Striking a Pose

The land of the Far East was still a distant enigma for the West. The mystery that enamoured numerous,also intrigued American inventor Thomas Edison. His messenger was his cameraman,who set out to explore the terrain of China and India in the 19th century. His findings appeared on movie screens in the US in 1906. Edison’s Hindoo Fakir was the first movie produced about India — one that had the film’s protagonist display a variety of tricks for the camera,several of which could be classified as yogic postures. More than a century later,the film is again garnering interest. It has the audience queuing before the screen at Smithsonian’s Arthur M Sackler Gallery in Washington DC. Part of the exhibition “Yoga: The Art of Transformation”,it is one of the 130 exhibits sourced from 25 museums and private collections in India,Europe and the US. “These works of art allow us to trace,often for the first time,yoga’s meaning across the diverse social landscapes of India,” says Debra Diamond,Associate Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art,Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

More than 90 sculpture and paintings — dating from the third to the 18th century — illuminate yoga’s central tenets and obscure history. Forty colonial and early modern photographs,books and films reveal how yogis became despised during the 19th century and how yoga was transformed in early 20th-century India. Neatly classified into categories,the section “Tantra” has a trio of life-size yogini goddesses from a south Indian temple,and two extraordinary sculptures of the skull-bearing deity Bhairava. The highlights of the section “The Path of Yoga” includes a powerful Chola dynasty bronze of the Hindu deity Narasimha meditating with a yogapatta (strap) and ten folios from the first illustrated treatise of yoga postures (1600-1604). “Yoga in the Indian Imagination 1570-1830” has exquisite paintings and manuscripts,created in Hindu and Islamic courts,which reveal how yogis became deeply and diversely embedded in Indian culture. This includes a bifolio from the Gulshan Album of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir and the spellbinding Yogini with Mynah from Bijapur. Representing the rudiments of modern yoga is the section “Modern Transformations” that comprises Thomas Harrison’s photographs of Swami Vivekananda,who introduced yoga to America in 1893,and possibly the earliest film of Krishnamarchya and his student BKS Iyengar,demonstrating posture sequences. “These works of art allow us to trace,often for the first time,yoga’s meanings across the diverse social landscapes of India,” notes Diamond.

In the Spotlight

Monumental stone Yogini goddesses from a 10th century Chola temple

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Ten folios from the first illustrated compilation of asanas made for Mughal emperor Akbar in 1602

Twelve feet scroll of the chakra body

The earliest illustrated Yoga

Vasishta that illuminates the central tenets of yogic practice and philosophy

Sandstone of Yogini on Owl: Seated on an owl,the flying yogini has weapons and bared teeth of a fierce deity and the voluptuous body of a benign goddess