Sufis, Yogīs, and genealogies of “Islamic yoga”: Broaching religio‐cultural encounters in premodern eastern India

This essay examines the state of recent scholarship on religio‐cultural encounters in premodern eastern India with a particular focus on the conceptual category of “Islamic yoga.” At one level, it acknowledges the importance of the discrete nature of religio‐cultural forces that constitute the cumulative achievement of meticulous scholarly engagements from the vantage points of different fields. Ironically, these complexities are frequently overlooked in the overwhelming, and ever so growing corpus of quasi‐academic and popular literature on yoga that have more successfully captured attention and imagination. Part of this is, however, traceable to Orientalist and subsequent scholarship preoccupied with the project of religious standardization. At another level, it suggests that the refreshing move away from a homogenised narrative of yoga in scholarly circles is a most welcome development not least because it brings into sharp relief the historically rooted complexities of these wider religio‐cultural encounters over the past few centuries which are at odds with the modern fad for pigeon‐holed identities. While mapping the broad contours of recent scholarship in this field, the essay draws attention especially to the yoga body as site of religio‐cultural encounters and to the issues of internal nuances and regional variations with a particular reference to eastern India. Finally, it also parenthetically refers to the salience of medieval and early modern literature, especially vernacular literature vis‐à‐vis high Sanskrit or Persian sources. In the process, the essay both identifies the key strands as well as possible new directions in scholarship in the field.