Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the

Early Twentieth Century

Mark Singleton

Put briefly: perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it
is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensi-
bility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of
nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Or rather:
hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, the
mode of living and of dwelling in the body; consciousness and evaluations in
the body, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure, are signs of these changes and
experiments. In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be over-
come (Nietzsche 1967: 358).

This paper is part of a project to map a diffuse, but clearly discernible, modern
preoccupation with engineering a new and better kind of human being.1 This impulse
often finds expression through what Joseph Alter has described as “the political
prose of physiology” (2004a: 19), a vast and ongoing modern genre concerned with
the manipulation of the body to often nationalistic ends. My main focus here is a
cluster of interlinked scientific, philosophical, and social ideologies which came into
being in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and flourished worldwide over the succeed-
ing hundred years: evolutionary theory in its various guises, Social Darwinism,
Eugenics, and the Nietzsche cult. These highly malleable cultural ideologies were
intertwined in popular thought and practice and called into the service of sharply
divergent social and political enterprises, from Fabianism to (notoriously) Fascism.
It is their transferability as ideological items, indeed, that interests me here and not
questions of whether such populist expressions represent departures from or perver-
sions of the original founding doctrines. Social Darwinism, evolutionism, and the
eugenic fervor took an unprecedented grip on the Western psyche in the early
twentieth century and quickly spread beyond the boundaries of Europe. As Carey
Watt has noted, “The discourse of the period was in fact rife with references to race,
eugenics and a type of international Darwinism which saw relentless competition
between communities, nations or races” (1997: 340)—and India was no exception to

International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, 2 (2007): 125–46

© 2007 Springer
DOI 10.1007/s11407-007-9043-7
126 / Mark Singleton

this trend. This paper is an exploration of several intersections of such discourses

within the early twentieth-century Indian Yoga renaissance. In adducing a range of
examples from several key architects of this eclectic endeavor, my main aim is to
illustrate the extent to which such discourses articulate pressing and pervasive
contemporary concerns which in turn alter the perceived quarry of traditional
spiritual practice. Certain varieties of neo-Yoga2 were conceived, I argue, as a
transgenerational fast track to genetic and spiritual perfection—a vision which
generally usurped perhaps more traditional otherworldly connotations of Yoga as a
technique of liberation from the cycle of birth and death. This occurred through the
“indigenization” and naturalization of a number of late nineteenth-century social
ideologies within the landscape of Indian neo-Yoga, including Social Darwinism and
Eugenics. This article attempts to situate modern Yoga within this larger history.
I begin by considering the main tenets and assumptions underpinning the
European efflorescence of eugenic evolutionism. Popular Social Darwinism, usually
combined with the Nietzsche cult, promoted the notion that human beings could
modify their own heredity through programs of selective breeding, hygiene, and
physical culture. Instead of the hereditary degeneracy that was perceived to afflict
modern nations and races, a new stock of Supermen would emerge as the products of
this eugenic religion. These fantasies of voluntary evolution (commonly of a
Lamarckian bent) struck a chord with certain sections of the Indian psyche, often via
the Åryan supremacy narratives3 of writers on India such as Arthur Avalon (John
Woodroffe). Social Darwinist discourses underpinned the rhetoric of the nascent
nationalist movement, and Indian Eugenics societies sprang up from the 1920s
onwards in response to the raging sentiment of national degeneration—physical,
moral, and spiritual. In the second part of the study, I consider the degree to which
these ideas passed into modern Yoga through organizations such as the Theosophical
Society. Evolutionism infiltrated Yoga writing to the extent that it became
naturalized as its transhistorical rationale. That is to say, through figures like Annie
Besant and Aurobindo Ghose, the Nietzschean faith was transplanted into “Eastern”
philosophy and made to seem like its truest expression. A transmogrified Så>khya
provided the rationale for various experiments in Yoga and, in combination with the
eugenically inclined physical culture movement, gave to Yoga many of the popular
postural forms we know today. I consider briefly one character in whom these trends
culminate most clearly: the self-proclaimed innovator of the “Yoga renaissance,” ÇrC
Yogendra (1897–1989).

Social Darwinism, Nietzsche, Eugenics

During the early twentieth century, notions of Social Darwinism held considerable
sway over the popular European psyche, and apparently benign “eugenicist” ideas
met with a generalized approbation. Such ideologies have been perhaps indelibly
tainted by a hundred years of racial hatred, genocide, and holocaust in their name.4
But as Gregory Claeys has demonstrated, by about 1900 Social Darwinist ideas of
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 127

struggle, fitness, and survival had become “virtually omnipresent and definitive of
one of the most important modern trends in European and American thought” (2000:
226). The term “Social Darwinism” is in reality a misnomer, referring less to Charles
Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection than to the work of the English philosopher
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” and to a
wide variety of subsequent superimpositions onto Darwinian theory, including those
of the aging Darwin himself (Claeys 2000: 228). In practice, Social Darwinism was
a patchwork of pseudoscientific assertions regarding the possibility of individual and
racial improvement and promulgated a distinctly proactive kind of evolution. It is in
this voluntaristic aspect that it differs most markedly from the Origin of Species’
vision of gradual and passive development. Lamarckism, with its emphasis on the
heritability of acquired characteristics, was one of the most important ingredients in
the stew of popular Social Darwinism and made popular the belief that the individual
could manipulate his or her own evolutionary processes. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
(1744–1829) held that particular changes wrought in the human constitution during
one’s lifetime (such as a blacksmith’s acquisition of muscular arms through constant
wielding of a hammer) are passed on in the same form to one’s children (who will
also, ergo, have muscular arms). Although largely discredited after the discoveries of
Darwin, Lamarck’s theory continued to hold sway well into the twentieth century,
influencing many expressions of the international physical culture movement of
which, as we shall see, modern Yoga was so clearly a part.
Lamarck was an important source of inspiration for another icon of the Social
Darwinist movement, the philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900). As Gilles Deleuze points out, Nietzsche admired Lamarck because he,
unlike Darwin, “foretold the existence of a truly active plastic force, primary in
relation to adaptations: a force of metamorphosis” (1983: 42; emphasis in original).
This conviction of the individual’s role in the evolutionary process and the
tractability of human kind, as well as his acute sense of European degeneracy, led
Nietzsche to formulate his enigmatic doctrine of the Superman, which was to have a
disastrously hypnotic effect on succeeding generations. As detailed in his profoundly
poetic Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche 1891), man could be overcome and a new
race brought into being through a relentless and remorseless assertion of the
individual will. This new race would rule over inferior humanity on the principle of
power. Nietzsche’s teachings were devoured by a wide audience throughout Europe,
and not least by the international Eugenics movement,5 which generally shared his
belief in the willful perfectibility of (select) humankind. As Dan Stone points out,
early writers on Nietzsche “took for granted the fact that Nietzsche and eugenics
were synonymous” (2002: 92), and his ideas were revered by prominent eugenicist
writers such as Maximillian Mügge who raised them to the status of a cult. Mügge
asserted that Nietzsche had “founded a Eugenic Religion” (1907: 2) based on the
superman and that if Francis Galton had instigated a science of Eugenics, it was the
Teutonic philosopher himself who had realized “the Religion of Eugenics” (10;
emphasis added).6 The cult of Nietzsche flourished, and his teachings were seized
128 / Mark Singleton

