#107 – Keen on Yoga Podcast with James Mallinson

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James Mallinson is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical and
Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London. His interest in
yoga grew out of a fascination for India and Indian asceticism –
he spent several years living with Indian ascetics and yogis, in
particular Rāmānandī Tyāgīs. His MA thesis, part of a major in
ethnography, was on Indian asceticism. He became frustrated,
however, with (to quote Sheldon Pollock) the “hypertrophy of
method” that afflicts much of the humanities, and anthropology in
particular, so sought to ground his future research in philology.
The one aspect of ascetic practice that is well represented in
Sanskrit texts is yoga, so for his doctoral thesis he chose to
edit an early text on haṭhayoga, the Khecarīvidyā, which teaches
in detail khecarīmudrā, one of traditional haṭhayoga’s most
important practices, and he used fieldwork among traditional
yogis in India to shed light on the text’s teachings. As he
worked on his thesis he became more and more unsure that the
received wisdom on the origins of haṭhayoga (whose practices form
the basis of much of modern yoga) was correct, in particular its
blanket attribution to the Nāth sect, based as that wisdom was on
a very small selection of the available texts and modern oral
history (which is rarely a reliable source in India). But it was
clear that to put his work in the broader context was going to be
impossible while working on his thesis. When he was revising it
for publication a few years after completing it, he was asked to
contribute to a volume on the Nāths and their literature. He
agreed and decided to concentrate on the corpus of texts of
haṭhayoga. It soon became apparent that this was going to be too
big a task for a single chapter of a book and he apologised to
the volume’s editor but continued with his research. Four years
on he has identified a corpus of eight works that teach early
haṭhayoga and about a dozen more that contribute to its classical
formulation in the Haṭhapradīpikā. With this philological basis
established it has been possible at last to put all of
haṭhayoga’s aspects into context, which is what he is doing in
the monograph on which he is currently working, Yoga and Yogis:
The Texts, Techniques and Practitioners of Early Haṭhayoga. Many
of the conclusions that can be drawn from the corpus and the
other sources he uses (from Mughal miniatures to his fieldwork
amongst traditional yogis) overturn what was previously thought
about yoga’s formative period. Although he has decided to present
the bulk of the findings in a single monograph (because its parts
are all so interdependent), in the course of working on it he has
written various spin-off articles and reviews on specific aspects
of haṭhayoga. Between September 2015-2020, Mallinson was the
Principle Investigator of The Haṭha Yoga Project (HYP), a
five-year research project funded by the European Research
Council and based at SOAS, University of London which aims to
chart the history of physical yoga practice by means of
philology, i.e. the study of texts on yoga, and ethnography, i.e.
fieldwork among practitioners of yoga. From January 2021,
Mallison has been the lead on three year project entitled “Light
on Hatha Yoga: A critical edition and translation of the
Haṭhapradīpikā, the most important premodern text on physical
yoga” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
and the German Research Foundation Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). He has been interviewed on yoga for
BBC Radio on Beyond Belief and for the Secret History of Yoga.
More information about Dr Mallinson’s work, his CV and
publications, many of them downloadable, can be found here, and
on his website: www.khecari.com


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