From Breathing to Writing: Meditation in the Colonial Public Sphere

As one of the last bastions of the universal, breathing appears to have withstood the assault of relativism over the past century.Footnote ² With the cultures of its variously modified forms regarded as separable from, and even irrelevant to, the universal essence of breath, respiration has been widely accepted as an ideologically neutral sphere of human activity. In the course of the twentieth century this assumed universality enabled distinctive Asian cultures of breathing (Yoga, Tai Chi) to be translated into European and American environments that proved otherwise less hospitable to the moral and political structures that had sustained these practices in their original contexts (ascetic renunciation, Chinese warfare). In short, breathing has seemed neither to require nor reflect a context. Yet like any other human activity, breathing always has a context and is indeed in its various forms (fast, shallow, hard, weak) perhaps the most subtly contingent of all human activities.Footnote ³ This contingency is still more the case with regard to the deliberate modifications of breathing found in systems of meditation, for breath control and meditation are no less shaped by history than any other form of physical culture. Given that contingency forms the traditional basis of historical analysis, it is from these initial observations that we may begin to recover a sense for the physical intimacy of a past whose body politics have constituted the history of breathing.

The contexts and cultures of breathing with which we are concerned in this essay are those of the forms of meditation promoted in colonial South Asia, a period which witnessed the formulation of a novel discourse on breathing, meditation and the body whose historicity is rarely recognised. Having their intellectual origins in theological notions of the universal, studies of Indian ‘mysticism’ have generally failed to recognise the political dimensions to the physical and psychological acts of conditioning and control that comprise the full variety of Indian meditation systems.Footnote ⁴ Discussions of religion in South Asia have often failed to historicise these practices, in many cases assuming a simple continuity over long periods of time between, for example, Vedic references to Yoga and the famous Yoga practitioners of the colonial period and beyond.Footnote ⁵ In contrast to this tendency, this essay attempts to contextualise Indian meditation by examining the place of its components of breath control and physical conditioning in the wider Indian ecumene of late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Since Yoga has often been seen as the pre-eminent Indian form of meditation, we also draw attention to comparable Indo-Muslim traditions of meditation from the same period. In India's increasingly communalised colonial public sphere, it is argued that Yogis and Sufis articulated rival forms of physical culture and religious identity in response to the wider crisis facing precolonial Indian lifeworlds.Footnote ⁶ The promotion of these distinctly Hindu and Muslim body practices is seen to represent a shared movement towards the indigenisation of physical culture in the face of colonial British modes of personal conditioning, from table manners to military service and cricket. ‘Reform’ was in this sense not merely an intellectual process of doctrinal dispute, but a means of reconditioning the physical body into atavistically new ways of being, both private and public. In deportment as in appearance, the Yogi and Sufi symbolised an Indian authenticity at the very moment that they absorbed elements of a colonial discourse on the essentially traditional character of the ‘authentic’ Indian. Here we see the complexity of the oppositional stance to imperial cultural hegemony that Francis Robinson identifies as characteristic of Indo-Islamic reform in his article in this volume.

For all this, the Yogi and Sufi ideologues of the colonial era were in no sense the silent and passive statuary of an India construed as the House of Wonders. In contrast, we aim to show that through their participation in the new vernacular public sphere of print, Sufis and Yogis formed important agents of social change whose connections to modernity were disguised through the widespread colonial figuration of the ‘fakir’ as the embodiment of tradition. Since the public nature of the politicising of breathing techniques and other methods of control of the body is evident from the large number of printed manuals addressing such practices, vernacular print culture plays a central role in our analysis. Yet as an exploratory essay in the history of breathing, we also hope to demonstrate something of the multiple and changing meanings of breath and their connection to wider debates about identity, politics and the proper behaviour of the body in South Asia.Footnote ⁷

Older scholarly paradigms interpreting meditation primarily in terms of ‘mysticism’ have been largely incapable of recognising the rhetoric of meditation. For Sufi and Yogi meditation form not only a practice of the body but also a discourse on physical culture. Rather than ‘liberating’ the practitioner into the solipsism of pure private experience, in colonial India both Sufi and Yogi modes of meditation formed attempts to connect the physical person to new ideologies promoted by a series of ‘reformist’ groups. In stressing the association between meditation and unmediated ‘spiritual’ experience, the mystical paradigm fails to recognise that in Yogi or Sufi contexts experience was in fact highly mediated, either through the authority of the living shaykh or guru or else through the mediation of writing. From meditation manuals through etiquette guides and other apparently innocuous genres of instrumental writing, textual practices help us not only map changes in physical culture but also reckon with the agency of such constitutive texts in the new printed ecumene. For the new ideologies of the body that emerged during the high colonial era within which meditation must be located were so effective due to the normalisation of writing through the mass medium of print.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, previously occult spheres of Sufi and Yogi knowledge that had been based on traditions of face-to-face initiation and instruction were gradually re-constituted as traditionalist and indeed indigenist wings of the growing colonial public sphere. Throughout the following pages this meditational discourse on the body is placed among a wider series of printed vernacular works on Muslim and Hindu physical culture. Given the sense of timelessness in which scholarly discussions of meditation have often taken place, it is important to recognise the transformations of Indian physical culture initiated by the technology of printing through shifting the primary context of meditation from the realm of personal mediation to the textual realm of the mediation of writing. For in both Sufi and Yogi domains, precolonial traditions of meditation were based on oral forms of instruction that also encompassed the spoken commentaries that mediated admission to written works.Footnote ⁸ Here access to the knowledge and power granted by manipulation of the physical (and subtle) body was based upon the relationship between master and disciple (guru/shishya, murshid/murid). In the printed marketplace, what was once mediated by living teachers and surrounded by the empowering rhetoric of secrecy that had long underwritten the association between meditation and magic suddenly became public property. From the closely guarded meditation of personal initiation, here were forms of meditational practice that were accessible to the vernacular-reading general public and its companion listening groups. Although still described as such, Sufi doctrines were no longer ‘secrets’ (asrar) in any socially meaningful sense, not least due to the publication and translation projects of European Orientalists.Footnote ⁹ Whether with regard to Sufi manuals, Yoga treatises, Tantras or even works on magic, the arrival of print transformed the nature of this knowledge as social capital. The most fitting examples are to be found in the new Indian genre of the printed ‘do-it-yourself’ guide to meditation, which in contrast to more traditional works on either Sufi or Yoga practice effectively replaced the living master with the book. Print, then, stood at the centre of the transformation of an earlier ecumene in which the symbolic capital of certain forms of knowledge had been guarded through the social barriers presented by traditions of secrecy and controlled initiation. Here, then, is the emphasis on self-transformation and the individual will that is described in Francis Robinson's contribution to this volume.

