The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality

ABSTRACT

What are the connections between bodies, healing, and transcendence? I propose that by examining the intersections of the medical and the socio-cultural body with dance or the performative body, we can shine a critical light on this question. This paper brings Yoga and Indian dance together to explore how notions of health, spirituality, and morality came to be inscribed in particular kinds of bodies leading to selective ideas of bodily transcendence and spirituality in postcolonial India. I show through a diverse range of scholarships how the heterogeneous roots of Yoga have been homogenized in modern India as something Hindu and Brahminical (which is now integrated with rightwing Hindutva). Interestingly, the Indian classical dance revivalism shared the same logic as Yoga revivalism. As a result, the upper caste Hindu bodies distinguished themselves from their cultural others (Muslims and low caste Hindus) through concepts of purity, health, spirituality, and transcendence. I examine how some of these concepts of Yoga, dance, and embodiment from the east and west mingled in recent times and influenced narratives of ‘contemporary dance’ in India and the U.S. In these symbiotic, cross-cultural exchanges, concepts of somatics and neurobiology blended with modern Yoga and dance to render the elite, upper-caste/class bodies, and/or white bodies as universal, righteous, and transcultural.

KEYWORDS:

• Yoga
• Indian dance
• Tantra
• healing
• Sufi
• Yogini
• transcendence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Freed and Freed, “Two Goddess Ceremonies of Delhi State in the Great and Little Tradition,” 246–77.

2. Narayan, “Refractions of the Field at Home,” 476–509.

3. Conway, 940, quoted in Narayan, “Refractions of the Field at Home,” 490.

4. Chakravorty, “The Paradox of the Subtle Body.”

5. Kapstein, “An Inexhaustible Treasury of Verse,” 23–35.

6. Mallinson, “Hatha Yoga,” 770–81.

7. Lorensen and Munoz, “Introduction,” x–xviii.

8. Hess and Singh, The Bijak of Kabir, 19.

9. Ibid.

10. Mallinson, “The Amtrasiddhi.”

11. Hatley, “Mapping the Esoteric Body in the Islamic Yoga of Bengal,” 355.

12. Ibid., 355.

13. Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” 15–43.

14. DSilva, “Bodies in Translation,” 168–186.

15. Ibid.

16. Ernst, “The Islamization of Yoga in Amrtakundu Translations,” 199–226.

17. Marglin, “Wives of the God-King,” 217.

18. Daheja, Yogini Cult and Temples. Online accessed February, 2020.

19. Lidke, “Dancing forth the Divine Beloved,” 2.

20. Prakash, “Cultural Labour,” 104.

21. Doniger, The Hindus, 90–1; Ibid.

22. Ibid., 106.

23. Narayan, “Refractions of the Field at Home,” 482.

24. Burke, A Grammar of Motive, 211 quoted in Narayan, “Refractions of the Field at Home,” 493.

25. Bose, “The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Polity,” 129–44.

26. Burnier, “Rukmini Devi as a Theosophist,” 55–60.

27. Chakravorty, ‘Why the Adivasis Will Not Dance.”

28. Alter, “Birth of the Anti-Clinic,” 109–128.

29. Coomaraswamy, “The Dance of Siva,” 18.

30. Robertson, “The Kalbelias,” 10.

31. Ernst, “Being Careful with Goddess,” 187–203.

32. Singleton, “India and the International Physical Culture Movement,” 81–94.

33. Singleton, “India and the International Physical Culture Movement,” 81; and De Michelis, “Modern Yoga Transmission of Theory and Practice.”

34. Singleton, “India and the International Physical Culture Movement.”

35. Alter, “Swami Kuvalayananda,” 74–108.

36. Goldberg, “The Goddess Pose,” 121–23.

37. Singleton, “Yoga as Physical Culture II,” 143–162.

38. Allen, “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance, ”63–100.

39. Stebbins, Dynamic Breathing and Harmonic Gymnastics, 86; Singleton, “Yoga as Physical Culture II,” 146.

40. Vatsyayan, “Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts,” 272.

41. Lopez, “Guru Surendranath Jena,” 264–78.

42. Chandralekha, https://scroll.in/magazine/855678/probe-deeper-into-your-art-chandralekha-on-the-duty-of-the-indian-classical-dancer.

43. See note 27 above.

44. Novack, “Sharing the Dance.”

45. Fraleigh, “Why Consciousness Matters,” 5.

46. Blacking, “The Anthropology of the Body”; and Farnell, “Mindful Body.”

47. Alter, “Swami Kuvalayananda,” 81, quoted in Wakharkar, “Swami Kuvalayananda,” 8.

48. Alter, “Mimetic Skepticism and Yoga,” 243–6; and Harraway, “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women,” 152.