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This article looks at the translation and circulation of yogis’ learning in Persian medical and alchemical texts produced in South Asia. I suggest that looking at the non-religious environment allows for a more accurate understanding of the overall circulation of yogic knowledge and techniques in the Muslim society of South Asia. Furthermore, I suggest that the assimilation of yogis’ learning in Persian sources concerned not only Yoga but also other types of knowledge associated with yogis. Muslim physicians’ interest in yogis’ knowledge focused on one specific aspect: rasaśāstra “alchemy” and the mastery over the production of mercurial and metallic drugs. The technical and pragmatic focus of Persian medico-alchemical writings contributed to give views of yogis beyond the exotic and foreignizing category of the wonders of India. Medical writings helped to develop views of yogis as a socio-economic group involved in the transmission of a specific body of knowledge. This was an important shift away from the perspective of the ‘ajā’ib al-hind “wonders of India” as well as from the ways in which yogis were perceived in Sufi texts. New perspectives on yogis emerged when Persian-speaking scholars and readers in India needed more pragmatic representations of local groups, such as the physicians who were in the process of appropriating alchemical notions that were closely associated with the yogis.
This chapter examines the history of ‘warrior asceticism’ in South Asia with a focus on the ‘gosain’ army of Rajendragiri and his disciples in eighteenth-century north India. It begins with a discussion of asceticism and power (including martial power) in Indic thought over the longer term, drawing on key concepts in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Developments under the Mughals and post-Mughal successor states are also examined. Warrior asceticism experiences dramatic expansion, however, during the eighteenth century, a fact that is due principally (the author suggests) to the complementarity of yogic asceticism and the rise of infantry warfare in South Asia, often understood as part of a global ‘military revolution’. Though ‘Hindu’ warrior asceticism became an ideological font for much anti-British (and anti-Muslim) nationalist thought from the late nineteenth century, the gosain army of Rajendragiri’s disciples Anupgiri and Umraogiri was noteworthy for its role in buttressing British power in the geostrategic buffer region of Bundelkhand, as Company forces confronted the amassing armies of the Marathas during the second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–5). Also contrasted are eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorisations of yoga and violence, focusing on the reflections of Padmākar, Mān Kavi, Bankim and Gandhi.
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