Andrea R. Jain's main objective in writing this book, she explains, is to examine the cultural changes that have enabled modern postural yoga to become part of transnational pop culture. Her work makes a contribution to the significant body of recent scholarship on the subject, much of which demonstrates that modern yoga in its current popular manifestation is the product of a complex coming together, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of elements of neo-Vedanta, Western esotericism, the transnational physical culture movement, and modern science and biomedicine. She decisively counters the notion that there is such a thing as an “authentic” form of yoga, arguing (as recent scholars have done before her) that yoga has throughout its history been polymorphous and adaptable.

Jain's main argument is fairly unremarkable and noncontroversial. She argues that postural yoga today is shaped by its encounter with market capitalism, and that to understand it one must understand the transnational consumer culture within which it thrives. She describes her research method as multisited ethnography. She does not, however, present the kind of ground-up empirical material based on fieldwork and participant observation that one would normally expect in ethnographic writing, relying instead on the print and online publications of various yoga groups, popular commentators, and promoters (as well as adversaries) of modern yoga.

Chapter 1 provides an insightful overview of academic work on yoga and tantra traditions in premodern contexts in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions. The author makes the point that yoga, though culturally South Asian, did not belong to any single religious tradition. This is an important point, and assumes significance in a later chapter where Jain examines discourses in the United States that claim that yoga is in essence part of “Hindu religion.”

Chapter 2 examines the countercultural basis of modern yoga's early forays into the West. Jain examines the careers of early entrepreneur-yogis such as Ida C. Craddock, Pierre Bernard, and Sir John Woodroffe, whose interests lay in the physical and often controversial aspects of tantra and hatha yoga. She contrasts these figures with others like Vivekananda, Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the Theosophists, who rejected yoga's physical and tantric aspects, focussing instead on its ethical and meditational dimensions, thus presenting it as rational and progressive. What was common to all these figures, she notes, was that their discourses were countercultural and appealed to individuals (in the West) with largely unorthodox religious interests.

All this changed from the 1960s onwards when yoga, most visibly in its postural form, became part of mainstream Western culture. In chapter 3 Jain examines both modern soteriological/denominational yoga traditions, and forms of yoga relatively free of religious, philosophical and denominational affiliations promoting comparatively secularized programmes of individual self-development. In this and the next chapter she illustrates with a range of examples how the popularization of postural yoga has been enabled through its adaptation to transnational developments in consumer capitalism, the branding of yoga forms and related products, and effective brand image management on the part of promoters.

Chapter 5 takes on scholars who dismiss modern forms of yoga as marketplace “distortions” of the real thing, allegedly lacking the religio-philosophical and ethical basis of premodern yoga. Jain argues that the notion of a distortion presumes that there is such a thing as an authentic form, an idea that she convincingly disputes. She also convincingly makes the important point that modern forms of yoga must be taken seriously since they provide meaning and purpose in the lives of a wide range of practitioners. She explores aspects of modern yoga that have a clear basis in notions of the sacred; in myth and ritual; in shared ethical, even ascetic, values; and in meaningful attempts to resolve the problem of suffering. In all these respects, she rightly argues, modern yoga forms and their practitioners should be taken seriously, not dismissed in their entirety as consumerist, profit-driven, hedonistic, and amoral. Unfortunately, a significant portion of this chapter is taken up by a discussion of what constitutes “religious” practice (with a view to establishing modern yoga's “religious” credentials). In my view this part of the discussion – dredging up outmoded debates in the study of religion – contributes little to this work and causes it to digress significantly from its central aims and objectives.

Chapter 6 provides a very interesting account of two types of discourse in the United States opposed to modern forms of yoga. The first emanates from Christian groups who see yoga as quintessentially Hindu, heathen, Satanic and anti-Christian (and therefore a threat to the US, envisioned as a Christian nation). The second emanates from right-wing Hindu associations such as the Hindu American Foundation (backed by sections of the Indian government) which insist on modern yoga's Hindu foundations, but which then claim Hindu ownership of this tradition in its “authentic” form, and rail against its “corruption,” “rape” and “theft” at the hands of modern promoters. This is relatively uncharted territory in scholarship on modern yoga and it is here that Jain makes her most original and insightful contribution.

Significant sections of this book have appeared in previous publications by this author. In the preface, Jain notes that the book is intended not just for academic readers but also for those who do yoga, and that she has made a deliberate choice to make her writing as accessible as possible. She has certainly succeeded in this respect. This book is highly readable, and has much to offer to scholars, practitioners and those mired in debates about ownership, authority and legitimacy in relation to modern yoga.