Fraudulent Yogis: Debating the Authenticity of the Yogi in the Victorian Age

The figure of the yogi-fakir in the colonial period, was for many outside/western observers, an emblem of Indian authenticity, especially in the sense of the presumed backwardness of traditional Indian culture, whereas modern Indians themselves were debating about what kind of yogi was “authentic” in a fashion that fit their own particular agendas.  For many in the West, the figure of the Indian yogi served as a foil against which to define the normative ideology of Western modernity, which Graham Jones defines as “a set of assumptions about the material nature of reality and physical limits of human perception that received widespread support in the scientific and scholarly institutions of post-Enlightenment Europe” (Jones 2017, 75).  For others, though, especially those in heterodox communities of Spiritualism, New Thought, Theosophy, and modern Western esotericism, the figure of the yogi was often used to question scientific materialism and assert alternative ontologies.  At the same time, for Indians like Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) and Srisa Chandra Vasu (1861-1918) who sought to reform Hinduism and forge a strong modern identity for an independent Indian nation, the figure of the yogi and his purported powers loomed as a real problem.  In the work of these Hindu reformers, the performances and activities of yogis were “made out to be the antitype of yoga, and the yogis of the twentieth century the degenerate heirs to the practitioners of the true yoga of yore” (White 2009, 244).   This paper investigates how discourse about the figure of the yogi often revolved around contested notions of “authenticity.”  What makes an authentic yogi?  Answers to this question were closely intertwined with understandings and articulations of authentic “religion,” authentic “science,” and authentic Indian culture. 

As a number of scholars—including Lionel Trilling, Charles Taylor, Adam Seligman, and Webb Keane—have discussed, the moral values of sincerity and authenticity received “a rare institutional and cultural emphasis” in Europe from the late 18th century and became a defining feature of the so-called “modern” era (Seligman 2009, 1090). This helps to explain why, again and again in 19th and early 20th century Western writings, yogis are presented as charlatans and impostors, and those who respect and revere them are correspondingly described as ignorant and vulgar.  Moor describes yogis as “covered with ashes and making a show of some species of torture.  But they are wretched impostors, who are glad enough at the end of a hard day to wash off their filth and count up the proceeds of their guile” (Moor 1864, 363).  William Butler, in his The Land of the Vedas (1872) states matter-of-factly that “no one who has seen and known them can doubt that the great majority of the Fakirs are impostors and hypocrites” (195), yet nonetheless—because of the credulity of the uncritical Indian masses, these yogis are “leading captive [India’s] poor, silly women” and “hold the general mind of India in such craven fear” (Butler 1895, 191). The critique of inauthenticity was most often leveled in relation to the reputed occult powers of the yogi.  For example, the anonymous author of an 1889 New York Times article on Indian yogis expresses marked contempt—a sort of moral outrage—at “natives who still pretend to supernatural powers through the rites of yoga,” sarcastically mocking “the filth and pretensions to supernatural powers of the yogi” throughout his piece.  Huxley’s Yoga: Hindu Delusions tells of Americans who went to India searching out the reputed wonders of the yogis, hoping “to see proofs of their magic powers,” but who instead found “painted impostors, who masquerade as Sadhus, to cheat the charitable, and secretly give loose to their beastly nature” (Huxley 1902, 28).  After making these comments, Huxley proceeds to consider the tricks of the Indian jugglers as genuine claims to yoga powers, thereby falsely equating yogic occult religiosity with an Indian performance tradition, depicting yogic occult practice as mere entertainment, charlatanism that can be easily disproven and shown to be but a trick (Huxley 1902, 28).  

Competing interpretations of yogis often hinged on an “all-consuming preoccupation with adjudicating the authenticity of [their] marvels” (Jones 89). Were they charlatans, impostors, frauds or did they possess extraordinary abilities?  This was the age of stage magic, spiritualism, and P.T. Barnum, and many in the West found the encounter with potential frauds to be an exciting opportunity to exercise their independent judgment.  As Neil Harris has discussed, “Concentration on whether a particular show, exhibit, or event was real or false, genuine or contrived, narrowed the task of judgment for the multitude of spectators.  It structured problems of experiencing the exotic and unfamiliar by reducing that experience to a simple evaluation” (N. Harris, 408).  With this context in mind, this paper analyzes discourse about and representations of Indian yogis and fakirs to reveal interconnections between rising conceptions of scientific objectivity and materialism, new social emphases on the social values of authenticity and sincerity, and rapid, major changes to visual culture (including new technologies, new mass-mediated images, and new understandings of vision itself).  The figure of the Indian yogi offers a fascinating analytical lens through which to understand these cultural and social changes and the way in which they spawned contesting visions of American, British and Indian modernities.  Indeed, attention to the yogi-fakir can expose the arbitrary construction of the conceptual scaffolding that orders much of modern life, for he was a figure used to weld those very categories into place even as he always threatened them and continues to haunt them to this day.