Author: David Gordon White
Publisher: Chicago University Press, 2009
Price: £29 (hardback)
Isbn: 9780226895130

David Gordon White, professor of religious studies at the University of California, and author of Kiss of the Yogini: ‘Tantric Sex’ in its South Asian Contexts and The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, was researching polytheism when he was knocked off-course by a passage from the Mahabharata: “A yogi can lay hold of several thousand selves, and having obtained [their] power, he can walk the earth with all of them.”

Though White rounds off his study with a look at modern and postmodern yogis, most of those described here bear little relationship to the gnomic old geezers of the 1960s nor to the teachers of the more recent and solipsistic expanded-mind-in-a-ripped-body schools of yoga. As the title of chapter two puts it, ceci n’est pas un yogi. The yogis he traces through many centuries of Hindi and Sanskrit literature may have elements of the entrepreneurial spirituality which derives, he sugg­ests, from 19th-century Europe (Mme Blavatsky and the Theosophists get a name check, though the British Raj was very wary), but they are an impressively dodgy bunch who often have an eye for the ladies and no qualms about using their supernatural abil­ities to amass temporal power. In Bhairavananda, the ‘hero’ of the eponymous 14th-century Nepali play muses: I don’t know mantra from tantra, / Nor meditation or anything about a teacher’s grace. / Instead, I drink cheap booze and enjoy some woman.

In chapter one, ‘Tales of Sinister Yogis’, White discusses possession, yogic cannibalism and a form of servitude whereby children born to previously barren north Indian women were given to yogis who appropriated their bodies or, sometimes, reincarn­ated into them, a rationalisation, he suggests, of slave culture.

In ‘The Science of Entering Another Body’, White suggests that before spirit and matter were sundered, the yogic body was seen as being “capable of transacting with every other body – inanimate, animate, human, divine, and celest­ial”, a discussion he continues in ‘Yogi Gods’, which looks at gods such as Shiva, Krishna and Vishnu, who inhabit other bodies and are sometimes present in all bodies, and at the deification of human yogis. He rounds the book off with a rogue’s gallery of poisoners, spies, spivs and fat cats culled from Mughal travellers’ tales.

Huge fun, fascinating and beauti­fully written.