upon both by socially progressive proponents of “positive” Eugenics like George

Bernard Shaw7 and the more right-leaning, “negative” eugenicists like Mügge and J.
M. Kennedy (on whom more shortly).8 The kind of millenarian conviction under-
lying Nietzschean Eugenics is perhaps best summed up by the eminent evolutionary
biologist Julian Huxley (1887–1975), who as late as 1941 could assert with confi-
dence that “Once the full implications of evolutionary biology are grasped, eugenics
will inevitably become part of religion of the future, or whatever complex of
sentiments may in future take the place of organized religion” (1941: 22). As we
shall see, in the context of modern Yoga, Eugenics did indeed enter the arena of
religion, as a powerful voice in the call to define and assert the essence of Hinduism.

Indian Eugenics

As Sarah Hodges has argued, Eugenics was taken up with such “remarkable vigour”
by the educated Indian middle classes that during the early twentieth century, “Most
social and political debates in India were informed and energized by eugenic
thinking” (2006: 115). While this may overstate the case, it is certain that the degen-
eration topos which gave European Social Darwinism its particular élan was all the
more pronounced in India, where the longstanding colonial stereotype of Indian
effeteness and debility festered in the nascent national consciousness.9 Eugenics
seemed to offer “an elegantly simple and totalising system for the improvement of
society” and “captivated the imaginations of well-read, idealistic and scientifically-
inclined Indians who were inspired to start societies of their own on an international
model” (Hodges 2006: 118–19). The Indian societies, moreover, regularly corre-
sponded with their British and American counterparts, as well as receiving and
occasionally sending10 donations. The Indian movement, however, developed a
distinctive character of its own and, as Hodges points out, “indigenised eugenics for
India by using the ancient Hindu literary tradition to claim that India’s cultural
heritage was inherently eugenic” (2006: 124). Thus authors like M. V. Krishna Rao
could invoke “our ancient laws of Eugenics” (1928: 54) and K. C. Bose could assert
that “The Science of Eugenics is a part and parcel of the Sacred Literature of the
Land” (1915: 151).11 As we shall see, a parallel process of “indigenisation” was
certainly at work within modern Yoga. Such readings of tradition, of course, are part
of the widespread “scientific exegesis” of the ancient texts that occurred around this
time, especially from SvåmI Dayånanda SarasvatI onwards.
Although Hodges insists that Indian eugenicists generally took little interest in the
“race question” (2006: 149), Susan Bayly has convincingly demonstrated over the
course of several works (1995, 1998, 1999) that “as of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, ‘Aryan’ caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and
British race theorists to be ‘awakening’ in evolutionary terms” (1999: 129). Figures
like Shiv Kishan Kaul, “a leading proponent of so-called Aryan Hindu regeneration”
(Bayly 1999: 153), vociferously proclaimed the greatness of Hindus and Hinduism
and offered a distinctly Social Darwinian worldview (see Kaul 1937),12 while others
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 129

such as Justice C. Sankaran Nair simultaneously invoked “ ‘modern’ Eugenics…on

the one hand, and the key principles of Brahmanical varna theory on the other”
(Bayly 1999: 159) to promote the myth of Hindu ascendency. Modern evolutionist
teachings offered a compelling interpretative framework to account for the degenera-
tion of the Hindu race as well as a blueprint for its renewal.

Eugenic Orientalism

Accounts of the former glory of the ancient Åryan race proliferated among
Orientalist scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the basis of evidence
that the Sanskritic languages of India were of the same “Indo-European root stock”
as those of Europe (Bayly 1999: 114; see particularly Havell 1918; Ihering 1897; see
also Leopold 1974). It is not difficult to see why the resultant myth of an Indo-
European or Åryan people would be attractive to the educated elites within India.13
Social Darwinism and Eugenics offered a way to reverse the “rule” of degeneration
and regain the nobility of the past, and cultural nationalists like Nair and Kaul rode
the tide of this narrative. While some Orientalists had tended to present ancient India
as a battleground of the noble conqueror and the degenerate native,14 it is the
Nietzschean-eugenicist narratives of scholars like Kennedy that provide the clearest
examples of the intersection of Indology, Eugenics, and Nietzscheanism at the fin-
de-siècle. As well as a scholar of India, Kennedy was a “vociferous member of the
Nietzsche movement” (Stone 2002: 69) and a staunch right-wing eugenicist. His
writings on India predictably project the towering racial pride of the colonizing
British onto the ancient past, envisioning an epic Nietzschean battle between the
noble warriors on the one hand and the priests and aborigines on the other (Kennedy
1910). The ascendency of the Åryan superman inevitably entailed “the elimination
of those who were unfitted to stand the ruthless competition—the weak, the
degenerate, the crippled, the physically weak and mentally defective” (Kennedy
1910: 5). Without denying the distinct possibility, as Sheldon Pollock (1993) has
suggested, that a current of “deep Orientalism” ran through precolonial Indian
history itself, it seems evident here that Kennedy’s dark narrative is part of a
specifically European, Nietzschean fantasy regarding India’s past.
John Woodroffe, the great interpreter of Yoga and Tantra, sought to defend Indian
culture in the interests of the Indian people and to hold out the possibility of a
“collective, cultural freedom” (Taylor 2001: 35) based on an evolutionary model. In
his book The Seed of Race, Woodroffe (1919: 6) adumbrated a theory of “cultural
Darwinism” (Taylor 2001: 89) in which the “racial soul” is brought to its highest
expression through eugenic processes. Although, as Taylor (2001: 85) argues, this
was not primarily conceived in terms of biological inheritance, its proximity to
biological varieties of racial Eugenics is evident from his concern for “purity of
stock” (Woodroffe 1919: 9) as well as appeals to “the Western theory of Heredity”
(11) and an apparently eugenicist defense of the caste system (16). In another work,
moreover, failure of a race to “maintain its own” is conceived explicitly as “the
130 / Mark Singleton

