When we think of yoga today, we envision spandex-clad, perspiring, toned people brought together in a room filled with yoga mats and engaged in a fitness ritual set apart from day-to-day life. Their aim is to enhance something they all deem sacred: their bodies. In Selling Yoga, Andrea Jain looks at the development of modern, popular yoga and suggests that its practitioners are strategic participants in the contemporary global market for self-developmental products and services. Pre-colonial and early modern yoga systems comprise esoteric techniques that aim at transcendent states of detachment from ordinary and conventional life. In contrast, contemporary popularized yoga aims at immediate self-development through the enhancement of the mind-body complex according to dominant health and fitness paradigms. Postural yoga is prescribed not as an all-encompassing worldview or system of practice, but as one part of self-development that provides increased beauty and flexibility as well as reduced stress; it can be combined with various other worldviews and practices available in the global marketplace. However, Jain argues that yoga systems cannot be reduced to mere commodities-that yoga is, in fact, a religion of consumer culture. It functions as a social ritual that removes individuals from everyday life for the sake of self-development. Yoga brands destabilize the basic utility of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that represent the fulfillment of self-developmental needs deemed sacred in contemporary consumer culture.

Premodern and early modern yoga comprise techniques with a wide range of aims, from turning inward in quest of the true self, to turning outward for divine union, to channeling bodily energy in pursuit of sexual pleasure. Early modern yoga also encompassed countercultural beliefs and practices. In contrast, today, modern yoga aims at the enhancement of the mind-body complex but does so according to contemporary dominant metaphysical, health, and fitness paradigms. Consequently, yoga is now a part of popular culture. In Selling Yoga, Andrea R. Jain explores the popularization of yoga in the context of late-twentieth-century consumer culture. She departs from conventional approaches by undermining essentialist definitions of yoga as well as assumptions that yoga underwent a linear trajectory of increasing popularization. While some studies trivialize popularized yoga systems by reducing them to the mere commodification or corruption of what is perceived as an otherwise fixed, authentic system, Jain suggests that this dichotomy oversimplifies the history of yoga as well as its meanings for contemporary practitioners. By discussing a wide array of modern yoga types, from Iyengar Yoga to Bikram Yoga, Jain argues that popularized yoga cannot be dismissedthat it has a variety of religious meanings and functions. Yoga brands destabilize the basic utility of yoga commodities and assign to them new meanings that represent the fulfillment of self-developmental needs often deemed sacred in contemporary consumer culture.