While the nature of this knowledge was transformed by its entry into print, and while a case can be made for the profiteering instincts of print capitalism undermining social institutions whose guarded knowledge was heedlessly disseminated, this was also a situation that a new generation of Muslim and Hindu public preceptors sought to mould to their advantage. For at the same time that inexpensive print technology undermined the need for a living master's presence, it also opened up the possibility of large-scale publicity for those religious ideologues willing to embrace it. Given the fact of colonial censorship, it is perhaps also worth considering the role of such ‘mystical’ texts as a form of concealed politics operating in the unrestricted colonial sphere of ‘religious affairs’. And as is well known, the circles of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Swami Vivekananda and the Christian missionary organisations that surrounded them took to printing on a hugely ambitious scale.

The following pages examine the roles of a series of lesser-known lithographic men in the cultural politics of colonial meditation.

Print Culture and the Meditational Marketplace

With the final dissolution of Muslim power in nineteenth century North India had come a re-evaluation of Muslim norms of comportment that placed Islamicate tahzib (‘etiquette’) and adab (‘propriety’) into a new set of relations with neo-Hindu as well as British systems of physical comportment and bodily conditioning. In spite of the intransigent and repetitive rhetoric of Indian meditation manuals, this changing context would radically shift their meaning; as, correspondingly, did their relation as books in the marketplace to other books offering instruction in alternative ways of controlling the body. Although Muslim writers had been producing works on meditational practice for centuries, works either printed or produced during the late colonial period had special significance due to their attempts to access a public sphere in which the behaviour of Indian bodies was increasingly contested.Footnote ¹⁰ The radical potential of print—homogenising, proselytising, entering domestic space—was quickly recognised by Sufi writers of the period who regarded themselves as sources of public authority. Print was able to transform the teachings of these often obscure and provincial holy men into models of emulation for not only their direct initiates but also for a far larger fellowship of unseen readers. In the same way that colonial India witnessed Sufi meditation move from the more closed sphere of manuscript and oral instruction to the open access of the printed and purchasable text, the doctrines of Yoga similarly shifted from a circumscribed realm of initiatic and caste membership to the printed public sphere. Yoga practices thus mirrored their Sufi counterparts in being offered to a much wider public than had previously been the case, partly in reflection of the missionary impetus of Hindu and Muslim reform movements. The emphasis placed on Yoga by a whole series of Hindu public preceptors—particularly Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950)—brought Yoga a prominence that it had never before enjoyed, a prominence that was closely connected to the colonial experience in its early export overseas no less than in its Bengali epicentre. The neglected vernacular works discussed in this essay further disseminated this new Yoga in the print marketplace of small town North India.

Like their Muslim counterparts, colonial Yogi writings posited transcendent moral and ethereal goals for the bodily practices they promoted. In this way they connected physical discipline and bodily purity to a wider vision of social progress and political independence based on an indigenous physical culture sanctioned through reference to antique ‘scriptural’ precedents. As time passed and as European scientific knowledge increasingly encroached on the Yogi Gedankenwelt, the physical benefits of Yoga came increasingly to the fore, with a whole range of scientific and pseudo-scientific evaluations of Yoga eventually marginalising most of what Yoga had meant to its classical proponents writing centuries earlier in Sanskrit.Footnote ¹¹ Whatever the antiquating rhetoric of its proponents, the physicalist and ‘scientific’ neo-Yoga of modern times is a direct product of the cultural negotiations of late colonial India. But at the same time, there continued an older discourse in which Yoga and other forms of meditation were articulated primarily in terms of practical (albeit none the less physical) ends whose realisation stood in stark contrast to the more limited modernist goals of the neo-Yogis. Seen in such vernacular works as Jagannath Prashad's Yogriti ba taswir (‘Yoga with Illustrations’, 1910), here the ultimate goal of breath control was seen as rendering the physical body capable of surviving for thousands of years.Footnote ¹²

Many common features may be observed across the range of early Sufi and Yogi printed works on meditation practice, whose composition seems in many cases to have been inspired by commercial as much as ideological reasons. The fact that such works as Shiv Brit Lal Varman's Yog ke ‘amali sabaq (‘Practical Lessons in Yoga’) were printed in the Perso-Arabic rather than the Devanagari script is a reminder of the continuity of ‘Hindustani’ cosmopolitanism through the early decades of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹³ Indeed, as knowledge of a range of meditation techniques moved into the public sphere from their older location within specialised subcultures, a whole series of Urdu works on Yoga were published during this period. A work such as Jagannath Prashad's Urdu Yogriti ba taswir offered its purchasers practical instruction in Yoga, its etchings demonstrating correct posture alongside instructions on the mastery of respiration and carefully tabulated programmes of the correct number of minutes to hold the breath.Footnote ¹⁴ In a lithographic equivalent of small print, its section of qualifications and exceptions provides glimpses of the changing contexts of meditation: readers were warned not to practise breath control while suffering from headaches or feeling physically unwell, and under no circumstances to practise Yoga in moving train carriages.Footnote ¹⁵

