It’s quite possible that you’ve taken a yoga class. It’s also very likely that you’ve had a moment during such a class, where you glance around at the spare, ascetic design, listening to a vaguely Eastern downtempo soundtrack, pull up your $140 leggings, do “vinyasas” and say “namaste” without really knowing what they mean, and wonder to yourself, “What exactly is going on here?” In Yogalands, Paul Bramadat sets an ambitious goal: to address questions that many Western yogis may have pondered but not examined profoundly. Such as, how today’s yoga relates to contemporary India, why 80% of North American practitioners are white women, the nature of the teacher-student relationship, and whether their pastime is spiritual, or simply exercise. 

Bramadat is director of the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria, and in Yogalands, he draws heavily on both his academic background and his personal entry into yoga as a means of alleviating osteoarthritis pain. As a professor with some South Asian heritage, he felt deeply ambivalent about entering “an environment where [I] was likely to be aggravated by a banal spirituality, the creeping tendrils of capitalism, impossible beauty standards, and the appropriation of South Asian religions.” Yet enter it he did, not just as a casual weekend yogi, but as a devoted practitioner of the Ashtanga tradition, practising six days a week for 90 to 120 minutes at a time. Yogalands tries, and mostly succeeds, at communicating his experience and research into a format and tone that is accessible enough for non-academic yoga devotees to enjoy. 

My own yoga practice began in the late ‘90s at my local Y. I quickly became hooked and joined Montreal’s Ashtanga studio, which taught in the Pattabhi Jois tradition, complete with chants, photos of gurus on the walls, and incense burning. I have since tried hot yoga, outdoor yoga, a lot of online pandemic yoga, and classes in large fitness clubs with no pretense of maintaining any connection to yoga’s religious roots. 

This experience seems to mirror the transition that yoga has gone through in recent decades, adapting to fit Western fitness and wellness culture. While the book’s focus is on yoga’s place within today’s socio-political context, it also delves into its origins. Much of what we consider yoga today was developed in the 1920s when a Mysore raja hired a teacher named Krishnamacharya – often called the “father of modern yoga” – to teach the boys of his palace. Bramadat speculates that this training was intended not only as a means of increasing the boys’ physical strength, but also “to challenge the British stereotype of the effete, listless, servile, Indian man.” Yogalands goes on to explore postural yoga within a colonial context, describing how early teachers participated in Indian nationalist efforts to popularize the practice among Westerners, who in turn tended “to see India as a bastion of spiritual wisdom and mystery” – a narrative that persists today in books like Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love and countless others. 

Much of the research for the book comes from interviews that Bramadat conducted with over one hundred North American yoga studio owners, teachers, and students. Bramadat doesn’t shy away from difficult questions, asking studio owners whether they think they are appropriating Indian culture for commercial benefit, how they have reckoned with yoga’s many #MeToo scandals in recent years, and how their practices are connected (or, more often, not) to broader socio-political movements. Through the responses that he quotes, you get the sense that Bramadat is perennially disappointed, wishing for something deeper. Further, he has made the curious editorial choice to leave in conversational hesitations (um, like, you know), which I found undermined the content of what the (many female) interviewees were trying to get across. 

Bramadat concludes by wondering “whether one day practitioners might be more comfortable talking about the political world in which we are all entangled, a world that produces the need for the balm of yoga in the first place.” Unlikely, but for the curious, Yogalands is a good place to start.mRb