biological sin” (Woodroffe 1918: 83). Woodroffe, writing under his alias Arthur
Avalon, was responsible for some of the first (and most enduringly popular)
translations of primary Sanskrit texts of Yoga and Tantra into English and is a key
figure in the modernization of Yoga in India. That he was fascinated by theories of
Social (or “cultural”) Darwinism is not unusual for a man of his time and
class—what is more pertinent for our purposes is the extent to which his writing
exemplifies the intersection of Yoga and the evolutionist theory that is so ubiquitous
and naturalized within modern Yoga discourse even today. Woodroffe’s work is
both a contribution to and an expression of this merger. In the following section, we
will examine in more detail how this conflation of the varieties of evolutionary
theory and Yoga came about.

Evolution, Såkhya, and Theosophy

The scholar of Western esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that

Evolutionism understood as historical progress is found neither in traditional

esotericism, nor in the Oriental religions which were assimilated by Romanti-
cism and occultism; but before the [nineteenth] century was over, this occidental
innovation had been assimilated so profoundly that it could seem as though it
had never been absent (1998: 463).

Such, I would argue, is indubitably the case for modern Yoga. Popular evolutionism
is at the heart of the twentieth-century Yoga renaissance, where it functions as
theoretical telos and practical rationale, a naturalized, retrojected feature of the
ancient yogic landscape. As we have seen in the foregoing sections, a range of
associated ideologies, like Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and Nietzscheanism
attached themselves to evolutionist theory and grew into Truth for large segments of
the European, American, and Indian population. Modern Yoga, beginning with
SvåmC Vivekånanda and extending to the present, makes manifest the ideological
and philosophical malleability of such evolutionary discourses. Like evolutionism
itself, modern Yoga came into being as one response to a crisis of national and
spiritual identity. It was largely the theories of (biological) evolution which,

provided educated Indians with a rationale for their “moral superiority” since
these theories provided history with a telos, and endowed an educated minority
with the hope of reforming society at large: the underlying dream of reshaping
society was manifest in Vivekananda’s transformist vocabulary of spiritual and
moral evolution (Raina and Habib 1996: 17).

Vivekånanda’s evolutionist aspirations seeped inexorably into his formulations of

practical Yoga and from there into virtually all the refashionings of Yoga that
appeared in the modern period, irrespective of their cultural or national provenance.
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 131

In its assimilation into modern Yoga, popular evolutionism enacted a transformation

of certain philosophical bases of the Indian tradition and subtly reoriented its cosmic
and soteriological trajectory—a process facilitated by the entry of the keyword
“evolution” into the Indian discourse in English twenty years prior to Vivekånanda’s
formulations (Killingley 1995: 182) and the enthusiastic endorsement of the concept
by forerunners of fully fledged modern Yoga like K. C. Sen (Killingley 1995; De
Michelis 2004). Perhaps the most striking and easily available example of this
transformation is the equation of Så@khya with an adapted Darwinian evolution,
which becomes commonplace in neo-Yoga writing from Vivekånanda onwards. This
conflation gained popular appeal in the Indian scientific press from at least 1897,15
when Satish Mukherjee uses Så@khya theory to prove the evolutionary precedents in
Indian philosophy (Raina and Habib 1996: 21).
Vivekånanda himself enthusiastically propounds the same notion. During a trip to
Alipur Zoo in 1898, for instance, he comments that the Indian theory of evolution is
“nicely discussed in the Sankhya Philosophy” and that Patañjali “holds that the
transformation of one species into another is effected by the ‘in-filling of nature’ ”
(Vivekananda 1992, 8: 152).16 Such statements are pervasive in his writings and are
based on a creative re-reading of prak®ti as the principle of inexorable progress of
mankind and the individual. Not only is Patañjali “the father of evolution, spiritual
and physical” (Vivekananda 1992, 7: 113), but Yoga practice is the linear pursuit of
evolutionary perfection across generations. So long as evolutionists will admit that
evolution is preceded by “involution”17 then “instead of destroying religion, they
will be great supporters of it” (Vivekananda 1992, 2: 207). Vivekånanda (1992, 5:
249) moreover identifies the increased physiological control brought about through
the practice of Yoga with this evolutionary progress (see also 1992, 8: 361), a notion
that would thenceforth become common in the practical popular Yoga systems
which burgeoned in his wake (of which more below). As Dermot Killingley points
out, however, such a notion of inevitable upward personal or racial mobility “is
hardly present in the Yogas¨tras or their commentaries” (1990: 160), where the
movement can of course be up or down.
The Theosophical Yoga writer Råma Prasåda is therefore already part of an
established trend when he states in 1907 that “One great merit of the Sankhya theory
of evolution is that it gives the conceptions of special creation and Darwinian
evolution their proper places in the scheme of the universe” (205). Prasåda, like
Vivekånanda, superimposes the strict linearity of Darwinian evolution upon the
cyclical nature of Så@khya. Hanegraaff argues that cyclical cosmologies (such as
Så@khya) can never really be referred to as “evolution” at all, since their cycles
simply mean “regression back to exactly the same state from which all has sprung”
(1998: 159). Therefore, he continues, “the process would be devoid of meaning and
the term ‘evolution’ would seem to be inappropriate” (Hanegraaff 1998: 159).18
Assertions like those of Prasåda and those who echo him, then, can be regarded as
conflations of incompatible hermeneutic schemes. In a trope endlessly rehearsed by
Yoga writers (see in particular Rajan Iyengar 1908), pralaya (periodic cosmic
132 / Mark Singleton

