Yoga's Colonial Past and Present
Note: This was first published on Apr 21, 2021.
In Southpaw episode 65 β "History of Eugenics & Fascism in Health, Wellness, and Music," we covered fascism's history in fitness and wellness. We also spent some time on yoga and how much of its origin story, as presented to the West, is myth and Orientalism. Afterward, an Indian listener and activist sent us this:
Hey, Sam. I'm a big fan of your work. I saw your tweet about yoga and thought you might find an actual Indian perspective on it interesting. So, I'm taking the liberty of writing to you about this.
What Westerners call yoga is, in fact, a physical practice heavily derived from Swedish calisthenics fused with certain schools of upper-caste Indian spiritualism. This sort of neocolonial product was always an orientalist project with active participation from (erstwhile) Indian comprador castes. The same compradors now represent Indian perspectives as definitive and all-encompassing, such as the idea that yoga is a common daily practice in India.
For most of its history, it was not so. It was an upper-caste practice ever since the days of the Theosophists. It was then mythologized and sold to the public in the 20th century as part of the nationalist (Hindu supremacy) project, which sought to hide, among other things, the class and caste conflicts at the heart of the Indian social realities. This leads directly to the love that fascists like Modi and his government have for yoga as a catch-all for the Indian brand. They also invest heavily in this through things like the International Day of Yoga. And the talk of "decolonizing" by upper castes who migrated to the West and now cosplay decolonizing is really a travesty. They uphold caste and class disparities and Hindu supremacy in their real interactions and investments back home while hoping to gain cultural capital through "decolonizing" in their specific business areas.
In other words, yoga is part of the colonial project of upper castes trying to maintain power in India. Its commodification in the West is the logical extension of its origins in 19th-century orientalist projects with the same collaborators and beneficiaries who now pretend to stand for "decolonization" in other spaces.
Part of what colonialism and now neo-colonialism do is to take your own past and then warp it for control and profit. Perhaps yoga being too "white" or for the elites isn't by accident but by design. But where do we go from here?
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