Decolonizing Yoga

Let’s talk, for a minute, about decolonizing yoga.  What might that mean?

To some, it implies racial/cultural fundamentalism:  Yoga, they would argue, originated in the Indian subcontinent and is the rightful possession of inhabitants of India and their descendants.  In addition, this argument goes, yoga is culturally Indian, inextricably linked with a religion called Hinduism.  Neither those without Indian heritage, nor those who do not practice this religion, have any right to teach or practice yoga; they are appropriators, pretenders, and must be cleansed.

This may seem like an exaggeration — far from it.  This is the exact party line currently being propounded by the government of Narendra Modi, his favored gurus and yoga entrepreneurs, and his backers in the neofascist Rashtriya Svayamvak Sangh (RSS).

But perhaps this kind of “decolonization” is not the only one; perhaps there are other perspectives.  Setting aside the question of where yoga originated or the syncretic and globalized nature of contemporary yoga practice, what happens if we pull on the thread of “Hinduism” and its relation to both yoga and India?

The word hindu is an exonym; it derives from the Farsi word for the people who live in the Indus Valley:  Hindustan.  It received scattered use in the Mughal era to distinguish members of various indigenous Indian sects from their Muslim colonizers; neither the word nor the concept as it is now understood have any currency prior to the Raj.  The word came to be used as a rallying cry by nationalist Indians in the fight for independence; and it entered English as a blanket term for the religion of the colonized people.

“Hinduism,” thus, is a product of colonization.  There is no evidence that people living in India had any sense of religious identity prior to English colonization; there were, rather, a welter of local deities, family practices, castes and subcastes to which individuals owed allegiance and which determined and signified family, ritual, linguistic and class identities.  Prior to colonization, there was no concept of “Hinduism” because there was no need for such a concept.

In the postcolonial era, however, the concept has continued to live on.  It is the ideological doctrine of the Modi regime:  Hindutva, “Hinduness.”  It is in the name of Hindutva that up to 2000 people died in rioting in Gujarat, when Modi was governor there; in the name of Hindutva that the Babri Mosque, on the site of the mythological birthplace of the Indian culture hero Ram, was destroyed by mobs in 1992, egged on by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Why did “Hinduness” live on after Indian independence?  It was kept alive, in large part, by the above-mentioned RSS, a paramilitary Indian nationalist organization founded before independence in explicit homage to the Nazi Party.  This is perhaps an appropriate moment to remind ourselves that Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, was a member of the RSS.  Godse had his copy of the Bhagavad Gitā in his breast pocket at the time; he performed the act in the name of Hindutva.  “Hinduism” was kept alive not as a religious idea, but as an alternate image of India:  Rather than the inclusive, secular, peaceful modern independent India of Gandhi’s vision, India as an exclusive, racially stratified, theocratic, warlike nation state.

That was the vision that inspired Godse.  Much as John Wilkes Booth was inspired, not by a dream of rebellion, but by an alternate vision of what America is:  a theocratic, racist, slaveholding country, not a Union but a Confederacy.  That was the vision that inspired Booth to put a bullet in the back of Lincoln’s head.  And just as these two images of America have struggled for its soul these last 150 years, the RSS has kept alive its image of an India in which only one religion is allowed, in which cows may not be killed, in which class is predetermined by birth, dialect, and, yes, skin color — for of course the Sanskrit word translated “caste” in English is varna, “color”; and members of “lower” castes in India can immediately be recognized by their dark skin.

Perhaps in this context we will be less surprised that BJP members performed fire ceremonies in support of Donald Trump during the American elections of 2016; Game Recognize Game.

It might not be pushing the analogy between the two countries too far, indeed, to propose that what “Hinduism” is in India, “whiteness” is in America.  “Whiteness” has functioned over the centuries in this immigrant nation as an endlessly elastic signifier.  Irish people were commonly considered black until sometime in the late 19th Century, and successive waves of immigrants have been stripped of their ethnicity since then and added to the melting pot of “whiteness.”  All the while, the word, and the concept, have functioned to maintain a socioeconomic gradient in American society, a dividing line between those who have political representation and those who don’t, between those the police protect and those they imprison, between subject and object of the American experiment.  Just so with “Hinduism.”

In India under the Raj, “Hinduism” had a dual function. First, as mentioned, it served to cohere a national identity in resistance to colonial rule.  But there was strategy, also, in what was and was not considered “Hindu.”  Muslims, first of all, were excluded, even if their families had been living in India for three centuries, even if they suffered just as many or more English brutalities.  But “Hinduism” was also used as a tool of cleansing.  Everything in Indian culture that was incomprehensible to prudish technocratic Victorian sensibilities could now be excluded from the national identity.  Magic, Tantra, snake worship, Animism, Buddhism, Jainism; all these perfectly Indian religious phenomena have been excised from the mainstream definition of “Hinduism.”  This includes, of course, the practices of the very lower caste people who, like “non-white” people in America, are essential for their useful labor but whose labor must be kept cheap in order for the economy to function, and who therefore must be denied political representation.

It is in this frame we should view events like Naxalite uprisings or campaigns for Dalit representation — the BJP has recently outlawed the very word “Dalit,” as well as denying material assistance to Dalits who are not “Hindu.”

The vision of “Hinduism” propounded by India’s far-right is a byproduct of colonialism in another way also:  It is derived, by dark paths, from the Orientalist exoticising perennialist discourse of proto-fascist ideologues like René Guenon and Julius Evola.  The phrase used within India is sanatana dharma, “the eternal way,” which includes normative religious practices, racial beliefs and class structure, all of which are claimed to be an unchanging tradition stretching back beyond written history, without internal conflict, input from other cultures or change in response to changing conditions.  We probably don’t need to point out how the romantic and Orientalist vision of yoga history still current among most American practitioners plays directly into this fundamentalist ideology.

Sociologists offer a distinction which might be useful to us here:  Between “external colonies” and “internal colonies.”  External colonies are those in which one country invades and occupies another, extracting its resources and enslaving its people; internal colonies are situations in which one easily-defined population extracts the same benefits from another, within a single country, through mechanisms of racism and oppression, by denying that population access to political representation.

Bearing this useful distinction in mind, we might consider again the question of how to decolonize yoga.  And we might begin to see that the Orientalism and cultural appropriation which is rightly criticized in American yoga — the tacky deity images, the insipid tabla beats, the ill-understood Sanskrit terminology — are not only cultural symbols drained of meaning and looted from their land of origin, but also dog whistles equivalent to hanging the Confederate flag on the studio wall.  That decolonizing yoga might mean re-acknowledging the contributions of India’s oppressed internal colonies:  Acknowledging Tantra, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Bauls and Sufis; acknowledging the contributions of Dalits and other “tribal” peoples of India; acknowledging Muslim contributions; and yes, even acknowledging the extent to which contemporary yoga incorporates elements of English and American physical cultures.  And above all, critiquing the insidious and totalizing discourse that would have us believe that any tradition is unchanging, that any aspect of human life is outside history, that any community is exempt from internal struggle and self-contradiction, that cultural or physical practices are the exclusive property of one race, creed, or country.

Touch Fucking Moonflower

2020