In their practical orientation, eschewing the old ways of face-to-face initiation and learning, works such as the Yogriti ba taswir had numerous Sufi counterparts. In the literary expression of the religiously plural readership that made up the North Indian marketplace, some of these Sufi works included sections on the techniques of Yoga. Among the most interesting of the colonial Sufi works that discuss Yoga practices is the Asrar-e-darwesh (‘The Dervish's Secrets’) of Sufi Sa'adat ‘Ali.Footnote ¹⁶ In addition to describing a number of familiar Sufi meditational practices (zikr, riyazat), the author also included a section devoted to a respectful elucidation of the techniques of the Yogis and the purpose of their various postures.Footnote ¹⁷ Like the more instrumentalist sections of licit magic that made Muhammad Ghaws's sixteenth century Jawahir-e-khamsa so popular in print during this period, the Asrar-e-darwesh was a deeply pragmatic work whose position in the marketplace was analogous to that of the new practical Yoga manuals discussed below that promised to yield vast powers from correct breathing. Printed in pocket-size format, the Asrar-e-darwesh seems to have been written as a guidebook for those wishing to set themselves up as Sufi masters in their own right, but who wished to avoid the trouble of initiation and gradual training at a pace dictated by a living master. Consequently, the Asrar-e-darwesh consists of descriptions of a series of practices—largely prayers, visualisation techniques and breathing exercises—that could be employed for specific and for the most part worldly ends. This was not a Sufism of metaphysical theory, but rather its social expression as medicine, prognostication and amulet-making, all of which could of course be adapted for profit-making enterprises. However, for present purposes what is most interesting about the Asrar-e-darwesh is the section it contains on breathing techniques, a section underpinned (as in the Yoga works of the period) by a short theoretical excursus on the connections between breath and the wider universe. Much more minimal and convenient than the often complex and time-consuming exercises of traditional Sufi and Yogi practice, these were a series of simple breathing techniques that could accompany very specific circumstances. In effect, dangerous or otherwise risky activities should be met by breathing through different nostrils or towards different parts of the body. The many and varied situations in which the power of breath could be so employed included the purchase of a horse, elephant or camel; the receipt of a gift gold jewellery or of new clothes (presumably to avoid mal de ojo); and the search for lost property. Accompanied by simple instructions to breathe in certain directions or through one or the other nostril, the numerous other eventualities in which the reader was advised to resort to the power of breath ranged from the quotidian (learning whether one was pregnant with a boy-child, ensuring a safe journey in given directions of the compass) to the extraordinary (meeting a king, anticipating an armed invasion).Footnote ¹⁸ Further undermining transcendentalist conceptions of Sufism and Yoga, such works were forthright in their orientation towards physical as much as spiritual ends.

Colonised Bodies and Indigenous Alternatives

Far from creating a sense of universal solidarity with the common facts of the human condition, the embedding of Sufism and Yoga in the pragmatic minutiae of daily life in colonial India echoed the shift towards sectarianism in public debates over the nature of community. This politics of meditation is most clearly discernible when meditation practices are placed into the wider discourse on physical culture that from the later decades of the nineteenth century increasingly sought to control—and indeed define—Muslim and Hindu bodies. While inter-Muslim polemic over the legitimacy of Sufi practice and authority is already well known, it is important to situate this Muslim controversy within a wider contest for the control of Indian bodies in which Muslims played only a part. For Sufi and other discourses that propounded an expressly Islamic physical culture were competing with alternative formulations of Hindu and British modes of bodily comportment. If this polemical triangle had a point of origin, this was the presence of a British colonial elite and their own consciously distinctive physical culture. For with its pomp, its prestige and its literal embodiment of power, the colonial etiquette of the British ruling class provoked a crisis of confidence in the old Indian ways of physical being in the world. One set of responses—an inevitable outcome of the cultural encounter of the politically unequal—was for Indians to adopt ‘British’ forms of behaviour, from dress, pastimes and mannerisms to the occasional extremes of English food habits. Another set of responses—the responses explored in this essay—sought to develop homegrown alternatives to this imperial culture of the body.

The impact of this imperial physical culture was variously seen in the (self-) suppression of aspects of the customary physical cultures of India; in the promotion of self-consciously indigenous alternatives; and in the minutiae of everyday personal encounters underwritten by the unequal distribution of power. Yet in the fraught intellectual and social climate of the era, such indigenising turns towards legitimate alternatives frequently articulated themselves as self-consciously ‘Muslim’ or ‘Hindu’ forms of behaviour. Indo-British cultural relations therefore emerged out of a series of debates that may be simplified into the pattern of a ‘trialogue’ of Christian, Hindu and Muslim, a polemical geometry that came to lay out the possibilities of definition for the self as for others. Of course, between these three discursive voices in the trialogue more ambiguous formulations of physical culture remained possible. Attempts to formulate a non-sectarian ‘national’ alternative may be plotted between Muslim and Hindu in the communicative triangle (as in Nehru's Islamicate dress), with the position of the Muslim modernists lying between Muslim and British points of reference. But despite these variant possibilities, the three main markers of identity nonetheless plotted the discursive parameters of definition.

We suggest, therefore, that the promotion of Sufi and Yogi meditation in the public sphere represented an important aspect of the colonial debate over the ownership and control of the body that sought to formulate the public display of personal identity. The proponents of Sufi and Yogi discipline were competing with the imperial Anglo-Saxon mode of physical culture in its broadest sense. As numerous studies have emphasised, in its innumerable manifestations this vigorous imperial culture of the body combined sporting prowess and military drill with a sense of missionary ‘action’, so encompassing an originally Protestant discipline of the flesh with an imperial culture of socially hierarchical personal etiquette. As with the rival systems of physical culture offered by those speaking in the name of Muslim and Hindu tradition, proper bodily restraint and physical endeavour for the British in India were underwritten by a strong ideological and moral code—‘the code’—that drew on ascetic strands of Protestant Christianity and public school sports adapted to the muscular contexts of empire.Footnote ¹⁹ For those willing to emulate imperial bodies, printed books in Indian languages provided written initiation into the mysteries of Victorian physical culture. In his Ma'dan-e-tahzib (‘The Mine of Manners’), published in 1901 in Lucknow, the old capital of Islamicate etiquette, the headmaster of the city's Hosainabad High School sought to instruct his boyish readers in proper English behaviour through a series of practical lessons upheld by admonitions no less forceful than those of his Sufi contemporaries.Footnote ²⁰ In this guidebook to the new mode of colonised being in the world, Mirza Habib Husayn detailed an enormous range of practices that the young Indian should endeavour to learn. These ranged from sitting correctly and playing appropriate sports (khel aur varzesh) to behaving properly at balls and even learning to dress in the fashion of the famous metropolitan dandy, Beau Brummel.Footnote ²¹ The Ma'dan-e-tahzib in this way aimed to self-consciously train its readers in modifications of bodily behaviour appropriate to India's new colonial society. Yet such works also bore an obvious political dimension, made explicit in the Ma'dan-e-tahzib through an appendix on the benefits of British rule.Footnote ²²

Neither this work nor its contemporary Sufi and Yogi manuals can be understood in isolation from the much larger body of Urdu books, pamphlets and journals devoted to manners and etiquette published in colonial India. These ranged from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's hugely influential journal Tahzib al-akhlaq (‘The Purifying of Manners’, founded c. 1870) to the well-known book of the same name by the North Indian ‘alim ‘Abd al-Hayy al-Hasani (d. 1923) and the similarly famous manual of female behaviour, the Bihishti zewar (‘The Heavenly Adornments’) of Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi (d. 1943). Besides these better-known works, scores of less successful etiquette manuals filled the shelves of India's booksellers. Among these cheap print works, many were still more practical and specialist in character, such as the short guides to the rules of cricket—that most successful component of the physical culture of empire—written by Muhammad ‘Abd al-Rahman of Bareilly and Nanak Chand.Footnote ²³

Such colonial modifications of physical culture were echoed elsewhere in Urdu print through the distribution of works delineating ‘Islamic’ alternatives to colonial comportment. The Adat al-tanabbuh fi bayan ma'ni al-tashabbuh (‘Tools of Awakening for Clarifying the Meaning of Imitation’) of Mawlwi ‘Abd al-Hayy, published in Delhi around 1910, sought to prove that copying the physical appearance of Englishmen was contrary to the Sunna of the Prophet. The legitimately ‘Muslim’ style of moustache was of particular concern, as was the length of beards and hair, with male Muslim readers warned to also attend to the hair of their womenfolk.Footnote ²⁴ The alternative offered to imperial mannequins was a system of etiquette based on a neo-classical model of Prophetic ‘custom’ (sunnat).

