643604

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PTXXXX10.1177/0090591716643604Political TheoryGodrej

Article
Political Theory
1­–29
The Neoliberal Yogi and © 2016 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591716643604
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Farah Godrej1

Abstract
Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to
dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay
I demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing
that yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of
contemporary Western neoliberal societies. In its current and most common
iteration in the West, yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing
neoliberal constructions of selfhood. However, yoga does contain ample
resources for challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading
the yogic tradition in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical
elements over others, while directing its practice toward an inward-
oriented detachment from material outcomes and desires. Contemporary
claims about yoga’s counterhegemonic status often rely on exaggerated
notions of its former “purity” and “authenticity,” which belie its invented
and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather than engaging in these
debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners may productively turn
their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga,
while remaining self-conscious about the particularity and partiality of the
interpretive position on which such a practice is founded.

Keywords
yoga, neoliberalism, biopolitics, Bhagavad-Gīta, Yōga-Sūtras, Patanjali,
authenticity

1Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Farah Godrej, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside, 2213
Watkins Hall, 900 University Avenue, Riverside, CA 92521, USA.
Email: [email protected]

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2 Political Theory 

Can the theory and practice of the yogic tradition serve as a challenge to
dominant cultural and political norms in the Western world? In this essay, I
demonstrate that modern yoga is a creature of fabrication, while arguing that
yogic norms can simultaneously reinforce and challenge the norms of con-
temporary Western neoliberal societies. The multivalence of the yogic tradi-
tion allows it to be put in service of a variety of socio-cultural norms and
political commitments. In its current and most common iteration in the West,
yoga practice does stand in danger of reinforcing neoliberal constructions of
selfhood. However, I caution against seeing this as a “distortion” of yoga’s
so-called “original” principles and norms, for modern, Western, capitalist,
and/or neoliberal tropes may occasionally be compatible with key norms of
the yogic tradition. Ultimately, I argue that yoga contains ample resources for
challenging neoliberal subjectivity, but this requires reading the yogic tradi-
tion in a particular way, to emphasize certain philosophical elements over
others, while directing its practice toward an inward-oriented detachment
from material outcomes and desires. However, in so doing, we must resist the
essentialism that marks contemporary discourse around yoga: the projection
of a “pure,” monolithic tradition characterized by seamless continuity of the-
ory and practice over centuries.
I begin with a brief historical overview of the yogic tradition, including its
arrival and development in the West. Next, I explore how current forms of
yogic practice tend to align with forms of neoliberal subjectivity seen in
regimes of biopolitical self-governance. I also propose a counterhegemonic
reading that may allow yoga to stand in opposition to neoliberal selfhood. In
concluding, I note that contemporary claims about yoga’s counterhegemonic
status often rely on exaggerated notions of its former “purity” and “authentic-
ity,” which belie its invented and retrospectively reconstructed nature. Rather
than engaging in these debates about authenticity, scholars and practitioners
may productively turn their energies toward enacting a resistant, anti-neolib-
eral practice of yoga, while remaining self-conscious about the particularity
and partiality of the interpretive position on which such a practice is founded.

What Exactly Is Yoga?

The term yōga is not as clearly defined as most of its contemporary practitio-
ners might imagine. Scholars point out that the word has meant many differ-
ent things in many different contexts, and that perhaps no word has been
more misunderstood. Used in the earliest texts of the Indic traditions, the
word yōga has a wider range of meanings than any other in the Sanskrit lexi-
con,1 ranging from “yoking” an animal to its harness, to practices that would
“yoke” or “unify” individual consciousness with the divine. It has variously

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Godrej 3

been employed to denote “a device, a recipe, a method, a strategy, a charm,

an incantation, fraud, a trick, an endeavor, a combination, union, an arrange-
ment, zeal, care, diligence, industriousness, discipline, use, application, con-
tact, a sum total, and the work of alchemists. But this is by no means an
exhaustive list.”2 Over time, it has come to be identified with techniques of
disciplined self-mastery, aiming toward an extraordinary state of conscious-
ness, usually defined as ultimate union with the divine.3
Recent scholarship has emphasized that the variety of texts, ideas, and
practices subsumed under the term yōga has always been heterogenous, doc-
trinally diverse, and highly syncretic, even (and perhaps especially) within
their premodern Indian iterations. While a “relatively systematic yoga
nomenclature became established among Hindus, Buddhists and Jains” in the
subcontinent between about 300 BCE and the fifth century,4 and while yoga
may have been “culturally South Asian,” it was practiced in a variety of ways
across different religious traditions of the subcontinent.5 Its textual and philo-
sophical foundations were highly diverse, as were its approaches to theory
and practice. Across many Indic texts and traditions, yoga was developed,
taught, and systematized in myriad ways, replete with cross-cultural borrow-
ing and exchange across the fluid boundaries between Hindu, Buddhist, Jain,
Islamic, and other non-Brahmanical traditions of renunciation.
Scholars agree that it was not until the relatively late, medieval develop-
ment of tantric philosophy in both Hinduism and Buddhism (around the tenth
or eleventh centuries CE) that postural practice emerged. Tantra refers
broadly to South Asian philosophical systems centered around the use of
embodiment as a path to transcendence. It involves the embrace rather than
the denial of bodily pleasure, which had up to then characterized the more
predominant ascetic systems of yoga in South Asia. Hat. ha yōga or the physi-
cal practice of postures (āsanas), today thought to be the most central yogic
practice, was in fact a much later and more heterodox development, rather
than a “pure” or “originary” form of yoga. Yoga as it is practiced today is a
medieval—rather than ancient—“hotchpotch of Buddhism, Saivism, with
even Islamic influence and non-Hindu tribal asceticism.”6 And, in contrast to
the notion of a “pristine and unchanging, millennia-old lineage of . . . theory
and practice,” most scholars now agree that yoga, like every other social
product, was derivative and syncretic from the outset, containing “a multi-
plicity of definitions and interpretations.”7
The arrival of yoga in the West, starting in the mid- to late nineteenth
century, was the combined product of the retrospective reconstruction of a
so-called classical yogic tradition by modern Indian pioneers, along with
key dialogical exchanges between Indians and Western interlocutors. During
an increasingly modern and globalized nineteenth century, yoga was

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4 Political Theory 

“deconstructed and reconstructed both within and beyond South Asia, lead-
ing to the emergence of a new transnational tradition” developed through
“encounters between Indian yoga reformers engaged with modern thought,
[and] Europeans and Americans interested in topics ranging from meta-
physics to fitness.”8 Various intellectual modernizers, both Indian and
Western, aimed to establish yoga’s legitimacy in the West as a contempla-
tive and ethical tradition of ancient provenance. Following his famous
address to the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami
Vivekananda gave a series of lectures in the United States, offering a ratio-
nalist, ascetic, contemplative interpretation of yogic spirituality. Using a
selective reading of Patanjali’s Yōga-Sūtras that reified the centrality of the
text, Vivekanada constructed a monolithic and ostensibly “authentic” version
of yoga’s “classical” history that today constitutes its most predominant nar-
rative: “From the time it was discovered, more than four thousand years ago,
Yoga was perfectly delineated, formulated and preached in India.”9
Vivekananda expressed disdain for yoga’s bodily practices, downplaying
their importance, but other Indian reformers began representing yoga as a
physical fitness regime comprised primarily of postures and exercises.
Among others, Sivananda Saraswati and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya con-
structed new postural systems with putative roots in earlier textual traditions.
Like Vivekananda, however, these reformers also undertook a selective, cre-
ative reliance on so-called “ancient” texts—particularly the Yōga-Sūtras and
the Bhagavad-Gītā—reifying certain texts over others, loosely linking pos-
tural practice to “classical” texts, and eliding the fact that the provenance of
these invented postures was hardly “ancient” or “classical.” Many of the
poses taught by these teachers (and now routinely practiced), despite their
Sanskrit names, do not occur in the medieval tantric texts where hat.ha-yōga
is elaborated, much less in the earlier classical texts, where there is scarcely
any mention of physical postures.10
Thus, “popular postural yoga came into being in the first half of the twen-
tieth century as a hybridized product of colonial’s India’s dialogical encoun-
ter with the worldwide physical culture movement,”11 along with nationalist
aspirations to building a strong, disciplined population capable of rejecting
colonial rule and ruling itself. Indian yogis internalized the importance of
physical fitness during the late colonial period, constructing “indigenous”
exercises partially borrowed from imported fitness techniques, resulting in a
“pan-Indian hub of physical culture revivalism.”12 The methods of postural
yoga that became popular in India in the early to mid-twentieth century (and
later in the West) “would not have been considered yoga prior to this period
of Indian history.”13 Meanwhile, the connections between these postural
methods and their putatively ancient textual roots is tenuous. “Monolithic

