Haṭhayoga’s Floruit on the Eve of Colonialism

My doctoral thesis (Birch 2013), which was supervised by Alexis Sanderson at the University of Oxford, contained a survey of texts on Haṭha-and Rājayoga. One of the challenges of completing such a survey was that very few of the texts composed from the sixteenth to eighteenth century had been critically edited or studied academically. Inspired by several exemplary surveys of Śaiva literaturein Sanderson’s articles (e.g. 2001, 2007 and 2014), I visited a large number of libraries in India in an effort to consult manuscripts of unpublished yoga texts. By the end of my doctorate, it was apparent to me that