Surya namaskar, the sun salutation now at the heart of modern yoga, has ancient roots in South Asia, but its systematic form is much newer. The first systematic presentation appeared in 1938 in The Ten-Point Way to Health, written by Pratinidhi Pant, the Rajah of Aundh, in what is now Maharashtra. He did not claim to invent it, presenting it as an age-old method he had refined in line with modern science and his own practice. Sun salutations were once linked to chanting to the rising sun and resembled traditional wrestling exercises. The Rajah promoted the sequence as physical education in local schools. Meanwhile, bodybuilders such as K V Iyer blended hatha yoga with European training, and nationalist movements saw physical fitness as a way to resist colonial rule. Yoga as a physical practice owes more to this early twentieth-century mix than many practitioners realise.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.