THE STORY OF YOGA
FROM ANCIENT INDIA TO THE MODERN WEST
ALISTAIR SHEARER
Hurst, 384 pp, £25
Alistair Shearer’s exhaustive examination of the history and purpose of yoga was widely reviewed – unsurprisingly, for it has for many years been hailed as an answer to all our modern ills: spiritual and physical. The sacred practice, which took yogis a lifetime to master, has undergone a range of Western permutations (including the everpopular Bikram yoga that involves a lot of sweating) which would have baffled its originators three millennia ago. Yoga was never intended to be squeezed into a stress-relieving lunch-hour break. As the Katha Upanishad (a Vedic text of around 500BC) described it: ‘Yoga is this complete stillness in which one enters the unitive state, never to become separate again.’
Shearer, who has written extensively on Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, approaches the subject, as Nicola Barker put it in the Spectator, ‘forensically, from every conceivable angle: historically, spiritually, geographically, culturally and commercially’. Barker thought the book ‘clear-eyed, elegantly written and wonderfully informative’. Mick Brown in the Sunday Telegraph concurred, calling it ‘scholarly, elegant and engrossing’, and he enjoyed the way that Shearer points out that yoga practised ‘stripped of its sacred associations’ is really just extreme stretching – and in extremis can in fact lead to all sorts of physical problems.
In the Financial Times, Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan agreed with Shearer that the modern enthusiasm for yoga as, vaguely, ‘mindfulness’ is misguided. ‘Sacred knowledge is not designed to solve the travails of the modern world or clear up anxiety. Believing it can single-handedly change lives smacks of a return to the magic of ancient days.’