The Science of Yoga

disguised himself as a penniless monk. His survey of hundreds of Hindu holy men found that more than 6 percent admitted to the performance of magic tricks and pseudo-yogic feats, including live burials. Interred performers would get food surreptitiously or leave the cell through a secret hole. In one case, townspeople were surprised to find an ostensibly buried holy man strolling beside a river.
    In 1896, Hungary held a Millennial Exposition in Budapest to celebrate its first thousand years. The festivities were to include two holy men from India. The yogis were said to have the ability to go into deep trances, seeming to die, and then return from the dead.
    Professor Aurel von Török, director of the Anthropological Museum in Budapest, was famous for his precise studies of skulls. His personal appearance echoed his love of precision and his abiding sense of caution—his beard tidy, his glasses tiny.
    The professor had a difficult time making arrangements to see the holy men and taking measurements. The yogis took turns displaying themselves in a glass coffin, going into trances and switching places every week or two, always with great fanfare and prayer and incantation. The awestruck crowds and all the comings and goings conflicted with the calm required for serious investigation.
    With some irritation, von Török noted in a preliminary report that true science was difficult under the circumstances. Unexpected results had clearly aroused his suspicions: the professor studied the men carefully but could find no plunge in their vital signs.
    The wisdom of von Török’s caution soon became apparent. A few skeptics hid themselves in the apartment with the glass coffin. Late one night, they watched inastonishment as the lid of the coffin opened and the yogi stepped out. He proceeded to enjoy a cake and a bottle of milk.
    They seized the startled man.
    He and the other impostor managed to escape—Houdini-like—and save their show for another city and another day.
    Inquiries into the miraculous side of yoga deepened in the course of the twentieth century, as we shall see. But the analyses and exposés amounted to little compared to a potent new force that surged across the length and breadth of yoga, concealing its unbecoming aspects and bestowing on its scientific investigation new legitimacy. That, in turn, caused the sheer quantity of research to explode.
    The force was Hindu nationalism. It took shape as the nation’s elite, drawing on decades of rising anger over British colonial rule, worked hard to create a national identity that could unify the masses, counter notions of Western superiority, and forge the popular will necessary to oust the hated foreigners. (Around the same time, a similar effort got under way in Ireland, with similar results.)
    The surge in nationalism sought to revive and modernize Hinduism as a foundation for Indian national identity, and did so across the subcontinent in countless political groups. They saw Indian antiquity as a time of cultural, religious, and social greatness. Scholars agree that the fundamental objective was to replace the myth of the white man’s superiority with one of native genius.
    Yoga—with its ancient roots and mystic aspirations—was seen as a potential star. But it had problems. Middle class Indians found its obsession with sex and magic to be “an embarrassing heritage,” according to Geoffrey Samuel, a yoga scholar. As a practical matter, yogis had fallen so low in status that many Indians saw the unkempt drifters as symbols of all that had gone wrong with the Hindu religion.
    The practice needed an extreme makeover. And it got one.
    In October 1924, at the age of forty, Jagannath G. Gune established something quite new in the world—a sprawling ashram devoted to the scientific study of yoga. It was perched on a mountainous plateau south of Bombay and adjoined a hill resort where people fleeing the coast’s heat would go for coolrefreshment. There, amid rolling acres of lush vegetation, Gune (pronounced GU-nay) conducted what is considered the world’s first major experimental investigation of yoga.
    He built a laboratory, filled it with the latest instruments, hired assistants, and donned a white lab coat. He founded a quarterly journal, Yoga Mimansa (Sanskrit for “profound thought or meditation”), and filled it with the results of his research. True to his nationalist roots, he made sure his rambling complex had room for armies of