Chapter 7: On White People Co-opting Yoga - Who Is Wellness For?

I have been practicing yoga on and off since the age of thirteen, more than half my life. It was my entry point into the wellness world, outside of my sister. Like a calling—maybe an ancestral longing that I’ve had my entire life—as a child capsized in diasporic ambivalence, yoga and meditation felt like portals into a lost, ancient self.

Perhaps it was also the closest tangible understanding that I had to being South Asian. The impact of partition, colonization, and the liberation war of 1971 had created a deep void of understanding in my parents. I’ve felt their longing to be known, and their longing for a homeland, or self, or family that never existed in the first place. Dislocated from a sense of who they are, my parents’ unknowing of themselves was passed down to me, fed into an already unstable sense of self I had of being away from my homeland, in spaces that couldn’t comprehend what it meant to be Bangladeshi or Muslim. I carried my shame and my parents’ shame. I carried my mother’s shame for the violence she had experienced in her body, that she took out on my body, and all the unprocessed feelings she had of herself that were funneled into me. I carry the war my parents survived and the violence they and my entire family had to survive. These things don’t disappear within a family—they linger and then they can very easily turn into disease.

My mother was a terrible parent, though I don’t know how much of it is truly her fault. When you don’t have the resources to heal, how do you? In My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem speaks to this through the concept of reenactment: “This may seem crazy or neurotic to the cognitive mind, but there is bodily wisdom behind it. By reenacting such a situation, the person also creates an opportunity to complete whatever action got thwarted or overridden.”^[1] I don’t know if my mother was ever that hyperaware—her moods were dicey and her cuts were like the hooks of a machete. Sometimes it felt like she was hacking my heart, wanting a response. I would never succumb, I would take whatever physical violence I needed to take to walk another day toward my freedom, one I was plotting. But my mother always felt like she was fighting with her internal ghosts—the jinn, she fears, that haunt her.

I was born into a generation where marriage wasn’t forced on me in the way it has been for so many women before me, especially those of my cultural and religious background. I think this tendency to force women into marriage is a patriarchal flaw found across the world, and it’s a way of controlling women, by setting their value based on male perception of their worthiness. My mother was never given an understanding of her own worth, and I have always felt that I was feeding her most of my life force, my energy, my vitality. I don’t know much about my maternal grandmother, but I do know she was an orphan. When my mother would describe her, she would explain that she was someone who wasn’t emotional. I can see how that lack of felt love transmuted into my mother’s feelings of unworthiness. These patterns always find a way in the family like an untenable weed with roots that are obscured by the depth of the Earth. There are so many demons in my mother’s psyche that I don’t understand, but as I try to uncover her, to see her clearly, I discover how much has been shrouded either in the history of my family or by the passing of time.

Out of my whole life, I’ve spent about two years in my parents’ homeland, Bangladesh. I can speak the language, read and write it, and yet when my sister and I have asked for more, of understanding the lineage or culture, nothing was ever known or given. I’ve asked my father to archive his memories, and he does, poetic in his own way (he spent the entire time of the pandemic’s first year by translating two hundred never-translated-before Rabindranath Tagore poems), and he writes about his memories, slowly, but I can see how they’re like pushing blood out of a stone. Recently he told me his family moved to Bangladesh by accident, and that one entire part of his father’s family lives in India. Partition ruled the lines in the sand, and in 1947, my paternal grandfather was working for the postal service in what was to become Bangladesh. He decided to stay in West Bengal and not return to India, to his family, out of obligation to his work. I am one of the many children of the diaspora who don’t have any answers to the many lines that connect and divide their familial past, and my life’s work is decoding all of it.

This comes back to yoga only because there’s a responsibility (in literally the act and understanding of yoga) to hold multiple truths. “No man is to be judged by the mere nature of his duties, but all should be judged by the manner and the spirit in which they perform them,” writes Swami Vivekananda in Karma Yoga. “We shall find that the goal of duty, either from the standpoint of ethics or of love, is the same as in all the other yogas, namely, to attenuate the lower self so that the Higher Self may shine forth, and to lessen the frittering away of energies on the lower plane of existence so that the soul may manifest them on the higher planes.”^[2] To teach yoga in the West, especially if you are not of South Asian heritage, by definition means you are appropriating it. However, the conversation of yoga rarely furthers the dialogue of how do we deal with the mass co-opting of Indian culture? Especially when yoga itself is unknown to so many of the people it belongs to.

The continuation of teaching a sanitized history of yoga is dangerous on many levels. If your yogic practice doesn’t engage with the vast historical truths of yoga, if it doesn’t make space for how these ancient practices were vilified—only to be co-opted by nations that perpetuated in quashing this knowledge so that Indians would lose their access to be well—then you are participating in an exploitative and unethical practice that is inherently, by definition, anti-yoga.

