[4] The book begins by setting yoga in its historical context, at once one of Hinduism's six schools of philosophy and a modern fitness activity.

Yoga was then, Alter argues, fitted into the western idea of a nature cure; Gandhi's ashrams offered this as a way of life.

Meanwhile, the RSS fused the ideas of nationalism, Hindu culture, and what Vivekananda had called "man making", using yoga for fitness.

The book ends by arguing that yoga's view that thinking goes with misperception has been moved from a philosophical context to social history.

All the same, she writes, it helped to transform yoga into what Alter called the "tremendously popular, eminently public, self-disciplinary regimen that produces good health and well being, while always holding out the promise of final liberation.

[1] The scholar Andrea R. Jain broadly agrees with Singleton, noting that posture "only became prominent in modern yoga in the early twentieth century as a result of the dialogical exchanges between Indian reformers and nationalists and Americans and Europeans interested in health and fitness".