Armed Ascetics, and a Discipline Now Sold by the Hour

Long before yoga became a global wellness practice, some organised orders of yogis, above all the Nath order of ascetics, were also armed and organised bodies who traded, lent money, and at times fought as mercenaries for regional rulers across early modern India, a martial and commercial history documented in temple and court records and now well established in the historical scholarship on the period, and one that sits uneasily beside the purely contemplative image the word yogi carries today.

The globalisation of yoga over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has separated the postural practice, asana, almost entirely from the ascetic and renunciant tradition the word yogi originally named, producing a large commercial industry of studios, retreats and standardised teacher certifications, typically built around a two-hundred-hour training course, that qualify someone to teach postures and breathing to paying students without any of the renunciation, lineage or spiritual discipline the traditional yogi undertook. That gap has generated an ongoing debate, inside and outside India, over cultural appropriation and over how much of the word's original religious and philosophical content survives its transplantation into a fitness and wellness market.