The Serpent's Tale - To understand Kundalinī, start in India

Kundalinī is a form of yoga centred on the belief that a dormant inner energy can be awakened through breath, mantra, meditation, and attention to the body’s subtle points. Across India, people have described its effects in countless ways—alertness, intensity, release, steadiness, bliss. The practice shifts across regions and lineages, and no two experiences are ever the same. That range of expressions is part of what has kept Kundalinī alive for some 1,200 years.

The Serpent’s Tale, published this year in India by Columbia University Press and distributed by Penguin Random House India, takes this complexity seriously. Its authors, Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, state their aim plainly: “As scholars who are also practitioners, this book brought our worlds together in unprecedented ways.” They note that while many popular guides claim to define exactly what Kundalinī is and does, they sought instead “to tell a more complicated story—one that tries to untangle the histories, practices, concepts, and symbols that have contributed to how Kundalini is understood today, acknowledging their multiplicity without dismissing any of them.”

I grew up with yoga in the least likely way imaginable. We were in Simla, in the Himalayas. I was six. We lived in a former British hotel the Indian Army had commandeered for officers. The furniture was heavy, the windows drafty, the ceilings tall. Before school my father would stand on his head—sometimes in the drawing room, sometimes on the balcony with his teacup still warm. Yoga, for him, was ordinary: as common as squash or army drills. A matter of balance. A bit of fun for us. We heard the army band below us on a sloping lawn— drums and the lone wail of a bagpipe—not bhajans or Om. There was no incense, no chanting, no ascetic gurus. My father even taught an eager American couple living one floor beneath us, usually just before his evening whisky and bridge game, amused by their earnest, almost devotional attempts to imitate his poses.

Anything outside that domestic frame felt suspect. In the 1970s and 80s, India buzzed with stories about Osho’s communes, Swami Muktananda’s shaktipat in Ganeshpuri, and smaller centres in Delhi and Pune offering “awakenings” to Western seekers. Kundalinī was spoken of in the same breath— something pursued by outsiders, not something rooted in the everyday yoga I knew. Borkataky-Varma and Foxen show, however, just how wide and varied the practice always was. They trace Kundalinī through Śākta and tantric lineages in Bengal and Assam, through Nath and Siddha traditions in the North, across ascetic and yogic practices in the Deccan, and into the religious lives of women whose songs, stories, and rituals preserved lineages rarely acknowledged.

Borkataky-Varma notes that while popular models locate Kundalinī at the base of the spine, “medieval Sanskrit sources instead locate Kundalini in the heart.” Foxen details how colonial histories and modern global practice braided East and West. “In many ways, Kundalini rests at the heart of yoga,” she writes, “and— like yoga itself—its modern form now spans the globe as a tangle of roots that originate in different soils.” As they put it: “The serpent has always had many heads; and many tales.” The authors begin by stating clearly what their book does not aim to do.

The excerpt below appears by exclusive permission of the publisher:

“Though ‘Kundalinī’ as a term originated in South Asian, and particularly Hindu, sources, we should not endow these with any sort of ultimate authority. Firstly, the medieval Hindu tantric texts in which we find the earliest mentions of Kundalinī are tapestries woven from many pre-existing concepts, including not only Hindu but also Jain and Buddhist understandings of both the body and the cosmos at large. And then, the Sanskrit sources on Kundalinī are minuscule relative to the body of literature that begins to coalesce even by the early twentieth century.

Most of the texts responsible for modern global understandings of Kundalinī are written in English. “Of course, this elides the reality that, for most of Kundalinī’s history, texts would have been precisely the wrong place to look if one wished for anything but a cursory understanding. For one, texts are not always direct. Arguably, our number of sources might expand dramatically if we were willing to read between the lines. Take, for instance, the Yoga Vāsistha, a medieval Sanskrit text that is tricky to date—scholars generally place it anywhere between the tenth and thirteenth century, depending on the version—and even trickier to interpret.

The Yoga Vāsistha has not generally been treated as having much to say about Kundalinī, that is, until you look at a very specific episode narrating the diverging paths the king Śikhidhvaja and his queen, Cūdālā, take towards enlightenment. “The story of Śikhidhvaja and Cūdālā may also be one of the very few explicit mentions of Kundalinī rising in a female body. But really— especially given the nature of the topic and the practices with which we are dealing—it is likely that most of the actual premodern transmission of Kundalinī occurred through vernacular, and especially oral, traditions.

Looking at the readily available Sanskrit literature means we encounter Kundalinī only in the forms that catch the attention of a certain class of cultural elites. Some of this is a matter of historical distance—if only we could hop in a time machine—but some of it, as we will come to see, reflects the way things still work today. As our story winds its way into the final chapter, we will invite you to consider whether the Kundalinī that occupies Western scholars, the Kundalinī that swirls within social media, and the Kundalinī that still dwells on the charnel grounds of West Bengal are indeed the same Kundalinī. “So, with this more modern and global lens in mind, our goal here is to explore how the shape and meaning of Kundalinī has evolved through conversation between Indian and Western traditions.”

Excerpted from The Serpent’s Tale by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen. Copyright (c) 2025 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved. Released in India in September 2025, The Serpent’s Tale joins a growing body of serious scholarship on yoga and tantra from both Indian and international writers. Following Kundalinī through texts, oral traditions, tantra, and global yoga, it shows how the practice has shifted—or stayed the same—over centuries. For practitioners, sceptics, and the simply curious, The Serpent’s Tale offers a grounded, nuanced entry into a subject often clouded by myth, exaggeration, and misunderstanding.