Yoga by the book

This essay analyses the cultural politics of yoga through a literary history of its twentieth- and twenty-first-century connection to books. The midcentury instruction manual for postural yoga, exemplified by B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, created a postcolonial literary genre that aimed to resolve particular tensions within the structure of Indian identity in a globalizing world. This genre has influenced the rise of twenty-first-century yoga fiction in Western popular culture in English. Ironically, such fiction also works against ideals of globalized Indianness projected through Iyengar’s manual. Through this exploration of yoga in print culture, this essay argues that the cultural instruction performed through writing is not just about yoga, but part and parcel of yoga itself.