The Modern Spirit of Yoga

This chapter presents a brief re-examination of the modern yoga phenomenon and field of studies. Based on the author’s previous publications on the topic, it aims to improve and expand earlier observations, to integrate some new and older scholarship, and to comment on more recent modern yoga developments. It starts with the briefest historical summary of the emergence of modern yoga, now fairly well mapped in various academic studies. It then goes on to argue that, developing in the wider ideological context of modern spirituality and mirroring different socio-cultural milieus, modern yoga gave rise to five main yoga idioms or discourses: the revivalist, from which emerged the nationalist, and the transnational (in its monastic and non-monastic variants), from which emerged the globalized. Last but not least, we find the pervasive healthist idiom.