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Godrej 5

deference” to the notion of classical yoga and to the authoritative status of

certain texts such as the Yōga-Sūtras are constructed by a combination of
modern Orientalist scholarship and the retrospective presentation of an
unbroken “classical” tradition by Indian reformers.14
These reformers attracted and trained many students, some of whom went
on to become key players in the global dissemination of yoga. B.K.S. Iyengar
and K. Pattabhi Jois, both students of Krishnamacharya, each innovated their
own schools of postural practice (Iyengar and Ashtanga Yoga respectively).
The yogas disseminated by these figures, much like those of their teachers,
were linked to a putatively ancient tradition, and simultaneously represented
as comporting with the rationalism of modern science and biomedicine. This
universalized, medicalized postural yoga became increasingly popular in the
West in the late twentieth century, driven by a combination of factors: a Euro-
American counterculture drawn to alternative spiritualities, increased global
travel allowing Euro-Americans to travel to India, the lifting of immigration
restrictions that allowed the rise of transnational teacher or guru figures in the
West, and the intersection of yoga with the emergent global consumer capi-
talist culture.15
In the late twentieth century, yoga’s popularity exploded as Euro-American
practitioners began to invent their own systems of yoga, commodifying,
branding, and marketing these innovations to global audiences. The mind-
boggling array of yoga practices now available in the West includes aerial or
flying yoga (performed on silk scarves suspended from the ceiling); acro-
yoga (performed in acrobatic, circus-like style); Stand-Up Paddleboard
(SUP) yoga, performed on a paddleboard on open water; “rock-n-roll yoga”
(set to certain kinds of music); “yogalates” (a hybrid of yoga and pilates);
Anusara yoga (innovated by American yogi John Friend); “hot yoga,” or
Bikram yoga (performed in a heated environment); “kundalini yoga” (osten-
sibly based on a version of tantra); as well as Iyengar, Ashtanga, and Vinyasa
yoga, among many others.

Yoga and Biopolitical Self-Governance

I now address the cultural status and treatment of yoga in the contemporary
West, where it is most closely identified with the physical practices (or
āsanas) of postural yoga. I explore how contemporary postural yoga may
stand in relation to forms of power exerted in liberal and neoliberal regimes.
Although my claims pertain to yoga in the United States, they may be broadly
applicable in a variety of liberal/neoliberal contexts. I rely on Foucauldian
concepts of biopolitical self-governance and neoliberal governmentality to
offer a reading of the role of postural yoga within such regimes. Following

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6 Political Theory 

Foucault, I refer to the US context as both liberal and neoliberal: valorizing

key features of liberal thought such as individual freedom, choice, and auton-
omy yet subject to neoliberal interpretations of these principles, as neoliber-
alism employs classically liberal values in a specific way.16
While some analysts argue that postural yoga stands in resistance to the
forms of domination Foucault identifies in such regimes, I argue that this is
only partially true. In some instances, postural yoga in the United States is
a participant within the exercise of neoliberal biopolitical power. Moreover,
the development of postural yoga into a form of biopolitical self-
governance does not always represent a divergence from the “authentically
Indian” or putatively “ancient” roots of the yogic tradition. Rather, it can be
compatible with a variety of imperatives found within the yogic tradition.
In some instances, yoga’s participation in a neoliberal biopolitics may
require a denial and even violation of the tradition’s most common norms.
But yoga’s transformation in the West—and particularly its participation in
neoliberal biopolitics— has also been “effected in a way that is coextensive
with some of the most important underlying assumptions or principles”17 of
the yogic tradition. I now analyze the ways in which yoga may participate
in neoliberal biopolitics, addressing yogic practice as it is reconstructed and
lived today in particular US contexts. The plural, hybrid nature of both
premodern and contemporary yoga entails a methodological approach that
relies not on any particular texts or practices construed as “authoritative”
but rather on specific forms of lived yogic experience. It is this set of lived
experiences in American urban centers—as evidenced by attendance at
yoga studios, and popular discourse in the world of blogs and magazines—
to which I refer.

Foucault’s Biopolitics and Neoliberal Governmentality

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics deals with the penetration of self-
disciplinary regimes into the most intimate domains of modern life such as
the body. Foucault offers us a compelling way to understand how individuals’
relationships to their own bodies—including practices of bodily cultivation
and self-fashioning—are enlisted in the workings of power. In his 1977–1979
lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault investigates processes of subjec-
tivation in liberal and neoliberal societies and introduces the concept of “gov-
ernmentality,” defined as the “conduct of conduct”: “the set of institutions
and practices . . . through which people’s conduct is guided,” as “authorities
seek to guide . . . [the] decisions of individuals and collectives in order to
achieve specific objectives,” through a “complex of practical mechanisms,
procedures, instruments and calculations.”18

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Godrej 7

The advent of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century

brings about an emphasis on a new kind of subject: autonomous, prudent,
responsible, and calculating. While neoliberalism is ordinarily equated with
a radically free market involving maximized competition and free trade,
Wendy Brown notes that it is also a political rationality: a “specific form of
normative political reason organizing the political sphere, governance prac-
tices, and citizenship.”19 Neoliberalism, she claims, “casts the political and
social spheres as . . . themselves organized by market rationality,” promulgat-
ing a “political culture that figures citizens exhaustively as rational economic
actors in every sphere of life,” and “policies that figure and produce citizens
as individual entrepreneurs and consumers whose moral autonomy is mea-
sured by their capacity for ‘self-care’—their ability to provide for their own
needs and service their own ambitions.”20 When “deployed as a form of gov-
ernmentality,” neoliberalism entails a mode of control “achieved through for-
mation rather than repression or punishment,” which “orchestrat[es] the
subject’s conduct toward him or herself . . . lead[ing] and control[ling] sub-
jects without being responsible for them.”21 It convenes a “free” subject who
is controlled through his or her own freedom: an “entrepreneur” in every
aspect of life, rationally deliberating about courses of action, making choices,
and bearing full responsibility for their consequences.22 Its methodology,
Sam Binkley notes, is uniquely minimal: “without acting directly on subjects,
neoliberal governmentality seeks to incite a set of specific transformations
through the intentional curtailing of the apparatus of government itself,
thereby effecting an indirect manipulation of the background conditions for
individual conduct.”23
Variously described as an ideology, an economic system, a logic of gover-
nance, a theory of the state, a new stage in capitalism, or a political rational-
ity, the term neoliberalism is vaguely defined but omnipresent, internally
contradictory, interdisciplinary, and promiscuous, used to describe a wide
variety of phenomena, with little consensus on its precise meaning. Brown
notes that it is a “loose and shifting signifier” with “no fixed or settled coor-
dinates,” exhibiting “temporal and geographical variety in its discursive for-
mulations, policy entailments and material practices.”24 At one level, we
might see these ambiguities as a productive source of theoretical possibility.
But many argue that when neoliberalism is seen as hegemonic and ubiqui-
tous, it loses its explanatory or analytical purchase, reduced to an all-or-noth-
ing “bulldozer.”25 If “neoliberalism can be everywhere and do virtually
anything . . . it is impossible to use the term to describe the . . . varied terrain
and methods of the exercise of power today.”26
My first task, then, is to provide a more precise meaning for my own usage
of the term. Not all scholars rely on Foucault to explicate neoliberalism.

