"The colonial world, is a world
divided into compartments" - Franz Fanon
"Recognizing the radical differences
that are part of yoga's history can open up new possibilities beyond the limits
of our current conceptual categories." - Carol Horton
While many teachers
and practitioners in the North American yoga scene have a very ahistorical
understanding of yoga, learning its history, as Carol Horton points out in her
book Yoga PH.D, can reveal how
diverse yoga practices have been. It's liberating been liberating for my own
personal practice to realize that yoga is so much more than physical exercise. What is typically practiced in North America, or Turtle
Island (to use a pre-colonial name for this land) is an extraordinarily
different yoga from the practice Sri Patanjali writes about in the Yoga Sutra,
or the practices of the early Hatha yogis during the Tantric (medieval) India.
The modern hatha yoga that was exported from India to Turtle Island in the
twentieth century came into being during British colonial rule in India, and in
many ways modern hatha yoga was a response to British colonization.
When Swami Vivekananda,
the man credited with bringing yoga to the West, said that all the mud on the
bottom of the Indian Ocean could not balance the filth that had been thrown at
India, it was not an exaggeration. In order to justify their colonization of
India, the British employed racist and orientalist narratives that created a
social, cultural, political and religious hierarchy with European Christians on
top, and Indian 'heathens' at the bottom. Years of political, cultural and
religious humiliation eventually led a number of Indians, including Swami
Vivekananda, Ram Mohan Roy and Mohandas K. Gandhi to adopt a Hindu Nationalist
stance.
What's
interesting to note, however, is that both the concept of a Hindu and India as
a unified nation-State were colonial constructs. India had never been a united
country until it was part of the British Empire, and even during British
colonialism there were semi-autonomous kingdoms within British India. There was
also no mention of Hinduism prior to British colonialism. Hindu was the Persion
name for the Indus Valley region (located in present day Pakistan) as well as
the people living there. In the eighteenth century, Europeans used the term
Hindu to refer to non-Europeans; members of non-Abrahamic religions were termed
heathens. Eventually Hindu and heathen merged to refer to anyone who wasn't
Muslim, Christian or Jewish.
When European
scholars began examining the religious beliefs and practices of 'Hindus' (a
homogenization of many, many distinctly different groups) they turned to the
beliefs of the Brahmin caste to construct a religion based on a European
Judeo-Christian model. As a result, there was a strong emphasis on Sanskrit and
yogic texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutra were singled out and
romanticized by European scholars to be far more influential than they actually
were at the time. Traditional Hatha yoga texts and traditions were looked down
upon and ostracized by both Brahmins and Europeans, who were not fond of the
more violent, ash-covered ascetics. Hatha yoga, a product of the Tantra period,
was viewed as source and symbol of India's degeneracy.
Hindu
nationalists such as Swami Vivekananda borrowed from European scholars a
romanticized, Brahmin-centered understanding of Hinduism, which they argued was
India's greatest strength and made them spiritually superior to Europeans. To
reclaim India's glory, Hindus had to return to the Brahmin-centered Raja yoga
practices. With this in mind, Swami Vivekananda arrived at the 1893 World
Parliament of Religions in Chicago uninvited with two primary goals: To
propagate the wisdom of Indian spiritual tradition and to combat the crushing
poverty of the Indian people. In India, Vivekananda's ideas were a stark
contrast to the colonial narratives being taught in schools that presented
Hindus as a weakling race that deserved to be dominated.
In nineteenth
century Europe, physical strength was equated with moral and spiritual
superiority. In Hindu Nationalist movements physical, bodybuilding activities
came to be seen as a way for Indian individuals and society to rise up out of
their cultural and political slump and vanquish their European colonizers.
Swami Vivekananda was a strong supporter of the physical culture movement in
India, arguing that a strong body is essential to achieving enlightenment. With
time campaigns of militant physical resistance began to operate out of local
gyms, focusing on Indianized forms of exercise that combined yoga asana and
pranayama with modern bodybuilding, increasingly referred to as 'yoga'.
The ultimate
merging of bodybuilding practices such as Suryanamaskar (sun salutations) with
yoga came in the 1930s when Sri Krishnamacharya, a Sanskrit scholar with a
particular focus on the Yoga Sutras, was invited to teach at Mysore palace. The
physical culture movement had a strong following in Mysore in the 1930s, when
Sri Pattabhi Jois and B.K.S. Iyengar studied under Krishnamacharya, and as
result the schools of yoga they founded and shared in the West have a strong
physical emphasis. Krishnamacharya claimed the hatha yoga he taught to have a
direct lineage with the ancient, Raja yoga texts he had studied. This myth that
the physical, modern hatha yoga practice spread around the globe by Iyengar and
Jois has direct lines back to the Yoga Sutra, or even the Vedas, continues to
be prominent today.
The yoga that I
teach, that most of us in Turtle Island practice today, is in part a product of
British colonialism in India. That is not to say that the yoga we practice
isn't yoga or isn't Indian, however there are Orientalist myths that persist in
our practice today. We need to decolonize our understanding of Hinduism as a
singular tradition and begin to talk about Hinduisms. We need to explore
non-Brahmin-centric yoga practices such as traditional Tantric, hatha yoga and
pay those traditions the respect we usually save for Raja yoga. We need to
realize that Jois and Iyengar are products of a particular time and place, and
that their teachings are not ancient, timeless pieces of wisdom. We need to move
beyond the binary of everything Eastern being inherently wise, perfect and
static and everything Western being devoid of any spiritual knowledge or
content. We need to embrace the fact that yoga is and has been many different
things to many different people and will continue to shift and change with
time.
For more
information see
Yoga PH.D. by Carol Horton
Yoga Body by Mark Singleton
"Orientalism
and the Modern Myth of 'Hinduism'" by Richard King
Orientalism and Religion by Richard King
"Ghosts ofYoga's Present and Past" by Prachi Patankar