A baronet who turned Mahant

He is the fifth baronet of Walthamstow near London, a member of the British aristocracy. He’s also a professor at SOAS (The School of Oriental and African Studies) and an eminent scholar of Sanskrit. And he’s a Mahant, christened Jagdish Das by his guru Shri Ram Balak Das when was initiated into the latter’s sampradaya (ascetic order) back in 1992. “I have three titles — Sir, Dr and Mahant — and I’m not quite sure how they should be arranged, how I should be formally addressed,” says Jim Mallinson, laughing.

It is unusual, indeed, the three disparate titles, nearly as much as the sight of Mallinson’s dreadlocks amongst all the sober hairdos at the recently-concluded Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (ZeeJLF). That’s until you heard him on the podium at the Diggi Palace talking about his new book, The Roots of Yoga, co-written with SOAS colleague Mark Singleton.    

The book, says Mallinson, is a history of yoga through the textual traditions, and includes translations from more than a hundred different texts, written in 12 different languages. “The oldest text we’ve drawn from is the Atharva Veda which is about 1,000 BC, and the latest is dated around mid-early 19th century,” he adds. Interestingly, the book, which has taken five years to write, was funded via a Kickstarter campaign on which Mallinson and Singleton raised $50,000.

“It’s the book that I would have liked existed when I first started studying yoga,” says Mallinson, who first came to India in the late 1980s, as a 17-year-old. He’d heard stories of India from older friends who’d been here, and inspired by the Sanskirt professor at Oxford University, he’d already decided to study the language.  

The turning point in his engagement with India and its esoteric religious traditions came at the 1992 Kumbh Mela in Ujjain, where he met his guru. Mallinson and his then girl friend (now wife) when saw a ‘rakish holy man’, they were told to beware of him because “if he gets inside you, he will suck out all of your energy”. “I’d read in Sanskrit texts of vajroli, the practice of urethral suction. Now expunged from prudish translations, it was said to be the ultimate technique of yoga. And this charismatic young sadhu could do it! We found ourselves gravitating towards him. Within a week he had initiated us into his order and we moved into his tent,” Mallinson wrote in a 2013 article in Financial Times, shortly after he became ‘mahant’ in a ceremony that was filmed for a BBC documentary, West Meets East, anchored by actor and Mallinson’s friend Dominic West.

And so began Mallinson’s double life — months spent travelling with his guru and his band of chellas, like himself, learning yogic practices, living the ascetic life. And the rest in London, acquiring a BA from Oxford, and an MA from SOAS. “Initially, I used to feel disjointed when he went back,” he says, but he got used to it. And he still wears a tulsi, chants the mantra taught him by his guru, and practices yoga and meditation most days. For me, says Mallinson, “the travelling and living with sadhus has always been justified by the scholarly work. After a while, they both became a mutual symbiosis.”

And a very productive symbiosis it has been, resulting in the translation of several important, early texts such as the 15th century “Khecarividya”, which describes the mudras of an esoteric set of Hatha Yoga practices that are said to harness spiritual energies. Mallinson is now leading a five-year project at SOAS called the Hatha Yoga project which will publish 10 critical editions of key manuscripts of Hatha Yoga that have never been published before.  

“The history of yoga is a fascinating subject, because it changes throughout history. It was not a monolith that changed suddenly in contact with the West. It has obsessed me for the last 25 years or so. And I’m still discovering more,” Mallinson says.