Courses

Ambitious in scope and interdisciplinary, Yoga and Tantra (Y&T), an introductory course, offers a critical inquiry into the field of yoga and tantra. The programme aims to trace historical antecedents to modern-day practice, exploring the relation between yoga and tantra and offering a broad understanding of the development of yogic and agamic/tantric traditions in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain worldviews as well as syncretic interactions with vernacular bhakti traditions, including the Varkaris and the Nath yogis from premodern to modern times.

The course is at once a meditation on life and an encounter between the philosophical and the experiential, situated in the socio-religious order of the historical world even as it adduces the transcendental, esoteric, and mystical dimensions of an array of yogic and tantric traditions.

Emphasizing current research and publishing in the field, Y&T brings national and international scholars leading innovative research projects to deliver lectures and seminars that trace the historical development of yoga and tantra, especially the ways in which their symbiotic relation contributed to the formation of hatha yoga around the end of the 1st millennium CE.  Y&T is sensitive to the increasing popularity of yoga today, its globalised and modernized practices, and seeks to place these contemporary trends in rigorous historical context, from the premodern to the modern periods.

Y&T presents views from Sanskrit studies and philology, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, art history, religion, archaeology, and anthropology.

It aims to foster a dialogue between practitioners and academicians and contribute to the ever-expanding field of yoga and tantra using both academic and praxis-based approaches.

Each Y&T lecture/seminar emphasizes a specific theme within the larger context of the philosophical concepts, meta-theologies, and cosmologies of yogic and tantric traditions as well as the aesthetics of the visual representations of those ideas (i.e., their manifestations in temple art, sculpture, painting, as well as their reflections in the lived practices of nationalists and saints).