Yogananda's Sacred Music in Paradise

Abstract

Musical practice in the form of singing and chanting accompanied by instrumentation constitutes an important embodied practice in contemporary yoga culture. Engaging the field of Ethnomusicology and allied fields of inquiry, this chapter therefore brings Paramahansa Yogananda’s (1893–1952) music into focus by examining the function of his sacred devotional music ( kīrtan ) in a contemporary community devoted to his teachings, Polestar Gardens on the Big Island of Hawaii, where ukuleles, harmoniums, and other instruments and sounds from around the world form the community’s popular ensemble. The author considers the late colonial history of the harmonium and the ukulele as well as the way that these rather novel instruments carry forward a thirteenth-century South Asian musicology in Yogananda’s universal kriyā-yoga practice at Polestar today wherein practitioners use audible music to eventually enter meditation on an internal, unstruck sound ( anāhata-nāda ). The frictions between Yogananda’s musicology and Polestar’s tropical musical influences thereby produce the second instantiation of engaged alchemy in this book. Yogananda’s lyrics and flexible ensemble, as the author shows, comprised a form of Indian multilingualism that creatively spoke in a transnational “guru language” his American audiences could – and still apparently do – understand.