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Also initially puzzling here is that Pavhari Baba’s stature in Vivekananda’s mind remains undiminished (although not unaltered) after this volte-face on haṭha yoga: at the end of these troubled months the guru is a “wonderful RajaYogi,” in spite of being simultaneously an acknowledged adept of haṭha yoga. Bharati (1976) argues that prior to modern times there was always a considerable haṭha component in practical yoga, but that “since the turn of the century . . . we find a clear polarization into dhyāna or meditation oriented and haṭha- or āsana- and body-oriented practitioners” (163). This encounter between Pavhari Baba and Vivekananda in the last decade of the nineteenth century represents the historical cusp of this change. Pavhari himself is able to combine haṭha and non-haṭha practice within himself with no apparent contradiction whereas Vivekananda shies away from those methods that do not fit within his conception of “raja yoga.” The perplexing ambiguity of the “therefore” in Vivekananda’s statement (“Therefore I am staying with this wonderful RajaYogi”) may, I suggest, point to a similar kind of selective forgetting (or hagiographic censorship?) that Urban (2003) and Kripal (1995) have convincingly pinpointed in Vivekananda’s management of the memory of Ramakrishna—in particular the latter’s obvious proximity to tantric practices. In a single stroke here, haṭha yoga is cast out while Pavhari Baba is appropriated (or expropriated?) as an exemplar of “raja yoga”—the implication being that he shares his student’s contempt for haṭha yoga, in spite of his noted, apparently contradictory, mastery of that discipline. Increasingly in the years to come Vivekananda would forge a vision of yoga in which this polarization between “raja” and haṭha practice would become permanently reified and in which his respective gurus would be rewritten to fit this modern orientation. An 1894 interview with The Memphis Commercial will serve as a final example of Vivekananda’s attitude toward haṭha yoga. Vivekananda is speaking to the reporter about the astounding longevity of haṭha practitioners when a local woman asks him if he is himself able to perform the kinds of feats she associates with the figure of the yogi, such as the rope trick and being buried alive (1992 [1894] 184).6 Vivekananda is incensed: “‘What have those things to do with religion?’ he asked. ‘Do they make a man purer? The Satan of your Bible is powerful, but differs from God in not being pure’” (184). Vivekananda’s outburst is illustrative for a number of reasons. First, the performing fakir-yogi—so familiar in North America and Europe through popular ethnography and nineteenth-century orientalist scholarship—is seen not only as impure but as embodying the very principle of evil.7 This is a particularly literal instance of the “demonization” that was directed toward the haṭha yogi in the modern formulation of yoga and of the urgent necessity for Vivekananda and those who emulated him to reverse the widespread