Smriti Srinivas offers a unique perspective on the academic study of yoga, drawing from her background in anthropology and lived experiences across diverse cultures. In this insightful interview, she shares her personal journey that sparked an interest in yoga and highlights the importance of bridging textual studies with anthropological approaches to understand yoga’s vernacular traditions and modern development. Srinivas’s vision encourages openness to interdisciplinary connections and exploring yoga’s interfaces with various communities, practices, and the non-human world, underscoring the urgency of such research in addressing pressing issues related to the body, violence, and home within historical and lived contexts.
Srinivas shares how she first became interested in studying yoga, including some personal experiences with iconic yoga figures like Paramahansa Yogananda. She discusses the value of studying yoga from an academic perspective, especially incorporating fields like anthropology and vernacular languages. Srinivas talks about common myths and misconceptions about yoga history, differences between how yoga is practised in India versus the West, the importance of studying texts, and exciting new developments in yoga research. Key themes include bridging gaps between academic disciplines to study yoga, understanding yoga’s relationship to modernity, and studying aspects like healing practices and human-animal relationships.
About Smriti Srinivas
Smriti Srinivas is a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, renowned for her innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on cities, religion, cultural memory, and the body in South Asian contexts. With an international upbringing and training in both anthropology and sociology, Srinivas pursues an integrative approach across academic boundaries. Her award-winning books, including The Mouths of People, the Voice of God (1998), Landscapes of Urban Memory (2001), and In the Presence of Sai Baba (2008), tackle questions of how urban spaces, spiritual movements, and bodily practices intersect within modern Indian and transnational settings. Positioned at the forefront of urban anthropology and South Asian studies, Srinivas lends her academic expertise to multiple boards and initiatives seeking to advance cross-cultural dialogue and reimagine the Indian Ocean world.
I think this kind of transcultural understanding is critical to the way I understand Yoga and India.
– Smriti Srinivas
Key Points
- Formative moments that kindled Srinivas’s curiosity include encountering the Autobiography of a Yogi during her teenage years, as well as the works of Indra Devi and the guru Sathya Sai Baba.
- Srinivas emphasizes the significance of a transcultural perspective in comprehending yoga, shaped by her lived experiences across various regions of India and beyond its borders.
- According to Srinivas, the academic study of yoga within the social sciences and humanities contributes to understanding its modern development in relation to religion, science, and medicine.
- Srinivas highlights the necessity of bridging textual studies with anthropological approaches, concentrating on vernacular languages and oral traditions that extend beyond classical Sanskrit texts.
The Interview
This interview took place on 22 March 2024.
Wittich: Could you share a personal story you feel comfortable with about your interest in studying yoga academically?
Srinivas: I came to study yoga academically and primarily through anthropology or sociology. For me the study of yoga is embedded in ethnography and fieldwork so it’s like asking me, how do you come to study anthropology?
If you’re asking me about a personal story, however, several moments in this story stand out. These are iconic moments, and I emphasize iconic. First was my discovery of this book that we’ve all probably encountered in our own lives one way or the other—Autobiography of a Yogi,—-which I remember consuming over and over again as a teenager. I came back to it much later in my life and it appears in my monograph, A Place for Utopia (2015), where I was able to contextualize Yogananda’s journey within the context of a cross-cultural conversation. I place him within a very important set of discussions that were happening between the 1920s and the 1950s, of which Aldous Huxley and Isherwood and Prabhavananda and a whole host of other people were part of, a conversations between the “West” and the “East.” Yogananda was very much part of that discussion.
The other iconic moment, I think, was the discovery of a book that was probably my mother’s, which was called Renew your Life through Yoga or some such title written by Indra Devi. I was 14 or 15 [years of age]. My own first attempts to learn yoga were based on this Western woman’s work which was a strange combination of her trying to sell yoga to a large popular audience but also featuring all these Hollywood celebrities. I wasn’t quite sure how to place her but I encountered her again in the 1970s through the guru Sathya Sai Baba. Indra Devi figured in the Sai Baba movement because she had become a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba at that point and was teaching yoga or was a presence in Sathya Sai Baba’s ashram in southern India.
