What Itihāsa means

If you have read my earlier essays on Śruti and Smṛti, you know the Vedic framework classified every text by what kind of knowledge it carries and what authority it draws from. Śruti was received, not composed apauruṡeya, not of human authorship. Smṛti was composed by human beings steeped in Śruti, for specific ages and conditions. Itihāsa is testimony, the category of text that says this happened, in this world, to these people, with these consequences. The Rāmāyaṇan and Mahābhārata both carry this designation. They fall under Smṛti in the broader classification, pauruṡeya, of human composition, but within Smṛti they form their own distinct category. The Mahābhārata names itself the fifth Veda in the Ādiparvan. What Śruti established in the most refined register of understanding, Itihāsa carries into the conditions of actual human life.

What changes when these texts are called mythology

When the Mahābhārata is read as mythology, the war at Kuruṣetra becomes a metaphor, Kṛṣṇa becomes a symbol of the higher self, and Arjuna becomes the spiritual seeker working through doubt. Everything becomes an archetype. The Bhagavad Gītā is chapters 25 through 42 of the Bhīṣmaparvan, the sixth of the Mahābhārata’s eighteen books. Most people who have studied the Gītā have never been told this. It is a conversation that happens at a specific irreversible moment inside a specific war. Arjuna has trained his entire life for exactly this. He looks across the field at Kuruṣetra and sees his teachers, his grandfather Bhīṣma, his uncles, people he loves arrayed against him, and cannot raise his bow. Kṛṣṇa’s teaching arises in response to this exact meltdown, with the armies standing, at a moment that cannot be undone.

The Gītā extracted from the Mahābhārata is a different text from the Gītā inside it. The philosophy is the same. The condition that produced it is gone. Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva all wrote their commentaries on the Gītā within the full Mahābhārata framework. None of them treated it as a standalone philosophical poem.

What the inner reading rests on

The inner reading of these texts is real and important so I am not denying if these texts are read, studied or understood as archetype. Every serious teacher across every lineage acknowledges the inner dimension and considers it important. Kṛṣṇa as the higher self, the battlefield as the mind, these readings are not wrong. But they rest on the historical claim, not the other way around.

Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to Arjuna is what it is because of the specificity of the situation. Arjuna’s grief is not a literary device. His paralysis is not a narrative technique. The Mahābhārata is not using his fall as a setup for a philosophical discourse. It is recording what happened when a specific person faced an impossible situation and what understanding made it possible for him to act. The inner dimension of that is inseparable from its historical ground.

How the Mahābhārata was composed

Most people who have studied the Mahābhārata do not know it went through three distinct stages before reaching its current form. The Ādiparvan documents this directly. Vyāsa composed Jaya first at 8,800 ślokas. His disciple Vaiśampāyana expanded this to Bhārata at 24,000 ślokas. Ugraśravā the Sūta, having heard Vaiśampāyana recite the Bhārata at King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, recited the expanded Mahābhārata at 100,000 ślokas to the sages at Naimiṣāraṇya. The text that survives is this third version. The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions northern and southern recensions which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. This is the version most people encounter.

The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions, northern and southern recensions, which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune produced a critical edition from 1919 to 1966, led by V.S. Sukthankar, then S.K. Belvalkar and P.L. Vaidya, comparing 1,259 manuscripts across both traditions and identifying passages found in some traditions but absent in others. The two traditions contain different episodes and in some cases different versions of the same events. Anyone reading the Mahābhārata seriously is worth knowing which tradition their edition draws from.

How the Rāmāyaṇa was composed

The Rāmāyaṇa was composed by Vālmīki, a contemporary of Rāma. The composition account is in the Bālakāṇḍa itself. Nārada narrated the story of Rāma to Vālmīki at his āśrama. Brahmā granted Vālmīki divya dṛṣṭi (direct vision) of all events of Rāma’s life, past and yet to come and instructed him to compose the Rāmāyaṇa in the śloka meter. Vālmīki composed 24,000 ślokas across seven kāṇḍas: Bāla, Ayodhyā, Araṇya, Kiṣkindhā, Sundara, Yuddha, Uttara. He first taught it to Lava and Kuśa, Rāma’s sons, who later recited it at Rāma’s court. The tradition calls Vālmīki Ādikavi, the first poet, and the Rāmāyaṇa Ādikāvya, the first poem.

