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[Dominik Wujastyk]

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From: Mark Singleton <ms156 at soas.ac.uk>
To: indology at list.indology.info
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Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:35:37 +0200
Subject: Workshop on Yoga and the Traditional Physical Practices of India
Dear Colleagues,

Daniela Bevilacqua and I are organising a workshop entitled 'Yoga and the
Traditional Physical Practices of India, Influence, Entanglement and
Confrontation' at SOAS, University of London, 8th-10th November 2019. The
workshop will take place under the auspices of the ERC-funded Haṭha Yoga
Project <http://hyp.soas.ac.uk>.

The call for papers is attached and pasted below this message. We would be
very grateful if you would share the information with colleagues you know
who may be interested, and/or circulate the call for papers on other your
academic networks.

Best wishes,

Mark Singleton
Senior Research Fellow
Haṭha Yoga Project
Department of Languages and Cultures of South Asia
SOAS, University of London

hyp.soas.ac.uk
ms156 at soas.ac.uk

---------

Yoga and the Traditional Physical Practices of India:
Influence, Entanglement and Confrontation

8th- 10th November 2019, SOAS University of London

Body practices such as physically-demanding āsanas, mudrās and ṣatkarmas
did not emerge out of nowhere. Many of them likely predate the later
synthetic, and profoundly influential, texts of haṭhayoga from the
fifteenth century onwards. For example, the Haṭhapradīpikā (c. 1450)
describes fifteen āsanas of which eight are non-seated, and later haṭha
texts describe many more. But new archaeological and art-historical
evidence, such as the 13th century Mahudi Gate in Dabhoi, shows that
non-seated, complex postures predate these later texts of haṭhayoga by at
least two centuries.
Furthermore, postures represented on temple pillars in Hampi suggest that
the artists were inspired by other body-practitioners alongside
yogis/fakirs (e.g. acrobats, wrestlers and dancers). If, as such sculptures
suggest, these various figures shared the temples’ spaces (perhaps
especially during festival times), with yogis, it is possible that the
yogis learned postural practices from other classes of practitioner, and
introduced them into their own repertoires as yogāsanas or mudrās, either
for pragmatic reasons (i.e. to catch the attention of pilgrims) or
spiritual ones (i.e. to push their bodies further into extreme forms of
tapas). Similarly, wandering sadhus are likely to have come into contact
with other physical disciplines, such as martial arts and military
training, especially around the time of the emergence of militarized yogi
ākhāṛas.

Could it be that the yogic physical practice, in its development from the
eleventh to the nineteenth century, drew widely on a variety of extra- or
para-yogic body disciplines? Are the advanced āsanas, bodily mudrās,
ṣatkarmas, and other innovative physical practices, the product of bodies
of knowledge and practice that are not themselves strictly ‘yogic’?
Conversely, are analogues to, or borrowings from practices apparent in
other yogic and non-yogic traditions? For example, did the contortions of
acrobats have soteriological or therapeutic purposes, beyond entertainment?
Did martial arts like kalaripayattu and varmakkalai incorporate yogic
physical practices into their training, combat or therapeutic aspects? And
beyond coincidences of physical shape or questions of direct causal
influence, can we point to a shared South Asian environment of ‘techniques
of the body’ within which a range of disciplines, may have developed?

This workshop aims to bring together specialists on the various traditional
physical practices of India. We are seeking papers that offer textual,
historical or anthropological analysis of physical disciplines such as
kushti; mallakhamb; silambam; kalarippayattu and other martial arts;
military training (including Persian/Mughal); various Indian dances;
acrobatics and contortionism; and any other traditional forms of Indian
body disciplines, from the oldest evidence of physical training in the
Dhanurveda and the Viṣṇu and Agni Pūrāṇas, to early-modern and contemporary
body practices.

The workshop will have two keynote speakers (to be confirmed). Each speaker
will have 30 minutes for the presentation and 15 minutes of discussion. The
conference will end with a public roundtable discussion. Travel,
accommodation and meals will be covered by the Hatha Yoga Project.

Please send proposals of 500 words and a list of relevant publications to
Daniela Bevilacqua (db28 at soas.ac.uk) and Mark Singleton (ms156 at soas.ac.uk).
Deadline for proposals: October 31st, 2018.


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