 Yoga in its modern form is being studied academically by the School of Oriental and African Studies.The yoga scholar Mark Singleton notes that early British travellers who visited India considered yoga practitioners to be unpleasant, vagrants at best and libertines at worst.John Ovington in his "A Voyage to Suratt, In the Year, 1689" described them as "holy mendicants" who had a "sordid aspect"; he attributed their taking solemn vows to remain in strange postures all their lives as "Delusions of Satan".