Origins and the Indus Valley question

Yoga classes sometimes open with a deep past: five thousand years, a seal, a person sitting like a yogi. The cities are real. The leap from those cities to a modern pose is not something the evidence can carry.

A UCLA South Asia summary, drawing on D. D. Kosambi and Romila Thapar’s earlier history, says the ruins of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa forced a rewrite of early Indian history once they were recognized in the 1920s. The cities stood on the Indus and the Ravi and flourished during the third millennium BCE. The same page says the Indus script has not been deciphered, and that ancient literature does not mention these cities. Houses were brick, streets were planned, and a large tank at Mohenjo-daro has been read as a place for ritual bathing. Those are archaeological descriptions. They are not a yoga manual.

The page also says a long decay set in toward 1750 BCE and that the end remains unexplained. It then repeats an older suggestion that newcomers finished the cities off. That last step is a theory with a long argument attached, not a settled fact. This article uses the UCLA page for the cities, the millennium, and the undeciphered script. It does not treat the cause of the collapse as known.

The famous seated figure belongs to this gap. A seal from Mohenjo-daro shows a horned figure in a seated shape. John Marshall, who published the excavations, proposed a link with later Shaiva imagery. Some popular books still call the figure a yogi. Other scholars have said the pose is not identifiable as a yoga asana, and that a picture without a readable caption cannot prove a practice. Because the script is undeciphered, the seal has no sentence on it that says “this is yoga.” Anyone who tells you the seal “says” something is ahead of the evidence.

James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, in Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017), collect premodern writings instead of starting the story from that seal. The publisher describes the book as passages from the early Upanishads and the Mahabharata, and from Tantric, Buddhist, and Jaina traditions, covering definitions of yoga and practices such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal, and meditation. That is a textual history. It can be checked against the passages. A seal that cannot be read cannot be checked the same way.

Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body (Oxford University Press, 2010) makes a related point from the other end of the timeline. The posture-heavy yoga of the twentieth century has a modern history. It is not a single unchanged survival of an Indus rite. David Gordon White’s The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014) argues, as a book-length history of one text, that the Yoga Sutras were not the everyday manual of most premodern practitioners and became central to yoga in the modern period. Scholars argue about the details of both books. They do not argue that an undeciphered seal has already settled the origin.

So what can you say, if you want to be accurate on a beginner site? The Indus cities are ancient, urban, and only partly understood. Yoga, as a named set of disciplines in Sanskrit literature, shows up later, and even then it does not look like a studio sequence. The next articles follow the words we can actually read.

Sources

• UCLA MANAS, Indus Valley Civilization, citing D. D. Kosambi, The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India in Historical Outline (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), and Romila Thapar, A History of India, volume 1 (Penguin, 1966).
• James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017). Publisher page.
• Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010).
• David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014).