And so I encountered her later as a figure in the Sai Baba movement. When I started doing fieldwork for my book on the Sathya Sai Baba movement in the 1990s, I was able to place her within the context of the Sathya Sai Baba movement’s own understanding of modernity, tradition, yoga, religion, and transnationalism.
So I have these several moments, my own encounters with some of these iconic figures within yoga, both within India but outside of India, but I reworked them academically much later in my life as an anthropologist and scholar. There is one more moment in this story which I suppose is also important. I’ve mentioned three gurus already— Yogananda, Indra Devi, but also Satya Sai Baba. But there is a guru whose name I don’t know: I started learning yoga myself as a graduate student at the Delhi School of Economics in Delhi. I think my teacher taught a series of exercises that I now recognize as probably belonging to the Sivananda tradition. I never learned his name. But a whole group of us every morning at about 6:30am went and studied with this teacher who was probably in his 50s or 60s, I think. That sequence of yoga āsanas stayed with me and supported me, and I turn to it even today. It is all of these personal stories, these gurus of various kinds and of various lineages, that I now look back on and that I’m able to make sense of in a scholarly way, in an academic way, but they come from different moments in my life.
Wittich: Have you spent time living, studying, or traveling in India, and if so, how did that shape your understanding of yoga?
Srinivas: Actually a fairly significant part of my life was spent in India but also outside of India. My early childhood was spent in the northeastern part of India in Assam. My father was a China specialist. And so we spent a fair amount of time in Malaysia and then in China. I returned to India in my teens and spend time there until my 30s. But while in India, we lived all over. I’ve spent time in south India, Mysore, Chennai, and Delhi. And I did my doctoral field work in the Himalayas in Ladakh in the Nubra Valley. This was before it became a well-trodden path and I was the first researcher to be allowed permission to do any long-termed research in Nubra Valley since 1947. I spent a year in 1990-1991 among Muslims and Buddhists in Nubra Valley in Ladakh. I’ve lived outside of India as well.
I think this kind of transcultural understanding is critical to the way I understand yoga and India. I cannot understand it as a singular formation; I think it is created in its multiplicity and so many forces shape it, and we have to see it as a relational entity, if we can call it that.
Wittich: What do you think the academic study of yoga in the social sciences and humanities contributes to our understanding of our academic knowledge? And how does it contribute to practitioner understanding?
Srinivas: The academic study of yoga in the social sciences and humanities is a relatively recent thing. For me, the classic study is probably Joseph Alter’s study of yoga. He situates it as a modern product within conversations not only about our understandings of texts but also understandings about religion, science, and medicine. I think this is critical. I cannot speak so much to practitioners’ understandings but I would imagine that kind of perspective would be important too for how yoga develops and changes.
For an academic understanding of yoga in the social sciences and the humanities, if you look at how communities today that are not strictly speaking yogic communities or even communities that practice yoga, and you want to see how a yogic vocabulary appears in their understanding of the world and study them, then it’s clear to me that we must take that understanding [offered by Alter] seriously. My monograph, Landscapes of Urban Memory (2001), was a study of a gardening community in the city of Bangalore that worships the goddess, which has an oral tradition of the Mahābhārata epic, and a performance and festival where the goddess in the form of Draupadi incarnates in the body of a male priest. Every year this oral tradition and Mahābhārata epic is performed by a Backward Caste community of gardeners who believe that they are a Kshatriya community. It is the biggest festival in Bangalore. This has no connection to yoga except if you look closely at the vocabulary of incarnation, transformation, and so on, or the bodies of these gardeners and their wrestling traditions, which is all about the relations between semen and blood and milk and food, it looks remarkably like the alchemical traditions described by David Gordon White. This festival and oral tradition share a vocabulary with yoga except that it’s not the classical Sanskrit tradition. So for somebody like me, who is coming from anthropology and who is not studying the classical tradition but the vernacular tradition, then the academic study of yoga has to create bridges with yoga studies that has up until recently followed a certain trajectory. That is where the creative linkages have to be formed. I think that is what is happening today and is exciting.