Although widespread, such attitudes were by no means uncontested. In an early twentieth century magazine article entitled Taj aur kulah-e-darweshi (‘The Crown and the Dervish Cap’), the well-known Sufi publicist Khwaja Hasan Nizami (1878–1955) offered a less antagonistic attitude towards the sartorial symbolism of British rule by relegating all such signs of power to an older Sufi discourse of the rejection of worldliness (tark-e-dunya). Although the wearing of the crown makes people (by implication, the British) appear different, advised Khwaja Hasan, without the crown, in reality all people are equal and share the same eyes, tongue, heart and indeed breath.Footnote ²⁵ Such sentiments notwithstanding, in other articles Khwaja Hasan was no less insistent than many of his contemporaries that the habits and attributes (khasa'il aur awsaf) of the Prophet Muhammad should be held up as the best behavioural example for his community, making repeated use of hadith to stress the importance of good manners and of Muhammad as their ideal model.Footnote ²⁶ Other printed works sprang to the defence of ‘Muslim’ physical culture by taking on single issues, as in the case of Babu Muhammad Husayn's Risala-e-goshtkhori (‘Treatise on Meat-Eating’), a tract in praise of the benefits to Muslims of the regular consumption of meat.Footnote ²⁷ As in other such works written amid the polemical triangle identified earlier, here Indian behaviour was being shaped through debate with Hindu antagonists, with bodily praxis used to quite literally incorporate symbolisms of community difference. Consequently, frequent references to the Arya Samaj appear in the Risala-e-goshtkhori.Footnote ²⁸

Print culture played a central role in publicising these re-formulations of the practice of daily life. It is here that colonial writings on meditation are also to be situated.

The Athletics of Sufi Rebellion

As we have noted, to emphasise the transcendent aims of meditation practices is to miss their central concern with the body and, through its medium, with the wider social world. As scholars of Mediterranean late antiquity have long recognised, the founders of the Christian monastic movement performed their feats of self-discipline in vivid and direct competition with the athletes of Rome. Indeed, in the prototypical Vita Antonii of Athanasius (d. 373), the physicality of Saint Antony's struggles was dramatically emphasised in order to compare the saint with the representatives of the alternative (and still at this point dominant) model of physical endeavour represented by the athlete.Footnote ²⁹ Just as the new physical culture represented by the early Christian ascetics was understood in counterpoint to wider social assumptions about the body, so was a similar set of cultural and historical references to be found in the writings on Sufi and Yogi techniques that entered India's printed public sphere. Even more than their earlier models, Indian Sufi manuals of the colonial period gave central emphasis to control of the body. Such works promoted a form of physical conditioning that, in accordance with longstanding tradition, was described in terms of ‘[physical] training’ (riyazat) and ‘work’ (shughl). Indeed, in the Ziya al-qulub (‘The Brilliance of the Hearts’) of Hajji Imdad Allah (d. 1899), the author went so far as to term the breathing practices he was describing as varzesh (‘athletic exercise, sport’) in their own right.Footnote ³⁰ In its account of the practice of breath control (pas-e-anfas), the Ziya al-qulub even described a technique that enabled the initiate to mystically breathe the living breath of his spiritual guide: to breathe as a Sufi was to be quite literally inspired by one's master.Footnote ³¹ Breath had now become a way of articulating authority.

Attempts to respond to polemical attacks on Sufi legitimacy are also seen in the writings of the Hyderabadi Sufi Iftikhar ‘Ali Shah Watan (d. 1906). There instructions on meditation practices—such as zikr-e-jali or zikr-e-kalima-e-tayiba—appeared only in the midst of this defence of Sufi legitimacy that stressed the primacy of an unambiguously Islamic bodily praxis of normative rituals and obedience to the shari'a.Footnote ³² Meditation practices by no means hovered in serene isolation above the ideological affray that surrounded them, but in such ways participated inexorably in the controversies of the age—through the books devoted to their elucidation and correct performance.

Without positing any kind of facile causality, this culture of self-discipline nevertheless cannot be disentangled from colonial efforts towards taming the violence of the holy man. For Sufi training manuals also need to be situated in relation to the failure of the jihad movements of the nineteenth century. These movements encompassed not only the unsuccessful jihad of Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi (d. 1831) but also the widespread sentiment among many Indian Muslims that the revolt of 1857 had also been a jihad. Here it is important to stress that from declaring holy war to formulating modes of legal and cultural separatism from Indo-British society, the most stringent rejections of colonial rule by Indian Muslims in the nineteenth century had come from Sufi circles.Footnote ³³

An illuminating example of the inverse relationship between armed struggle and meditation is seen in the life and works of Hajji Imdad Allah (d. 1899), whose involvement in the jihad of 1857 led him to seek exile after the revolt's suppression in the Hijaz, from where he continued to write and teach. In addition to the oral dissemination of his teaching through the network of Indian students emanating from his charismatic presence in Mecca, Imdad Allah's collected writings were also printed in Kanpur in 1898. Written in Persian and Urdu, his works included one of the most significant manuals on Sufi meditation of the nineteenth century, the Ziya-al-qulub. However, Imdad Allah also composed a lengthy Urdu masnawi poem, the Jihad-e-akbar (‘The Greater Jihad’), on the moral struggle against the self; it was in many ways the poetic companion to his prose guidebook on meditation. What is interesting about the poem is its adaptation of the language of jihad for the disciplining of the self. Of course, the notion of the struggle against the self as the ‘greater jihad’ goes back to a famous hadith of the Prophet Muhammad and Imdad Allah was by no means the first Sufi to expand the theme. But given his involvement in the events of 1857, Imdad Allah's subsequent decision to promote the internalisation of this rejection of British power had a particular salience. The language and poetic imagery of the Jihad-e-akbar made its reference to contemporary physical warfare quite clear, describing the struggles with the various elements of the self in terms of a series of skirmishes and sorties involving battalions (lashkar) armed with rifles (tufang), swords (tigh) and daggers (khanjar).Footnote ³⁴ Manifest here was the intimate relationship between meditation and rebellion as resistance alternatively externalised through armed struggle or internalised through the discipline and purification of the self. In either case of inward or outward aggression, the body became the focus of political struggle against external influence in which firm boundaries were constructed between Indian Muslims and their British overlords.

