The Yoga of Power

This brilliant work reveals a new way of understanding yoga that makes sense of a hugely important but hitherto overlooked aspect of its history. It is essential reading for students and scholars of yoga. -- Jim Mallinson, coauthor of <i>Roots of Yoga</i> Novetzke and Kalé’s combined disciplinary insights—from religious studies and political science—provide something that is extremely rare in the study of Indian politics: a convincing argument for how and why it is critically important to understand political philosophy in a way that engages with modernity but is not defined by the ideological supposition of Enlightenment reasoning. The authors of The Yoga of Power do a masterful job of radically demythologizing yoga. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of <i>Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Science and Philosophy</i> The Yoga of Power is a marvelous piece of scholarship that argues that yoga is more than either a school of philosophy or a regime of psychophysical practice, but rather rewrites the history of yoga as an enduring tradition of political thought and practice in India. Combining textual reading, archival work, and ethnographic study, the book intervenes in the disciplines of history and area studies by demonstrating the epistemological gains of breaching the temporal boundaries between the precolonial, the colonial, and the postcolonial, urging us to rethink what we imagine today as politics and the political. -- Prathama Banerjee, author of <i>Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South</i>