Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 10
Interview
ist audience. Her questions and ideas
have also shaped my research significantly, and she’s been with me every
step of the way in conducting the fieldwork and writing up the findings. I’ve
come to appreciate that practitioners
ask good questions and often direct
academics down interesting avenues. I
should also emphasise that academics
can learn much about premodern texts
by working closely with practitioners.
The filming of the
Hathbhysapaddhati provided me with such an opportunity.
MA If India had never been colonised, how d
o imagine y
oga would
have looked like nowadays?
JB Very different, I’m sure. In the early
20th century, it may have been closer
to what we see in the early nineteenth
century, which is a fluid mix of older
sources and inter-religious dialogue.
There are convincing arguments that
economic and political changes in the
16th and 17th centuries heralded the
modern period in India, but I don’t see
the impact of that modernity on Indian
yoga until the late nineteenth century,
and perhaps the influence of European modernity would have happened
more recently without colonialism.
Also, I doubt whether yoga would have
been as popular in India or worldwide
without the Indian nationalist movement in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, which was a direct
response to British rule. Nonetheless,
India has a deeply rich culture and I
suspect that, regardless of colonialism
and even if India had been a more ‘insular’ country, the remarkable history
and ideas underlying yoga would have
eventually attracted the international
attention they deserve. A
JASON has an Honour’s degree in Sanskrit and Hindi at the University of Sydney and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Oriental Studies at Balliol
College, University of Oxford. He is currently a senior research fellow for the ‘Light on Hatha Yoga’ project, hosted at SOAS University of London
and the University of Marburg. He is also a visiting researcher on the Suruta Project at the University of Alberta (http://sushrutaproject.org). His
research brings to light primary sources and material evidence on the history of premodern yoga and medical traditions of India.
Jason has published peer-reviewed articles and edited and translated six texts on Hathayoga for the Hatha Yoga Project 2015–2020
(http://hyp.soas.ac.uk); taught Masters courses and Sanskrit reading classes at SOAS and given seminars on the history of yoga for MA programs
at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Won Kwang University in South Korea and Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles. He is a founding
member of the Centre of Yoga Studies SOAS and the Journal of Yoga Studies, and combines his practical experience of yoga with academic
knowledge of its history in collaborating with Jacqueline Hargreaves on The Luminescent.
8 AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021
