that many medieval yogis were as much in search of occult

powers as cosmic self-discovery. Indeed the fascinating texts that Mallinson has himself

translated show this very clearly.

Yogis seem to have gone particularly out of control during the eighteenth-century anarchy

between the fall of the Mughals and the rise of the British. This is a subject explored by

William Pinch in his brilliant 2006 study of the militant yogis of the period, Warrior

Ascetics and Indian Empires.

European travelers of the period frequently describe yogis who are “skilled cut-throats”

and professional killers. “Some of them carry a stick with a ring of iron at the base,” wrote

Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna in 1508. “Others carry certain iron diskes which cut all

round like razors, and they throw these with a sling when they wish to injure any person.”

A century later the French jewel merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier was describing large

bodies of holy men on the march, “well armed, the majority with bows and arrows, some

with muskets, and the remainder with short pikes.” By the Maratha wars of the early

nineteenth century, the Anglo-Indian mercenary James Skinner was fighting alongside “10

thousand Gossains called Naggas with Rockets, and about 150 pieces of cannon.”

T

Pinch focuses in particular on the well-attested case of Anupgiri, a Shaivite ascetic and

mercenary warlord who led a large army of killer yogis and fought with both modern

weaponry and spells: Mahadji Shinde, a rival leader of the time, was convinced that

Anupgiri had attacked him with a painful case of boils through his “magical arts.” Nor was

Anupgiri necessarily a champion of Hindu interests: “Far from thinking of themselves as

the last line of defense against foreign invaders, armed ascetics in the seventeenth,

eighteenth, and early nineteenth century served any and all paymasters,” writes Pinch.

Though he sometimes fought with the Hindu Marathas, at other times Anupgiri worked for

the Mughal emperor.

Indeed in 1803 his last act, as Pinch shows, “was to enable the Maratha defeat at the hands

of the British…and, thereby, the British capture of Delhi, an event that catapaulted the

Hon’ble [East India] Company into the role of paramount power in southern Asia—and

ultimately the world.”

hrough this complex jungle of rival interpretation, Debra Diamond leads the visitor to

“Yoga: The Art of Transformation” with the steady tread of the umpire.

The show opens with images of wizened ancient ascetics: Gandharan Buddhist images of

lean dreadlocked sages found in the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a

beautiful Kashmiri ivory of the fasting Buddha. A room is devoted to a series of

fabulously voluptuous flying yoginis occupying that peculiarly Indian space between the

sacred, the sensual, and the utterly frightful.

Ironically it is only with the coming of the Muslims, in Indo-Islamic art, that we see for

the first time what a modern practioner of yoga would recognize as an asana. But perhaps

it is the yogis’ post-Mughal glory days of the eighteenth century, once thought to be a

period of artistic decadence, that gives this show its highlights. The period of Nath power

in Jodhpur, and Nath prominence in nearby Jaipur, led to attempts by artists in both cities

to explain their understanding of the world in what are perhaps the supreme examples of

the art of yoga: two vast, awesome purple-gold images of the Cosmic Body, with the sun

on one eye, the moon on the other, including a representation of the relationship of the

macrocosmic to the individual entitled Equivalence of the Self and the Universe.

It was under the guidance of these power-hungry Nath gurus that painting in Rajasthan

transformed itself into something utterly remarkable, reaching heights of Rothko-like

abstraction and mystical strangeness that predate by more than a hundred years many of

the experiments of twentieth-century European and American art. Cosmic oceans of gold

hint at states of heightened mystical consciousness; Mondrian-like fields of color are

divided by frames of pure red; esoteric ideas take wing in sublime forms of fabulous,

dreamlike intensity. Cosmic oceans lap against figures incarnating divine principles such

as Purusha (Consciousness) and Prakriti (Matter). These are images that do not tell

religious stories as much as attempt to explain the great questions of human existence:

What are we doing here? How did we come? Who created us? Where are we going?

*

The penultimate room of the show examines the story of how yoga moved west between

the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. From the black-and-white photographs of early

British Orientalists to 1940s circus posters for “Koringa—THE ONLY FEMALE fakir IN

THE WORLD,” the show ends by telling a story of cultural misunderstanding, as the

complex and sometimes contradictory body of yogic knowledge was cleaned up and

rebranded as a vogueish health trend open to all—men and women, Indian and foreigner—

to be marketed to a sometimes credulous Western public through celebrity yoga faddists

beginning with Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s. It was only at this very late point, under the

influence of Swedish body building, gymnastics, and British military drill, that it became a

method of fitness: almost all pre-twentieth-century Indian yoga involved staying for a

prolonged period in one asana, not moving rapidly from one to another in a yogic

workout.

Today it is estimated that around 20 million Americans have performed yoga. It is a fitting

end to the show, therefore, that remarkable 1940s black-and-white film footage of

Krishnamachrya and his youthful disciple Iyengar, inventor and exporter of Iyengar yoga,

is shown in a room where visitors are encouraged to bring their yoga mats and perform

their asanas within the exhibition space. They became part of one of the most stunning

shows of Indian art ever to be displayed in the US.

“Hatha yoga”—“Forceful” or “willful” yoga performed with a set of physical exercises or asanas, designed to align and balance

the body and mind. ↩

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