notes
introduction 1. In 2004 there were more than 2.5 million practitioners of yoga in Britain alone (statistics from the consumer research company TGI as reported in the London Times, Carter 2004). For practitioner numbers in Britain, see also De Michelis (1995) and Newcombe (2007b). A 1994 Roper poll commissioned for the world’s most popular yoga magazine, Yoga Journal, estimated that over six million Americans (approximately 3.3% of the population) were practicing yoga—1.86 million of them regularly (Cushman 1994: 47–48). Ten years later in 2004, another national poll estimated that 15 million Americans were practicing yoga regularly (Carter 2004), while the proportion “interested in yoga” had also risen substantially. Yoga Journal estimated in 2003 that approximately 25.5 million Americans (12%) of the population were “very interested” in yoga. A further 35.3 million people (16%) intended to try yoga within the next year, and 109.7 million (over half the population!) had at least a “casual interest” in yoga (Arnold 2003: 10). The 2008 Yoga Journal market study suggests that while the US population practicing yoga has stablized, spending on classes, yoga vacations and products has almost doubled (Yoga Journal 2008). 2. On the initiatives by Bikram Choudhury (1945–) to franchise his yoga technique, see Fish (2006). See Srivastava (2005) for a report on the Indian government’s countermeasures to Bikram’s strategy. 3. I use the term yogas, instead of the singular yoga, to emphasize the plurality and variety of experiments and syntheses that sprang up under the name “yoga” during the modern period. 4. Alter’s excellent 2006 piece “Yoga at the Fin de Siècle” goes a long way toward redressing this, and in fact covers many of the same “moments” in the history of modern yoga as I do here. Unfortunately, the article came to my attention too late for it to be incorporated with any care into the argument, but I nevertheless highly recommend it to interested readers as a sophisticated and insightful counterpart to the material in this book.