Yoga as Embodied Resistance

A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History

De: Anjali Rao, Thenmozhi Soundararajan - foreword

Narrado por: Deepti Gupta

What does yoga have to do with caste, gender, and power?

This groundbreaking work explores how yoga can be a vital path to resistance, agency, and collective liberation.

Yoga as Embodied Resistance illuminates the essential—but often unseen—relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Bridging scholarship, history, and cultural analysis, yoga educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, and colonization impact contemporary practice, and offers listeners radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.

Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance—and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:

• Foundational histories of yoga, caste, and Hinduism
• The tensions among yoga, nationalism, anticolonialism, and Indigeneity
• The impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and culture
• Brahminical appropriation and its relationship to eros, spirituality, and loving devotion
• Sanskritization, vernacularization, and the impact of patriarchy on bodily expression
• Bhakti as a subversive tool of personal agency and anticolonial resistance

With provocative chapters like “Is Yoga Hindu?” and a foreword from Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Rao’s work is both an invitation and a force of nature that lights up the path of yoga toward brighter, just, and more liberated futures.

©2025 Anjali Rao (P)2025 North Atlantic Books

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Yoga as Embodied Resistance is like a map to the hidden terrain of yoga's history.... This perspective is a gift beyond measure, and I'm so grateful to Anjali for taking the time to do the research and reflection that is so needed."—JIVANA HEYMAN, author and founder of Accessible Yoga

"Let the unlearning begin. Anjali provides a brilliant intersection where all practitioners of yoga can meet and evolve."—KATHRYN BUDIG, founder of Haus of Phoenix

"Rao's storytelling weaves the deeper meaning and history of yogic tradition with important corrections. We learn that transcending the self also means actively challenging social hierarchies. That spiritual devotion can be an experience of embodied pleasure or radical expression. That practice, like reality itself, always demands a play of sameness and difference, synthesis and identity."—DR. ANYA FOXEN, associate professor at California Polytechnic State University