dissolution) is refashioned into the modern notion of progress, often in the service of
a project of cultural nationalism. Aghenananda Bharati forthrightly asserts that
“there is no potential for progress in the Indian core-tradition” and that Yoga is first
and foremost “the supererogatory way of cracking the chain of rebirth” (1976: 156).
Modern evolutionary Yoga, then, would certainly seem to represent a marked
departure from that tradition.19
Popular notions of evolutionary biology and Social Darwinism are pervasive in
the writings of modern Yoga authors. Nowhere are they more apparent than in the
Theosophical writings of Annie Besant (1847–1933), which represent one of the
most significant early attempts to package Yoga for the modern individual. Theoso-
phy, indeed, might reasonably be portrayed as the main contender for Vivekånanda’s
title (bestowed by De Michelis 2004) of original progenitor of a properly modern
Yoga.20 Prior to her adherence to Theosophy, Besant was a tireless social reformer
and made her first declaration of Socialist faith at an 1885 meeting of the Dialectical
Society, at which George Bernard Shaw, the principal popularizer of the Nietzschean
“superman,” was the main speaker (Besant 1970: vi). Besant was a partisan of
benevolent Eugenics and wrote her book Law of Population (1877) to spread her
ideas on birth control. It is not surprising, therefore, that in her apostatical passage to
Theosophy, she should import many of the progressive, Social Darwinist notions
that she had espoused in her previous life (see Nethercot 1961).
Yoga, for Besant, was a way to speed up evolution, a voluntaristic override
function of nature’s stately processes, much as Nietzsche’s “self-overcoming” is also
a conscious rebuttal of Darwin’s passive evolutionary schema. Using the metaphor
of the gardener, Besant asserts that Yoga is a way of weeding out the undesirable
elements of character, “eliminating those that are against his aim” in order that “the
evolution of the people shall be quickened” (1927: 37). It is the catalyst for the
evolution of the Mother Race, a higher form of civilization, and the equivalent of
“what used to be called the Aryan Race” (Besant 1927: 44). With utmost earnest-
ness, Besant (for example, 1959) proclaims the coming of the “super-man” through
Yoga practice, adapting to an Indian context the cherished Nietzschean concept of
her Fabian colleague Shaw. That Besant’s Yoga incorporates significant aspects of
benevolent eugenics and Nietzscheanism is, if nothing else, evidence of the transfer-
ability of these ideological items and the facility with which they are naturalized
within modern Yoga. The Theosophist and Helena P. Blavatsky disciple Karl
Haushofer’s imputed schooling of Adolf Hitler in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine
while they were both in Landsberg prison in 1924 (Carr 1978: 93), as well as
Nazism’s continued fascination with Theosophy, are certain of the more sinister
aspects of this multilateral transferability that will not directly concern us now.21

Aurobindo: “Remorseless Eugenics” and the Superman

Theosophical conceptions of Social Darwinism as expressed by Besant are without

doubt a ramification of modern Western esotericism’s close association with various
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 133

forms of evolutionism (see Hanegraaff 1998 on “esoteric” evolutionism). Through

her and her Society, the ideological clusters that include Nietzscheanism and social
programs extrapolated from biological evolutionism22 (in particular Eugenics)
pervaded assumptions about the meaning and purpose of Yoga. Another enormously
significant figure in the early development of a clearly modern Yoga is Aurobindo
Ghose who, like Besant, lived several distinct “lives,” including incarnations as a
Cambridge undergraduate and English gentleman, outlaw terrorist, and yog.
Aurobindo was fascinated by avant-garde ideologies like popular Nietzscheanism
and saw in the Social Darwinism associated with it a means to liberate the Indian
people from their impaired and impoverished condition under British rule. In
sketching out his theories of Yoga, Aurobindo was alert and receptive to the
discourses of the more extreme eugenicists. As he writes in 1915,

the Inconscient operates by the law of heredity and, left to itself, works fault-
lessly to ensure the survival of good and healthy types. Man misuses heredity in
the false conditions of his social life to transmit and perpetuate degeneracy. We
must study the law of heredity, develop a science of Eugenics and use it wisely
and remorselessly, —with the remorseless wisdom of Nature, —so as to ensure
by intelligence the result that the Inconscient assures by instinctive adaptation
(Aurobindo 1973, 16: 260).

Although such bald references are relatively rare in Aurobindo’s writings, the
eugenicist thrust remains distinct all the way through his lifetime—and is more often
than not explained in the name of Yoga. As with Besant, Yoga is consistently
presented by Aurobindo in his mystical mode as a method of tapping and accelerat-
ing the slow progress of evolution, which is itself perceived as a fundamentally
benign, if apparently cruel, eugenic mechanism.
For R. C. Zaehner, this enthusiastic espousal of evolution in Aurobindo represents
“something totally new in mystical religion” (1971: 3), that we might here charac-
terize as “Spiritual Darwinism”23 (in so far as, as we shall see, it deals with the inner,
spiritual evolution of the individual). In the mode of socialist reformer, however,
Aurobindo’s spiritual evolutionism is expressed as pragmatic social action. Consider,
for example, his assertion of “the need for Administrative Unity” within the coming
“World State,” which includes the expedient of eugenic solutions for criminal
behavior. Society, he asserts, needs “to deal with crime at its root and its inception”:

It may attempt this, first, by a more enlightened method of education and moral
and temperamental training which would render the growth of criminal propen-
sities more difficult; secondly, by scientific or eugenic methods of observation,
treatment, isolation, perhaps sterilisation of corrupt human material; thirdly, by
a humane and enlightened gaol system and penological method which would
have for its aim not the punishment but the reform of the incipient and the
formed criminal (Aurobindo 1973, 15: 477).
134 / Mark Singleton