The Rāmāyaṇa has one of the largest commentarial traditions in Sanskrit literature more than thirty major commentaries. The three best known Tilaka, Bhūṣaṇa (by Govindarāja), and Śiromaṇi are together called the ṭīkātraya. Maheśvara Tīrtha’s Tattvadīpikā is another major commentary. Ācāryas across philosophical traditions engaged with the complete text, including all seven kāṇḍas. Madhvācārya in the 13th century references Rāmāyaṇa events including Uttarakāṇḍa episodes in his Mahābhārata Tātparya Nirṇaya. Govindarāja wrote commentary on the full Uttarakāṇḍa. The text exists in multiple manuscript recensions southern, northern, Gaudiya, and northwestern across which the commentators worked. The Oriental Institute at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda produced a critical edition between 1960 and 1975 comparing manuscripts across these recensions. The critical edition retains all seven kāṇḍas.

Beyond Vālmīki’s Sanskrit text, there are major regional compositions that retell the Rāma story in other languages. Kamban’s Iramavataram in Tamil (12th century), Madhava Kandali’s Saptakāṇḍa Rāmāyaṇa in Assamese (14th century), Gona Budda Reddy’s Ranganatha Rāmāyaṇa in Telugu (14th century), and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (1576). These are separate literary works, not translations or manuscript variants of Vālmīki’s text. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is the dominant version across much of North India and is what most Hindi-speaking people encounter as the Rāmāyaṇa.

What the record shows

The Mahābhārata contains precise astronomical descriptions planetary positions, eclipses, stellar configurations at the time of the Kuruṣetra war. Indian researchers across multiple disciplines are actively working with this data. The astronomical school includes Dr. Narhari Achar, Dr. Manish Pandit, P.V. Vartak, and Nilesh Oak, using planetarium software and traditional astronomical methods. Shrikant Talageri works from linguistic and textual evidence, Rigvedic genealogies and Avesta-Mitanni correspondences. Jijith Nadumuri Ravi, a former ISRO scientist, has produced a three-volume Geo-Chronology Series (Rivers of Rigveda, Geography of Rāmāyaṇa, Geography of Mahābhārata) combining satellite imagery, archaeological data, and analysis of over 110,000 Sanskrit verses. The dates these researchers arrive at differ, and they disagree publicly. What they share is treating the data in these texts as specific and worth working with, not as vague symbolic language. This is an active field of Indian scholarship with ongoing debate

The Sarasvatī river, described extensively across both texts and long treated as mythological by modern scholarship, was confirmed by satellite imaging as a vast dried riverbed running exactly where the texts describe it. Underwater investigations off Dwarka in Gujarat found submerged structures dated to roughly 3500 BCE, consistent with the Mahābhārata’s account of Dvārakā being swallowed by the sea after Kṛṣṇa’s death.

What these texts are for

The events of the Rāmāyaṇan occurred in Tretā yuga. The events of the Mahābhārata at the junction of Dvāpara and Kali yuga. The two texts together show dharmic life under different conditions. The Rāmāyaṇa shows dharma largely intact the ideal son, husband, king, friend, devotee; institutions that function; roles that hold. Rāma is called Maryādā Puruṣottama, the ideal of proper conduct. The Mahābhārata shows dharma under severe pressure and breaking down, and what it takes to hold a dharmic orientation when the conditions are hostile to it.

The crises in the Mahābhārata, the fall of dharma, the corruption of institutions, the confusion of roles, the degradation of human capacity are not ancient problems being remembered. This is what the Ādiparvan means when it says what is not in the Mahābhārata is nowhere. It is not a record of something finished. It is a map of the conditions even this age produces and what it takes to live in them with understanding intact.

This is what is lost when these texts are called mythology. Mythology is about archetypes and universal themes applicable always, specific to nothing. Itihāsa is testimony about what happened to specific people in specific conditions, and what it took for them to hold dharma through it..

