When we speak about yoga, we usually think of philosophical treatises and meditation techniques. Yet for centuries, other forms of spiritual practice existed in India, transmitted through poetry, song and dance.

The Gita Govinda and the tradition of the Maharis of Odisha open a window onto a less known history, where art was not an addition to spirituality, but one of its most profound expressions.

When yoga is discussed in the West, the same texts tend to appear: the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, the Bhagavad Gita or the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. These are foundational works, but they have also shaped a partial understanding of what yoga has historically been. The question that emerges today is different: who produced these texts, in which contexts, and what forms of knowledge were left outside this canon?

Most classical treatises were written by men in contexts where access to knowledge was shaped by gender, caste and social position. This does not imply the absence of women practitioners, but the absence of their voices within the formats that became “authoritative”.

Contemporary scholarship, such as Anjali Rao’s “Yoga as Embodied Resistance“, invites us to shift the focus: not only what we read, but what we understand as transmission of spiritual knowledge. If certain bodies were excluded from the archive, where is their experience preserved?

Beyond the text

The spiritual history of India is not limited to philosophical systems. It is also woven through figures such as Andal, Akka Mahadevi, Lal Ded or Mirabai, whose transmission takes the form of poetry rather than treatise.

Their verses do not explain spiritual experience: they expose it. They speak of longing, absence, surrender, loss of stable reference points and the intensity of a search that is not framed as doctrine but as lived experience.

What matters is not only their content, but their persistence. These texts have survived not merely as literature, but as practice: they are sung, recited and memorised. Their transmission depends not on archives, but on living repetition.

In this sense, spiritual knowledge in India has not always been fixed in conceptual systems. It has also circulated through performative forms where poetry, music and ritual are not vehicles of knowledge, but its very material expression.

The Gita Govinda: longing as a spiritual path

Within this horizon stands the Gita Govinda, composed in the 12th century by Jayadeva. Far from being only a devotional poem, it is one of the most influential works in the religious, musical and performative culture of eastern India, especially Odisha, where it shaped the development of Odissi dance.

The text was not meant to be read alone. It was sung in temples, integrated into ritual practice, and embodied through dance.

Radha and Krishna are not merely characters, but figures of the relationship between the soul and what it seeks. The poem articulates an experience: union, separation and recognition.

The central element is “viraha“, separation. Not as narrative device, but as the core of experience. In the Gita Govinda, absence does not weaken the bond; it intensifies it. Longing becomes a form of sustained attention toward what is absent.

Temple, voice and movement: the “Maharis”

This logic explains why the Gita Govinda does not belong solely to the literary domain. For centuries, its verses were integrated into ritual practices where they were sung, set to music and danced as part of worship.

In the temples of Odisha, these practices were linked to the Maharis, women dedicated to the ritual service of the deity. The Maharis belonged to a spiritual tradition in which dance, music, recitation and devotion formed an integrated practice.

Their relationship to the Gita Govinda was not that of performers to an artistic work, but of practitioners to a living text within their spiritual discipline.

If we ask today where the yoginis absent from classical treatises might be found, we may also need to look at these women. Not because they followed Patañjali’s system, but because they developed other forms of spiritual cultivation centred on the body, ritual, devotion and sacred arts.

Dance was not entertainment or representation. It was a spiritual practice: living the states of the text, not illustrating them.

Odissi: when text becomes form

Odissi, one of the classical dance forms of Odisha, emerges directly from this context. This connection is essential: dance here is not simply performance, but a way of engaging with fundamental questions of the Indian spiritual tradition.

Through the Gita Govinda, generations have explored spiritual longing, the relationship between human and divine, the separation of the soul, the search for union and the mystery of devotion.

The Maharis played a central role in this transmission. For centuries they sang and performed the verses as part of temple liturgy. Their dance was not spectacle, but ritual offering.

The Gita Govinda thus becomes a lived teaching. The states it describes are not emotions to be represented, but experiences explored through the body.

Contemporary Odissi inherits this tradition. When a dancer performs a verse, she is not simply narrating a story; she enters a symbolic language about the soul, longing and separation.

For this reason, dance is not only aesthetic. It is also a form of knowledge. tratados, aquí se articula en poesía, música y danza.

Another genealogy of yoga

Modern narratives of yoga have privileged texts, mental discipline and philosophical systems. Yet Indian tradition is far more diverse: poetry, song, ritual, devotion and dance.

The Gita Govinda belongs to this register. Its significance lies not only in what it says, but in how it has been lived: as poem, song, ritual and dance.

Its verses did not remain in manuscripts, but entered communities and the practice of the Maharis, as spiritual discipline and offering.

When a dancer performs Radha’s longing or her meeting with Krishna, she is not representing the past. She participates in a tradition that has explored for centuries, through poetry, music and dance, some of the deepest questions of human and spiritual experience.

Perhaps we must remember that the history of yoga was not only written in texts. It was also sung, recited and danced.