Women in Yoga History: From Vedic Ritual to Modern Asana

Somewhere inside a 200-hour yoga teacher training, a student asked Firdose Moonda a question nobody had put to her in quite that form: had asana, the movement practice, really travelled from Indian men to white Western women and then, only at the end of that circle, back to a brown woman like her? That question is the spine of "Women in Yoga: Expert Insights with Firdose Moonda," a Yoga Medicine podcast episode hosted by Rachel Land. Moonda, a broadcaster, journalist, academic, yoga teacher and researcher who holds an MA in the traditions of yoga and meditation from SOAS, works backward from today's magazine covers and activewear campaigns toward the Vedic fire altar, the great epics, fierce goddesses, medieval devotional voices, and Indra Devi's part in moving asana West. Her throughline is that yoga has no single, straightforward history, that ancient material cannot be read cleanly through modern eyes, and that the teachers and practitioners working today are writing the next chapter themselves.

What did a student's question reveal about the story we tell about yoga?

Moonda is candid that the whole course grew out of one exchange in a training room. Her account is that most teachers carry a rough outline of yoga history: it was once a male practice and is now mostly done by women, especially on social media, in magazines and in active-wear advertising. What falls in between, the centuries that connect ancient texts to contemporary capitalist Western yoga, is largely blank. The student's question forced Moonda to hear her own position as a sequence of moves, not a fact.

"Nobody had ever put it to me that way. And I thought actually, yeah, she's right. That that is exactly what I'm saying." (Firdose Moonda, Yoga Medicine podcast, at 2:45)

The point is less that the student was wrong than that the question exposed a gap. The story as usually told runs in a straight line from ancient India to the modern studio, and it skips the women, the lineages and the cultural translations that made the line possible. Moonda's response was to build a course around the blanks, and she describes them as an opportunity: "there's a lot we don't know which means there's a lot of room to play." That phrase, more than any single fact in the episode, sets the tone for how to listen to it.

How old is the asana most of us practise, really?

Before looking for women in yoga's movement practice, Moonda makes a dating argument that most students never hear. The asana we practise today, she explains, is around 150 years old at its oldest. A handful of poses are much older: sitting cross-legged, the lotus position and some of the very basic twists, which she traces to roughly the 15th century, but she notes that very few poses come from that period. A proliferation of poses appears from the 17th century, including demanding forms such as the one-handed handstand. Most of the sequences in a typical class, in other words, belong to the last century and a half.

That timeline changes the research question. If you ask where women appear in the physical practice, you can start with the 150 years we can document and then move forward into the last 60 or 70, when women began to shape the form. Or you can go back before asana existed and work through metaphor, mythology and what Moonda calls "yoga adjacent" content, which later got folded into the practice. The second route is harder, but it is the one she takes for most of the course, because it asks what women were doing in the world that yoga's ideas grew out of.

(Listeners who want to hear this reasoning in full can find it around the 4:28 mark of the conversation, where the age of the poses is laid out.)

Were women really part of the earliest ritual, or only imagined there?

Moonda starts with the oldest practice of the Vedic era, the ritual fire sacrifice. In that setting, a married male householder performed the sacrifice, and a woman's presence was required. Her role, though, was to be there silently. Moonda frames this as the first and most useful puzzle: a woman could physically occupy the space while being, in her phrase, "present but invisible." The question she asks her students is what that position actually meant, and what it would mean to live inside it.

"We start with that understanding of like I can physically be in a space but what does it mean to almost be present but invisible." (Firdose Moonda, Yoga Medicine podcast, at 6:13)

The approach matters because it refuses two easy stories. One says women were excluded from ritual entirely, which the fire altar's requirement contradicts. The other says women were full participants, which its silence complicates. Holding both at once is the kind of historical thinking the episode keeps modelling. It also tees up the central warning of the conversation: the Vedic world is not a Western yoga studio with different clothes, and reading it that way flattens both.

Who were the epic women, and were they just stereotypes?

When Moonda moves to the epics, which she describes as myth and poetry rather than documentary record, she names specific women she returns to across her courses. The first is Sita, wife of Rama in the Ramayana. Sita is written as the perfect wife, obedient and submissive, a figure many modern listeners will recoil from. Her ordeal begins when she is kidnapped by a demon king and then rescued. Her husband then refuses to believe she has remained faithful during her captivity and sets her a series of challenges to prove her fidelity. Moonda argues that these trials, unfair and punishing as they are, are part of what the epic defines as the struggle of womanhood.