A Yoga of Silent Resistance

Having seen the connection of Sufi works to a wider Muslim discourse on the body, it is now necessary to place colonial Yoga writings within the same colonial transformation of Indian physical culture. As we have already hinted, we suggest that the entry of the previously initiatory traditions of Yogi no less than Sufi forms of bodily training into the public sphere of print represented a self-consciously indigenous alternative to the physical culture of the Raj. This may be most vividly demonstrated in connection with the major publicists of the new Yoga of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for several of these figures were also connected to the nationalist and proto-nationalist movements.Footnote ³⁵ The most obvious example is Gandhi, with his notions of the connections between (bodily) swaraj and Yoga. However, a more interesting figure is Aurobindo Ghose, for whom the practice of Yoga formed part of a wider re-discovery of Indian knowledge concomitant with the rejection of the colonial learning he had acquired at public school in London and at university in Cambridge.Footnote ³⁶ Ghose's shift from nationalist violence to nationalist asceticism occurred during his imprisonment in Calcutta during the Alipore Bomb Case of 1908–09. It was only after his acquittal that Aurobindo passed through the final stage of his metamorphosis from political agitator to Yogi, rejecting the trappings of his colonial education in favour of a dress act of indigenist self-definition. Once again print played a central part in this reclamation of identity, with Aurobindo furiously publishing his ideas on Yoga between 1914 and 1921 in the journal Arya that was issued from his refuge in French Pondicherry as the counterpart to his earlier political daily, Bande Mataram.Footnote ³⁷ The position we have argued for Yoga within the indigenising politics of the period is made quite explicit in a number of Ghose's writings in Bande Mataram. For as he declared in an article entitled ‘Religion and Politics’ published in 1907, ‘There cannot be a more mischievous delusion than to suppose that we can advance our soul by committing our bodies to the care of others’.Footnote ³⁸

In many ways, the politics of Aurobindo's choice of the ascetic yogi as the authentic Indian was an echo of the confrontational politics of the previous century. The East India Company's military expansion in Bengal had earlier been met with fierce resistance from the ascetic armies of the Sadhu orders (akharas), while memories of the uprisings of 1857 continued to be enriched with tales of the conspiratorial communications network run by fakirs and Sadhus.Footnote ³⁹ But Aurobindo's circle also contained other figures who represented this juncture between revolutionary politics and Yoga, such as the Irish-born supporter of Indian independence Margaret Noble, better known as Sister Nivedita (1867–1911). A follower of Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita had also been strongly influenced by the political writings of such figures of the great Russian anarchist, Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921).Footnote ⁴⁰ Other nationalist groups in Bengal established anuśilan samitis (‘self-culture clubs’), while in other regions of India militant akharas posing as centres of Yogic instruction attracted the attention of the British authorities.

Although few other Yogis had such expressly political careers as Aurobindo, the place of Yoga in Aurobindo's indigenous turn was nonetheless clearly linked to the wider Yoga revival of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴¹ For despite its presentation as an antique and so ‘purely’ Indian tradition, the colonial Yoga of Aurobindo's direct predecessors had not remained unchanged by its imperial passage and had already begun to blend with Anglo-Saxon notions of physical culture.

It is important to stress here the hybrid genealogy of the neo-Yoga of the nineteenth century and its connections to the occult subculture of the Victorian empire, a situation also reflected in the colonial rehabilitation of a bowdlerised Tantrism.Footnote ⁴² As early as the 1860s, the practice of breath control was beginning to be promoted in Britain, with the earliest notable example being George Catlin. A blend of ethnology and quackery led Catlin to promote the ‘natural’ method of nostril breathing, as summed up in his motto shut your mouth. Although he had no links with India, Catlin's ideas were nonetheless founded on the exoticism of foreign climes: he claimed to base his theories on the observation of the Indians of Brazil, Peru and the United States.Footnote ⁴³ By the 1870s and 1880s, breath was beginning to feature in several of the New Religious Movements emerging from the suppressed cosmopolitanism of Victorian Britain. Of these, the Sympneumata movement of Laurence Oliphant (1829–88), that ‘mystic in lavender kid gloves’, is perhaps the most interesting through its attempts to link breathing to individualist self-discovery and the sexual liberation of the country women of Palestine.Footnote ⁴⁴ A few decades later, by now in the context of ‘meditation’ per se, breath control further infiltrated British reading circles via the Theosophical movement.Footnote ⁴⁵ Popular printed works further extended the adaptation of Yoga to scientific notions of physiology and health, as in Health and Right Breathing, published in London in 1912 as part of Cassell's ‘Health Handbook’ series. This book anonymously quoted Vivekananda as well as George Catlin in its physiological exposition of breath control.Footnote ⁴⁶ Interestingly, the Cassell handbook espoused the same appeal to scripture as Sufi and Yoga works did in India, with precedent sought in the Old and New Testaments to support the link between right breathing and moral rectitude.Footnote ⁴⁷

With the growing interest in Yoga in the imperial centre in Britain, and beyond it in America, Yoga would subsequently be further reconstituted through still greater appeals to modern medicine and science.Footnote ⁴⁸ Here, however, we are principally concerned with an earlier stage in this colonial transformation of the means and ends of meditation. For despite Aurobindo's exemplification of a Yoga of colonial resistance, his own turn from violent to meditational resistance had been influenced by Vivekananda, whom Aurobindo considered as his absent mentor, having only met him through the vicarious medium of a vision he experienced in gaol in Calcutta.

