South Asia Institute Book Talk: The Yoga of Power. Yoga as Political Thought and Practice in India

Yoga has an enormous range of meanings, but two spheres dominate its most common uses: yoga as a psychophysical activity and as philosophy. In this book talk, Sunila S. Kalé and Christian Lee Novetzke, authors of The Yoga of Power (2025), trace a third sphere for yoga as political thought and practice that intersects with the other two yet retains a distinct genealogy in text and history. This political idea of yoga names the strategies of control used by kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes political stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance that follow victory. Yoga here indicates routes to sovereign self-rule under the yoke of foreign power and defines righteous action amidst the grime of politics and even war. The talk will lay out the book's key arguments and empirical subjects from India’s earliest textual history to its bureaucratic forms in contemporary India.