I was part of the one-month residential “Young Instructor’s Course”. Both foreigners and Indians immersed themselves to gain mastery over yogic practice amongst urban-dwelling, mall-hopping, Brahminical Kannadigas, yet the Indian cretins, who received plenty of admonitions for not coming to class on time, were still awarded certificates at the end. It is said that these certificates are recognised internationally.

This was yoga of a different kind. After doing asanas for 10 years, I felt it was a waste of time. We were are asked to take permission from the teacher before going to the loo; we were told every morning to wear our uniform; where we were lectured about “good Indian culture”, we could not ask questions even though Guruji told us we have to “tear our teachers apart”; and where we were acquainted with our nationalist samskruti, I was amused to discover that if you want to be nationalist, at least be good at it. I wonder why yoga (which is undoubtedly Hindu) needs to be seen as “beyond religion” and “beyond asana“. The last time I remember reading a book about Hinduism and yoga, I did not read about the absence of a god heading this universe and the presence of worldly individuals claiming to speak on behalf of Patanjali.

My experiences with the right-wing have been astoundingly bad over the years. With Swarajya magazine, I learnt that centre-right and socially liberal perspectives are a far cry from what actually goes on in the making of a political entity: that no matter what posturing and “persecutions with the pen” (à la Vivekananda) are thought through and enacted upon, the wisdom that appears extraordinary and full of modern solutions are tied to a capitalism where the poor are excluded and where minorities are sidelined. For example, Guruji had announced, “In the 19th century, there was one Narendra who brought yoga to the world, his name was Vivekananda. In the 21st century, another Narendra is revolutionising the way yoga is propagated. He is Modiji.” More applause. I could hardly believe my ears. “You must stand up for the national anthem and show respect for the national flag,” they demanded.

Yet, S-VYASA was tolerant only in that the dummies did not understand that cultural studies has rearranged the ways in which culture is understood. As I spoke to them on Mrinalini Sebastian’s essay on Understanding Culture, which provides that useful analytical framework through which culture can be problematised, the students (not teachers) asked their questions: Why don’t you go to Pakistan? I said, “Whose culture are we talking about? Are we all Hindus? If Guruji says Hinduism is not a religion, why does he cry hoarse about divinity and compare Hinduism to Christianity and Islam?”. Throughout the lectures by  this scientist with several accomplishments to his name, we were told the West is bad and the East is good and that all Westerners are white, do drugs and that Indians need to help them out of various addictions.

The Odia “yogi” who was taught us asanas throughout the 29 days and who had told us to follow him as if he were Modi, could not perform even a simple padahastasana with ease. I felt like crying, for yoga will always be the asana and no matter what the BJP may think yoga to be, true asana practitioners will know that yoga can be disembedded from its religious appeal and contemporised for a growing population tired of political rhetoric. Patanjali would agree.

Dhruv Ramnath is a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies pursuing a Master’s degree in social anthropology. He had been primarily a freelance filmmaker, photographer and journalist before he worked with two media organisations in Bangalore

Courtesy: kafila.online
 

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Representation Image

The matter was brought to the notice of Sanjay Kumar, Principal Secretary to state Chief Minister Raghubar Das. He asked the police to provide security to the girl.

Acting on the instructions, Ranchi Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Kuldeep Dwivedi sent a police team to meet her, and now she has been provided two security guards — one male and one female, according to the police.

Rafia Naaz, a resident of Doranda locality in Ranchi, ekes out a living for her family by teaching Yoga. She is the eldest among her siblings. She is also doing her M.Com from a local college.

She came into the limelight after she shared the stage with Yoga Guru Ramdev in the city some time back.

Her family members are scared of threats issued by the members of her own community. She was threatened with Fatwa if she continued with her Yoga teaching.

“My problem is with members of both communities. On one hand I am asked not to teach Yoga and on the other, I am asked to change my name so that people do not hesitate to learn Yoga from me” Rafia told reporters.

She said: “I will continue to do Yoga and teach Yoga till the end of my life.”

Courtesy: Two Circles
 

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Yoga is not a culturally homogenous, all-Hindu, Vedic tradition, as is often portrayed by revivalist demagogues and those who have set up a raucous campaign to reclaim its roots. It is, in fact, a liberal, eclectic tradition that absorbed freely from Buddhist, Jain, even Sufist ascetic practices.

Roots of Yoga, a new academic work by renowned yoga scholars Mark Singleton and James Mallinson, is an intensive study of over 100 core texts on the subject. These date from 1000 BCE to the 19 century CE, from early Upanishads and Mahabharata to Jnaneswari and Hawz al-Hayat (The Spring of Life), and include rare texts in several languages, including Tamil, Avadhi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Pali, Tibetan, Arabic and Persian.

