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Pahalwan Baba Ramdev: Wrestling with yoga and middle-class masculinity in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2020

JOSEPH S. ALTER Open the ORCID record for JOSEPH S. ALTER [Opens in a new window]
JOSEPH S. ALTER*
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University of Pittsburgh Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the view of many people, Baba Ramdev embodies the practice of modern yoga in twenty-first century India. A tremendously successful entrepreneur, infamous ‘godman’ with political ties, and a highly visible TV personality, he is also a vocal supporter of pahalwani (Indian wrestling) as a way of life and of wrestling in India as a national sport. Beyond sponsorship of tournaments and support for a new professional wrestling league, he promotes a form of modern, nationalistic masculinity that draws on the ‘ideals’ of yoga, competitive athleticism, ‘Hindu’ conceptions of embodied power, and fetishized Vedic asceticism. In complex and often contradictory ways, Baba Ramdev's embodiment of these ideals shapes the bio-morality of wrestlers as they train, compete, and endorse his products. Critically analysed in terms of gender theory, his sponsorship of wrestling belies deep contradictions in religious nationalism, middle-class modernity, and in the gendered morality of both wrestling as a sport and yoga as a form of practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , July 2021 , pp. 1359 - 1381
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Niko Besnier and Susan Brownell for inviting me to participate in a conference on the globalization of sport in Prague in 2017 where I gave a talk that has developed into this article. A more developed version of the talk was given as a public lecture in 2019 at the Centre of Yoga Studies, SOAS University of London. I am grateful to Mark Singleton and Daniela Bevilacqua for the invitation to speak at the Centre.

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