YOGA TODAY
Yoga Without a Single Beginning: Listening for Truth in a Tradition Shaped By Movement, Memory and Power BY ANJALI SUNITA
Yoga does not arrive with a birth certificate. It comes to us with - out a single point of origin, without a founding moment that can be neatly named or owned. Instead, Yoga appears the way breath does — emerging, disappearing, changing shape depending on the body, culture, and time that receives it. Its history is not a straight line but a river system, fed by many tributaries, shaped by land, people, and exchange. To study Yoga’s past is to learn how to listen across centuries of movement, remembering and forgetting. Yoga’s history is an ongoing conversation that, like all conversations, includes dynamics of power. Even the word Yoga refuses to settle. From the root yuj , it gestures toward union and yoking, but also toward separation. It is discipline, restraint, and gathering oneself back from dispersion. Yoga has meant stillness and ecstasy, asked renunciation and devotion, and embodied awakening and ethical living. It has been practiced by forest ascetics and householders, priests and lineage holders, mystics, poets, and re- formers. Yoga is not a single system. When History Becomes a Claim Modern tellings of Yoga often search for a beginning: a seal, a sage, or a scripture. These origin stories promise reassurance. They offer clarity in a world that feels increasingly unmoored. But history rarely offers the kind of certainty we crave. The images we inherit are not photographs of the past. They are symbols, carrying cultural memory rather than documentation. They ask: What mattered enough to be remembered ? When fragments are turned into proof, history becomes a claim rather than an inquiry. And claims, especially spiritual ones, are often sold by the politically powerful. What Yoga Has Been Allowed to Mean Across time, Yoga has been defined according to the needs of those practicing it. In the Yoga Sūtra , Patanjali describes Yoga as the qui - eting of the mind’s movements — a turning inward, a refinement of attention. The Upanishads speak in luminous poetry of a Self that shines beneath surface identity, known devotion and realization. Tan - tric traditions shift the axis entirely, describing a cosmos alive with energy, where liberation is found through intimate participation. In the modern period, figures like Swami Sivananda and B.K.S. Iyengar reframed Yoga as a lived discipline — ethical, physical, and psychological — capable of supporting modern lives. These are not contradictions. They are responses. Yoga has always changed because human lives and conditions change. Attempts to fix Yoga into a single definition, lineage, or worl - dview often say less about the past and more about who tells the story — and why. Before Texts, Before Names Long before Yoga appeared in Sanskrit texts, people across South Asia were already practicing ways of listening to the body, the land, and the unseen. Archaeological sites such as Mehrgarh in Pakistan, dating back to around 7000 BCE, reveal ceremonial burial, symbolic ornamentation, and cosmological orientation. These were people who marked meaning through rhythm, ritual, and relationship, but their traces were lighter. Flourishing at least 4,000 years later between roughly 3300 and
1300 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization, in a region spanning much of Pakistan, northwestern India and northeast Afghanistan, becomes central to Yoga’s story, because it is more visibly excavated. Cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were clearly built with care: sophisticat - ed drainage systems, standardized measures, and shared baths. There are no obvious palaces or monuments to conquest. What endures is infrastructure — evidence of collective life. And rather than asking whether Yoga existed, we might ask what forms of attention already mattered. The images most often equated with Yoga, the seals left behind, show animals and human figures in composed, deliberate postures. The much-discussed Pashupati seal, often identified as a proto-Shiva or yogic figure, cannot be definitive - ly named; yet its power remains. It suggests a cultural intimacy with stillness, with the porous boundary between human and animal, and sits in a posture as a way of being rather than performing. Movement, Not Rupture Inquiries into Yoga’s origins inevitably raise deeper questions: Who lived there, and how did cultures change? This is where the language of invasion, migration, and purity enters — and where history becomes central and especially charged. For much of the colonial period, European scholars framed South Asian history through the lens of invasion. The so-called “Aryan inva - sion theory” proposed that Indo-European–speaking peoples violent- ly displaced earlier populations, bringing with them the language that would become Sanskrit, along with religion and culture from outside the subcontinent. This framework served imperial interests: it por - trayed Indian civilization as fragmented and perpetually declining, thereby reinforcing the logic of colonial rule. The term “Aryan,” originally a self-designation ( ārya ) in early In - do-Iranian texts meaning “noble” or “cultured,” was later misappro- priated by European scholars and entangled with racial and suprem- acist ideologies. Similarly, “Dravidian,” which originally referred to a family of languages, was racialized under colonial scholarship as de - noting a biologically distinct, darker-skinned population whose lan- guage and religious traditions were presumed to have been displaced or overwritten. Over time, archaeological and genetic evidence has shown little to The Pashupati Seal of the Indus Valley Civilization, more than 4500 years old, is claimed to be one of the earliest depictions of the Hindu god Shiva. (Image source: Wikipedia)
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PATHWAYS—Spring 26—13
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