Professor Sir Jim Mallinson

Jim Mallinson is the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at Balliol College. His research focuses on the history and current traditional practice of yoga and his primary methods are philology, ethnography and art history. 

Prof. Mallinson led the Haṭha Yoga Project (2015–2021), a six-person research project on the history of physical yoga funded by the European Research Council. The project’s core outputs are ten critical editions of Sanskrit texts on physical yoga and four monographs on its history and current practice. Together with Professor Jürgen Hanneder (University of Marburg), Prof. Mallinson led the Light on Hatha Yoga Project (2021–2024) which will result in a critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā. 

Prof. Mallinson’s publications include the following: The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha, a Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of an Early Text on Haṭhayoga (Routledge, 2007), a revision of his doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Professor Alexis Sanderson at the University of Oxford, where Prof. Mallinson also read Sanskrit as an undergraduate; Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017, co-authored with Mark Singleton), The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: The Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition (École française d’Extreme- orient, Pondicherry, 2021) and The Dattātreyayogaśāstra (École française d’Extreme-orient, Pondicherry, 2024). 

Prof. Mallinson has spent many years living in India with traditional ascetics and practitioners of yoga, and at the 2013 Kumbh Mela was awarded the title of Mahant by the Rāmānandī Saṃpradāya.