Yoga as Embodied Resistance - by Anjali Rao (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What does yoga have to do with caste, gender, and power?

This groundbreaking work explores how yoga can be a vital path to resistance, agency, and collective liberation.

Yoga as Embodied Resistance illuminates the essential--but often unseen--relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Bridging scholarship, history, and cultural analysis, yoga educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, colonization, and the right-wing Hindutva movement impact contemporary practice and offers readers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.

Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance--and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:

• Foundational histories of yoga, caste, and Hinduism
• The tensions among yoga, nationalism, anti-colonialism, and Indigeneity
• The impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and culture
• Brahminnical appropriation and its relationship to eros, spirituality, and loving devotion
• Sanskritization, vernacularization, and the impact of patriarchy on bodily expression
• Bhakti as a subversive tool of personal agency and anticolonial resistance

With provocative chapters like "Is Yoga Hindu?" and "Ethnonationalism and Yoga: Meeting the Moment," Rao's work is both an invitation and a force of nature that lights up the path of yoga toward brighter, just, and more liberated futures.

Review Quotes

"Yoga as Embodied Resistance is like a map to the hidden terrain of yoga's history.... This perspective is a gift beyond measure, and I'm so grateful to Anjali Rao for taking the time to do the research and reflection that is so needed."
--JIVANA HEYMAN, author and founder of Accessible Yoga

"Let the unlearning begin. Anjali provides a brilliant intersection where all practitioners of yoga can meet and evolve."
--KATHRYN BUDIG, founder of Haus of Phoenix

"Rao's storytelling weaves the deeper meaning and history of yogic tradition with important corrections. We learn that transcending the self also means actively challenging social hierarchies. That spiritual devotion can be an experience of embodied pleasure or radical expression. That practice, like reality itself, always demands a play of sameness and difference, synthesis and identity."
--DR. ANYA FOXEN, associate professor at California Polytechnic State University

"...a book I have long awaited. It conducts an exploratory historical analysis of yoga that contextualizes yoga's cultural power over the modern world, providing an important component in understanding the true layers of both what yoga has meant and what it can mean for us in the future. This ancient Vedic teaching has the power to transform us into being. It is a revolutionary tool, and Rao deftly takes us through its layers of history and resistance."
--FARIHA RÓISÍN, author of Who Is Wellness For?

"This book calls us into deeper awareness and action, and it will disrupt, in the best way, how we think of and practice yoga."
--MICHELLE C. JOHNSON, author of Skill in Action, Finding Refuge, and We Heal Together

"Fierce voices like Anjali Rao's show us what's possible when writers are courageous enough to contend with yoga's entangled origins in Hindu and caste-based oppression while simultaneously politicizing its potential toward embodied resistance.... Rao's text weaves critical analysis of historic texts, compelling storytelling, and reflective narrative toward a dismantling of neoliberal and Hindutva control over yoga's transnational circulation. May more yogis read it and politicize their practice toward interconnected freedom!"
--SHEENA SOOD, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at Delaware Valley University

"I've been waiting a long time to have a trusted resource on the history of yoga and resistance, one that is far from simple and pushes modern day approaches to yoga into necessary examination."
--MELISSA SHAH, yoga therapist

About the Author

ANJALI RAO is a yoga educator-practitioner, her work deconstructs the dynamics of power in yoga with a multi disciplinary approach integrating philosophy, art and history. She offers insight into the stories that have been obscured by heteropatriarchy, orthodoxy and colonization. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion in California Institute of Integral Studies, her studies continue to explore the formulation of movements of dissent and resistance in the religio-spiritual context. She is on the faculty of many yoga teacher training and continuing education yogaprograms. She is the host of The Love of Yoga podcast, and shares thought provoking conversations with yoga scholars and activists on the frontlines of liberatory movements