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Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence

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What Smṛti includes

The category is considerably larger than most practitioners realize, and it helps to understand why before looking at what falls inside it. The Vedas are an extraordinarily precise body of knowledge transmitted orally, in specific sounds, specific meters, specific sequences that could not be allowed to drift even slightly across generations. To transmit something like that faithfully over thousands of years, you need supporting sciences; grammar so the language stays exact, phonetics so the sounds stay correct, etymology so the meanings do not get lost, a calendar so the rituals tied to the Vedas happen at the right time, and procedures so they are performed correctly.

These supporting sciences are the Vedāṅgas, the six limbs of the Vedas. Composed by human beings, they exist entirely in service of Śruti. Without them the Vedas could not have been correctly transmitted or applied.

Śikṣā is phonetics, the precise rules of pronunciation that kept Vedic sound intact across generations. Vyākaraṇa is grammar, most famously Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, built so the language of the Vedas could not be misread or distorted over time. Chandas covers meter, the precise rhythmic structures the Vedic hymns are composed in, which the tradition considered meaningful in themselves. Nirukta is etymology; a study of Vedic words whose meanings had already become obscure by the time the scholar Yāska wrote his analysis. Jyotiṣa covers astronomy and the ritual calendar, determining when Vedic ceremonies must be performed. Kalpa covers the ritual procedure itself, the detailed instructions for how each rite is conducted.

Beyond the Vedāṅgas, the Smṛti category holds everything the tradition produced as human composition rooted in Śruti. The Dharmasūtras are among the older texts, concise treatments of righteous conduct and social order attributed to teachers like Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha. The eighteen major Dharmaśāstras, attributed to sages like Manu, Yājñavalkya, Parāśara, Nārada, and Bṛhaspati, are comprehensive treatments of how dharma is to be understood and lived in specific ages and conditions, they are not law codes in any Western sense of that word, and reading them as such, as colonial-era translators did, strips them of what they actually are. The Itihāsas, the Rāmāyaṇan and the Mahābhārata, are Smṛti. The eighteen major Purāṇas are Smṛti. The philosophical schools Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā whose methods of inquiry the tradition developed to investigate Vedic knowledge are Smṛti. The Sāṃkhya Kārikā, which gives yoga its metaphysical framework of Puruṣan and Prakṛti, is Smṛti. The Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali is Smṛti. The range of what falls under this category is wider than most practitioners expect, and understanding what holds it together matters more than simply knowing what belongs to it.

The Bhagavad Gītā sits within the Mahābhārata and is formally Smṛti. Its place in the tradition — and why every major lineage has treated it with a weight that goes beyond ordinary Smṛti — is something we will come to properly in the Itihāsa piece next week.

Where Smṛti gets its weight

Smṛti does not stand on its own. It draws from Śruti, and the tradition maintained this across every school. A Smṛti text that clearly contradicts Śruti is to be questioned. One consistent with Śruti carries that consistency as its credential, even where no direct Vedic passage can be identified as the source.

The Mīmāṃsā school, whose foundational text is the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra of Jaimini, elaborated in Śabara’s Bhāṣya on sūtras 1.3.1-3, worked out the relationship between Śruti and Smṛti with precision. Where a Smṛti teaching has no directly traceable Vedic source, the position is that it rests on a Vedic basis that has not come down to us intact. The gap in the textual record does not, in the tradition’s reasoning, constitute an absence of root. This is a methodological stance, not an act of deference it holds that wisdom transmitted with this consistency and depth across lineages does not originate in individual opinion.

When Smṛti texts disagree

Different Smṛti texts give different answers to the same questions, and this is not a failure of the tradition to arrive at consistency. It is built into how Smṛti functions. Manu prescribes one thing. Parāśara prescribes something different. Yājñavalkya says something else. These texts were not composed as a single unified code meant to apply everywhere and always. They were composed for specific regions, specific communities, specific periods of time. The concept of yuga-dharma, that what is appropriate shifts with the nature of the age, is not a later rationalization. It is structurally present in the Smṛti literature itself. The Parāśara Smṛti states plainly that it was composed for Kali Yuga because what was understood in Kṛta, Tretā, and Dvāpara no longer fits the conditions people actually live in now. Both Manu and Parāśara draw from the same Śruti, the Vedic understanding. The application differs because the world it enters is different.