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8 Political Theory 

Some (influenced by Marx) focus on the role of economic policies and the
restructuring of socio-economic and class relations,27 while others are more
likely to focus on neoliberalism’s effects on individual subjectivity: how sub-
jects come to understand themselves, how their behavior is shaped and their
sensibilities cultivated by neoliberal assumptions.28 Here, I follow the latter
Foucauldian form of scholarship, which tends to emphasize the “governmen-
tality” effects of neoliberalism.
My usage of neoliberalism follows those who see it as “a large-scale histori-
cal project . . . operating through a wide variety of social agents,” involving a
“deep transformation of culture.”29 Seen in this way, the project of neoliberal
governmentality “plays out equally on the levels of social, economic, cultural,
and personal life.”30 This approach focuses on the “culture of neoliberalism,
and the specific governmentalities through which it insinuates itself into the
fabric of our lives . . . touch[ing] on many of the most innocuous and personal
categories of self-understanding, from sexuality and embodiment to emotional
self-management and intimacy.”31 It seeks to “trace the ways in which neolib-
eral thought has penetrated people, including the ways we understand who we
are and how we live our lives.”32 It focuses particularly on the routine, every-
day practices of living, assuming that we are all implicated in shaping politics
through quotidian personal conduct.33 Admittedly, this entails a uniquely
Foucauldian view on the power of discourses and technologies of government
to shape people’s lives,34 although many Foucauldians acknowledge that this is
not an uncontested lens through which to read our current moment, and that
Foucault’s account of neoliberalism is quite distinct from many others.
A key aspect of its socio-cultural transformation is neoliberalism’s empha-
sis on what has variously been called the optimization of the self or the “tech-
nization” of its well-being.35 Theorists like Binkley and Barbara Cruikshank
demonstrate how positive psychology, self-esteem movements, and other
discourses of personal self-help and transformation create self-governing
subjects.36 On this view, “individuals govern themselves through the cultiva-
tion and optimization of their own . . . potentials,” and “everything, including
one’s own mind, body, and emotional state is a resource . . . to be developed,
exploited or leveraged for advantage in a world of competitive actors.”37
Neoliberal governmentality entails the freedom to take up “self-cultivation as
an enterprising program”:38 central to its apparatus are “frameworks through
which individuals reflect back on themselves, assess themselves for their
potentials and aptitudes for independent conduct, and work to optimize their
freedom.”39 Those who fall short of the realization of this potential are seen
to have betrayed their human capacities.40
This emphasis on “responsibilizing” citizens to optimize their potentials is
rooted in what Brown and others have called the self as an entrepreneurial

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Godrej 9

self-investor, and human capital as “the new conduct.”41 What distinguishes

neoliberalism from capitalism, Brown notes, is not simply its enlarged domain,
but the importance of self-investment: the pursuit of activities such as “educa-
tion, training, leisure, reproduction, consumption and more are increasingly
configured as strategic decisions and practices related to enhancing the self’s
future value.”42 As both individuals and states become projects of manage-
ment rather than rule, neoliberal reason construes both person and states on the
model of the contemporary firm: both are expected to “comport themselves in
ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future
value,” and both do so through “practices of entrepreneurialism, self-invest-
ment and/or attracting investors.”43 Competition, not exchange, structures
relationships among selves construed as human capital.44 Meanwhile, human
capital’s constant and ubiquitous aim, whether studying, working, planning
retirement, or reinventing itself, is to entrepreneurialize its endeavors, appreci-
ate its value, and increase its rating or ranking.45

Yoga’s Participation in a Neoliberal Biopolitics

I now demonstrate how postural yoga as practiced in the United States may
converge with neoliberal governmentality. Foucauldians have noted that the
“responsibilization” of individuals is particularly apparent in the field of
health, for liberal humanism is in part anchored in the belief that “individual
health is a product of our own choices.”46 The shift in technologies of govern-
ment in neoliberal regimes involves “an increasing emphasis on the respon-
sibility of individuals to manage their own affairs”47 through prudent
self-investment and self-optimization. The practices of yoga can be seen as
what Foucault called “technologies of the self”: practices that “permit indi-
viduals to effect . . . operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a
certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”48
Foucault traces the genealogy of this self-care to ancient Greek and Roman
practices, locating in them an emancipatory potential for resistance to power.
But some claim that the rise of modern biopolitical disciplinary power
absorbs these technologies of the self, through a precise, detailed, and con-
stant knowledge and control of bodies and lives.49 The ancient philosophical
project of self-care can be displaced by modern scientific discourse and insti-
tutions serving the mass formation of individuals.50 In contemporary neolib-
eral societies, these technologies of the self can be put in service of the
imperatives of self-maximization designed to normalize bodily self-disci-
pline: “the body and its capacities . . . become central to technologies of self-
hood.”51 While bodily self-enhancement has of course been a human goal

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10 Political Theory 

since time immemorial, self-enhancement in contemporary biopolitical

regimes is characterized by the “[maximization of] the vital forces and poten-
tialities of the living body . . . understood as an imperative.”52 Contemporary
forms of yoga practice can often reflect this imperative—and responsibil-
ity—to maximize human vital capacity through self-management, invest-
ment in oneself, optimization of one’s own well-being, and thus of one’s
future value.
Postural yoga is a teleological project of progressive individual self-
fashioning, self-improvement, and optimization. Despite the diversity of
yogic teleologies, at the heart of the yogic project is the impetus toward incre-
mental betterment of one’s capabilities, whether understood in lofty terms of
soteriological transcendence, or more mundane terms such as bodily beauty
or perfection of postures. One practices with regularity, repeatedly honing,
training, and cultivating the body, working to make it more pliable and ease-
fully able to move through poses. Nor is this commitment to teleological
self-fashioning an artefact of “Western” yoga. The emphasis on repeated self-
cultivating practice appears in premodern Indic texts now regarded as
“canonical,” as well as in modern Indian forms of practice.53 For instance, K.
Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga yoga valorizes “the body’s ability to . . . progres-
sively achieve greater heights in the performance of yoga poses,”54 while
B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga is replete with references to repeated practice
in pursuit of progressive achievement.55
As a “technology of the self,” postural yoga also occasionally participates
in discourses of individual choice and responsibility so crucial to the neolib-
eral program. It offers the modern consumer a dizzying variety of choice,
while allowing her to construct her own identity in keeping with market logic
and consumer culture.56 The self-fashioning of yoga is couched as an expres-
sion of lifestyle choice and individual identity. One yogi claims: “In my opin-
ion, rational egoism is the proper moral code for a yogi . . . I cherish MY right
to life, liberty and the pursuit of MY happiness. In selfish pursuit, I hope to
achieve MY inner peace.”57 Many yoga classes are rife with the language of
individual choice, as teachers deploy responsibilizing language that congrat-
ulates the yoga practitioner for her or his healthy choices. “Thank yourself for
coming to your mat,” and “you showed up to practice today” are routinely-
heard refrains. Like Althusser’s subject, yoga practitioners are “hailed” when
they choose to engage in yogic self-cultivation, thus recognizing their own
identity as responsible subjects.58 Teachers gently exhort the students with
slogans such as “this is your time” and “this is your practice.” Also highly
common is the idea of individualizing practice to each person’s requirements:
students are given choices to modify their practice following their own bodily
constraints and capabilities. Often, teachers will demonstrate a physically

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Godrej 11

demanding posture or sequence, while reassuring students that they are wel-
come to modify them to make them less demanding, or to skip certain
sequences by taking “child’s pose” or bālāsana, a restorative fetal position
accessible to almost all. Yoga sometimes adopts the neoliberal ethos of “risk
management” that responsibilizes the individual for her choices: signing a
waiver releasing the teacher or studio from legal liability due to injury is now
mandatory at most yoga studios in the United States. Nor is there any doubt
that postural yoga has become a commodified, fetishized object of material
gain. Magazines such as Yoga Journal attest to the variety of yoga “merchan-
dise,” along with photo shoots featuring pouty models and designer yoga-
wear, all reinscribing consumerism and heteronormative beauty standards.
The rational, prudent yoga consumer chooses her specific practice from this
smorgasbord, she chooses daily to “come to her mat,” to modify the postures
in accordance with the available choices, and to be responsible for recogniz-
ing her own bodily capacities and limitations.
This convergence of yogic practice with the neoliberal logic of consumer
choice exemplifies postural yoga’s occasional detachment from—and trans-
formation of—the dominant norms of the Indic traditions. In premodern
Indic contexts, yogic knowledge was typically transmitted within the context
of a guru–disciple relationship characterized by submission of disciple to
guru. Premodern and contemporary Indian guru-oriented yoga is sometimes
characterized as rigorous, physically demanding, and forceful, requiring
physical stamina, capacity for exertion, and submission to the teacher’s
instructions (hence the translation of the Sanskrit term hat.ha-yōga as “vio-
lent” or “forceful exertion”). Stories are told of legendarily authoritarian
Indian teachers like Iyengar and Jois who were famous for their punitive
teaching styles, sometimes employing corporeal discipline, such as aggres-
sive physical adjustments and even slapping and shouting. However, yoga
now functions largely according to the principles of individual choice, as
each practitioner chooses his or her own path eclectically, without immersion
within a lineage. Of course, lineages of modern Indian gurus are reified by
some Western yoga practitioners who seek to travel to India to study “at the
source” and thus authenticate their teaching or practice.59 Yet, discipleship
under modern Indian gurus takes on the normative features of modern
Western life.60 The individual choice of the student continues to take prece-
dence as the organizing principle for Western practitioners, even when fil-
tered through the lens of guru–disciple tradition.61
The trope of yoga as an “investment in” oneself is ubiquitous in public
discourse; yoga magazines, websites, and ads exhort subjects to treat yoga as
“an investment in yourself . . . with many positive returns,”62 directly connect-
ing its role as a “self-care” strategy to its perceived potential for increasing the

