Book talk with Sunila S. Kalé & Christian Lee Novetzke The Yoga of Power: Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India

BOOK TALK HELD IN ENGLISH

Yoga has an enormous range of meanings, but two spheres dominate its most common uses: yoga as a psychophysical activity and as philosophy. In this talk, we trace a third sphere for yoga as political thought and practice that intersects with the other two yet retains a distinct genealogy in text and history. This political idea of yoga names the strategies of control used by kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes political stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance that follow victory. Yoga here indicates routes to sovereign self-rule under the yoke of foreign power and defines righteous action amidst the grime of politics and even war. Our talk, based on our book entitled The Yoga of Power (Columbia University Press, 2025), will lay out the book's key arguments and empirical subjects from India’s earliest textual history to its bureaucratic forms in contemporary India.

Sunila S. Kalé is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her previous publications include Electrifying India (Stanford University Press, 2014) and Mapping Power (Oxford University Press, 2018) and numerous essays in the disciplines of political science, development studies, energy studies, yoga studies, and South Asia Studies.

Christian Lee Novetzke is a professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Washington, Seattle. His prior publications include Religion and Public Memory (Columbia University Press, 2008), Amar Akbar Anthony (Harvard University Press, 2016), The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press 2016), and many essays in the fields of religious studies, history, yoga studies, and South Asia Studies.

 

Moderator:

Ute Hüsken is a professor and head of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Heidelberg. Her publications include Die Vorschriften für die Buddhistische Nonnengemeinde im Vinaya-Piṭaka der Theravādin (Reimer, 1997), When Rituals Go Wrong (Brill, 2007), Viṣṇu’s Children (Harrassowitz, 2009), and numerous edited volumes mainly in the fields of gender and ritual studies. Together with Ronald Grimes and Barry Stephenson she edits the Oxford Ritual Studies Series. Hüsken’s main research fields are Buddhist studies, Hindu studies, Ritual and Festival studies and Gender studies. In most of her most recent work she combines methods of textual research (Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil) and anthropology.