Even in the more radical sections of the Indian Eugenics establishment, calls for
sterilization are quite rare (Hodges 2006: 161).24 That such expedients are not cast
out from this utopian administration is significant. If nothing else, it reveals the
extent to which notions that today suggest 1930s fascism could, at that time, evoke a
potential passage to more elevated cultural and spiritual climes, even among
revolutionary intellectuals like Aurobindo.
While there is not space to rehearse the substance of Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga
system, it is worth making clear my position that the eugenic vision which periodi-
cally arises in explicit form in Aurobindo’s political writing leaves a discernible
watermark on the pages of his Yoga prose. His aspiration for “total perfection
including the perfection of the body” (Aurobindo 1973, 16: 9) within a cosmic
scheme of progressive evolutionism is perhaps more nuanced than the passages
quoted above but is still redolent of the religious rhetoric of popular Nietzscheanism.
Similarly, Aurobindo’s Superman may not share the racial specificity nor the
brutality of the Nietzschean Overman, but he certainly shares the same will to
perfection and self-overcoming. In spite of Ranajit Sarkar’s (2002) ultimately
unsuccessful attempt to distinguish his guru’s teaching from that of Nietzsche, it
seems clear that both stem from the soil of European Social Darwinism. Biological
Eugenics (such as that mooted in his youth) are replaced in later life with a spiritual
Eugenics, in which the need for the unseemly and degrading act of sexual union will
be avoided by the superman’s “voluntary creation of bodies for souls that seek to
enter the earth-life to help in the creation and extension of the divine life on earth”
(Aurobindo 1973, 16: 31).25 Although these bodies are created through spiritual
technology, Aurobindo (1973, 16: 33) is still clearly enthralled by the parallel and
ongoing efforts of “physical science” to pass beyond nature “in this matter of
propagation” and, in a rhetorical move familiar from Indian Eugenic prose, claims
that a blueprint for this procedure can be found in the Tantras.26 As we have seen,
Aurobindo’s use of Yoga as a catalyst for evolution, and his emphasis on a this-
worldly culmination of Yoga technology, is not a vision that is exclusive to him. It
has stamped, in fact, many expressions of modern Yoga, from Vivekånanda to Gopi
Krishna (see his 1972).27 But as Zaehner (1971: 10) points out, there is no room for
evolution in the “classical” Indian tradition, and contemporary systems which follow
Aurobindo’s vision of evolutionary progress are innovations which constitute “a
clear break with the traditional Sånkhya-Yoga” and can be more fruitfully traced to
the work of Darwin and Bergson as well, of course, as Nietzsche’s theory of embod-
ied spirituality to be developed through a thousand experiments (see Epigraph).

Yoga, Physical Culture, Eugenics

I will now turn briefly, and finally, to the physical culture movement’s dalliance
with Social Darwinism and Eugenics and the deep influence that this had on the
development of modern Yoga. There is little doubt that the modern international
physical culture movement (which began in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 135

and reached its peak, arguably, in the 1930s) exercised a profound effect on the
shape of Yoga today. Alter (2004b: 28), in somewhat iconoclastic fashion, has
argued that Eugene Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, had a greater
influence on the form and practice of modern Yoga than either Aurobindo or even
Vivekånanda. I would largely agree with Alter’s claim but add that it was not only
the form and practice of early gymnastic/bodybuilding regimes that were assimilated
into modern Yoga but also the ideological constellations of Social Darwinism and
Eugenics to which these regimes almost invariably cleaved. As one Indian eugenicist
put it, “In the West, the practical outcome of the thought spent on the subject [of
Eugenics] seems to have taken the shape mostly of physical culture” (Das 1930: 1):
when modern Yoga embraced the technologies of modern physical culture, it was
with a similar eugenic underpinning.28
As Michael Budd (1997: 118) has argued, physical culture was a complex inter-
national enterprise that brought together many disparate ideologies, including a
significant dose of Social Darwinism. The nationalistic gymnastics of Europe, such
as J. P. Müller’s (1905) tremendously popular “System,”29 were built on narratives
such as the degeneration of the “stock” and the Lamarckian mythos of inherited
acquired characteristics.30 Indeed, Müller’s “system” has a deeply Lamarckian/
eugenicist bent, and it is not surprising that “Müllerites” were regulars at British
Eugenics meetings from at least 1913 (Kevles 1995: 58). To take but one example,
Müller encourages citizens to practice physical culture in order that they “may have
children who are improved editions of their parents,” thereby rendering the “noblest
service to the State, namely, that of contributing to raising the level of the race as a
whole” (1905: 44). Such notions, known as the “law of exercise,” were standard fare
in the physical culture prose of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries31—and were often the principal motivation to take up physical exercise in
the first place. Jan Todd points out indeed that Lamarckianism “dramatically
influenced the push for women’s physical training” (1998: 24).
In India, as John Rosselli (1980) has convincingly shown, the physical culture
movement (which from the 1920s onwards included Yoga) was closely associated
with the cultural nationalist drive for racial improvement and bears many of the
same ideological traits as the European systems, including the tactical use of degen-
eracy rhetoric. The interface with popular ideologies such as Social Darwinism
makes it unsurprising that Indian physical culturism also assimilated a eugenic bent.
For instance, the prominent eugenicist Krishna Rao published his principal eugenic
tract with the Physical Culture Publishing Company of Coimbatore: the last section
consists of “A Special Course of DUMB-BELL Exercises” (1928: 56).32 Modern
physical culture was Larmarckianism in action, and in colonial India the two were
rarely long apart. A particularly clear example of this confluence comes from the
renowned physical culturist and Ha†ha Yoga syncretist K. V. Iyer who, writing in the
exercise periodical Vyayam: Body Builder in 1927 laments, “Will our women bring
forth only healthful useful children to save our motherland from this degeneration,
from this slavery?” (237). “Physically deficient mothers and devitalized fathers,” he
136 / Mark Singleton

goes on, are producing “helpless derelicts and weaklings” (Iyer 1927: 237), and he
urges his readers to take up physical culture to forestall this. Such sentiments are
common in postural Yoga syntheses during these years, for example in SvåmD
Çivånanda’s aspirations for the regeneration of “the race” through the practice of
åsana (1934: 23) and the eugenic function ascribed to the exercises of s¨ryanamas-
kåra by the systems founder, the Råjah of Aundh (see Mujumdar 1950: vi).
As we shall see with reference to ÇrD Yogendra, self-professed father of the “Yoga
renaissance,” such eugenicist inclinations can also be discerned within Yoga in the
early twentieth century, largely as a result of postural Yoga’s close association with
the Indian physical culture movement of which Iyer was in many ways the figure-
head.

