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. 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.
