Indian PM Narendra Modi on Yoga Day
On the occasion of International Yoga Day 2021, I’m sharing a couple of excerpts from The Truth of Yoga.
Whatever the merits of acknowledging yoga as India's gift to the world, this message is entangled with politics. That's increasingly common in globalised yoga, with various political agendas now at play.
Several are discussed in the book, from campaigns against injustice to questions of cultural appropriation and decolonisation. The following both focus on power.
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WHAT’S APPROPRIATE?
After decades of commercialization, modern yoga is often detached from traditional roots. Yet it peddles its products with Sanskrit names and Indian symbols. This arouses strong feelings, especially online, where strident activists denounce those complicit in the sin of “cultural appropriation.”
Like many of humanity’s creations, yoga has evolved through a trade in ideas. However, some of this was subtly coercive. Modern forms of practice developed under British occupation. Toward the end of colonial rule, Indians used yoga to assert their own power, but they did so in ways that were often conditioned by foreign priorities, from the primacy of science to promoting fitness. The fundamental issue is not cultural exchange, but the way it occurred, since what is at stake is disrespect and exploitation.
Long before yoga was commoditized, plundering imperialists prized Indian resources, but not local knowledge. In an infamous “Minute on Education,” which sought to civilize the natives by teaching them in English, the British politician Lord Macaulay sneers: “I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
The legacy of this sort of arrogance adds to frustrations with globalized yoga. Decontextualized into a lifestyle for urban consumers, it suggests greedy Westerners take what they want while dismissing tradition. However, the backlash is often misleading. No matter how sincere modern critics might be, the notion of a pure and unadulterated yoga is illusory. Practices and theories have always been shared among diverse groups, from early interactions with Buddhists and Jains to fusions with Islam and Christianity.
Does that make it okay to post half-naked selfies that show off your handstands while breast-feeding infants? Either way, people do, accompanied by hashtags espousing “self-love.” There are also concerns about getting “yogic” tattoos with sacred images, or putting such images on mats that practitioners stand on. The very existence of a self-absorbed industry worth billions of dollars might well seem crass, or completely irrelevant, but decrying it does little to change it—or to defend “true yoga,” whatever that might be.
Meanwhile in India, the most famous yogi has colonized Patanjali, naming his business after the Yoga Sutra author. Baba Ramdev, a TV icon with millions of students, predicts that by 2025 his brand—selling everything from toothpaste to jeans—will eclipse all its rivals in “fast-moving consumer goods,” including Unilever, Nestlé, and Procter & Gamble. Patanjali’s dominance is already such that a search on Google Images brings up its products instead of a sage with a serpent’s tail. The company even sells “fairness cream” for skin whitening. So much for Patanjali’s yamas of truth and non-harming!
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POWER YOGA
Hindu nationalists are taking advantage of yoga’s popularity. In 2014, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, won United Nations backing for an International Day of Yoga, which is now held each year on June 21. This apparently innocuous event has insidious side effects, asserting ownership of yoga while promoting ideas about Hindu supremacy.
For the 2018 celebrations, in which one hundred thousand Indians took part in the largest-ever class, Modi marked the occasion by releasing cartoons of himself teaching postures. He also called yoga “one of the most special gifts given by the ancient Indian sages,” and “a key to fitness and wellness.” Neither of these priorities is ancient, and when foreigners pursue the same goals, they are roundly denounced for misappropriating yoga.
The Indian government makes dubious use of yoga history. A recent tourism campaign featured artwork of early modern backbends alongside the slogan: “Go back to 3000 BC, and get a healthier life.” There is no surviving evidence of any yogic practice from that era, let alone dhanurasana—which was first taught in texts in the fifteenth century with no reference to benefits. Although facts can be hard to establish, misleading dates serve political purposes, identifying yoga with a dehistoricized form of Hinduism.
The general aim is to turn back the clock as far as possible. Linking yoga to Vedic culture would make it Brahmanical from the beginning, not a parallel development. And if the Vedas were dated much earlier, preceding immigration from Central Asia, then the “Aryans” mentioned in texts would be indigenous. Connections to other traditions (such as those in Iran, whose name comes from arya) would mean that Indians moved west and not vice versa. This unproven theory repackages work by colonial scholars, who often venerated Aryans and their martial civilization.
These sorts of ideas drove the Nazi illusion that northern Europeans were direct descendants of this ancient master race. The Third Reich borrowed Indian symbols, distorting the meaning of the swastika, which stands for auspiciousness (the word itself combines su, “good,” with asti, “it is”—plus the suffix ka). Reversing the process, modern Hindu nationalism draws inspiration from National Socialism, and some early activists supported Hitler against the British Empire. Even today, he is revered in India for strong leadership, and Mein Kampf is still widely on sale.
Another 1920s treatise developed the doctrine of Hindutva, meaning “Hinduness.” The author, V. D. Savarkar, calls India the home of “a race” with its roots in the ancient Indus Valley. “The Hindus are not merely the citizens of the Indian state because they are united not only by the bonds of the love they bear to a common motherland but also by the bonds of a common blood,” Savarkar writes. Although India is nominally secular, this militant mentality defines it as Hindu, rallying mobs against beef-eating Muslims and other minorities.
Today’s Hindutva is often couched in subtler language. It helped Modi win power on a modernizing platform, with support from a nationwide group inspired by European fascists (the RSS, or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu voluntary network). Some of its ideas are unwittingly endorsed in yoga circles, especially regarding the timelessness of traditions, whose spiritual insights are so universal that they might be the basis of other religions. However appealing such theories might sound, they might also have sinister hidden agendas.
Further Reading
