Yoga Body:The Origins of Modern Posture Practice by Singleton Mark

Author:Singleton, Mark [Singleton, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-01-28T23:00:00+00:00

Yogi Gherwal

This rapprochement of post-Payot physical culture and yoga is evident in other Indian “export gurus” active at the time in the United States, such as the California-based Yogi Rishi Singh Gherwal, who published his Practical Hatha Yoga, Science of Health in 1923. The book, based on a lecture-demonstration tour of the previous year, is probably the earliest photographic manual of modern, populist haha yoga—even predating by one year the launch of Kuvalayananda’s Yoga Mms. Like Yogananda’s publications, it functions in part as an advertisement for Gherwal’s “First and Advanced Course of Correspondence.” Yoga correspondence lessons, probably modeled on Sandow’s phenomenally successful postal courses, were already big business at this time. As well as Yogananda and Gherwal, many of the other yoga writers and gurus considered here (like Sivananda, Iyer, Sundaram, Yogendra, and Ramacharaka) reached their public via the postal service. This marks a fascinating intermediate phase in transnational anglophone yoga’s shift away from an exclusive guru-iya model and toward the self-help model that dominates today.15

As the very title suggests, Gherwal’s book is concerned foremost with “the physiology of these asana postures and their application to therapeutics” (1923: 37) and treats in particular the regeneration of the thyroid gland and the correction of constipation. Whereas the postures in the book are in the main drawn from “classical” haha yoga texts (unlike many of the manuals under consideration), they are interpreted not only in the language of modern medicine but also through the idiom of modern, “psychologized” New Thought physical culture. Gherwal notes that “one of the outstanding features of the Twentieth Century mode of scientific muscular exercise is that this most valuable will power or soul power is roused, disciplined and developed to an enviable degree,” such that “physical culture comes to be studied from the Yogic point of view” (40).

In effect, it is the converse that occurs: yoga comes to be considered as an Eastern variant of New Thought physical culture. Gherwal’s manual is steeped in the rationale of the New Thought mode of physical culture, even down to the admiration for the “auto-suggestions imparted to the muscles and physical tissues” (1923: 44) so favored by Haddock and other New Thought luminaries like Trine (1913). Although the emphasis on body cultivation exceeds that of earlier manuals, it is clear that the system is in keeping with Vivekananda’s injunction (see epigraph in “The New Thought Yogis” above) to use “Christian Science” methods of body cultivation—such as those auto-suggestive techniques I have described—as part of a yoga program. Christian Science, of course, was a massively popular system of spiritual health and healing founded by Mary Eddy Baker (1821–1920) and was inspired, like many brands of New Thought (such as that of the Dressers), by the work of New England healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (see Meyer 1965; Parker 1973; Jackson 1981). Indeed, for many Americans, movements like Theosophy, Christian Science, New England Transcendentalism, and New Thought functioned as “way stations between participation in the institutional Church and an identification with [neo-] Vedanta” (French 1974: 299).

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