"Argues that yoga as a political form retains a presence in India across historical periods, including the contemporary, even though it might appear on the surface that modern Indian politics is overdetermined by concepts like democracy, secularism, rights, etc., drawn from European political philosophy. Christian Novetzke and Sunila Kalé reconstruct the shifting literal, metonymic, and metaphorical connotations of the term "yoga" through time, beginning with the Rig Veda (c. 1500-1000 BCE,) which uses yoga as a mode of yoking/harnessing multiple instruments of military and ritual power, to the Bhagavad Gita (c. 500-100 BCE), which conceives it as a strategy of war and persuasion. In the Arthashastra (3rd c. BCE-3rd c. CE), the earliest treatise on statecraft in India, yoga functions as an index of war, security, and governance; in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries nationalist revolutionaries deployed it as a way of practicing freedom in conditions of bondage.

The state of Aundh utilized the sun salutation as a leitmotif of of governance, of both the self and the populace, as it transitioned to full representative democracy (1938) a decade before independent India. Finally, an overview of the sustained policy and bureaucratic administration of yoga from the 1950s to the 2020s in India disproves the common-sense idea that it is only the Hindu right that has a stake in yoga as a rhetorical device to support hypernationalist, conservative, and anti-Muslim initiatives"--.