Wittich: So the bridges between anthropologists and philologists or historians?
Srinivas: And historians and classical textual study folks. Yes. And hopefully, also people working in the sociology of science and medicine and those studying vernacular traditions. I think we are missing the vernacular languages in that conversation. You probably know more about that than I do.
Wittich: What are today’s most common myths or misconceptions about yoga history?
Srinivas: I think some very good works have already answered that. Singleton, Newcombe, and so on, I think they’ve already dealt with many of those myths. Honestly, I don’t think I have any more to add to that.
Wittich: Do you see a difference between how yoga is practised in the West and how it is practised outside of India and how it is practised in India?
Srinivas: I’m not sure I can speak to that either, except that in some urban areas there’s a convergence. I think the discourses don’t seem very dissimilar. What would you say?
Wittich: I would ask you about the yoga in ashrams as opposed to urban metropolitan yoga of the upper class in India and upper class outside of India. I would ask about the yoga of sādhus, saṃnyāsins, or other parts of India.
Srinivas: I can’t say I have a lot of experience of that. I’ve been thinking about it a little through a recently completed a book on a figure that I’ve written about in a different context—Shirdi Sai Baba. We brought out a book called Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint on Shirdi Sai Baba, who died in 1918, but who has continued to garner devotion since his passing in the contemporary world. The book just came out in 2022. In the Shri Sai Satcharita, which is sometimes considered an account of his life and written in Marathi, it is said that he practised yoga and there are accounts of him performing āsanas, including Khanda Yoga; it states that he removed his intestines and he hung it up in a row on a line to dry and that he spent a considerable amount of his life with wrestlers. We know that Shirdi Sai Baba belonged to or at least spent a considerable amount of his earlier life with Sufis, was raised by Sufi teachers or was mentored in a Sufi tradition or many Sufi traditions. The area in which he was raised around Aurangabad was home to Chishti and other Sufi traditions. So what does this mean? I’m trying to answer your question. What kind of yoga is this that was being practiced by figures like Shirdi Sai Baba? What is what does it mean to call this yoga? In places of holy men like Shirdi Sai Baba, there are practices that people looking at it will say is yoga. Some might call it Sufi practices, and others will call it something else. There is multiplicity or multi-vocality or poly-semantic practice here that doesn’t fit the upper-class traditions that we might be used to or what some people think is classical yoga.
Wittich: Why is the study of historical texts important? Or is it important in the academic study of yoga?
Srinivas: Oh, I think that the study of historical texts is always important. I mean, these things have to go together. I think there are fewer and fewer people who know how to read texts correctly.
Wittich: Together with the study of lived religion, together with oral traditions, together with anthropology, with all of that.
Srinivas: All of that, yeah, absolutely.
Wittich: What can texts tell us that we cannot see today?
Srinivas: Well, read and interpreted correctly, I think they are, in some ways also living tradition. Or at least that is my understanding of some texts and it depends on which text. So it’s hard to answer that, you know, in isolation.
Wittich: Why is the study of anthropology important for academic yoga studies? And you already mentioned vernacular languages; could you elaborate?
Srinivas: We have a great deal to learn about all the multiple ways in which what we understand to be yoga is lived in practice in India or in many other contexts. What about Sri Lanka? What about Southeast Asia? What about, you know, Himalayan societies? Some recent work, including the work of Chris Miller, who has done work in transnational yoga communities, we need to have studies of that kind. Historically, in anthropology, so much of the emphasis is on Sanskrit, Tamil, or Bengali. There’s so little work on, you know, on Malayalam or Kannada.
The oral Mahābhārata tradition, which I worked on, is in Tamil and Telugu. So there’s much work to be done on all of this.
Wittich: What are some of the most significant texts or sources that have shaped your understanding of ancient or modern yoga traditions?