The book, five years in the making and launched last week by Abhyas Trust in Delhi, punctures some of the popular myths around yoga. To begin with, there is no evidence that yoga started as a religious tradition.

“Yoga was a sort of floating technology between various religious systems,” said Singleton. “The Dattatreyayogasastra (13CE), for instance, says that yoga can be practised by anyone irrespective of religion or caste, ascetics, Brahmins, Buddhists, Jains, tantrics and even materialists.”

Dattatreyayogasastra has some pithy things to say about religious figureheads in “ochre robes” claiming to be great yogis, while lacking practice, faith and wisdom – “men like that do not practise yoga but attain their ends through words alone, one should shun those who wear religious garb”.

What inspired the book, Singleton said, was the desire to relook at the hegemony of a handful of texts, mostly Patanajil’s Yogasutras (2CE), in the modern recap of yoga history. “There is a vast range of thinking on yoga through different texts and they don’t necessarily repeat the Yogasutras,” said Singleton. He and Mallinson are also part of an ambitious ongoing five-year research project at SOAS, a university in London, on the evolution of one of the branches of yoga – hatha yoga.
 

Another widely-held theory is that yogas are a Vedic practice, traceable back to 1500 to 1000 BCE. This is part of a common revivalist tendency to push the antiquity of knowledge traditions further back in history to give them greater importance. Some wishful thinkers in fact push it as far back as the Indus Valley Civilisation (3300-1300 BCE), pointing to the Pasupati seal that depicts a seated figure and was discovered at Mohenjo-daro. As the book points out, there are images in Mesoamerica that resemble yogic asanas more than the seal.

The book also traces what is now referred to as yoga, particularly dhyanayoga (meditation), to a much later period – 500 BCE, also the period when Buddhism began its rise to prominence. The Vedas had certain elements of mysticism, posture and breath control critical in yoga, but by no means does that make for evidence of a systematic yogic practice in Vedic era, say the authors.

It was a bunch of renunciant ascetics called Sramanas (strivers) seeking nirvana and moksha (liberation) around 500 BCE whose practices created the earliest template for yoga, though they did not call it that. “These groups, which probably developed independently of the Brahmanical Vedic traditions, but were influenced by them to varying degrees, included Buddhists, Jains and the lesser-known Ajivikas,” says the book. Ajivika was an ascetic sect that challenged the Brahminical grip on Hinduism.
 

Buddhist practices, texts and deities indeed exerted a strong influence in the shaping of yoga, taking its early practice, under other names, to Tibet and Sri Lanka. “The first major text on hatha yoga is Amritasiddhi, an 11th century tantric Buddhist work,” said Mallinson, who has researched extensively on extreme practices in yoga and written a book on the esoteric tantric practice of Khecharividya.

Research now shows that the Buddhist Yogacara school and its texts predate Yogasutra by two centuries. And the use of several asanas and mudras “bear a close similarity to ascetic practices first mentioned in the latter half of the first millennium BCE, shortly after the time of the Buddha”.
“In the second millennium, the new techniques of haṭha yoga began to be incorporated into the vedantic mainstream, and new texts were composed – such as the so-called Yoga Upaniṣads – which assimilated these technologies and presented them as part and parcel of the tradition,” said Singleton. “Previously, authorities like Shankara had rejected yoga as a spiritual path. Increasingly, hatha yoga became accepted as a practice suitable to householders rather than just renunciants.”

The vedantic appropriation of yoga reached a high point with raja yoga, popularised by Swami Vivekananda towards the end of the 19th century. It combined vedanta, yoga and western “spiritual” techniques. It is the heady mix of yoga, spiritualism and nationalism propagated by him that makes him the favourite philosopher and yogi of the Right-Wing establishment.
 

 

Yoga has, over the last couple of years, been personally pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Yoga Day spectacles on June 21, the drive to ensure it greater place in academia and institutions, and the aggressive stance on issues taken by babas and yogis have ensured that the tradition has now acquired a muscular nationalist profile.

Alongside, the US-based Hindu American Foundation has been protesting what it calls the cultural appropriation of yoga by the West. It accuses the Western countries of tearing the tradition from its Hindu roots. There are an equal number of Christian and Islamist organisations that see yoga as a Hindu practice. Singleton and Mallinson themselves were at the receiving end of blunt comments at the 2017 Jaipur Literature Festival: what are two white guys doing writing on yoga? They are often asked confused questions about yoga’s religious roots and antiquity.