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12 Political Theory 

value of the self.63 These languages and frameworks underscore that many
contemporary subjects of postural yogic practice are hailed in public discourse
as human capital to be managed entrepreneurially through investing in their
own long-term well-being. Like education, fitness, diet, therapeutic work, and
other activities of personal reform and self-optimization, yoga is increasingly
seen as a strategic practice designed to enhance one’s own esteem and future
value, whether understood in terms of stress reduction and overall good health,
or attracting future “investors” such as significant others or even social peers.
But even while postural yoga’s participation in neoliberal biopolitics
occurs at the expense of distorting certain predominant yogic norms, it simul-
taneously converges with others. Of all yogic principles, those most likely to
resonate with the responsible, self-governing subjects of neoliberalism are
self-discipline and self-mastery. The very translation of “yoga,” despite the
variety involved, usually denotes self-discipline or self-mastery. In almost
every text now construed as authoritative, self-discipline and self-mastery are
considered primary routes toward yogic goals. This self-discipline and self-
mastery so foundational to the definition of yoga appear to have been trans-
lated into and made compatible with contemporary forms of self-regulation
required in neoliberal times. Like weight loss and exercise regimens that
“[assign] to each individual the responsibility for monitoring and measuring
their body’s activities,” yoga’s fundamental commitment to self-mastery
aligns creatively with a neoliberal biopolitics that “affords individuals both
the tools and the motivation for increasing levels of self-governance.”64 This
alignment is further intensified by the branding practices of yoga merchan-
dising firms which “appropriate yogic practice into a consumerist model of
discipline and self-care” in order to reinforce Western ideologies of healthism
and personal optimization.65
In a study interviewing yoga practitioners, a majority of respondents
answered that among the things they valued in yoga was the discipline and
work ethic it instilled. In a representative response, a student explains: “I
stopped smoking, I lost about fifteen kilos, I stopped doing drugs, I stopped
drinking . . . I have developed self discipline . . . I am more focused.”66 Like
diet and exercise, postural practice becomes one more way in which neolib-
eral subjects can become “governors of their own selves.”67 The financial
incentives offered at yoga studios for regular attendance hail the committed
practitioner who brings herself to practice with regularity. The system of the
series or multi-class pass encourages monitoring of attendance; regular atten-
dance is incentivized through a pricing that makes a “drop-in” class far more
expensive than a series. To commit seriously to yoga is to work steadily and
cumulatively, perhaps over years, on precision, alignment, breath flow, and
so forth. Every āsana (pose) “is a challenge that sometimes has to be

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Godrej 13

practiced intensively until you finally master it.”68 Even when shorn of the
ascetic implications of transcendence, these aims require disciplined, regular
practice, and mental and corporeal self-mastery. In this sense, “the conceptu-
alizations of selfhood that are produced within yoga converge with neoliberal
constructions of selfhood, and these discourses are therefore mutually rein-
forcing and constantly reproduced.”69
Yogic norms of self-mastery may also assist the subject in dealing with
neoliberalism’s contradictory demands. As Julie Guthman notes, “neoliberal
governmentality produces contradictory impulses such that the neoliberal
subject is emotionally compelled to participate in society as both out-of-con-
trol consumer and self-controlled subject.”70 Neoliberalism and its attendant
forms of consumer culture require the subject to engage in obligatory forms
of ingestion, while simultaneously moderating her own consumption or aton-
ing for it through forms of health-inducing self-cultivation. The perfect sub-
ject-citizen who either resists the temptation of “unhealthy” foods or
moderates their physical effects, achieving both eating and thinness, is
imbued with rationality and self-discipline. Postural yoga serves as an instru-
ment to fulfill these conflicting demands: either the repeated physical prac-
tice militates against eating unhealthily, or self-discipline allows the subject
to avoid temptation altogether. Meanwhile, the popularity of postural yoga in
the Euro-American middle classes may also be explained by the demands of
the post-Fordist economy, in which the density of work is increased while the
workday is delimited by blurring the boundaries between “work” and the rest
of one’s life. Postural yoga may allow subjects to continue coping with the
stresses of the post-Fordist workplace, while keeping the body healthy, use-
ful, flexible, and productive enough to work all hours.71 Yoga may empower
citizens to enhance their capacities and skills in ways that subtly (if uninten-
tionally) shape them into “self-monitoring and self-reliant subjects . . . pre-
pared for success in global capitalism.”72
Contemporary forms of yoga thus illustrate the “empowering” aspect of
self-governance at the heart of governmentality. On Foucault’s view, exer-
cises of power do not necessarily result in the removal of liberty; rather, they
may “‘empower’ or ‘activate’ subjects and enlarge the field of individual
freedom and choice.”73 Participation in postural yoga empowers its subjects
to choose the form of practice that may best aid their self-enhancement, while
partaking in an ethic of what Nikolas Rose calls active biological citizenship:
exploring and pushing their own physical limits, accessing new realms of
possibility in the rest of their lives, achieving new things in body and mind,
encountering challenge, and perhaps conquering physical limits.74 As Sara
Rushing notes, the concept of empowerment, once identified with civil rights
activism and feminist consciousness-raising, was co-opted by neoliberals,

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14 Political Theory 

deployed to diminish social safety nets by valorizing entrepreneurial self-

care and “responsibilization, . . . [a] solicitation to self-discipline and subjec-
tivity in compliance with the dominant logic of systems of power.”75
In this way, the practice of postural yoga may fulfill the neoliberal “cul-
tural demand for entrepreneurial, disciplined, and self-regulating subjects.”76
The techniques of self-governance valorized by yoga produce forms of
agency both required and rewarded by neoliberal regimes, providing indi-
viduals “the ability and motivation to ensure the productive and predictable
development of their own body toward the end of smooth economic develop-
ment.”77 Modern postural yoga may creatively align with biopolitical impera-
tives, as the language of yogic self-discipline converges with neoliberalism’s
self-surveillance, self-monitoring, and self-mastery. Many yoga practitioners
may become perfect subjects of neoliberalism: autonomous, self-disciplined,
driven by the logic of choice, responsible for their own health, geared toward
progressive self-cultivation, made amenable to the competing demands of the
neoliberal economy, and empowered to be productive members of such an
economy through their own entrepreneurial self-investment.
Now, some may object that there is surely nothing wrong with a healthy,
productive populace in which people discipline themselves, take responsibil-
ity, and feel challenged or empowered by their pursuit of health. But Wendy
Brown reminds us that neoliberalism as rationality has “prepared the ground
for profoundly anti-democratic political ideas and practices to take root.”78 It
produces an “unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian orientation,” undermining
“an already weak investment in an active citizenry and an already thin con-
cept of a public good.”79 Neoliberal conceptions of selfhood produce a “paci-
fied and neutered citizenry”80 divested of any orientation toward the common.
Citizenship is reduced to self-care, consumption and entrepreneurship,
thereby ensuring that “the project of navigating the social becomes entirely
one of . . . procuring a personal solution to every problem,” while the “con-
version of socially, economically, and politically produced problems into
consumer items” entails “depoliticization on an unprecedented level.”81
Unemployment, obesity, or ill health—and by extension poverty—are attrib-
uted to the failure of responsibility, entrepreneurship or self-mastery, rather
than to unjust socio-political structures. Democratic subjects, wholly in thrall
to their own interests, become “available to political tyranny . . . precisely
because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that
they mistake for freedom.”82
The danger is that contemporary yogis may become perfect neoliberal sub-
jects, as the practice of yoga may inadvertently reinscribe a consumerist, polit-
ically passive, undemocratic, and anti-egalitarian orientation. Responsibilizing
yogic subjects for health-inducing self-cultivation and “consumption” of

