Is it important to study the role women have played in yoga?
Why is it worth studying the role women, specifically, have played in yoga?
It is clear that the majority of practitioners in the modern, global yoga industry are women – mostly white, able bodied, thin women – but this has not always been the case. It is important to ask, therefore, how have women been involved in yoga, historically speaking, and what sources reveal their roles? How and why has their place in the practice and dissemination of yoga changed, from the pre-modern to the modern?
The significant shift, alone, makes it worth studying women in yoga.
The term ‘yoga’, of course, is not a singular, united concept or practice – it is a polyvalent conceptual category. It’s meaning has shifted over centuries, between texts and sects to such an extent that origins for the term and associated practices can be ascribed to groups as diverse as Indian ascetic yogis, Muslim fakirs or shamans.
For the purposes of this article I understand ‘yoga’ to include hatha yoga and tantric traditions, which include yoginīs, female deities, in their belief and ritual systems.
If we take ‘yoga’ as a shifting notion we must also acknowledge that the relationship women have had with yoga has also changed. Regardless of the shifts in the meaning of ‘yoga’, certain themes within the texts consistently link male and female practitioners and women to yoga, namely sexual activity. This becomes clear when considering the roles and representations of women in both pre-modern tantric and hatha texts.
Rather than getting into the specifics of this sexual activity, I will outline the relevance and importance of studying the place of women within the yoga traditions in an academic context. Miranda Shaw, in Passionate Enlightenment, argues that western academics historically considered the male religious experience in South Asia as ‘normative and universally representative’ (2000: 5).
Beatrix Hauser expands on this point when she writes: ‘due to the lack of adequate sources, conservative scholars used to legitimize the previous inattention to women in the academic discipline of religious studies as a consequence of women’s lesser degree of involvement in the religious domain’ (2012: 5).
On the contrary, women have never been involved to a ‘lesser degree’ in the religious domain, as Hauser discovers first hand through ethnographic fieldwork. Rather, an andocentric view of South Asian religious traditions was constructed within the western academic domain that, by the mid-nineteenth century, allowed this to become the dominant view. This cannot be entirely ascribed to western scholars but came about through a process of ‘intercultural mimesis’ – a cultural interchange between ‘the native and the Orientalist in the construction of knowledge’ about ‘the Orient’ (King 1999: 148). Typically, this interchange took place between western male scholars and, in the case of Hinduism, for example, male brahmanical pundits (149).
In addition, by the mid-nineteenth century the ‘eastern’ traditions (namely Hinduism, Buddhism, yogic and tantric traditions) were understood in the west through textual study and translation (1999: 143). By locating these ‘eastern’ traditions in canonical texts and the male experience, women’s voices, lives and actions have been systematically excluded in the generation of knowledge. Whilst the ‘sameness of women’ across South Asia cannot be presumed this inattention to women and their religious lives has, on the whole, been a ‘collective phenomenon’ (Hauser 2012: 10). It is therefore no wonder that in his work regarding the textual representations of women in the Brahmayāmala, Shaman Hatley begins by stating that ‘the prospects for meaningful recovery of women’s own voices seem particularly discouraging’ (Hatley 2015: 1).
Whilst they might not offer us the voice of women, it is possible to reframe our reading of the texts in order to establish how women are represented and question what this tells us about the social position of women in the period of writing.
Andocentric means centred or focused on men, and is the opposite of gynocentric, which means focused on women. In order to redress the balance of scholarship – and society – we must take a gynocentric view and this is what I do in my work on women in yoga.
I question whether women are presented as having independence, power and agency and what constraints were in place that limited the positions of women. I attempt to understand to what extent textual representations of women align with the social reality of their lives – equally, the difficulties and limitations to achieving this must be acknowledged.
To return to the idea that women, today, actively participate in yoga, it is worth looking back in order to move forwards and consider – what practices and philosophies remain relevant, to our bodies and social experiences; what traditions were created with us in mind; what can we co-create and take forwards that honours the roots of yoga?
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If you’re interested in learning more Amelia is running a course Women in Yoga: an exploration 27 April - 18 May 2023. Click here for more details and to sign up.
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[Please do not reproduce part or all of this work without permission - it is part of a larger project. Copyright remains with the author.]
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