It was ultimately Vivekananda who was the most influential player in this transformation of Yoga from minoritarian ascesis into the global physical culture it would become over the course of the next century. Despite its repeated appeals to Vedic authenticity, it is in Vivekananda's Raja-Yoga (‘Royal Yoga’, 1896) that we must locate the single most important colonial hybrid of Indian and European notions of physical culture as pertains to meditation. In reflection of the bourgeois parapsychologists of late Victorian Britain, Vivekananda was the first of a long line of neo-Yogis to elicit comparison between Yoga and European systems of knowledge, so making the first steps towards the detachment of Yoga from the subtle bodies of classical Sanskritic physiology to the mechanical human body of modern science.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vivekananda was by no means the only figure involved in the colonial transformation of pre-modern Indian meditation and physical culture through missionary work overseas. The Indian Sufi missionary ‘Inayat Khan (1882–1927) offers another important example of the new centrality that the body and its optimal health came to occupy in articulating the new purposes of meditation. In the years after his departure from India in 1910 ‘Inayat Khan's presentation of Sufi practice in Britain and subsequently America wrought a similar shift towards modernist notions of the body and its health.Footnote ⁵⁰ Here, as in the physical culture of the Victorian public school, physical vigour became an important frame of reference for Sufi meditation. Breath control also played an important part in ‘Inayat's message, with the legacy of an earlier holistic Islamic paradigm of the physical and subtle bodies adapted or discarded to fit modern Western notions of physiology.

Vivekananda was not only instrumental in the gradual mechanisation of Yoga, for he also passed on an older political discourse on Yoga breathing that, in precolonial Indian society, had served as the ideological underpinning of the activities of the Sadhu orders as warriors, merchants and bankers.Footnote ⁵¹ It is here that a discourse on breathing re-enters our analysis, since for Vivekananda the physical exercises of Yoga were primarily concerned with control of prana (literally ‘breath’), the élan vital that he described as ‘the infinite, omnipresent manifesting power of this universe’ and whose force could only be mastered through the practice of breath control (pranayama).Footnote ⁵² In his promised transformation of the colonial subject into the puissant Yogi, Vivekananda unveiled the centrality of power to his worldview by describing the vast cosmic forces accessible to the masters of this indigenous practice of breath control that ‘opens to us the door to almost unlimited power’.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, Vivekananda's vision of pranayama went as far as to offer an explicit political sociology:

Here Vivekananda finally turned India's political reality upon its head to provide an indigenous key to political empowerment capable of undermining a colonial discourse explaining power in terms of moral supremacy, technological advancement and political maturity.

The relationship that Vivekananda framed between breath and power was also evident in vernacular works on meditation from the period. An example is found in Shiv Brit Lal Varman's Yog ke ‘amali sabaq (‘Practical Lessons in Yoga’), one of the numerous autodidactic meditation manuals fostered in India by the emergence of print capitalism. Having discussed the uses of different types of Yoga, like Vivekananda (whom his ideas reflect), Varman devoted several chapters to discussing the importance of breath (pran) and breath control (pranayam).Footnote ⁵⁵ Varman began this account with a discussion of the etymology of the word pran. While this appeal to linguistic origins was possibly a reflection of the relative unfamiliarity of the term vis-à-vis more common spoken Hindustani terms for breath (sans, dam), it also demonstrated the same orientation to words' ‘original’ meanings and antique precedents shared by proponents of neo-Hinduism and colonial scholars alike.Footnote ⁵⁶ But for all its ideological subtext, like other contemporary works on physical culture, Varman's work bore a forthright practical orientation towards the supernatural empowerment of his vernacular readership. His etymological conclusions were therefore that, among its several layered meanings, pran signified breath (sans), life-power (zind ki taqat) and more simply power itself (taqat).Footnote ⁵⁷ Having established that the entire universe—from planetary to human bodies—is composed of a fusion of pran and akash (‘ether’), Varman then continued to extol the might of this ‘breath power’. Since pran is limitless (la-mahdud), he noted, so also are its works, such that all that people see in the world is merely a manifestation (zahur) of pran, from the physical realm right through to the imaginings of the inner life.

Capable of being mastered by ordinary Indians through the Yoga practices of breath-control described in Varman's book, once again pran was here explicitly portrayed as the source of all power (qudrat).Footnote ⁵⁸ In a printed ecumene in which vernacular works on Yoga shared shelf space with accounts of the new British sciences, formulated here in cheap print was an indigenist theory of power as prana. Like the parapsychologists of the imperial metropolis, India's colonial Yogis thus made comparisons between their ‘antique’ Yoga and the arriviste findings of European science. As Vivekananda grandly declaimed, ‘What moves the steam engine? Prana, acting through the steam. What are all these phenomena of electricity and so forth but Prana? What is physical science? The science of Pranayama [breath control], by external means’.Footnote ⁵⁹ If breathing was related to power, then here we see rather the relationship between Indian cultures of breathing and the discursive power of the scientific knowledge and physical culture of the British Empire. In this vision of Indian breath as Indian empowerment, we see meditation as a form of politics.

As we have noted in connection with the Sadhu armies of the eighteenth century, this does not mean that precolonial notions of meditation had borne any fewer connections with politics and power. This may be seen in the various popular legends concerning breath control (habs-e-dam, pranayama) that associated respiration and meditation more generally with the acquisition of supernatural powers. We are fortunate in possessing a number of ethnographic accounts from the nineteenth century that provide considerable insight into the means and ends of meditation as represented by perhaps the most significant precolonial representatives of Yoga, the Kanphata Yogis.Footnote ⁶⁰ The importance of the followers of Gorakhnath was not simply commensurate with their limited number but measurable rather in terms of their place in the popular imagination. Like the legends of Gorakhnath himself, the ‘split-eared’ Yogis who followed him were widely celebrated in the folklore of precolonial and colonial India, and it is their central place, lingering in this ‘unreformed’ folk discourse on meditation, that renders the Kanphata Yogis of interest.

In the 1830s, the Kanphatas of Kuchh in Gujarat were visited by the British soldier Lieutenant Postans and again in the mid-1870s by the local educational inspector, Dalpatram Khakhar. Khakhar was able to visit several Kanphata maths and both his and Postans' accounts record the oral traditions associated with the Kuchh Yogis and their illustrious forbears. What is most striking about the legends is the place of supernatural power as their principal theme. However, like similar tales of meditational power from other parts of India, the legends collected by Khakhar and Postans were more deeply embedded in the local landscape than in the written ideological formulations of their colonial equivalents.Footnote ⁶¹ The most famous of these narratives described the formation of the arid landscape of the Rann of Kuchh as taking shape when the Yogi Dharmanath opened his eyes after twelve years of meditation and gazed from his hilltop towards the sea, whose waves were immediately burned up to leave the desolation of the Rann.Footnote ⁶² Khakhar also recorded a legend (noting its adaptation to refer to all the ruined towns of Gujarat) in which Dharamnath, upset when someone spilled his begging bowl as he emerged from meditation, cursed the town of Pattan—‘Pattan sab dāttan!’—which then immediately sank beneath the ground.Footnote ⁶³ Other folktales connected the Yogis to more explicitly political applications of supernatural power.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gharibnath of Kachh was thus held to have miraculously intervened in the elevation or extermination of a whole series of figures at the Jadeja court in Kachh, as well as to have expelled the Jats from Kachh after one of their children disturbed his meditational repose.Footnote ⁶⁵

