Kaya Mallick

Kaya Mallick is an anthropologist of religion who studies the interrelation between yoga and gender.  She holds an MA in South Asia studies from the University of Washington, where she was a two-time Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow in Hindi/ Urdu.  She is also a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher (200-RYT) and creator of The Woke Yogi, a yoga lifestyle blog.  Kaya’s scholarship largely centers around female practitioners of the Hindu ascetic traditions of yoga and tantra, but she is also currently researching the role of yoga in hyper-masculine nationalist iconographies.

Kaya is a devout scholar, teacher, and practitioner of yoga who spends much of her free time on her mat. She has been teaching vinyasa and yin-style yoga for six years, and her classes seek to integrate the psychosomatic practice of modern postural yoga with the tradition’s rich philosophical lineage.

Before discovering yoga, Kaya was primarily a playwright whose plays were staged across the U.S. and India.  While earning her BFA, she discovered an inherent theatricality in the Hindu mythological texts and thus she began weaving their tales into her own.  The resulting research ultimately inspired her transition from dramaturgy to sociocultural anthropology.  However, despite her disciplinary shift, Kaya continues to tell stories – on the stage and in the yoga studio.

With the Fulbright-Nehru research grant, Kaya is conducting an ethnography of Hindu women who lead ascetic lifestyles (sādhvīs/saṃnyāsasinīs/yoginīs).  Through participant observations and interviews, she is studying how and why Hindu women practice asceticism in uniquely gendered ways and how their ascetic practices impact their lives both materially and metaphysically.