Fascist Yogis: Martial Bodies and Imperial Impotence

Abstract

Between the First and Second World Wars, two retired British military officers, Francis Yeats-Brown and J. F. C. Fuller, embraced fascism and yoga. In their publications and lecture tours, they used their past experiences as soldiers in India to encourage strength, discipline, and virility. While Fuller believed that yoga could teach men to be strong and powerful leaders, Yeats-Brown celebrated yoga as a part of "Aryan" racial inheritance. This article examines both Fuller's and Yeats-Brown's published accounts and archival trails in order to understand the development of global masculinities within individual British lives. It reveals that their engagement with yoga was a defensive effort to appropriate the "regeneration" of martial masculinity encouraged by Indian nationalists. Claiming yoga for "great men" and "Aryan" audiences became a way to rewrite their own histories of service to the British Empire. They erased the weakness and fragility of imperial life, and replaced it with idealized bodies that were strong, disciplined, and virile. In so doing, they attempted to save imperial soldiers from political and cultural irrelevance. This reimagining used imperial hierarchies of gender and racial difference to encourage a "universal" model of martial masculinity that could restore the power of the British Empire.