A therapy to live by: Public health, the self and nationalism in the practice of a North Indian yoga society

Abstract

In this article I focus on the relationship between concepts of self and health in modern North India. Drawing on field research in a popular yoga society, I argue that yoga therapy, as practiced by the Bharatiya Yog Sansthan of Delhi, provides a reconceptualization of what can be meant by public health. Using studies that challenge both the essentialist and epistemological facticity of the self, I show how the discourse and practice of yoga is implicated in, and derived from, a complex search for self definition in terms of health; health which is conceived of as a public regimen that seeks to reconnect that which modernity has broken apart: mind and body.