In this episode, we speak with Dr. Daniela Bevilacqua (Post-Doc Research Fellow, SOAS) about her background in History and Anthropology, her doctoral work on the Rāmānandī Sampradāya, her ethnographic fieldwork for the Haṭha Yoga Project, and the role of yoga among sādhus today in contemporary India.

Speaker Bio

Daniela Bevilacqua is a South-Asianist who received her PhD in Civilizations of Africa and Asia from Sapienza University of Rome and in Anthropology from the University of Paris Nanterre. Her PhD research was published by Routledge under the title, Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India: The Śrī Maṭh and the Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya in the Evolution of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya. She is now a Post-Doc Research Fellow at SOAS, working for the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project (2015-2020).

Through her groundbreaking fieldwork in India, Daniela looks at the present practices of Haṭha Yoga among sādhus belonging to “traditional” samprādayas connected with the physical practice of yoga and austerities. The purpose of this research is to confront ethnographic material with textual and historical evidences to reconstruct the development of these practices.

Links

• YS 103 | Yoga and Hindu Asceticsm, Past and Present
• "Let the Sādhus Talk. Ascetic understanding of Haṭha Yoga and yogāsanas"
• Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2019)
• Yogasana | Embodied Liberation II | Brunei Gallery | SOAS University of London (YouTube video)
• https://www.instagram.com/dhanya_83