Scholars reconciled the variations through nibandha texts, digest compilations that drew together multiple Smṛtis and worked through their harmonization question by question, region by region. P.V. Kane’s History of Dharmaśāstra documents this genre in detail: texts like the Smṛticandrikā, Kṛtyakalpataru, and Dharmasindhu exist precisely because different Smṛtis gave different answers and the tradition needed a method for working through that. For questions no existing Smṛti had directly settled, Āpastamba Dharmasūtra (1.4.12) recognises a parishad - an assembly of learned scholars - as a valid source of guidance, drawing on the full range of Śruti, Smṛti, and reasoned inquiry to arrive at what was appropriate for that time and place.

What this means if you practice yoga

The Yoga Sūtra is Smṛti. The commentaries built on it such as Vyāsa’s Yogabhāṣya, Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī, Vijñānabhikṣu’s Yogavārttika are Smṛti building on Smṛti. What you are working with when you study these texts is not the origin point of the tradition but a transmission vehicle: carefully constructed, carrying real knowledge, standing on a foundation that goes further back. Mahrashi Patañjali’s understanding of Puruṣan and Prakṛti, of the deeper states of samādhi, of what he calls ṛtambharā prajñā (truth-bearing wisdom) is rooted in what the Upaniṣads had already seen. The Yoga Sūtra is not where that inquiry begins. It is one of the clearest transmissions of it that we have.

When teachings drawn from Smṛti appear to conflict and they do, at time for given place and time; the tradition’s method is to look at what both are drawing from and ask which teaching sits closer to the Upaniṣadic understanding both are trying to transmit. Without any grounding in Śruti, that method is simply not available. What replaces it is preference which teacher sounds more convincing, which interpretation is most common in your community, which reading feels most reasonable right now. These are not illegitimate ways to navigate, but they are not the tradition’s method and they will not serve you the same way when the questions get harder.

Smṛti is not a diminished category. It is the category through which Śruti became teachable, applicable, capable of reaching people where they actually are. The tradition honored that work and produced texts of extraordinary depth within it. What it did not do was allow Smṛti to lose its sense of where it came from.

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Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence

A note: any error in this article is mine. Where I have simplified, the intent is to make this accessible to readers encountering the Vedic literary tradition for the first time not to override my gurus or the tradition they carry. Any over-simplification reflects my own effort to understand and convey the connection between the Vedic corpus and yoga practice. If you find an error or feel something has been misrepresented, please DM me. I will correct it immediately or in the next revision.

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What the word means

Śruti comes from the Sanskrit root śru to hear. To hear something that was already there. To receive something that was already there. Not to compose. Not to reveal in the way a prophet receives a divine message. To hear something that was already there.

The Vedas: the four collections of Ṛg, Yajur, Sāma, and Atharva along with the Upaniṣads that emerge from them, carry the designation Śruti. They are apauruṣeya not of human authorship. No sage composed them. No deity dictated them. The ṛṣis who are associated with them are called dṛṣṭas (seers) or more precisely, receivers. They did not generate this knowledge. They received it.

For a Western reader, the immediate instinct is to reach for a familiar framework. Was this like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments? Was it vision, prophecy, divine inspiration? The answer is no to all of these. The Abrahamic idea of revelation involves a personal God communicating to a human recipient. Apauruṣeya means something fundamentally different. It means this knowledge does not belong to anyone. No individual owns it, authored it, or stands behind it as its source. It was there before the ṛṣis heard it and it remains there still.

A closer analogy, though still imperfect, is mathematics. When a mathematician discovers a theorem, we do not say they invented it. The relationship between prime numbers existed before anyone found it. The mathematician became the person whose mind was refined enough to perceive what was already operating. Apauruṣeya is something like this except applied not to physical laws but to the deepest laws of consciousness and reality.

The instrument that receives

This is where the tradition makes a claim that is not religious but epistemological and it is the claim your yoga practice is directly related to. The ṛṣis could perceive what ordinary minds cannot because their instrument of knowing had been thoroughly refined. The ordinary human mind is constantly in motion pulled by desire, fear, memory, anticipation, opinion, and the endless noise of its own commentary. In this state, perception is always partial and distorted. What we know is always filtered through what we want, what we fear, and what we already believe.

Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtra describes a specific state that arises in deep meditation as ṛtambharā prajñā, truth-bearing wisdom. This is not insight in the ordinary sense. It is perception that arises when the mind has become so still and transparent that it no longer distorts what passes through it. The individual ego is not receiving a message. The individual ego has temporarily ceased to be the loudest thing in the room.

The tradition’s claim about Śruti is that the Vedic ṛṣis were people who had cultivated this state so completely, through years of disciplined practice, that what they received was not colored by personal preference, cultural conditioning, or the limitations of ordinary mind. Sri Aurobindo, in his study of the Veda, argued exactly this, that the ṛṣis were not primitive poets anthropomorphizing natural forces as European scholars assumed, but practitioners who had evolved their consciousness far beyond ordinary mental functioning and were recording what became perceptible from that vantage point.

This is not a claim you have to believe. It is a claim you can hold as a question and carry into your own practice. What does your practice point toward? What becomes perceptible when the fluctuations settle? The tradition is saying the ṛṣis went further in that direction than anyone you have read about and what they found when they got there is Śruti.

Why it was never written down

Here’s something about the Vedas that usually isn’t explained very clearly. For thousands of years, Śruti was not written. It was memorized, chanted, and transmitted orally from teacher to student across generations. This was not because writing had not been invented. It was a deliberate choice. The tradition understood that the knowledge was not in the words the way ink is in paper. The knowledge was alive in the transmission, in the relationship between teacher and student, in the precise sound of the chanting, in the breath and intention behind every syllable.

The Sanskrit word for this oral transmission is pāṭha recitation. And the tradition developed extraordinary systems to ensure accuracy. The Vedas were memorized in multiple ways simultaneously forward, backward, in pairs, in permutations so that any error in one version could be detected and corrected by the others. The Vedic chanting we can hear today is considered by scholars to be among the most accurately preserved oral literature in human history, transmitted across at least three thousand years with a precision that written transmission could not have guaranteed. When the tradition eventually did write the Vedas down, it was understood as a concession to a time when oral transmission was becoming harder to maintain not as an improvement. The text was a support for memory, not a replacement for it.

Reading the Veda without a teacher was, in the traditional understanding, like reading the notation of a rāga without having heard it played. You have the symbols. You do not have the thing itself. This is why even today the most rigorous Vedic traditions insist that Śruti must be received from a qualified teacher and not simply studied from a book. The knowledge is not only in the meaning of the words. It is in the sound, the breath, the precise transmission of something that has been kept alive across an unbroken human chain.

The Vedas and the Upaniṣads

The Saṃhitās of the four Vedas are the most ancient layer. They are collections of hymns, chants, and ritual formulas. For a long time, Western scholars read them as nature poetry or primitive mythology. Aurobindo spent decades arguing that this reading was a fundamental misunderstanding that the Vedas are a highly sophisticated psychological and spiritual record, using a symbolic language that was deliberately veiled to protect it from being used without proper preparation and transmission.

The Upaniṣads emerge from the later portions of each Veda and are called Vedānta, the end of the Vedas, the culmination of Vedic inquiry. If the Saṃhitās are the seed, the Upaniṣads are the fruit. They are conversations between teachers and students, between sages, sometimes between a seeker and their own deepest inquiry. Yājñavalkya explaining the nature of the self to his wife Maitreyī. Uddālaka showing his son Śvetaketu the reality of Brahman through a series of direct experiments. These are not lectures. They are transmissions happening in real time, through relationship, through sustained questioning, through direct investigation.

The Upaniṣads gave us the great statements that still echo through every yoga class and Vedānta lecture in the world. Tat tvam asi: That, thou art. Aham Brahmāsmi: I am Brahman. Prajñānam Brahma: Consciousness is Brahman. Ayam Ātmā Brahma: This self is Brahman. These are not beliefs to be accepted. In the tradition, they are destinations of inquiry, things a prepared person is meant to discover for themselves.

Why this matters for yoga practitioners

Yoga as a living tradition stands on Śruti. The Upaniṣads are not historical context for what you practice. They are its source.

When a yoga teacher quotes the Gītā or references the Yoga Sūtra, they are standing on a foundation that goes back through Smṛti to Śruti. Most do not know this. And not knowing it changes how you hold the teachings. If you think the Yoga Sūtra is the origin point, you are starting in the middle of a river and wondering where the water is coming from.

