Dr Patrick McCartney

Ancient Street Performers, Espionage and “Yoga”: Across and Beyond South Asia

This project builds upon my previous research, which began four years ago, regarding the possible links between medieval yoga postures and royal wrestlers in southern India. This shows how the 12th century ce training apparatus, known as the “wrestler’s pole”, was borrowed from bamboo pole-dancing “street performers”.

There are many leftover questions. Therefore, I will focus between the 8th to 18th centuries ce when the commercial guilds of yoga akhāḍās (“gymnasiums”) controlled much of south Asia’s pilgrimage/trade routes and mercantile centers and the espionage and information networks.

While some scholars suggest there “might be an acrobatic influence on yoga”, an earnest academic enquiry has not yet occurred. However, prior to medieval ascetics performing complex postures such as crossing one’s feet behind one’s head, ancient ascetics simply stood still with one leg or arm raised. It is strange that one of the most pivotal periods in yoga’s grand narrative – about the origins, emergence and historical development of complex physical postures – is ignored.

Therefore, using the heuristic phrase, the “contortionist’s turn”, I will attempt to determine why this happened and by whom it was inspired. Furthermore, I will attempt to verify whether the emergence of complex yoga postures is something akin to a historical accident or unintended consequence, which resulted from yogins cynically appropriating the performative aspects of street performing acrobats who were thought to have “superhuman powers”.

To do this, I will employ a multi-modal suite of analytical methods from archaeology, historical sociology, classical philology, political economy, cultural anthropology, human geography, art history and computational social science.