Yogendra: Neo-Ha†ha Yoga as Eugenics

SvåmD Yogendra, like his great rival and guru-bhå SvåmD Kuvalayånanda, set out to
make Yoga accessible to a broad range of people through the incorporation of a
variety of practices from the physical culture repertoire and modified Yoga exer-
cises. Although no longer well known, he was one of the main actors during the
early decades of the twentieth century, alongside Kuvalayånanda and Tirumalai
Krishnamacharya, in the creation of the postural neo-Yoga forms that predominate
in the West today. His work, as a synthetic product of Western exercise regimes
and modernized Yoga, is similarly imbued with the evolutionism that we have seen
to be at the heart of many expressions of the neo-Yoga ethos. As for Besant and
Aurobindo, the “technology of Yoga” functions for Yogendra as a fillip towards
higher states of “physical, mental, moral and psychic” development which “the slow
process of evolution” tarries in attaining (1978: 28).33
Like Råma Prasåda, Yogendra shares the widespread belief that “the very concept
of evolution originated and developed with (Så@khya) Yoga” (1978: 27). While his
committed populism would make it unlikely for him to partake of the racial
exclusivism of some Indian eugenicists, Yogendra is nonetheless fascinated by the
prospect of human genetic modification through Yoga. As a materialist who from a
very early age distrusted the magical elements of traditional Yoga, his version of
Yoga Eugenics remains rooted in the physical and biological. For Yogendra, as for
Nietzsche, Darwin’s stately vision of progress through the ages is not sufficient.
Natural evolution, lamentably, does not alter the “germ plasm” determining a man’s
hereditary disposition, but through the project “contemplated by yoga” this sub-
stance can be modified to produce a “permanent germinal change” (1978: 29). Such
a transformation affects not only the Yoga practitioner himself, “but by inheritance
also becomes transmitted as the germinal instinct (propensity) of the progeny”
(Yogendra 1978: 29). It is this transformative technology, he asserts, that is “the crux
of the entire metaphysical perspective in ancient India” (Yogendra 1978: 29).
Yogendra here revives the Lamarckian dream of acquired, transmittable charac-
teristics and imbues it with the mystical landscape of ancient India. This yogic neo-
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 137

Lamarckism would seem to be a rejoinder to the influential “germ plasm” theory of

the embryologist August Weismann (1834–1914), which had effectively discredited
Lamarck’s apparently simplistic cause-effect model of heredity. Weismann had
asserted that “the force of heredity resided in a substance impermeable to environ-
mental influence” (Kevles 1995: 19) and had proved his convictions through
apparently incontrovertible experiment. As a result, the inviolability of the “germ
plasm” became largely accepted as fact in the scientific community (see Maranto
1996: 99).34 The term had also passed into the vocabulary of the Eugenics movement
and was in common use among the Indian eugenicists of the day.35 Here Yogendra
reasons that it is the practices of Ha†ha Yoga alone which can overcome this
impermeability and lead to permanent and hereditary change in the individual and
offspring. The example of “recent experiments on certain receptive worms and
their succeeding generations” (Yogendra 1978: 28), which apparently produced
hereditary alterations comparable to the ones that he envisages through Yoga, is
further grist to his mill. Yogendra, like Aurobindo, transmutes his fascination with
the “science” of Eugenics into one of the eternal truths of Yoga, and his work
represents a striking instance of Ha†ha practice married with modern biology. Also
very notable, and characteristic of modern Yoga as a whole, is his repeated
conviction that Yoga does not concern itself solely with the well being or liberation
of the individual, but with “the germinal character within the whole society of
mankind” (Yogendra 1978: 30). This is a perspective that is far more in keeping with
the modern eugenic enterprise than with premodern expressions of Yoga. The
empowerment afforded by this “germinal change” is furthermore identified with the
human domination of “nature” (that is, prak®ti), which is in turn startlingly identified
as the successful attainment of the four goals of Hindu life (puru‚årtha). Thus,
Yogendra aligns his Yoga project (and Hinduism itself) with the aspirations of
modern science to control the natural world. And the means towards this end is self-
directed eugenic mutation.
Yogendra’s version of Yoga as a system of curative gymnastics and fitness
training makes his eugenic fantasy of society-wide hereditary mutation through
exercise far more in keeping with Lamarckian aspirations of the kind espoused by J.
P. Müller (whom Yogendra cites as an influence) than the alchemical Yoga tradi-
tions studied by David White (1996). One final example, taken from Yogendra’s
1928 fusion of Western physical culture and Yoga, Yoga Asanas Simplified,36 will
have to suffice to indicate this orientation. Yoga insists, he writes, “that it is impera-
tive in the interest of human evolution [sic]” that the seed be made strong and that
“this link [that is, the reader] in the endless chain which connects the generations
past with the generations yet to come shall be made as healthy and strong as the
environments, heredity and auto-inherited potentials (saskåravåsana) will permit”
(Yogendra 1989: 42). In Yogendra’s hands, the gymnastic practices of Yoga become
a transgenerational insurance policy, and the yogic enterprise an expanded and
revised version of the Lamarckian Eugenics promoted by the international physical
culture movement. Yogendra was by no means alone in his fascination with
138 / Mark Singleton

Eugenics and human engineering. Many others contributed to the wider percolation
of social Darwinist ideas into popular modern Yoga.37

