Pahalwan Baba Ramdev: Wrestling with yoga and middle-class masculinity in India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
JOSEPH S. ALTER
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Religious Nationalism ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Professional Wrestling ◽  
Political Ties ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract In the view of many people, Baba Ramdev embodies the practice of modern yoga in twenty-first century India. A tremendously successful entrepreneur, infamous ‘godman’ with political ties, and a highly visible TV personality, he is also a vocal supporter of pahalwani (Indian wrestling) as a way of life and of wrestling in India as a national sport. Beyond sponsorship of tournaments and support for a new professional wrestling league, he promotes a form of modern, nationalistic masculinity that draws on the ‘ideals’ of yoga, competitive athleticism, ‘Hindu’ conceptions of embodied power, and fetishized Vedic asceticism. In complex and often contradictory ways, Baba Ramdev's embodiment of these ideals shapes the bio-morality of wrestlers as they train, compete, and endorse his products. Critically analysed in terms of gender theory, his sponsorship of wrestling belies deep contradictions in religious nationalism, middle-class modernity, and in the gendered morality of both wrestling as a sport and yoga as a form of practice.

Twenty-First-Century Writers: The Rural Southern Tradition Continues

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean W. Cash
Keyword(s):  
Secondary Education ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Rural Families ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
Southern Writers ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Universal Themes

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century writers who carry on the rural southern tradition in their work. Since 2000, several young southern writers, nearly all born after 1975 and from middle-class rural and lower-class backgrounds, have begun to publish fiction. Both portraying the areas where they were born and grew up and transcending those settings to address more universal themes, they have produced a significant body of praiseworthy work. Most were born into rural families but received the benefits of post-secondary education, but all seem committed to presenting the working-class South with realism and empathy. Among these new novelists are Joe Samuel Starnes, Peter Farris, John Brandon, Wiley Cash, Skip Horack, Barb Johnson, Michael Farris Smith, and Jesmyn Ward. Clearly, novels that address southern characters in southern scenes will continue to be written, whether of the Rough South variety from writers like Johnson or from writers like Ward, Horack, Brandon, Cash, and Smith.

scholarly journals Radical Remodeling

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-69
Author(s):  
Wendy Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Experimental Models ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Ecological Cost

The modest, functional bungalow provided affordable housing for millions of homeowners as California’s population exploded and its cities spread outward over the course of the twentieth century. But in the twenty-first century, when land is more expensive and we’re aware of the ecological cost of urban sprawl, a new model is needed. The author discusses what made the California bungalow such a successful mode of middle class housing, and what new experimental models might take its place, including small lot subdivisions and cohousing.

Bobs and the “Character of Our Citizenship”

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Leah Payne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Public Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century

Many view the twenty-first-century white Pentecostal-charismatic rejection of feminism, and enthusiasm for self-professed harasser of women, Donald J. Trump, as a departure from the movement’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century origins wherein many Pentecostal-charismatic women were welcomed into the public office of the ministry. Early Pentecostal writings, however, demonstrate that twenty-first-century white Pentecostal orientations toward women in public life are based in the movement’s early theological notions that women must uphold the American home, “rightly” ordered according to traditionally conservative, white, middle-class norms. An America wherein women work and minister primarily in the domicile, according to early white Pentecostals, would be a powerful instrument of God in the world. Thus, no matter how transgressive they may have appeared when it came to women speaking from the pulpit, for the most part, white Pentecostals sought to conserve the traditional social order of the home.

Progressivism, Liberalism, and the Rich

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McGerr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
First Century ◽  
National Community ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Rich

This chapter discusses the indictment of wealthy Americans by progressives and liberals alike. Both effectively demonized the rich as alien beings who threatened the national community. The campaign against great wealth produced a paradoxical denouement. By the 1940s, the liberals' crusade helped create the seemingly homogeneous, essentially middle-class national community they wanted. But by the end of the twentieth century, the liberals' very success undermined their vigilance against the threat of wealth, helped make the rich seem safely like other Americans, and, paradoxically, made a liberal governmental elite appear to be the true threat to national community. As a result, liberalism has, in recent years, proved too conservative and too ineffective against the continuing resurgence of great fortunes in the early twenty-first century.

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