Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798889842774)

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.

Author: Anjali Rao
ISBN-13: 9798889842774
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Language: English
Published: 10/14/2025
Pages: 200
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.81lbs