Conclusion

My argument through this paper has been that Yoga in the early twentieth century
assimilated unmistakably modern, “extraneous” elements and naturalized them as
ancient Indian wisdom. It might be objected that Yoga has always concerned itself
with self-modification and all manner of physical and spiritual engineering—the
“eugenicist” or “Social Darwinist” themes gleaned from modern Yoga simply
reprising concerns perennially felt within this sphere of Indian cultural life.38 There
are several good reasons not to accept this viewpoint. While, as Gina Maranto points
out with regard to Eugenics, we have “thousands of years of documentable efforts
to control the quality of offspring in the hopes of improving upon the species’
standard model” (1996: 18)39 it seems clear that while modern Eugenics may
represent perennial, and perhaps universal, aspirations for better children, such
ancient hopes are expressed in terms of protoscientific theories at best and are
usually manifested in mere magical manipulations. The “ancient science” case is, of
course, routinely made by Indian eugenicists of the period. To take one example, the
role of caste in ancient India is commonly adduced by them as a mechanism of
selective, racial reproduction. It seems clear, however, that caste structures occurred
less within a project of evolution and generational betterment (like modern
Eugenics) than within a framework of the maintenance and stasis of already present
racial characteristics. Furthermore, Sanskritic culture is far more familiar with the
idea of decline than that of progress: notions of teleology, evolution, eugenics, and
the linear betterment of humankind are markers of a modern enterprise. Yoga is no
exception, and popular modern theory and practice after Vivekånanda derives a
significant share of its legitimacy from precisely such a recasting of modern science
as ancient truth.

Notes

1. I would like to thank the three anonymous referees who reviewed this paper.
Their advice was most helpful.
2. That is, those modern Yogas which are a product and expression of the revival
of Hinduism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (see Bharati 1976; De
Michelis 2004).
3. By this I intend specifically nineteenth-century notions of an “Åryan race”
which in ancient times migrated West from India. The same race was often consid-
ered to be extant, albeit degenerate, within modern India itself.
4. Stone writes: “ ‘Eugenics’ is still so associated with ‘Nazism’ in our minds that
we are blind to the reality that the reformist ideas which grew out of it had a wide
geographic but highly differentiated impact” (2002: 6).
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 139

5. The term “Eugenics” was coined by Francis Galton (1822–1911) who argued
that desirable individual characteristics could be increased through selective human
breeding. After the publication of his seminal Hereditary Genius (Galton 1869), his
ideas gained a widespread credence among scholars (see Stone 2002). See also Pick
(1989) on the importance of “hereditarian theory” and the theme of degeneracy in
European literature.
6. In fact, as Kevles points out, Galton himself “had expected eugenics to provide
a secular substitute for traditional religion” (1995: 68).
7. According to the popular Yoga author Stocker, thanks to George Bernard
Shaw’s play Man and Superman of 1903, ten years later the term “the superman”
was “so exceedingly familiar…as to be almost a household word” (1913: 206).
8. Mügge and Kennedy collaborated, along with eugenicists Oscar Levy and
Mario Ludovici, on the first English translation of the complete works of Nietzsche
in 1909.
9. On the topic of Indian (and in particular Bengali) effeteness, see also Rosselli
(1980); Sinha (1995).
10. For example, Hodges records that the “Maharaja of Mysore gave the London
Eugenics Education Society what its president referred to as a ‘generous donation’ in
May 1920” (2006: 120). It is not, I would strongly argue, mere coincidence that the
patronage of this same Mahåråjå created the conditions for the development of
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s “Mysore” Yoga system, which has had determining
influence on the genesis of an international modern postural Yoga. As I will suggest
later, postural Yoga in fact came into being as part of a wider “eugenicist” project at
the heart of the international physical culture movement.
11. See Hodges (2006: 146–48) for other examples of this rhetorical trend in
eugenic authors.
12. See also Bayly (1998: 95) on Kaul.
13. On the formation of the myth of the Åryan people, see Trautmann (1997). See
also Jones (1998) for a useful survey of Indian nationalist ideas of Indian or Hindu
degeneracy.
14. Exemplary is Hunter’s Annals of Rural Bengal (1897) which paints an Åryan
“evolutionary epic” on the canvas of Bengal (see Bayly 1995: 198). See also
Hopkins (1970: Chapter 18) on the “aboriginal black Dravidians” who were
overtaken by the “Aryan white wave.”
15. Perhaps encouraged by Vivekånanda’s seminal modernization of the Yoga
tradition, Raja Yoga of 1896?
16. This is an allusion to Patañjali’s Yogas¨tra 4.2: “jåtyantarapari~åmaª prak®-
tyåp¨råt.” See Killingley (1990).
17. That is, that the entire tree is present in potential, “involuted” form in the seed
and that the next seed is present in potentia in the growing tree.
18. However, we should also perhaps take into account Gould’s (1989: 43) indict-
ment of the equation of evolution (social or biological) with progress as “the great
conflation” and Killingley’s (1990: 152) observation that some Darwinians such as
140 / Mark Singleton

Charles Lyell and T. H. Huxley had proposed theories of evolutionary cycles.

