Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History
Anjali Rao
Oct 2025 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Deepti Gupta
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About this audiobook
What does yoga have to do with caste, gender, and power?
This groundbreaking work explores how yoga can be a vital path to resistance, agency, and collective liberation.
Yoga as Embodied Resistance illuminates the essential—but often unseen—relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Bridging scholarship, history, and cultural analysis, yoga educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, and colonization impact contemporary practice, and offers readers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.
Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance—and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:
With provocative chapters like “Is Yoga Hindu?” and a foreword from Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Rao’s work is both an invitation and a force of nature that lights up the path of yoga toward brighter, just, and more liberated futures.
This groundbreaking work explores how yoga can be a vital path to resistance, agency, and collective liberation.
Yoga as Embodied Resistance illuminates the essential—but often unseen—relationships between caste and gender in yoga. Bridging scholarship, history, and cultural analysis, yoga educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, and colonization impact contemporary practice, and offers readers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.
Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance—and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:
- Foundational histories of yoga, caste, and Hinduism
- The tensions among yoga, nationalism, anticolonialism, and Indigeneity
- The impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and culture
- Brahminical appropriation and its relationship to eros, spirituality, and loving devotion
- Sanskritization, vernacularization, and the impact of patriarchy on bodily expression
- Bhakti as a subversive tool of personal agency and anticolonial resistance
With provocative chapters like “Is Yoga Hindu?” and a foreword from Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Rao’s work is both an invitation and a force of nature that lights up the path of yoga toward brighter, just, and more liberated futures.
About the author
ANJALI RAO is a yoga educator-practitioner, her work deconstructs the dynamics of power in yoga with a multi disciplinary approach integrating philosophy, art and history. She offers insight into the stories that have been obscured by heteropatriarchy, orthodoxy and colonization. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion in California Institute of Integral Studies, her studies continue to explore the formulation of movements of dissent and resistance in the religio-spiritual context. She is on the faculty of many yoga teacher training and continuing education yogaprograms. She is the host of The Love of Yoga podcast, and shares thought provoking conversations with yoga scholars and activists on the frontlines of liberatory movements
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