The Yogi as Hypnotist: Attention, Colonial Politics, and the Vulnerabilities of the Modern Mind

This paper examines the figure of the Indian yogi in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century within the intertwined histories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology. In Western scientific and popular media, Indian yogis and fakirs were repeatedly represented as “mesmerists” (c. 1830-1860s) and later “hypnotists” (c. 1880-1920s), masters of attention and suggestion at a time when science and technology were increasingly revealing the fragility and vulnerability of the mind and will. This paper shows how the extraordinary figure of the yogi was interpreted through the new categories of mesmerism, hypnosis, and psychology, and how the modern Western mind (and self) was understood and enacted through engagement with the yogi.  Through the yogi, Western audiences both explored and distanced themselves from the unsettling possibility that the mind is more permeable, the self more suggestible, and the will more limited than the dominant ideal of the rational, self-transparent liberal subject would admit.