Scholars in the field of Indian Ocean Studies have considered how bodily practices such as eating, singing, or even the air we are breathing have made journeys beyond the Indian Ocean region and into new worlds of practice globally. In this first module, students will learn how yoga techniques such as eating, singing, and breathing have constituted and intersected with these transoceanic journeys, consider the continuities and discontinuities in practice as their own yogic practices have moved through time and space, as well as how they might begin to consider the ways by which their own yoga traditions are shaped by particular historical and cultural forces.

Many contemporary yoga traditions prescribe particular dietary practices as a central transformative bodily technique. In this module, students will learn about yogic diet in the countercultural United States where vegetarianism constituted a central component of many communities’ commitment to the principle of ahiṃsā, or non-harming. Students will then bring these yogic dietary logics into dialogue with the critical field of Food Studies and will appreciate what the compelling insights concerning American countercultural “counter-cuisine” reveal about the participants in this oft-celebrated, bygone era in US history.

Kīrtan is a popular practice in transnational yoga. In this module, students will learn the social history of the European harmonium and how this instrument was appropriated and remade in the image of South Asian musicians and instrument makers during and after the colonial period. Engaging the field of ethnomusicology, students will then follow the social history of the harmonium as it makes its way into the ensemble of a traveling South Asian yoga guru, and, along with the ukulele, into a contemporary kīrtan ensemble on the Big Island of Hawaii where both instruments invite practitioners into an eventual meditation on a silent, unstruck sound within. Although the ukulele and harmonium are both of European provenance, students will see how a particularly flexible 13th century South Asian musicology has enabled both instruments to continue to accomplish the community’s haṭha-yoga inflected meditative goals today.

Global air pollution has made breathing an increasingly dangerous activity. With regards to yoga, what does it then mean to practice purifying prāṇāyāma techniques in geographic regions with persistent air pollution? In this final module, students will consider how particular South Asian yoga institutes frequently disseminate models of a self-purifying, isolated yogic body gleaned from medieval yoga texts. Next, they will look at how these yogic models of the body differ from social scientific models of a socially and environmentally entangled yoga body embraced within the field of Pollution Studies. Students will leave with an appreciation for the cultural logics of purifying prāṇāyāma practices but also the social history that has enabled the encouragement of prāṇāyāma practice despite the presence of urban air pollution today.