Women and Yoga: A History of Female Practitioners

This module begins by framing our inquiry into the history of female practitioners by asking us to reflect on our histories as students and perhaps practitioners of yoga. It offers interpretive strategies for approaching history—our own and others—drawing on critical pedagogical approaches. This session sketches broad historical outlines and key themes. What do we mean by female, what do we mean by yoga? What does a chronology of female practitioners look like through stone, art and word? How is gender used as an organising principle in metaphysics, particularly cosmogony and philosophy, in Vedic hymns and Sāṃkhya philosophy? The role of women in Indian society is circumscribed by law texts and extolled in myth. We will explore the tales and spiritual negotiations of ‘perfect wives’ and philosophers—Lopamudrā, Maitreyī, Gargī, Gandharī, and Sulabhā—and consider how they relate to lives lived: who told the tales and why?

The second module tells the tales of ascetic practitioners such as Pārvatī and investigates the lack of women in the Haṭhayoga sources—asking why this is so. Widening the frame we consider ascetic and devotional practices more broadly—as figured by the female poetess from Kashmir, Lal Ded—before exploring in detail the term yoginī. This opens to a discussion of tantra and the ‘divine feminine’. Where does this leave Haṭhayoginīs—especially those portrayed in Mughal era imagery—are these depictions of practitioners or erotic fetishizations?

This third module locates female practitioners in the haṭha corpus through their blood, rajas. Drawing on her recent research Ruth outlines paradigms of the yogic body—kuṇḍalinī, bindu/rajas, and more ascetic models—before detailing those rare but specific accounts of female practitioners in the haṭha sources. We will also briefly explore Daoist internal alchemy (nüdan) to offer a speculative but enticing comparative study.

The final session asks why modern global yoga is so dominated by female practitioners, at such stark contrast with the premodern South Asian story? This module outlines key lenses and themes: femininism, neoliberalism and body politics, appropriation, power and abuse. These themes are illustrated via an anecdotal history of women in modern yoga—the enigmatic Helena Blavatsky, Genevieve Stibbens, Molly Bagot Stack, Indra Devi, and Yogini Sunita. We will conclude the course by coming full circle: what are we doing when we look for a history of female practitioners? What does this say about us, and the future of the study and practice of yoga?