The Master's Narrative: Swami Sivananda and the Transnational Production of Yoga

Abstract

Over the past century, the set of ideas and practices known generically as yoga has broadened to accommodate a range of activities and practitioners quite different from those that characterized earlier forms of this discipline. The stories that surround Swami Sivananda, an Indian guru who popularized yoga through English-language publications beginning in the 1930s, help to demonstrate the process by which yoga has become a transnational phenomenon. Sivananda's life stories - mythical, autobiographical, biographical, fictional, poetic - become the texts that illuminate how yoga has traveled from its south Asian homeland to the rest of the world and back. Sivananda wrote extensively about his own life and work, and that life has also been represented in texts produced by his many disciples. In addition to the standard genre of devotional biography common to spiritual leaders, Sivananda has been described in both fictional and journalistic texts. The A. highlights the writings of Mircea Eliade, renowned scholar of comparative religions, who learned to practice yoga under Sivananda's guidance.