Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the socio-political history of globalised prāṇāyāma at the turn of the nineteenth century, proposing that the various methodologies that abounded in the self-help literature of the day function to delineate an embodied, moral orthopraxis of breathing for modern men and women.

Paper long abstract:

Although it is often presented as a universal, natural and fundamentally a-historical human activity, prāṇāyāma is, like āsana, a physical, embodied practice of yoga that inscribes the practitioner in a nexus of culturally and socially specific meaning. Taking as its conversation partner Nile Green's 2008 article on the 'political economy of [yogic] breathing' among yogis and Sufis in colonial India (entitled 'Breathing in India, c.1890'), this paper attempts to analyze the historicity of prāṇāyāma practice as it was transmitted and taught outside of India from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The paper will examine the place of prāṇāyāma in the wider context of 'mystical breathing' in turn-of-the-century Europe and America, proposing that the various methodologies that abounded in the (yogic) self-help literature of the day function to delineate an embodied, moral orthopraxis of breathing for modern men and women, encoding and enacting specific orientations and attitudes towards this world and the next. The paper will examine prāṇāyāma's role in the performance of health and vitality in early twentieth-century physical culturism; its transformation into a method of 'aspirational breathing', particularly within popular positive-thought movements; its assimilation into the metaphysical frameworks of contemporary western esotericism; and its popularity as a method for the acquisition of extraordinary powers, such as superhuman strength, prognostication and clairvoyance. Each of these contexts help to illuminate the particular social, political and economic history of prāṇāyāma within contemporary, globalised yoga.