James (Jim) Mallinson read Sanskrit for his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford from 1988 to 1991, then took an MA at SOAS in South Asian Studies, with ethnography as his primary subject, for which he wrote a dissertation on Indian asceticism. He returned to Oxford in 1995 for doctoral studies under the supervision of Professor Alexis Sanderson. His thesis was a critical edition of a haṭhayoga text called Khecarīvidyā, and his work on that was the first step in a nearly three-decade-long career whose main research focus has been the history of haṭhayoga and its practitioners, primarily through text-critical study but also through art-historical materials and fieldwork among ascetics in India today. He has spent several years living with Indian ascetics and, in 2013, was honored with the title of “Mahant” by the Rāmānandī Saṃpradāya at the Allahabad Kumbh Mela.

In addition to his work on yoga, from 2002–to 2008 Jim was a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he produced five volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry, including Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta (in Messenger Poems), the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (in two volumes entitled The Emperor of the Sorcerers) and some of the Kathāsaritsāgara (in two volumes entitled The Ocean of the River of Stories). He has published several articles on the history of yoga, four books on haṭhayoga texts (translations of the Gheraṇḍasaṃhitā and Śivasaṃhitā published by YogaVidya.com in 2005 and 2007, and two critical editions, The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha, Routledge 2007, and, with Péter-Dániel Szántó, The Amṛtasiddhi, and Amṛtasiddhimūla, EFEO 2021), and an anthology of texts on yoga (Roots of Yoga, with Mark Singleton, Penguin Classics, 2017). Many of his publications can be found on his academia.edu page.

From 2013 to 2023 Jim had the Sanskrit position at SOAS University of London before, in 2023, taking up the Boden chair of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford.