"Adapt,adjust, accommodate": The production of yoga in a transnational World

The Divine Life Society (DLS) is a spiritual organization founded by Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh, India. Sivananda's DLS, including associated centers across India and abroad, has figured prominently in expanding the role of yoga as a tool for the development of modern India. In this paper, Sivananda's own poetry and the many pamphlets and books produced by this noted swami, his contemporaries, and his successors through the 20th century in India serve to highlight ways that the promotion and practice of yoga has contributed to the ongoing Indian nationalist project. In addition, yoga is viewed from the perspective of the transnational and global forces that have become dominant in the latter half of the 20th century.