Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History

By Anjali Rao, Thenmozhi Soundararajan 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, and colonization 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, anticolonialism, and Indigeneity The impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and culture Brahminical 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 a foreword from Thenmozhi Soundararajan, 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.

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