anjali
rao
author, yoga educator & practitioner
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.
JIVANA HEYMAN, author and founder of Accessible Yoga
Yoga as Embodied Resistance is like a map to the hidden terrain of yoga’s history…. This perspective is a gift beyond measure, and I’m so grateful to Anjali Rao for taking the time to do the research and reflection that is so needed.
DR. ANYA FOXEN, associate professor at California Polytechnic State University
Rao’s storytelling weaves the deeper meaning and history of yogic tradition with important corrections. We learn that transcending the self also means actively challenging social hierarchies.
MICHELLE C. JOHNSON, author of Skill in Action, Finding Refuge, and We Heal Together
This book calls us into deeper awareness and action, and it will disrupt, in the best way, how we think of and practice yoga.
SHEENA SOOD, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at Delaware Valley University
Fierce voices like Anjali’s show us what’s possible when writers are courageous enough to contend with yoga’s entangled origins in Hindu and caste-based oppression while simultaneously politicizing its potential toward embodied resistance.
Events
October 24 and 31, November 7 and 11
An invitation to study and discuss the book in community. The intention is to cultivate a community of critical thinkers attuned to the praxis of yoga without essentializing the ancient practice and its contemporary incarnations. Together, we will review as it interrogates and dismantles multiple threads of oppression so as to co-create a movement toward individual and collective healing and transformation.