Srinivas: I mentioned some of these, you know, the ones that I came back to in terms of an academic understanding: Yogananda and others. But I think also Gandhi. I read his Key to Health, for instance, alongside Hind Swaraj, and I put them together because it provides an understanding of his notion of the body and of the body as a template for transformation. I like Joseph Alter’s reading of Gandhi’s body.
I place the study of modern yoga and anthropology as a field within the larger problem of dualism and modernity. I think that we cannot separate the study of yoga from that. What do I mean by that? I mean that whether it is the nation-state or whether it is a problem of science or whether it is a problem of religion, the central issue is modernity and the separation of theory and practice and fact and value, and that is the problem. Whether it is our own bodies or knowledge or diet and whether we use yoga to solve it or use faith, that is the problem. Since the 1600s, that is the central problem that we’ve all been stuck with. That is the problem that Marx Weber, and Durkheim were stuck with.
Gandhi is dealing with it, Yogananda is dealing with it. Ambedkar is dealing with it.
I think Yoga in the modern world cannot be understood outside of that framework of the problem of modernity. And so also for your group in Tamil Nadu and the choices that face it.
Wittich: I think that’s the case with lived religion everywhere, right? In modern times. Yeah, and what developments in yoga research are you most excited about?
Srinivas: Developments? I think the possibility of having a conversation like this. And all of the stuff that we’ve talked about, the fact that bridges are possible. I think more than any other time, to realize the urgency of the questions that face us, maybe not only for yoga research but for many of the fields that we work in that are closely related to Yoga, including religion and other such fields.
Wittich: What would be the urgent questions?
Srinivas: How can we say something or provide ways to think about the body differently in response to violence, inside or outside? How can we think about these things historically? This is something that I think about more and more in part because so much of my life has been about traveling from one place to another. I could say that I’ve lived in many homes or I could say I’ve been homeless. So what do we do with questions of home and homelands and being at home, All of that stuff, but always situated in a lived way, in a historical way, in a located way. I’m a historical anthropologist. So, I ask these questions in time and space.
Wittich: Where do you see the most potential for growth and discovery in yoga in the coming years?
Srinivas: With having young people do more and more of the kind of work like you have done.
Wittich: You mentioned vernacular languages and bridging social sciences and humanities.
Srinivas: Yes, and I think being just open to surprise because you don’t know where that potential is. I mean you can make predictions, but I think you have to be open to surprises.
Wittich: A friend of mine is doing some work on acrobats and he found a lot of similarities to yoga.
Srinivas: And yes, yes, right.
Wittich: And I know there is some research about dancers and yoga, yeah.
Srinivas: All of these are interesting things. I would also say, you know, maybe some people are already doing this, I would also look at healing systems. I have to think that there are some affinities between healing systems in South Asia and yoga vocabulary, for want of a better word.
Wittich: Do you mean Āyurveda or marma points or alchemy?
Srinivas: I mean any and all of the above. I mean, there has to be a relationship between, you know, yoga and all of that. It’s no wonder yoga practitioners are naturally drawn to thinking about healing, too. Also, as Chris Miller himself has done, looking at things like at music and food. I would also push for, and I’m not quite sure how one would study it, is to look at interfaces with non-human nature, but particularly looking at animals, what could be the interfaces between yoga and animals.
Wittich: Communication with animals, taking care of animals?
Srinivas: All of the above. Goat yoga. Yeah, there’s that! There is the use of animals in therapy but I’m thinking there must be other kind of interfaces as well.
Wittich: So there is goat yoga in the West already.
Wittich: I’m thinking of Nandi as the element, the body element of Shiva in South India.
Srinivas: Right, right… In animal studies we have an entire field there that’s growing and I wonder if we can create some kind of conversation there. It could be interesting and vibrant, perhaps.
Wittich: Well, thank you. My questions are over. Do you have anything else you would like to add? Maybe something I haven’t asked.
Srinivas: I’m glad we were finally able to talk. I don’t have anything else to add to this. I’m excited about the new website.
Wittich: OK.
Srinivas: Thank you very much.
Wittich: Thank you, a lot.