Introduction

Daniela Bevilacqua; Mark Singleton

Daniela Bevilacqua ISCTE
Mark Singleton

Abstract

This volume is the outcome of a workshop held at SOAS University of London in November 2019, under the auspices of the five-year, ERC-funded Haṭha Yoga Project (HYP). The workshop was organised because of several questions that had been on our minds for some time: considering the centuries-long presence of multiple embodied traditions in India, what was the relationship between the physical practices of yoga and other physical disciplines that bear certain similarities to yoga, at least in appearance? Had there been interchange or even influence across and between different physical disciplines and the practices of yoga? Could such a perspective on the history of yoga help to understand better any of its developments?

Author Biographies

Daniela Bevilacqua, ISCTE

Daniela Bevilacqua is a South-Asianist and currently an Assistant Researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) at University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE). She worked as a post-doctoral research fellow at SOAS University of London on the ERC- funded Haṭha Yoga Project (2015–2020). Her research interests include Hindu asceticism and ascetic practices, analysed through ethnographic and historical perspectives. She authored Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India, published by Routledge, From Tapas to Modern Yoga (forthcoming in 2024, published by Equinox), and several articles and book chapters on topics related to Hindu religious tradition, gender and embodied practices.

Mark Singleton

Mark Singleton gained his PhD from the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge. He has published extensively on yoga, including Yoga Body, the Origins of Modern Posture Practice (OUP 2010) and Roots of Yoga (with James Mallinson, Penguin Classics 2017). Between 2015 and 2020 he was Senior Research Fellow on the Haṭha Yoga Project at SOAS University of London, where he is currently a Research Associate.