Yoga Breath

This book explores the history of pranayama, a crucial practice of both premodern and modern yoga, from 1850 onwards. It sheds light on pranayama's transnational entanglement with occultism, physical culture, medicine, and hygiene.

Rewriting the History of Modern Yoga: Exploring Modern Prana and Pranayama in Depth

A central practice of both premodern and modern yoga, pranayama ("breath control") is practised in yoga classes worldwide. Like the notion of prana ("breath", "vitality"), pranayama has a longstanding history in South Asia, constituting the fourth limb of Patanjali's yoga. Since roughly 1850, prana and pranayama have been reinterpreted in light of the ideas of Hindu reform movements, nineteenth-century occultism, science, biomedicine, and transnational hygiene. In this book, Magdalena Kraler traces the history of yogic breath cultivation between 1850 and 1945 for the first time. She reconstructs how prana assumed a central role in the cosmological frameworks of modern yoga and how pranayama came to be understood as a form of self-cultivation. Engaging one of modern yoga's key practices, this book not only offers a thorough academic analysis, but also responds to a growing worldwide interest in breath cultivation.