Yogic style in motion: experiments in power and knowledge

Abstract

In this essay I speculate on the idea that literary style can be informed by concepts of yoga and can constitute a yogic textual practice in its own right. As a popular practice around the world, yoga is often considered a set of embodied pursuits that promote holistic health and spiritual advancement. Yet yoga also claims a long tradition in South Asian philosophies as a modality of knowledge. Drawing on remediated concepts from these traditions, I theorise a form of yogic style that integrates changing genealogies of textual practice with attention to structures of power. This understanding of yogic style resonates with a twenty-first-century decolonising effort in Indian literature to animate the power of Indian cultural genealogies, while it contests a parallel tendency to manufacture mystiques of Indian civilisational belonging that legitimate the hierarchies and exclusions of majoritarian populism