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

This paper examines a variety of “authenticity discourses” about the figure of the Indian yogi that were circulating from the mid-19th to early-20th century, exploring how different representations of the yogi-fakir shed light on the contested, dialogical construction of Western and Indian modernities.  Were yogis representative of an authentic Indian cultural essence (and how so)?  What sorts of yogis were “real” yogis (and what sort were fakes)? Were yogis genuine possessors of occult powers or were they charlatans? These questions, and the competing authenticity claims that emerged in answers to them, were never as simple as they seemed on the surface, but were intimately tied to larger political and social agendas, ethical value judgments, and even metaphysical assertions about the nature of reality.  Debates about the authenticity of the yogi were part and parcel of constitutively “modern” local and global negotiations regarding “religion,” “science,” and “magic” in this period.