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Godrej 15

yogic opportunities, while connecting such success to self-governance, may

imply that poor, heavy, unhealthy, or unemployed others have only themselves
to blame. Inequities in health, body size, employment, or income can be legiti-
mated and depoliticized by being relegated to the realm of “personal” choice
and a failure of disciplined self-optimization. The optimizing of bodily perfor-
mance becomes the marker of productive and conscientious citizenship, while
self-improvement and self-regulation become a civic obligation, a “vaccine”
against sources of social instability such as gender inequality and violent
crime.83 The logic that the achievement of enhanced bodily health is the result
of one’s “free choices” and “hard work” (the nontrivial price of most yoga
classes notwithstanding) may produce apolitical attitudes that disregard ine-
galitarian social structures, focusing instead on the freedom to engage in the
consumption of yoga. Such a yogic subject may become amenable to arroga-
tions of power, absorbed in pursuing her free choice of yoga practice, disin-
terested in questioning the broader structures that produce differential
outcomes.
More insidiously, yoga can function as a complete preoccupation, a choice
which perpetuates the fallacy that one is doing something meaningful. In
pursuing yoga, many may see themselves as making a lifestyle “choice” that
seems to supply a seemingly benevolent ethical content. Practitioners of yoga
may imagine that they have discovered a broadly palatable ethics that feels
exotic and countercultural.84 But in actuality, this choice may function to dis-
place politics, by pacifying the subject in a measure proportional to the extent
of her preoccupation with deviating from the apparent default lifestyle choice.
The larger the lifestyle “choice” looks, the more it may preclude her from
having the energy to explore more radically democratic solutions. Yoga can
become a visible outlet to soak up resources in a way that will not truly desta-
bilize the dominant system, an elaborate preoccupation that absorbs the time
and money which could be directed toward challenging political structures. It
may provide the illusion that one is taking a drastic step away from the domi-
nant system, while simultaneously consuming the resources and effort
required to explore truly radical alternatives.
But just because contemporary yogic practice occasionally converges
with neoliberal governmentality, should we assume that yoga’s political
effects can simply be reduced to its production of the good neoliberal sub-
ject? Clearly not—the highly diverse set of texts and practices now referred
to as yoga cannot be considered either “compatible with” or “subversive of”
certain political commitments in any inherent sense. Rather, because it entails
a variety of goals and purposes, yoga’s normative underpinnings may align
with a variety of political formations, those that capitulate to neoliberal forms
of governance as well as those that critique and resist these same forms of

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16 Political Theory 

governance. Like every polyvocal tradition, yoga offers an abundance of

interpretive possibilities, and I now demonstrate that reading and practicing
elements of the yogic tradition in a particular way may offer challenges to
neoliberal constructions of selfhood.

Yogic Resistance to Neoliberal Biopolitics

Perhaps the most promising avenue for a counter-neoliberal reading is yogic
philosophy’s devaluing of materiality relative to spiritual reality. The Yōga
school of philosophy developed within the context of a renunciatory classical
tradition in South Asia during the second century CE,85 influenced by the
ontology of the earlier Sām.khya school. Sām.khya’s dualist ontology sees
matter (prakr.ti) as inferior to absolute spirit or ultimate reality (purusha). The
realm of phenomenal change—māyā or illusion—includes nature, the human
body, its functions, and worldly life, all considered subordinate to ultimate
transcendent reality.86 In contrast to Western dualism, the mind and body are
both included in the realm of embodiment: mental and emotional processes
are considered subtle forms of matter, subject to the same illusory tendencies
as the body. Along with other classical systems, Sām.khya and Yōga prescribe
complex practices of ascetic discipline in order to extricate the individual
from the grip of materiality. Liberation—the transcendent realization of the
Self in its purity—requires controlled withdrawal of the senses from this tran-
sient realm.
The purpose of yogic self-discipline, on this view, is steady disidentifica-
tion from the corporeal self—including the volatility of one’s mental pro-
cesses—in order to realize one’s identity with a supra-material, transcendent
consciousness. The opening chapter of the Yōga-Sūtras famously defines
yoga as the cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness: yogaś-citta-vr.tti-
nirodhah. .87 This definition is further reinforced in the Bhagavad-Gītā, at
least one version of which translates the very word yoga as “discipline”: “He
is said to be mature in discipline [yōga] when he . . . is detached from sense
objects and actions (yadā hi nendriyārthesu . . . yogārūdhas tadocyate)”88 In
these texts, the fluctuations of one’s mental content—particularly sensory
desires—is reflective of the fleeting and ultimately illusory nature of mate-
rial existence. The application of self-discipline to the senses requires the
dispassionate observation of sense processes, cultivating awareness of
and detachment from the logic of materiality and from the content of one’s
own mind when ensnared in the grasp of materiality. “He should focus his
mind and restrain the activity of his thought and senses (tatraikāgram-
manah.-kr.tva yata-cittendriya-kriyah). . . . When his controlled thought
rests within the self alone, without craving objects of desire, he is said to

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Godrej 17

be disciplined (yadā-viniyatam. -cittam-ātmany-evāvatis.t. hate nispr.hah-

sarva-kāmebhyo yukta-ity-ucyate-tadā).”89
While modern Indian teachers like Vivekananda and Iyengar may have
referenced the Yōga-Sūtras and the Bhagavad-Gītā, the success of postural
yoga in the West stemmed from a de-emphasis of its soteriological ascetic
commitments, and its mass-marketing to Western consumer audiences as a
universally accessible and largely scientific practice privileging no philo-
sophical or religious metanarrative.90 In contrast, I propose that when re-
linked to particular philosophical roots, postural yoga practice can be
subversive with respect to neoliberal subjectivity. The self-discipline under-
taken in conjunction with these philosophical teachings would be antithetical
to the self-disciplining of the neoliberal subject: rather than self-governing to
become a docile body, a responsible consumer of choices, or a responsible
self-investor, this self-discipline would require its practitioner to cast critical
light on the mental processes having to do with worldly outcomes and thus
deconstruct their ultimately illusory and unsatisfying nature. Taught in this
way, the emphasis on detachment from worldly desire can place yogic prac-
tice squarely in opposition to the norms of consumer culture.
Crucial to Patanjali’s self-discipline are yogic practices such as swādhyāya
or self-inquiry, the pursuit of satya or truth, brahmachārya or self-control/
continence, and aparigraha or the renunciation of possessions.91 The pursuit
of these observances can encourage attitudes and behaviors that directly
counteract neoliberal subjectivity: cultivating a truthful inward gaze that
reflects on and problematizes the construction of one’s own needs, desires,
and self-image; truthfully uncovering and critically scrutinizing one’s own
motivations for certain sensual desires; practicing detaching from needing to
possess material goods or outcomes for external fulfillment, and so on. Such
practices can decouple self-governance from the imperative to “choose” and
“consume” wisely, directing it instead toward the problematization of dis-
courses encouraged by neoliberalism, by inculcating a critique of material
desires and conventional notions of the successful life. Rather than “optimiz-
ing my well-being” or “investing wisely in myself,” the yogic pursuit of
truthful self-inquiry might cause me to deconstruct the motivations underly-
ing such goals, possibly allowing me to unmask the larger socio-political-
cultural forces at work in disseminating such values. Rather than becoming a
docile site for resolving the contradictory impulses of neoliberal-consump-
tion-and-control, the yogic body may “[become] a sanctuary and a place of
resistance against the pervasive demands of consumer society.”92 The yogic
practices of vairāgya (dispassion)93 and pratyāhāra (sense-withdrawal)94
require one to remain a witness rather than a participant in one’s thoughts
and desires, while viewing one’s bodily experiences from a detached

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18 Political Theory 

perspective.95 This could inculcate an awareness that denaturalizes neoliberal

norms, cultivating the ability to detach oneself from the normative desirabil-
ity of goals such as self-optimization and self-investment. The emphasis on
pratyak-cetanā or habitual inward-mindedness96 can remind us that the well-
lived life need not be defined in terms of exterior characteristics such as “job
title, salary . . . bodily weight, and firmness.”97 In a disciplinary context
where all activities must aim toward some productive, externalized, self-
optimizing outcome, yoga may become subversive precisely because of its
non-instrumental nature. Although still teleological, this yoga is “good for
nothing”98 other than self- and world-transcendence, a goal decidedly at odds
with work and body discipline for the sake of consumerism, self-investment,
and self-optimization.
Such an outcome may produce what Foucault called “counter-conduct”:
“resistances, refusals, revolts against being conducted in a certain way.”99
Despite his early insistence on subjectivity being determined by power,
Foucault’s late ethical writings appeal to the self’s capacities to “reflect criti-
cally upon the power–knowledge relations . . . and to engage in practices of
critical self-transformation” that could resist disciplinary subject-forma-
tion.100 In a constructive, ethical turn, the later Foucault elaborates on the
practice of parrhesia or frank speech for the purpose of criticizing oneself
and others, and of speaking truth to power.101 In a similar vein, we may see in
this reading of yoga the potential for transformative self-care combined with
truth-telling, which may critically unmask—rather than unreflectively con-
verge with—biopolitical disciplinary projects. In a culture defined by exteri-
ority, exacting standards of physical perfection and corporate/commodified
ideals of success, some argue, yoga may “[teach] resistance to some of the
prevailing conceptions of self that powerful entities in our society—the fit-
ness industry, the cosmetics industry, the finance charge industry, the corpo-
rate workplace—support.”102 When taught in this particular way, yogic
practice can constitute what Ann Cvetkovich calls a “utopia of ordinary
habit”: everyday activities that can “remake the affective cultures of . . . con-
sumerism . . . and neoliberal culture.”103
Arguably, such efforts, while still fledgling, are already under way: exam-
ples abound of lived yogic experiences that seek to inculcate countercultural
values. Movements like “Yoga to the People” offer donation-based classes
designed to combat yoga’s consumerism and make it widely accessible, cit-
ing the following: “There will be no correct clothes/there will be no proper
payment. . . . No you’re not good enough or rich enough/This yoga is for
everyone.”104 Critical public discourse by yoga teachers and practitioners on
the commodified nature of yoga is increasingly common, with attempts to
link these issues to yogic philosophy through introduction of texts like the

