Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the
West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old aged.
Marketed as a clear path to self-realization, mind expansion, and
taut abs, yoga is also perceived as an ancient and unchanging Indian
tradition based on the revelations of benign and limber sages. But
this modern conception of yoga derives from nineteenth-century
European spirituality, Sinister Yogis reveals, and the true story of
yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and much more
entertaining. To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on
yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast
and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed
as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural
abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and
levitation—to acquire power, money, and sexual gratification. As
White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear
little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns
rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of
yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in
their proper context.
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