But yoga itself has been robustly open to the idea of taking diverse cultures into its cultures throughout its history. “You often find greater details in some of the Persian texts on yoga than in Sanskrit,” said Mallinson. “In fact, the first illustrated manuscript on yoga, Bahr al-Hyat (Ocean of Life), was commissioned by Prince Salim, later Emperor Jahangir.”
 

Courtesy:Scroll.in.

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Image: Danish Ismail/Reuters

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. In recent years, the nation has made international headlines by creating a national ministry for yoga.

It has promoted yoga tourism; staged mass yoga practices and Indian officials have even proposed yoga as a national solution to an astonishing range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer.

AYUSH, the Indian ministry responsible for yoga, has recently gotten into the music business, releasing Yog Geet as the official song for this year’s International Day of Yoga.

But, as yoga has gone global, the cultural meanings of yoga have spiralled far and wide. While Indian politicians have suggested that yoga will tame rates of sexual assault, US lawmakers have tried to ban “yoga pants” under indecent exposure laws. Yog Geet will have to compete internationally with dozens of yoga-inspired albums in the West.

Yoga’s global popularity is useful for the Indian state, which uses it to employ soft power. But this popularity can be a double-edged sword. Identifying yoga as “Indian” may increasingly be an uphill battle.

In the ongoing battle over the question of “who owns yoga,” one of the most interesting trends has been the emerging voice of the Indian diaspora. Artists and writers of Indian ancestry are offering new and often provocative points of view on yoga’s origins, its meanings, and its cultural work in a globalizing world.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi performs yoga during World Yoga Day in Chandigarh, India, June 21, 2016. Ajay Verma/Reuter

The Indian American artist Chiraag Bhakta, who goes by the pseudonym of *Pardon My Hindi, has made visually stunning installations about yoga. These works invite viewers to reflect on the racial and economic hierarchies of globalising yoga.

His 2009 artwork #whitepeopledoingyoga formed part of a recent Smithsonian Museum exhibition on yoga and visual culture. It collects decades of magazine covers, posters, and pictures of yoga in the West. Covering a towering wall, these images loom over the viewer – asking us to contemplate how small images become part of larger patterns of cultural power.

#WhitePeopleDoingYoga

In #whitepeopledoingyoga, stereotypes of South Asia as an otherworldly place abound. Deities both exotic and available for Western use, press in on the viewer. So too do histories of Western commercialisation. Viewers of #whitepeopledoingyoga are asked to think about who has made money from the global popularity of yoga – and who has not.

Pardon My Hindi writes in his artist’s statement accompanying the piece:

In the end, I feel compelled to draw parallels with industrial colonization by the same dominant voice that is now adding another conquest to its collection. Meet the new founders of YOGA™.Yet not all of the Indian diaspora has been quite as critical of the circuits of globalisation and consumerism that have brought contemporary yoga around the world. Others have, instead, seen that relationship as a source of possibility.

This approach appears in novels like those of the writer Bapsy Jain, whose Indian heroine Lucky uses her training in yoga to find the superpowers she needs to survive a life of global crime and cutthroat capitalism in the US.

People practise yoga at a glass sightseeing platform ahead of the International Day of Yoga, on the outskirts of Beijing. Chinese Stringer Network/Reuters

Blending chick lit with murder mystery, Jain’s work presents yoga as a powerful tool for Indian women navigating stormy seas of romance and business. In such fiction, yoga is not so much a practice that opposes consumer culture. Instead, it becomes a practice that helps an individual survive the often nasty search for profit.

Other writers from the Indian diaspora have sought to use yoga-themed popular fiction as a way to promulgate particular Indian philosophies and mythologies. The writer Mohan Ashtakala, who identifies himself as a Hindu priest based in Canada, recently published an adventure novel in this vein called The Yoga Zapper (2015).

This time-travel adventure dramatises a perfect past where yogis meditated in harmony with the grand principles of the cosmos. This ideal, the author suggests, can be found both in South Asian scriptures and in Western fantasies.These works from the Indian diaspora all, in their different ways, draw attention to the role of “India” in shaping yoga. They speak out against the potential exploitation of Indian cultural capital for white Western gain.

They develop their own stories, in which yoga plays a part in a globalised commercial world. And they remind us that the wild worlds of imagination, superpower, and fantasy are part of how India has contributed to the yoga of today.

(Author is Fellow, Department of Gender, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Culture, History and Language, Australian National University)

Courtesy: The Conversation

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