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Godrej 19

Yōga-Sūtras in classes.105 Teachers write about introducing Patanjalian con-

cepts such as satya (truth), swādhyāya (self-inquiry) and aparigraha (non-
possession) in order to encourage developing self-awareness of one’s
externally motivated self-image,106 questioning contemporary yoga’s confla-
tion of bodily perfection with self-optimization,107 critiquing the
“achievement”-oriented nature of contemporary yoga by refusing to push
oneself into difficult postures, and emphasizing the anticompetitive nature of
yoga by keeping one’s gaze inwardly focused instead of comparing oneself
with others.108 Of course, these contemporary efforts do not seek as radically
ascetic a fulfillment of the Patanjalian ideal as, say, Indian renunciates have
long attempted, engaging in acts of intense self-deprivation and austerity
such as fasting, celibacy, and nakedness designed to produce absolute mysti-
cal union. Nor can they, for in the Euro-American context, such radical ascet-
icism and transcendence carry little resonance. Rather, these efforts, while
rooted in a fundamentally ascetic set of principles, are more modest in aim,
focusing on “moving the needle” away from uncritical investment in exteri-
orized, competitive, consumerist, values of self-optimization, and closer
toward the ideal of inward-oriented detachment from material desires and
outcomes.
However, a deeper reading of yogic texts also reveals that the very pur-
pose of Patanjali’s philosophy is to “amplify human dissociation from the
changeable, dissatisfying environment of eco-social complexity.”109
Patanjali’s adept is liberated when concentrated in meditative experience
(samādhi), in order to attain the state of kaivalya (isolation or aloneness) in
which mind, body, and phenomenal world are transcended—a state hardly
conducive to the sort of socio-political awareness and action required to sub-
vert neoliberalisms. The premodern practice of yoga was in fact thought to be
radically individualist, asocial, anti-human, and perhaps even anti-ethical,
requiring the removal of the individual from webs of conventional social
relation, obligation, and concern that render social ethics possible,110 resist-
ing the values of traditional householding, convention, and human attach-
ments.111 Is it possible, then, that the marrying of postural practice to classical
yogic philosophy can end up depoliticizing the subject in ways that might
comport conveniently with neoliberalism?
Certainly one narrative holds that the classical yogic philosophy encour-
ages a withdrawal from the phenomenal world and an indifference to, if not
emphatic prejudice against, socio-political engagement.112 However, this nar-
rative ignores the lively contestation in classical texts about combining the
renunciatory project with a concern for worldly ethics. The Bhagavad-Gītā
bears out this multivocality, for despite what is often thought to be a reduction
of the socio-political world to the status of an illusion or cosmic spectacle, the

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20 Political Theory 

Gītā simultaneously propounds the doctrine of karma yōga: disciplined action

according to the dictates of duty and ethics, while renouncing attachment to
the consequences of one’s actions.113 The seeker must act ethically but with
complete detachment from desire, and the detached pursuit of transcendence
must lead to un-self-interested action promoting the worldly welfare of all.
Perhaps no thinker was more creative in combining Hinduism’s renunciatory
heritage with political activism than Mohandas Gandhi. Like many of his con-
temporaries, Gandhi relied selectively and eclectically on a variety of classical
sources, including and especially the Gītā, to create a unique political project
often characterized as “ascetic activism” or “this-worldly asceticism”: a proj-
ect in which renunciation of desire was combined with tireless effort toward
socio-political change.114 Gandhi was among a generation of Indian reformers
for whom the Gītā acquired new life for “reconstructing a normative language
of ethics and politics,”115 as the concept of action-within-renunciation, or
detached yet dutiful action aimed toward the welfare of all, was enlisted to
show that devotion to one’s individual spiritual duty [dharma] was not incom-
patible with devotion to socio-political causes.116 The deployment of yoga
during the anticolonial and postcolonial periods underscores these abundant
political possibilities within yoga, possibilities also evident in contemporary
“activist” yoga, which expresses an ethical agenda that impels collective
action toward social justice.117
Like any tradition of thought, yogic philosophy lends itself to a variety of
interpretations. Following Gandhi, then, we may read the Bhagavad-Gītā’s
doctrine of karma-yōga as a call to socio-political engagement. When com-
bined with the emphasis on critical scrutiny of sense desires in both the Yōga-
Sūtras and the Gītā, we may read the yogic tradition as containing ample
resources for critiquing and resisting neoliberal selfhood, when postural prac-
tice is directed toward the philosophical goal of inward-oriented detachment
from material outcomes and desires. If contemporary yoga is taught in ways
that keep it loosely yoked to these philosophical precepts, it contains the
potential for a counterhegemonic construction of subjectivity, one that would
stand in opposition to the norms of consumption, self-optimization, self-
investment, and depoliticization.

Conclusion: An “Authentically”
Counterhegemonic Yoga?
I have argued here that the politics of contemporary yogic practice is charac-
terized by multiple levels of ambivalence. First, forms of postural yoga prac-
tice prevalent in the West may militate against but simultaneously legitimate
forms of selfhood that are produced within neoliberal biopolitical regimes.

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Godrej 21

Second, the convergence of postural yoga with modern Western neoliberalism

occasionally distorts certain principles and norms of the yogic tradition, while
simultaneously expressing ideas compatible with other aspects of yoga’s his-
tory. I have presented above a proposal for reading, teaching, and/or applying
the yogic tradition in a counterhegemonic or countercultural way—a non-
instrumental and non-neoliberal reading that requires marrying postural prac-
tice to particular philosophical precepts, rather than allowing it to remain
largely divorced from those precepts. Given space constraints, I have here
been able to offer only a preliminary outline for such a proposal, in the hope
that it serves as a provocation to future scholarship and practice in the same
vein. In concluding, I wish to raise some issues about the potential pitfalls of
such an approach, while suggesting a way beyond these difficulties.
Crucially, this reading of yoga—which privileges a particularly Patanjali-
inspired form of anti-materialism, while connecting yogic practice to the
explicitly political rendering of the Bhagavad-Gītā—cannot ignore the diver-
sity of goals within yoga’s long history. Anti-materialist asceticism is only
one strain within a tremendously polyvocal tradition: examples abound of
premodern yoga being pressed into service of worldly goals such as “bodily
perfection, beauty, and other ‘physical’ goods.”118 Across yoga’s history,
pleasure, worldly aims, instrumental manipulation, and material gain have
stood alongside ascetic, spiritual aims, reflecting the coexistence of the
sacred and the mundane. Tantra’s world-affirming embrace of both embodi-
ment and physical pleasure—its elevation of bhukti (success/pleasure) and
mukti (liberation) as co-equal goals of the spiritual endeavor—further com-
plicates the notion that yoga has ever been exclusively focused on either tran-
scendence or materiality.
Any counterhegemonic reading of yoga based on a revival of its ascetic
metaphysics must therefore studiously avoid essentialist claims about the
“authenticity” of its understanding. South Asianists have emphasized that the
attempt to define these traditions in monolithic ways is dangerous—rather,
they are constructed and reconstructed through the imaginings and counter-
projections of their interpreters.119 But in popular discourse, the intuition that
yoga is countercultural is often married to an anxiety about preserving its
“authenticity” or “purity.”120 Many lament that yoga’s cultural alterity and
therefore authenticity is being denuded as it becomes more secularized, com-
modified, and palatable for liberal Western consumption.121 They suggest
that if only yogic practice could remain attached to its transcendent, spiritual
imperatives, less instrumentalized or put in service of individualist, material
goals, we could kill two birds with one stone: restore yoga’s “authenticity,”
while allowing it to resist consumerism and/or commodification. The view
that yoga may contain counterhegemonic potential is often linked to the