Such folktales, making explicit homologies between meditational power and political supremacy, were also recounted in connection with Sufis, whose own decade-long sessions of breath control (habs-e-dam, pas-e-anfas) often paralleled those of the Yogis in their political application.Footnote ⁶⁶ The presentation expounded in the writings of Vivekananda and his vernacular contemporaries of breath as power and of meditation as the route to its acquisition was thus by no means a discourse limited to a learned coterie of Yogi authors in Bengal, but rather the adaptation of an older and popular discourse of supernatural politics for the new colonial era. Although undoubtedly shaped by their imperial climate, the indigenising meditational politics of colonial India's masters of breath control had deep roots in the soil of Indian tradition.

Categorising Meditation: From Universal Respiration to Hindu and Muslim Breaths

We have already noted the increased role of bodily health in underwriting the value of meditation at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the connections we have seen in Vivekananda's Raja-Yoga between physical culture, health, inner purity and material success were shared by other Hindu writers of the period, not least those connected to the Arya Samaj. In the writings connected with such figures, the physical condition of the body was seen to parallel the moral state of society at large.Footnote ⁶⁷ These themes were expounded in numerous publications, such as the early twentieth century chapbook entitled Akhlaqi wa Ruhani Sihhat (‘Moral and Spiritual Health’) written by Mahashah Kashi Ram.Footnote ⁶⁸ The central theme of this work was that physical well-being (tandorosti, sihhat) was the outcome of spiritual and moral purification. Here, in reflection of the new physiological orientation of Yoga, the achievement of mental purity (pak) and peace (shant) was directed not primarily towards spiritual ends but towards the physical health of the body.Footnote ⁶⁹ As in Yoga works of the same period, through the connection made between health and morality a continuum was posited not only between mind and body but also between the private and the social body. Ethical behaviour in the social world was seen to reflect the level of purity achieved by individual minds and bodies. This was not least the case with regard to the practical ends to which such purification and the physical strength that derived from it were to be directed in the world of work. In a strong encouragement towards social utility, unemployment (bikari) was said to lead to disquietude (biqarari), illness (bimari) and suffering (ranj).Footnote ⁷⁰

Other Hindu texts notwithstanding, close parallels may also be found in works on Sufi meditation printed in North India during the same period. Once again, chapbooks formed the most important means by which this discourse entered the public realm. Ayina-e-khod-shinasi (‘The Mirror of Self-Knowledge’), a short Urdu work on the doctrine and practice of Sufi meditation printed in Lucknow in 1890, is a case in point.Footnote ⁷¹ Its author, Muhammad Najm al-din, similarly placed the body and its travails at the centre of his presentation of meditational practice. Once again, the body was regarded as impure, with the author reminding his readers that all of our bodies come from the unclean stomachs of our mothers.Footnote ⁷² The physical body provided Najm al-din with the frame of reference with which to conceive the means and ends of meditation: the body suffers from heat and cold, requires perpetual nourishment, and causes misery and distress throughout life that can only be alleviated through the liberation of spiritual ‘passing away’ (fana).Footnote ⁷³ As in Kashi Ram's Akhlaqi wa Ruhani Sihhat, physical illness also played a central role in the rationale of meditation, with a rhetoric of physical suffering counterbalanced with instructions on the restorative ‘exercise’ (mashq) of the chanting of pious formulae (zikr).Footnote ⁷⁴ Here in the form of a provincial chapbook was a subtle reconfiguration of Sufi doctrine that placed new emphasis on the physical body, how to understand it and, in turn, relate to it. The colonial transformation of Sufism seen earlier in the overseas missionary career of ‘Inayat Khan can also be traced here in the vernacular sphere of the book markets of the United Provinces.

This heightened Sufi emphasis on bodily purity was echoed in many other Urdu publications of the period, such as Mawlwi Muhammad Salih's Silsila-e-Islam (‘The Tradition of Islam’). Framed in the format of a series of questions and answers between a disciple (shagird) and his master (ustad), in addition to emphasising the benefits of formal prayer (namaz) like many Sufi works from this period, the Silsila-e-Islam was largely devoted to the question of ritual impurity (najasat) and its avoidance. The purity of the body thus played an important role in the text, with an entire section devoted to cleansing the body; subsections discussed ways to purify the mouth if it had touched alcohol and the hair if it had been dyed.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even beyond the arid terrain inhabited by such works, the same concern for purity was central to the language and ethos of the works on Muslim meditation discussed earlier. In this context too we witness the importance of a discourse on breathing that sought to Islamise even the most quotidian of corporeal activities. In the descriptions of techniques of breath control in his Ziya al-qulub, Hajji Imdad Allah described one breathing technique as a ‘sweeping brush for the heart’ (jarub-e-qalb) capable of cleansing the heart of all dust and dirt.Footnote ⁷⁶ For the influential Sufi Habib ‘Ali Shah (d. 1905), the discipline of Sufi etiquette (adab) was a hermetically closed system, a physical culture complete and self-sufficient in its own right. To the east of Habib ‘Ali's centre in Bombay, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, Sufi meditation stood at the centre of a new purification movement aimed at islamising the ‘lapse’ Muslims of the Deccan countryside in the hands of the Hyderabadi Sufi reformer, Mu'in Allah Shah (d. 1926). Like many of his contemporaries in other parts of India, Mu'in Allah aimed to achieve this through the promotion of an unambiguously Islamic life praxis based on conformity to the shari'a and the regular performance of Sufi meditation.Footnote ⁷⁷

We have argued that the meditation practices promoted by the Hindu and Muslim ideologues of nineteenth and early twentieth century India were indigenising forms of private physical resistance to colonial rule that sited the body as the locus of cultural resistance. Yet in their intellectual orientation many of the proponents of meditation were also communalist in character, looking back at legitimate textual authorities (the Veda, Patanjali; the Prophetic Sunna) rather than sideways at the contemporay social facts of shared Muslim and Hindu traditions of meditational endeavour. For despite the fact that caste groups comprising tens of thousands of Muslim Yogis still existed in India at this time, Yoga was instead being defined in terms of the social and intellectual categories suggested in ‘classical’ Vedic and Vedantic writings which perforce excluded Islam as a frame of reference.Footnote ⁷⁸ While colonial Yogis discussed breath in terms of the Sanskritic vocabulary of prana, for Sufi writers breath was correspondingly described through the Perso-Arabic terminology of dam or nafas. In this way, breath itself came to acquire a communalist dimension that shirked the everyday vernacular of the ‘Hindustani’ term sans. A consequence of the colonial anxiety over the authenticity offered by textual precedent in ‘scriptural’ languages was therefore the rejection of the middle ground of history that had comprised the complex series of encounters between Sufis and Yogis.Footnote ⁷⁹ The quest for unambiguous categorical purity therefore also extended to the social body, with the result that the largely unwritten traditions of Muslim Yoga were marginalised in favour of more transparently Hindu or Muslim forms of meditation.

