Yoga as Embodied Resistance, Anjali Rao
Yoga as Embodied Resistance, Anjali Rao
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Yoga as Embodied Resistance
A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History

Author: Anjali Rao, Thenmozhi Soundararajan

Narrator: Deepti Gupta

Unabridged: 7 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/14/2025

Synopsis

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, yoga  educator and practitioner Anjali Rao exposes how caste oppression, patriarchy, and colonization impact contemporary practice, and offers readers radical ways to re-envision a yoga grounded in liberation, inquiry, discernment, and even dissent.

Rao calls upon us to realize the work of co-creating a compassionate and courageous world, uplifting the stories of women and gender-expansive people who confront caste and gender dominance. The stories, or kathas, reflect different parts of yoga history from the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Bhakti renaissance—and highlight the seismic shifts in consciousness about the potential of spiritual teachings for social change. She explores:

Foundational histories of yoga, caste, and HinduismThe tensions among yoga, nationalism, anticolonialism, and IndigeneityThe impacts and intersections of yoga, gender, caste, and cultureBrahminical appropriation and its relationship to eros, spirituality, and loving devotionSanskritization, vernacularization, and the impact of patriarchy on bodily expressionBhakti as a subversive tool of personal agency and anticolonial resistance
With provocative chapters like “Is Yoga Hindu?” and a foreword from Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Rao’s work is both an invitation and a force of nature that lights up the path of yoga toward brighter, just, and more liberated futures.

About The Author

ANJALI RAO is a yoga educator-practitioner, her work deconstructs the dynamics of power in yoga with a multi disciplinary approach integrating philosophy, art and history. She offers insight into the stories that have been obscured by heteropatriarchy, orthodoxy and colonization. She is currently pursuing her Doctorate in Philosophy and Religion in California Institute of Integral Studies, her studies continue to explore the formulation of movements of dissent and resistance in the religio-spiritual context. She is on the faculty of many yoga teacher training and continuing education yogaprograms. She is the host of The Love of Yoga podcast, and shares thought provoking conversations with yoga scholars and activists on the frontlines of liberatory movements

Reviews

Goodreads review by Cynthia on July 29, 2025

In this book, Rao provides a thorough overview of the origins of yoga, Hinduism, and the caste system. Rao applies a critical lens to primary and secondary sources (texts) and examines hierarchies of caste and gender as tools of oppression. Rao argues that there is an amplification of elitist Brahma......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on August 02, 2025

Book Review: Yoga as Embodied Resistance: A Feminist Lens on Caste, Gender, and Sacred Resilience in Yoga History by Anjali Rao Rating: 4.8/5 A Radical Reimagining of Yoga’s Legacy Anjali Rao’s Yoga as Embodied Resistance is a seismic intervention in yoga scholarship, dismantling neoliberal and Hindutv......more

Goodreads review by Saoirse on November 30, 2025

5 stars, game changing A much needed antidote to neoliberal capitalist yoga as well as an extremely necessary contextualisation of the texts and concepts through the lens of caste. Teacher trainings should all include this and teach the sutras and the gita alongisde it. The first few chapters and con......more

Goodreads review by Jackson on February 20, 2026

I was fortunate to read this as part of a book club with my yoga community, and really appreciated the opportunity to gain others’ perspective! It was a really rich and dense text, and I loved hearing what others got out of it! It was an interesting perspective on the impact of colonialism on yoga an......more

Goodreads review by Yar on December 10, 2025

This gets better as it goes on with the later chapters telling stories rather than hectoring in sanctimonious academese. As much as it discusses identity, it doesn't get into how dissolving it works in the context of the historical categories (namely caste) which it is keen to preserve for upliftmen......more

Quotes

"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 for taking the time to do the research and reflection that is so needed."
—JIVANA HEYMAN, author and founder of Accessible Yoga

"Let the unlearning begin. Anjali provides a brilliant intersection where all practitioners of yoga can meet and evolve."
—KATHRYN BUDIG, founder of Haus of Phoenix

"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. That spiritual devotion can be an experience of embodied pleasure or radical expression. That practice, like reality itself, always demands a play of sameness and difference, synthesis and identity."
—DR. ANYA FOXEN, associate professor at California Polytechnic State University

"...a book I have long awaited. It conducts an exploratory historical analysis of yoga that contextualizes yoga's cultural power over the modern world, providing an important component in understanding the true layers of both what yoga has meant and what it can mean for us in the future. This ancient Vedic teaching has the power to transform us into being. It is a revolutionary tool, and Rao deftly takes us through its layers of history and resistance."
—FARIHA RÓISÍN, author of Who Is Wellness For?

"This book calls us into deeper awareness and action, and it will disrupt, in the best way, how we think of and practice yoga."
—MICHELLE CASSANDRA JOHNSON, author of Skill in Action, Finding Refuge, and We Heal Together

"Fierce voices like Anjali Rao'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.... Rao's text weaves critical analysis of historic texts, compelling storytelling, and reflective narrative toward a dismantling of neoliberal and Hindutva control over yoga's transnational circulation. May more yogis read it and politicize their practice toward interconnected freedom!"
—SHEENA SOOD, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at Delaware Valley University

"I've been waiting a long time to have a trusted resource on the history of yoga and resistance, one that is far from simple and pushes modern day approaches to yoga into necessary examination."
—MELISSA SHAH, yoga therapist

"This is the book everyone in the yoga space is talking about—or should be. It's an unflinching exploration of caste, patriarchy, gender, Hinduism, culture, and other not-often-talked-about truths that helped contribute to our contemporary yoga space. Rao's objective is not only to bring to light these lesser-known aspects of yoga's past but to incite readers to consider the practice as one of liberation and self-discernment as we reconsider its past, rethink its present, and determine its future."
—RENEE MARIES SCHETTLER, Yoga Journal

"An accessible and timely intervention that all practitioners and teachers should read."
—MS. MAGAZINE

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