19. Zaehner points out that the same is true for Vedånta, in which the “static and
unfractionable” leaves “no room for evolution” (1971: 10). However, I cannot
wholly agree with Bharati’s view that the various manifestations of Yoga through
the ages have always been primarily about liberation from the trammels of
(sa såric) existence. As White (1996) has demonstrated, “ ‘popular’ soteriologies”
such as Siddha alchemy often have little in common with the kind of authorized
soteriology sanctioned by Bharati. I would argue, however, that the entry into Yoga
of evolutionism and its off-shoots is certainly a modern phenomenon that has in turn
altered the orientation of Yoga in contemporary practice.
20. Blavatsky indeed proclaimed as early as 1881, and not without some reason,
that “neither modern Europe nor America had so much as heard” of Yoga “until the
Theosophists began to speak and write” (1982: 104). One might argue, of course,
that Blavatsky is tactically ignoring the role of the American Transcendentalists
here.
21. For more on this topic, see Goodrick-Clarke (1992), and in particular his 1998
book on “Hitler’s Priestess” Savitri Devi. Another fascinating figure in this regard is
the Indologist and SS-Untersturmführer J. W. Hauer, who wrote a clutch of books on
Yoga in the first decades of the twentieth century and gave a series of lectures on
Ku~
alinN Yoga with Carl Gustav Jung at the Eranos conferences in the early 1930s.
He went on to found the “German Faith Movement” which he proposed as the
religion of National Socialism (see Hauer 1922, 1932, 1958; Jung 1996; Noll 1996).
22. As Raina and Habib point out, it was common for “arguments from biological
evolution” to be drawn upon to legitimate social and moral policy (1996: 31).
23. Zaehner compares Aurobindo’s “spiritual evolution” to the thought of radical
Jesuit philosopher and biologist Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), whose notion of
“orthogenesis”—a mystical, teleological evolutionism—has had such a significant
impact on New Age religion (see Hanegraaff 1998). Teilhard’s attempts to integrate
Christian theology with evolutionary theory, which earned him condemnation from
the Vatican, parallel Aurobindo’s project to recast Hinduism as evolution in action.
24. A notable exception being Phadke who advocated that “defectives,” such as
drunks, criminals, and the “feeble-minded,” be “rendered incapable of procreation”
(1927: 280–83). Significantly, as an addenda he recommends the inclusion of
vagrants “from the out and out beggar to the aristocratic authorised priest” (283) in
this sterilization program.
25. I thank one of my referees for pointing out here that Aurobindo’s goal of
asexual reproduction is profoundly un-Darwinian, since sexual selection and the
possibilities of change inherent in sexual reproduction itself are essential to Darwin’s
view of evolution.
26. The distaste for the sexual act is prevalent in eugenicist/Nietzschean prose,
where it is the correlate of a marked misogynist tendency: women as vessels of
procreation. Significantly, the same fantasy of sexless reproduction that we find in
Aurobindo occurs in Eeman’s (1929) Nietzschean manual for the new race. The sex
 Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism / 141

act, for Eeman, is “merely a temporary substitute” until the superman can find an
alternative (15). As he so concisely puts it, “sex shall be overcome” (15). As I have
noted elsewhere (Singleton 2005), Eeman borrows apparent postural Yoga
procedures as part of his regime of self-overcoming.
27. The “yogic superman” fantasy is often present in early practical “transna-
tional” Yoga primers, such as those of Yogi Wassan, who operated on the American
West coast in the early 1920s. If readers would only follow the wisdom of his
teachings, he claims, “we would become supermen and women” (Wassan 1925: 60).
28. I refer the reader to my (as yet) unpublished doctoral dissertation on Yoga’s
early relationship to physical culture (Singleton 2007). The evidence I have gathered
overwhelmingly suggests that modern Yoga absorbed the ethos of physical culturism
to a very high degree. While this is not the main point of my argument here, it is the
premise I am working from.
29. Which first appeared in book form in a Danish edition in 1904, was translated
the following year, and continued to enjoy an astounding success for the next five
decades.
30. See Park (1992) for a study of the American encounter of gymnastics and
evolutionary biology in the late nineteenth century.
31. “The application of Lamarckian theories, particularly as they affect heredity, to
the improvement of the human race was a subject of fascination to a number of
thinkers who embraced Lamarckism as the foundation of the new science of
‘eugenics’….Individuals could consciously and substantially modify their bodily
organs during their lifetimes. The Lamarckian ‘law of exercise’…provided a scien-
tific and moral basis for physical education and gymnastic exercise, such as that
found in Jacques’ Hints Towards Physical Perfection” (Dutton 1995: 204). Jacques’s
(1861: 67) tract exhorts readers to bring themselves to peak physical condition so
that these characteristics will be passed on to the succeeding generations.
32. Krishna Rao also wrote books called Paradise of Health; Brahmacharya;
Radiant Health; and Muscles of the Body and How to Develop Them. I have not been
able to locate any editions of these books so far.
33. Significantly, Yogendra terms this process ç%ghramok‚asyahetuª, literally
“the cause of swift liberation” (1978: 28). That he equates this with the project of
“modern science” is indicative that Yogendra’s vision of Yoga has diverged signifi-
cantly from what might be termed more “traditional” conceptions of liberation. This
book is a collection of writings by Yogendra which originally appeared in the Yoga
Institute’s periodical during the 1930s.
34. The eugenicist and evolutionary biologist Haldane, for example, is evoking
Weismann’s experiments on multi-generational amputation of mice’s tails when he
notes, as evidence contra Lamarck, that Jews “whose ancestors have been circum-
cised for thousands of years are born without any trace of this operation” (1935:
108).
35. See for example Mehta’s Hindu Eugenics (1919: 19): “The law of heredity or
‘Nature’ for practical Eugenics is to be sought in the germ-plasm of the parents.”
142 / Mark Singleton

36. Regrettably, the edition I am working from is a 1989 reprint of the 1928
original and contains some additions and modifications that are not flagged up as
such in the text. I have not been able to track down the original edition. Even
Yogendra’s own Yoga Institute seems not to own a copy.
37. A further example: Kuvalayånanda’s collaboration (at his research institute
Kaivalyadhamma) with the aforementioned evolutionary biologist and eugenicist J.
B. S. Haldane would doubtlessly make for an interesting appendix to Alter’s case-
study of the SvåmH in his Yoga in Modern India (2006). Haldane, whose eugenic
science fiction Daedalus (1924) foresaw the predominance of designer test-tube
babies by the late twentieth century, had a fascination with Hinduism and Yoga and
even lived in India between 1958 and 1963 (Dronamraju 1985). He occasionally
referred to himself as a “Hindu agnostic” (Dronamraju 1985: 171) and was
increasingly influenced by Hinduism’s “contributions to discussions on human
evolution” (98).
38. This was one of the objections raised when I presented an early version of this
paper at the Sanskrit Tradition in the Modern World Conference held at Manchester
University, May 2006.
39. I am grateful to Dermot Killingley for pointing out several such instances to
me within Hinduism, including the series of prescriptions for ensuring offspring of
specified quality in B®hadåranyaka Upani‚ad (6, 4, 15–18).

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MARK SINGLETON is Tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe.

<mhsingleton@sjcsf.edu>