Breath control was by no means the exclusive domain of these religious ideologues, but as we have seen, also played a central part in the nineteenth century in folk traditions centring on the supernatural powers attainable by mastery of the breath. Unlike the colonial Yoga and Sufi texts that placed their respective forms of meditation within closely defined systems of religious identification, this folk tradition was often less sectarian in nature, which is to say, it employed a different set of categories than those of the communalising public sphere of print. If popular legends of Yogis and Sufis competing in the longevity of their breaths and the ostentation of their miracles remind us that there was no precolonial idyll in which religious rivalries did not exist, what did nonetheless evolve at times was a shared popular understanding that Sufis and Yogis were doing much the same thing.Footnote ⁸⁰ In contrast to the abstract technical discourse of written Sufi and Yoga theory, this world of narrative was much more open to the subversive bricolage of Sufi Yoga. Numerous precolonial examples may be found in Hindwi romance literature, as for example in Shaykh Qutban's well-known Mirgavati (1503) and in such lesser-known works as the Citravali (1613) of ‘Usman of Ghazipur.Footnote ⁸¹ Meditation techniques were by no means the sole exchange between precolonial Yogis and Sufis. Nath Yogis referred to their masters as pirs using the same Persianate terminology as the Sufis and also wore the same patchwork cloaks, carried the same coco-de-mer begging bowls (kashkul, khappar) and buried their dead in mausolea that were often architecturally indistinguishable from those of the Sufis.Footnote ⁸² While printed practical guidebooks on meditation did offer important possibilities of self-definition and transgressive meditational praxis, such voices were often lost in the clamour of calls to purify the social body. Traditions of Muslim Yoga certainly continued to exist throughout the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸³ But such formulations appeared increasingly oxymoronic as modernist paradigms of religious definitions came to replace the bricolage of religious practices born through centuries of ad hoc negotiations on local ground rather than through reference to the unambiguous written world of doctrine.

Belonging to textual genealogies drawing ultimately on Sanskrit and Arabic models, both Yogi and Sufi writings on meditation were more entrenched in cycles of inter-textuality than in the actual practices of the societies that produced them. As Carl Ernst has demonstrated in a series of recent studies of the Arabo-Persian literature of Yoga, textual precedent played a far more important role in Indo-Muslim meditation manuals than the observation of local practice.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the written sphere of Indo-Arabic and Indo-Persian at least, such practices were generally ignored in favour of more clearly ‘Islamic’ modes of practice.Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet the sudden appearance of lithographic printing in India was able to transform such handwritten manuals, previously passed between relatively small numbers of learned and so likened minds, into a far more pervasive literature of socio-religious norms. Print, then, was able to relegate custom to the defensive margins in a way that (whatever the logocentric orientations of historians) the manuscript ecumene had never previously managed to do.

This turning away from ambiguous social complexity towards the uncompromising clarity of written doctrine may be seen in many Hindu writings from the nineteenth century. Like the religious sobriety of Indo-Islamic reform, temperance formed an important part of the neo-Hindu movements of the colonial period. In their search for ‘classical’ authenticity, figures like Vivekananda and Aurobindo ignored the living practice of large numbers of Yogi practitioners to create a sober and restrained Yoga based instead on what they presented as scriptural precedents, ignoring the widespread use of cannabis and opium among the existing traditions of Yoga.Footnote ⁸⁶ The suppression of the intoxicated breaths of the Kanphata Yogis and other precolonial traditions of Yoga was in this sense concomitant with the suppression of the categorically transgressive praxis of the Muslim Yogis, for these logocentric movements were axiomatic in their disregarding of living practice in favour of antique writing. The pure pranayama breathing of the Yoga revivalists was in this way coterminous with a wider process of social and cultural purification. The inward focus on the person and the purification of bodily behaviour represented by so many of India's colonial masters of meditation thus involved a rejection of the cross-traditions that had over the previous centuries emerged from India's pluralistic societies.

As a discipline based on the purification and control of the body, the ascetic physical culture envisaged by the Sufi and Yogi writers we have discussed was the analogue of a wider discourse of social purification. Just as the female body became subject to ideological control of its social and sexual interaction beyond the boundaries of the community, so the disciplines of Yogi and Sufi practice sought to instil an ascetic self-discipline that would constrain the bodies of both men and women.Footnote ⁸⁷ From the regular performance of ritual Muslim prayer to the careful control of all the fluids and foodstuffs that entered the body, the purity instilled in the meditational body was in this sense the mirror of the wider ideological obsession with the purification of Islam and Hinduism as criteria for community in colonial India. This quest for purity prevented the transgressive praxis of the Muslim Yogis from entering the new public sphere just as it suppressed the traditional use of cannabis and opium in meditation to deflect disrepute from its Indian reformulation of Victorian moral puritanism.

Yet while print offered broad outlets for religious polemic and new formulations of collective identity, it also opened up possibilities for more individualistic forms of self-definition. The North Indian ‘Hindustani’ book market encouraged readers to choose liberally between works on Yogi or Sufi practice and, in doing so, to exercise a degree of choice between the different programmes described and the distinct benefits such books offered. Alongside the possibility for public disputation and polemic that the printed sphere offered, such possibilities for individual self-conditioning coined the other face of print. For it is important to distinguish writings of a more collectivist kind from those of a more individualist orientation. Alongside Urdu manuals on cricket, table manners and other forms of the physical culture of empire, such works offered their readers a range of indigenous alternatives to imperial medicine, science and physical culture, not least in their appeal to the worldly benefits of breath control. Meditation manuals held open to their readers the promise of self-transformation and the possibility of self-definition. It is this print-mediated appeal to a new individualism that makes them important, if wholly neglected, way-markers of South Asia's road to modernity.