A profound reckoning with feminine power, sacred art, and the restless spirit of resistance.

Irwin Allan Sealy—master chronicler of the Indian imagination—sets off on a singular quest: to follow in the wake of the yoginis, those fierce, flying, shape-shifting female adepts of yoga whose images were carved in stone a thousand years ago across India and who now sit, displaced, in American museums.

Part travelogue, part philosophical musing, part cultural excavation, Flying Yoginis is a meditation on art, power, devotion, and the subversive energy of women who step out of line. With wit and wonder, Sealy traces their transcontinental journey from lost temples near Kanchipuram to glass-walled galleries in Kansas City and Minneapolis—finding along the way unexpected kinship with rebels and visionaries, from Rosa Parks to Carson McCullers. Blending the spiritual with the personal, the mythic with the mundane, Sealy offers a dazzling, genre-defying reflection on how the sacred persists, how memory travels, and how history is always being rewritten by those bold enough to reclaim it.

Irwin Allan Sealy was born in Allahabad in North India in 1951 and educated in Lucknow and Delhi. He is the author of The Trotter-Nama, The Everest Hotel, The Brainfever Bird, From Yukon to Yucatan, and The China Sketchbook. He lives in Dehradun, where he is apprenticed to a bricklayer.
 

Flying Yoginis