"Those challenges and those kind of really really tough and potentially very unfair tests are what really define the struggle of womanhood." (Firdose Moonda, Yoga Medicine podcast, at 7:05)

The epics are not uniformly passive, though. Moonda points to Draupadi, who is married to the five Pandava brothers, and who lives an unusual arrangement that the tradition rarely discusses. Draupadi's story turns on the Pandavas' overreach. They fall into gambling after conquering large territories, and they eventually lose her in a gambling match, because she is the only possession they have left. Moonda's comment that this is "a bit weird to think about" is typical of how she invites students to sit with discomfort instead of tidying it up.

Her teaching method draws the same lesson. Nobody practised physical postures for exercise in those periods; people walked, carried water and worked. Moonda asks students to imagine themselves into those bodies and those routines rather than projecting a modern studio onto them. The result is a more physical history of women than the stereotypes allow: the epic woman as someone who moves, labours and sometimes pushes back against the system she lives inside.

What do Mirabai and Indra Devi add to the arc?

The episode's chapter structure moves from the epics into the medieval period, where Moonda places Mirabai as a figure who challenged social expectations, and then to Indra Devi, whose chapter is framed around asana moving West. These are the hinges that connect the ancient material to the practice most readers recognise. The two sections show, in different ways, women who take devotion or practice beyond the roles prescribed for them, and whose lives became part of how yoga travelled.

Because the episode goes deeper into these figures than a summary can, the most useful way to approach them is as the bridge Moonda builds between the ritual and epic women above and the modern teacher below. Each step asks the same question she asked her trainee: what did women do, and how has that been reshaped in the telling?

Who is writing yoga's future history right now?

The episode's description makes an explicit claim: that today's teachers and practitioners are actively creating the future history of yoga. This reframes the whole conversation. If the past is full of gaps, the present is full of people filling them. Moonda's course is built on that premise. Her trainees are asked to research, question and reinterpret rather than memorise a settled lineage, and she treats the open gaps as a creative space rather than a deficiency.

The same logic applies to the limits of looking at ancient traditions through modern eyes. A reader who notices the tension between a silent wife at a fire altar and a confident teacher on a live stream is already doing the work Moonda describes. The question is not whether yoga's history is complicated, since she argues that it is, but whether today's teachers will tell it honestly.

Have we moved past fear-based cultural appropriation debates?

The episode closes its substantive discussion with a question that many yoga teachers have been circling: have we moved beyond fear-based accusations of cultural appropriation to truly honour yoga's roots? Moonda approaches it not as a settled verdict but as a conversation that needs to be had with clarity about what is being asked. Her central ethical frame, given in the episode description, is a line about freedom.

"The best part of having freedom is allowing somebody else to have their freedom and respecting that freedom even if you disagree with it." (Firdose Moonda, quoted in the Yoga Medicine episode description)

That sentence does a lot of work. It suggests that respect for yoga's roots need not require uniform agreement about who may teach what, or how, and it places the burden on practitioners to hold their own views without policing others. For a practice built on a long, contested, cross-cultural history, that is a demanding standard, and it is one the episode invites listeners to test against their own teaching.

Where to go from here

The episode is best heard in full, because Moonda's reasoning unfolds across the conversation rather than in a list of facts. Its published chapters run from the opening question about Indian men and Western women, through the Vedic ritual, the fierce goddesses, Mirabai, Indra Devi and the creation of yoga's future history, to the cultural appropriation question and the course itself. Listeners who want to go further can look at the Women in Yoga teacher training that Moonda has created, a live online programme running from November 5 to December 10, 2026, at yogamedicine.com/product/women-in-yoga-teacher-training-online/. Rachel Land's Strength + Stretch series on Yoga Medicine Online, linked in the episode notes at yogamedicine.com/video_playlist/strength-stretch-in-10-20-series/, offers a more physical companion to the history.

The most practical next step is the one Moonda models: when you next teach or practise a pose, ask what it actually came from, who was doing what around it, and which women's lives the story has left out. The gaps are where the work begins.