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22 Political Theory 

advocacy of a purist, authenticity-obsessed mode of yoga, and thus to pre-

cisely the same essentialisms on which much of modern yoga’s trajectory in
the West has been built.
But I wish to stress that the link between these is contingent rather than
necessary. Therefore, seeking counterhegemonic potential in a particular
philosophical and renunciatory reading of the tradition (as I have suggested
above) must avoid replicating facile appeals to the trope of contemporary
yoga as a commodified divergence from some authentic, premodern, mono-
lithic, cultural ideal.122 These appeals ignore the fact that yoga has repeatedly
been reinvented, both in the West and in India.123 The modern practice of
postural yoga is built on countless accretions: what people have been “get-
ting” out of yoga, whether in premodern India, modern India, or in the con-
temporary West, has always been subject to a variety of modes of
meaning-making by those who have undertaken its practice: instrumental and
otherwise, materialist and anti-materialist, secular and spiritual, political and
apolitical.124 Admittedly, this recognition sits ill at ease with recent attempts
to assert Indian “cultural ownership” of yoga,125 for if ancient Hindu yogis,
Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Sufis, medieval Nath yogis, and Kanphata tant-
rics, not to mention Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, and countless
others each reinvented yoga, why should “Westernized” forms of yoga
involving stand-up paddleboards, silk scarves, Yogalates, and so forth not be
deemed equally legitimate? As sympathetic as we may be to the claims of
those like Vandana Shiva who point to the “biopiracy” of Western institutions
profiteering from indigenous, non-Western knowledge, our sympathy sits at
odds with the recognition that the very idea of an “authentically Indian”
yogic tradition is to some extent a retrospective reification.
If we accept this, then we must disarticulate yoga’s anti-neoliberal poten-
tial from its ostensible “purity” or “authenticity.” The anti-materialist and
politically compatible reading of the Yōga-Sūtras and the Bhagavad-Gītā
must be self-conscious about appealing to specific strains within a highly
plural tradition, while eschewing the notion that this appeal “accurately rep-
resents” an entire tradition. It must understand itself as a syncretic and piece-
meal—yet constructive— interpretation of the yogic tradition for the express
purpose of emphasizing its counterhegemonic potential, rather than being
motivated by the glib desire to “authenticate” one’s practice.126 Instead of
presenting an “authoritative” understanding of yoga, our reading seeks to
selectively employ aspects of the tradition for our critical project, tempered
by the recognition of the partiality of our own perspective in light of the tradi-
tion’s multivalence.
The danger is that it is precisely this multivalence that allows yoga to feed
into neoliberalism by giving it many footholds. But I have suggested that not

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Godrej 23

all forms of yoga need be complicit with neoliberal subjectivity. Meanwhile,

for every claim that neoliberalism is pervasive, ubiquitous, normalized, and
dominant,127 we find a counterclaim about its incompleteness, malleability,
vulnerability and porosity.128 Neoliberalism is “continually operationalized,
enacted, performed . . . every attempt at its reiteration also provides an oppor-
tunity for resistance.”129 Perhaps the foremost political task, then, is for
scholars and practitioners to treat yoga in ways that emphasize its counterhe-
gemonic potential, steering clear of authenticity debates and instead turning
our energies to the productive task of taking up its intellectual resources for
socio-political resistance. Our counterhegemonic reading can re-enact yogic
practice to produce a series of ongoing resistances against a deterministic and
totalizing conception of neoliberal subjectivity. This political task need not
be exclusive with an intellectual honesty that admits the particularity of this
reading and its deliberate, piecemeal reliance upon certain influential compo-
nents of yogic philosophy, without fetishistic claims to authenticity and exag-
gerated alterity.

Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Sara Rushing, Michaele Ferguson, Andrew March, Mihaela
Czobor-Lupp, David Haekwon Kim, Bronwyn Leebaw, Keally McBride, Greg Ver
Steeg, Sarah Pemberton, Jane Bennett, and the anonymous reviewers for Political
Theory. Thanks are also due to Taryn Parks for her invaluable research assistance.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

Notes
   1. David Gordon White, ed., Yoga in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2012), 2.
   2. Ibid., 2.
  3. Geoffrey Samuel, Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Mircea Eliade, Yoga:
Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
  4. White, Yoga in Practice, 6.
  5. Andrea Jain, Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 18.

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24 Political Theory 

   6. Kenneth Liberman, “The Reflexivity of the Authenticity of Hat.ha Yoga,” in Yoga

in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark Singleton and Jean
Byrne (London: Routledge, 2008), [hereafter YMW], 104.
   7. Mark Singleton and Jean Byrne, “Introduction,” in YMW, 4.
  8. Jain, Selling Yoga, 21.
  9. Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta:
Advaita Ashram), 1992 [1896], 20.
10. Joseph Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 22–23.
11. Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81.
12. Ibid., 176–77.
13. Jain, Selling Yoga, 37.
14. Mark Singleton, “The Classical Reveries of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and
Constructive Orientalism,” in YMW, 78.
15. Jain, Selling Yoga, 43–44; Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga:
Patanjali and Western Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004), 191–94.
16. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978-79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 218, 118, 94, 102. Foucault
uses the phrase “liberal and neoliberal” several times in his 1979 lectures on neo-
liberalism, a usage which suggests that the two regime types are mutually impli-
cated in the late modern age: The Birth of Biopolitics 78, 85, 322. Wendy Brown
notes that Foucault’s own usage of neoliberalism in the Birth of Biopolitics lec-
tures is contradictory: the lectures vacillate between marking neoliberalism’s
distinctiveness and establishing its continuity with liberalism, and neoliberalism
appears inconsistently as a break with, swerve from, and a modification of lib-
eralism. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 54.
17. Stuart Ray Sarbacker, “The Numinous and Cessative in Modern Yoga,” in YMW,
178.
18. Thomas Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm, 2012), 1, 4–5.
19. Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and
De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34, no. 6 (2006): 693.
20. Ibid., 694.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Sam Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2015), 21.
24. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 20–21.
25. Taylor C. Boas and Jordan Gans-Morse, “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal
Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan,” Studies in Comparative International
Development 44 (2009): 137–61; Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal
Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism

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Godrej 25

as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2006); Terry Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics
and Contemporary Neoliberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108, no. 1 (2012):
44–65.
26. Keally McBride, “Neoliberalism: Its Unnatural Life and Timely Death,” paper
presented at the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting,
Chicago, 2013.
27. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
28. Brown, Undoing the Demos; Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal
Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009); Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in
Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010).
29. Raewyn Connell, “Understanding Neoliberalism,” in Neoliberalism and
Everyday Life, ed. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2010), 27, 33.
30. Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 4.
31. Ibid., 11. See also Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012).
32. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, “Competing Philosophies: Neoliberalism
and Challenges of Everyday Life,” in Braedley and Luxton, Neoliberalism and
Everyday Life, 6.
33. Ibid., 20.
34. Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 9.
35. Ibid., 18.
36. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other
Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
37. Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 4–5.
38. Ibid., 23.
39. Ibid., 24.
40. Ibid., 18.
41. Brown, Undoing the Demos; Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics”;
Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise.
42. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 33–34.
43. Ibid., 22.
44. Ibid., 81.
45. Ibid., 36.
46. Chad Lavin, Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 79.
47. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in
the Twenty-first Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4.
48. Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A
Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick
H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 18.