There is also a more direct connection. The state Patañjali describes the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, the arising of truth-bearing wisdom, is the same state the tradition says the ṛṣis inhabited when they received the Veda. The goal of yoga practice and the source of Śruti are pointing at the same thing from different directions. The ṛṣis arrived there and received something. Your practice is moving you toward the same place. What you find when you get there even in glimpses, even in brief moments of genuine stillness is a small taste of what made Śruti possible.

This is why the tradition insists that Śruti cannot be understood only intellectually. You can study the Upaniṣads for years and still be standing outside them. The understanding that the tradition is pointing at comes through practice, through the refinement of the instrument, through the relationship with a teacher who has already gone further than you. Reading about Śruti is the beginning. The beginning is worth taking seriously.

The living source

The state from which Śruti arose did not belong to the Vedic age alone. Ṛtambharā prajñā is not something that existed only then. It is available wherever the conditions for it are met wherever a human mind has been sufficiently refined through practice and transmission. The tradition preserved what the ṛṣis received with extraordinary care precisely because that level of reception is rare. What it takes to arrive there is what the entire edifice of Vedic and yogic practice is designed to cultivate.

Next in Words & World: Smṛti - what human beings do with revealed knowledge, and why the difference between Śruti and Smṛti is one of the most important distinctions you are not being taught in yoga trainings.

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Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence

A philosophical darśana works the same way. It is a complete vision of reality what the world is, what a human being is, what causes suffering, and what the path out looks like that you enter, practice, and let work on you over time. Every darśana comes with practice built in, because the problem these traditions address is not that we are thinking incorrectly. It is that we are seeing incorrectly. You cannot fix seeing with thinking alone. This puts darśana in a different category from what the English word philosophy suggests. Philosophy is a project of the mind argument, analysis, conclusion. Darśana is a project of perception. The goal is not a better position. It is clearer sight.

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It is not a political name. It was not created to mark a border or administer a territory. It is a civilizational name, one that holds within it a particular understanding of what this land is, what it asks of those who live within it, and how the practices that arose here are meant to be held. That it remains present today is significant in itself. The Constitution of India opens with it: India, that is Bhārat. A modern nation choosing to root itself in a name thousands of years older than the nation.

Before any of the philosophical texts were written, before the traditions had names, this land was already known to the ancient world. Mesopotamian records speak of a trading civilization they called Meluhha, ships arriving from this coast, whole communities of Meluhha people living in Mesopotamian cities, a professional interpreter employed full-time to work between two worlds. Carnelian from Gujarat, teak from the western coast, lapis lazuli travelling south from a trading colony in what is now Afghanistan. We do not know what those people called their own land. Their script has not been deciphered. But the civilization was already flourishing, already in conversation with the ancient world, long before it settled on a name for itself.

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I. Why this matters

Why does this matter for a series about words in the yoga tradition? Because one of the most persistent misunderstandings about yoga is to give it a starting point that is far too recent. It gets traced to the Yoga Sūtras, or to the Śramaṇa movements, or to the Ṛgveda as though each appeared from nowhere, and as though the Ṛgveda itself was a beginning rather than a layer within something much older. The civilization that eventually named this land Bhāratavarṣa was already flourishing, already philosophically alive, already known to the wider world before any of these texts or movements emerged. That depth of continuity is part of what the name carries, and part of what gets lost when the name is replaced.

Today, yoga’s origins are increasingly described using the term South Asian. It sounds careful, academically precise, respectful of multiple national identities. But South Asia is a contemporary geopolitical category, assembled from nation-states whose borders were drawn largely in the 20th century, in many cases through partition, violence, and displacement. It is not the framework within which yoga was developed, transmitted, or understood. Applying it to a tradition thousands of years old is not neutral. It is a substitution and what it substitutes matters, which is what this essay is about.

To understand what Bhāratavarṣa names, it helps to look at all the names this land has carried, because each one is a different way of knowing it and each one, if followed carefully, opens into an entire world of history, philosophy, and lived understanding.

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The idea came from something I keep noticing in conversations around yoga and Indian traditions: many misunderstandings begin not with the practice itself, but with the words used to describe it. The language around yoga is everywhere now, yet the meanings behind those words are often far less clear than t…

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