James Mallinson

One of Mallinson's books, Roots of Yoga, with Mark Singleton as co-editor, is accessible to the public as well as to scholars. It contains a selection of texts on yoga from ancient times to the 19th century, presenting the core teachings.

Mallinson is Reader in Sanskrit and Yoga Studies at SOAS, University of London where he has held the Sanskrit position since 2013. Prior to his appointment at SOAS Mallinson worked as a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library. He is the author of nine books, all of them translations and editions of Sanskrit texts on yoga, poetry, or epic tales. Mallinson has written numerous book chapters and papers on the history of yoga, in particular the early development of physical or Hatha Yoga, on which he is recognised as the world's leading expert. In 2014 he received a European Research Council Consolidator Grant worth €1.85 million for a five-year six-person research project on the history of Hatha Yoga. In 2018, he opened the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies.

Mallinson travels to India each year, and has spent months at a time living as a Sadhu, taking only a blanket and a small bag. He enjoys paragliding including in the Himalayas and has accordingly been nicknamed the "flying yogi", a humorous allusion to the yogic flying of Transcendental Meditation. He has competed internationally for the British paragliding team and won the British Open paragliding competition in 2006. In 2018 he became the first person to cross the eastern Solent on a paraglider. He has two children with his wife Claudia. In 2015, Mallinson appeared in the Smithsonian Channel documentary West Meets East with his longtime friend, actor Dominic West, which was shown in the UK on BBC Four; they visited the Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, where he was ordained as a Mahant (Abbot) of the Terah Bhai Tyagi suborder of the Ramanandi Sampradaya, the only Westerner to receive this honour.

Mallinson became interested in India by reading Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim as a teenager; the book describes an English boy travelling India with a holy man. He was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford, where he read Sanskrit and Old Iranian for his bachelor's degree, and studied the ethnography of South Asia for his master's degree at SOAS University of London. Mallinson is described as "perhaps the only baronet to wear dreadlocks"; he let his hair grow out from 1988 on his first visit to India during his gap year. He cut his hair in 2019 after the death of his guru, Mahant Balyogi Sri Ram Balak Das, who had initiated him into the Ramanandi Sampradaya at the Ujjain Kumbh Mela in 1992. Supervised by Alexis Sanderson, his doctoral thesis at Oxford was a critical edition and translation of the Khecarīvidyā with an explanation of its place in the Hatha Yoga traditions.

Sir James Mallinson, 5th Baronet of Walthamstow (born 22 April 1970) is a British Indologist, writer, translator and nobleman.