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26 Political Theory 

49. Edward McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical

Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 98, 241, 283.
50. Ibid., xix, 282.
51. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 8.
52. Ibid., 23.
53. Georg Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali: A New Translation and
Commentary (Folkestone, UK: Dawson, 1979), 35, 41, 88, 118, 119.
54. Benjamin Richard Smith, “‘With Heat Even Iron Will Bend,’” in YMW, 156.
55. B.K.S. Iyengar, The Illustrated Light on Yoga (New Delhi: Harper Collins India,
1997), pp. 5, 8, 12, 22.
56. Jain, Selling Yoga, 69, 77–78.
57. Kristin McGee, “Ethics for Yogis,” Mantra Yoga + Health, Issue 4, p. 12
58. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
59. Mimi Nichter, “The Social Life of Yoga: Exploring Transcultural Flows in
India,” in Yoga Traveling: Bodily Practice in Transcultural Perspective, ed.
Beatrix Hauser (Germany: Springer, 2013).
60. Ellen Goldberg and Mark Singleton, “Introduction,” in Gurus of Modern Yoga,
ed. Singleton and Goldberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4, 7, 8.
61. Julie J. C. Peters, “Guruji, Get Your Hand Off my Vagina: The Modern Yoga
Teacher-Student Relationship,” Elephant Journal, January 6 (2012), http://www.
elephantjournal.com/2012/01/guruji-get-your-hand-off-my-vagina-the-mod-
ern-yoga-teacher-student-relationship/
62. “Yoga: Making an Investment in Yourself,” http://duskyleaf.ca/blog/
yoga-making-investment-in-yourself/
63. Colette M. Herrick and Allan D. Ainsworth, “Invest in Yourself: Yoga as a Self-
Care Strategy,” Nursing Forum 35, no. 2 (2000): 32–26.
64. Lavin, 19–20.
65. Christine Lavrance and Kristin Lozanski, “This Is Not Your Practice Life:
Lululemon and the Neoliberal Governance of Self,” Canadian Review of
Sociology 51, no. 1 (2014): 76.
66. Sarah Strauss and Laura Mandelbaum, “Consuming Yoga, Conserving the
Environment: Transcultural Discourses on Sustainable Living,” in Yoga
Traveling, 185.
67. Cruikshank, The Will to Empower, 89, 91.
68. Verena Schnäbele, “The Useful Body: The Yogic Answer to Appearance
Management in the Post-Fordist Workplace,” in Yoga Traveling, 146.
69. Strauss and Mandelbaum, “Consuming Yoga,” 187.
70. Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, “Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy,
Culture and the Politics of Fat,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
24 (2006): 444.
71. Schnäbele, “The Useful Body,” 143–44.
72. Lavin, 20.
73. Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, 20
74. Schnäbele, “The Useful Body,” 146.

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Godrej 27

75. Sara Rushing, “What’s Left of ‘Empowerment’ After Neoliberalism?,” Theory &
Event 19, no. 1 (2016).
76. Lavin, 19.
77. Ibid., 5.
78. Brown, “American Nightmare,” 702.
79. Ibid., 703, 695.
80. Ibid., 709.
81. Ibid., 695, 704.
82. Ibid., 699, 703.
83. Lavrance and Lozanski, “This Is Not Your Practice Life,” 80, 85.
84. I owe this to Sara Rushing.
85. Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and
Practice (Prescott, AZ: Hohm Press, 1998), 100, 103.
86. Ritu DasGupta Sherma, “Sacred Immanence: Reflections of Ecofeminism in
Hindu Tantra,” in Lance E. Nelson, (ed.), Purifying the Earthly Body of God:
Religion and Ecology in India (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 95. See also
Farah Godrej, “Orthodoxy and Dissent in Hinduism’s Meditative Traditions: A
Critical Tantric Politics?” New Political Science 38 (2), 2016, 256-271.
87. Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali, 26.
88. Barbara Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), VI.4, 63.
89. Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita, VI.12, VI.18, 64–65.
90. Jain, Selling Yoga, 65–70.
91. Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali, 59, 80, 86.
92. Schnäbele, “The Useful Body,” 148
93. Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali, 34, 35–36, 60; Stoler-Miller, The
Bhagavad-Gita, 67.
94. Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali, 79.
95. Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita, VI.4, 63: “detached from sense objects and
actions (sarva-san.kalpa-sannyāsi).”
96. Feuerstein, The Yōga-Sūtra of Patañjali, 45.
97. Laura Duhan Kaplan, “Physical Education for Domination and Emancipation:
A Foucauldian Analysis of Aerobics and Hatha Yoga,” in Philosophical
Perspectives on Power and Domination, ed. Laura Duhan Kaplan and Laurence
F. Bove (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 75.
98. I owe this to Lisa Disch. See also Dean Mathiowetz, “The Political Potential of
Mindful Embodiment,” New Political Science 38 (2), 2016, 226-240.
99. Arnold I. Davidson, “In Praise of Counter-Conduct,” History of the Human
Sciences 24(4), 2011, 28.
100. Amy Allen, “Foucault and the Politics of Our Selves,” History of the Human
Sciences 24, no. 4 (2011): 44.
101. McGushin, xxi, xxix, Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as
a Practice of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994), 282.
102. Kaplan, “Physical Education,” 75–76.

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28 Political Theory 

103. Cvetkovich, Depression, 193.

104. http://yogatothepeople.com/about-us/mantra/
105. Kaplan, “Physical Education,” 73.
106. Gary Kraftsow, “Polishing the Mirror,” Yoga Journal, February 25, 2008.
107. Frank Jude Boccio, “Questioning the ‘Body Beautiful’: Yoga, Commercialism,
and Discernment”; and Melanie Klein, “How Yoga Makes You Pretty: The
Beauty Myth, Yoga and Me,” both in Carol Horton and Roseanne Harvey, eds.,
21st Century Yoga: Culture, Politics, Practice (Chicago: Kleio Books, 2012).
108. Aadil Palkhivala, “Teaching the Yamas in Asana Class,” Yoga Journal, August
28, 2007.
109. Matthew Remski, “Modern Yoga Will Not Form a Real Culture Until Every
Studio Can Also Double as a Soup Kitchen, and Other Observations from
the Threshold between Yoga and Activism,” in Horton and Harvey, eds., 21st
Century Yoga, 118.
110. Jain, Selling Yoga, 120; Alter, Yoga in Modern India, 8.
111. Mikel Burley, “A Petrification of One’s Own Humanity? Nonattachment and
Ethics in Yoga Traditions,” The Journal of Religion 94, no. 2 (2014): 204–28;
Remski, “Modern Yoga Will Not Form,” 115.
112. See Godrej, “Orthodoxy and Dissent in Hinduism’s Meditative Traditions.”
113. Stoler-Miller, The Bhagavad-Gita, II.47-48, II.50-51, 36.; II.9, 42; II.19, 43;
II.21, 44.
114. Veena Howard, Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph,
The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967).
115. Shruti Kapila and Faisal Devji, “Introduction,” in Political Thought in Action:
The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), xi, xiv.
116. C. A. Bayly, “India, The Bhagavad Gita and the World,” in Political Thought in
Action, 7.
117. http://www.offthematintotheworld.org; http://www.yogaactivist.org.
118. Sarbacker, “The Numinous and Cessative,” 173; Jain, Selling Yoga, 11.
119. Hugh Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 11–12, 15–16.
120. Boccio, “Questioning the ‘Body Beautiful,’” 49.
121. Singleton and Byrne, Yoga in the Modern World, 4; Peter Sklivas, “How Do You
Like Your Sweat: With or Without Devotion? Keeping Vigorous Yoga Authentic
to the Values of Yoga,” Mantra Yoga + Health, Issue 4, 56.
122. Gwi-Seok (Peggy) Hong, “Yoga Tradition and Lulu-ji: Can Commercialized
Yoga Be Respectful to the Indian Traditional Practice?” The Periphery, February
2015, http://www.theperipherymag.com/essay-yoga-tradition-and-lulu-ji.
123. Alter, Yoga in Modern India, 9, 11; Beatrix Hauser, “Introduction: Transcultural
Yoga(s). Analyzing a Traveling Subject,” in Yoga Traveling, 3.
124. Alter, Yoga in Modern India, 25; Wendy Doniger, “Assume the Position: The

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Godrej 29

Fight Over the Body of Yoga,” in On Hinduism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
125. Hauser, Yoga Traveling, 6; Rob Schware, “Restoring Yoga to Its South Asian
Roots,” Huffington Post, October 21, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-
schware/restoring-yoga-to-its-sou_b_4005329.html; https://saapya.wordpress.com
126. For a detailed treatment of methodological and interpretive issues involved in
employing non-Western texts to solve political problems within Western con-
texts, see Farah Godrej, Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice,
Discipline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
127. Harvey, Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, 3–5.
128. Don Kalb, “Afterword,” in Nicolette Macovichy, Neoliberalism, Personhood
and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies (Surrey, UK:
Ashgate, 2014), 198.
129. Connor Cavanagh, “Constructions of neoliberal reason by Jamie Peck” Canadian
Geographer 58, no. 3 (2014): 33.

Author Biography
Farah Godrej is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, Riverside. Her areas of research and teaching include Indian political
thought, Gandhi’s political thought, cosmopolitanism, globalization, comparative
political theory, and environmental political thought. Her research appears in journals
such as Political Theory, The Review of Politics, New Political Science, and Polity,
and she is the author of Cosmopolitan Political Thought: Method, Practice, Discipline
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Her new research explores the intersec-
tion between politics and materiality, focusing on the role of the body in ancient and
contemporary Indian traditions of thought. She was the recipient of the 2013–2014
UC President’s Research Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities.

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