In early 2021, India was hit with some of the most devastating Covid numbers, and writer Meera Navlakha wrote in gal-dem, “On 22 April—the same day Archana Sharma was trying to find oxygen for her struggling family—India reported the highest daily increase worldwide (314,835) in Covid-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic. Hours later, India’s capital, Delhi, announced there were just 26 vacant ICU beds across the city. And, despite India being the largest Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer in the world, the country is facing a dire shortage of jabs as it is forced to fulfill export contracts to the US and Europe.”^[3] She added to these harrowing details: “All Indians have left are each other and their social networks. It is a damning reflection of the country’s lack of preparedness to save its citizens.”

This is a civilization that had answers to its own wellness inquiries only to have them stolen and profited off of, while it now as a colonized society suffers. It’s not right. On top of this, so many of us, like my family and parents, are still in a process of grief absolutely rooted in the devastating impacts that colonization has had on migrants. A disconnection from the homeland has given so many of us a disconnection from self and therefore an understanding of who we are, which leads to both a philosophical and spiritual dilemma that continues to impact the well-being and psyche of my people.

Given the surge of Hindutva supremacy in India, a fascist-led movement, it is an urgent reminder that a holistic understanding of yoga—and therefore India—is immensely necessary. Yoga itself is a varied discipline compiled over thousands of years of thought that sometimes contradicts itself. Similar to the dynamics of racial segregation, caste was born out of Hinduism in India and is “one of the world’s oldest social hierarchies, ordering society based on purity laws. A person is born, raised, and dies in the caste their family is assigned to, with doctrines of karma and dharma justifying extreme differences in qualities of life,”^[4] writes my cofounder at Studio Ānanda (an online archive on wellness), Prinita Thevarajah. Given the growing instability across India, it’s important to understand that the origins of these ancient practices are still steeped in present-day atrocities. “Brahmin priests and teachers hold the highest status, and lower caste communities (considered ‘untouchables’) are made up of Dalits and indigenous Adivasi communities.”^[5] This is a living reality for Indians in India, and it’s important that we carry this understanding as we move toward global liberation.

Though caste was constitutionally abolished in 1950, “marginalization against lower caste communities has been historically consistent, with segregation, discrimination in opportunities, and a higher violence rate common against lower caste communities. Research estimates crimes against a Dalit person occur every 18 minutes, with 21 Dalit women being raped each week in an act of caste supremacy.”^[6] The last figures are the most jarring and go back to power and oppression used against femme bodies across the world.

“The right performance of the duties of any station in life, without attachment to results, leads us to the realization of the perfection of the soul,”^[7] writes Vivekananda. This dislocation from the truth of spirituality can be seen throughout the world. Muslims are misusing the words of the Qur’an from Saudi Arabia onward. Buddhist monks are killing Rohingyas in Myanmar. I’m not trying to moralize—humans, by nature, are flawed. This is why we must engage with ourselves holistically so that we can continue to tell the real societal truths that haunt us but need to be faced. This means all of us get to talk and all of us are required to listen, to each other. No voices are prioritized over others, so we have a chance at healing by telling the whole truth, our whole truths. We deserve to return to the people we were before we were told we were inherently wrong. We need to return to a time when we were invested in ourselves as people; when it mattered if you were a good person. If that time in history has never happened, why aren’t we all actively jumping toward that possibility? Is it just our unevolved and unchallenged nature holding us back? Or is it something more? Like our collective traumas?

*  *  *

Yoga originates from practical and personal teachings documented in the Vedas, which are “considered the most sacred and treasured spiritual texts of India,” but it is the handbook of the Upanishads (which contains over two hundred scriptures) where wisdom of the Vedas is transferred into personal and practical teachings. This practice was slowly refined and developed by the Brahmans and Rishis (mystic seers), and the most renowned of the yogic scriptures is the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, composed around 500 BCE. “Though it virtually ignores postures and breath control,” writes David Gordon White in “Yoga, Brief History of an Idea,” “devoting a total of fewer than ten verses to these practices. They are far more concerned with the issue of human salvation, realized through the theory and practice of meditation.”^[8]

Over the years interpretations of yoga have shifted, evolved, and changed, but at the foundation, White suggests, “Yoga is an analysis of the dysfunctional nature of everyday perception and cognition, which lies at the root of suffering, the existential conundrum whose solution is the goal of Indian philosophy.”^[9] Even still, this history is complicated. White also adds, “The gulf between yoga practice and yogi practice never ceased to widen over the centuries. In later, esoteric traditions, however, the expansion of consciousness to a divine level was instantaneously triggered through the consumption of forbidden substances: semen, menstrual blood, feces, urine, human flesh, and the like.” White explains the “menstrual or uterine blood, which was considered to be the most powerful among these forbidden substances, could be accessed through sexual relations with female tantric consorts. Variously called yoginis, dakinis, or dutis, these were ideally low-caste human women who were considered to be possessed by, or embodiments of, Tantric goddesses.”^[10] It’s a complicated history that dips in and out of tradition and focus, which is why it’s extremely interesting to track these shifts of perception that rely on caste in ritualized aspects as well.

Later “a new regimen of yoga called the ‘yoga of forceful exertion’ rapidly emerged as a comprehensive system in the tenth to eleventh century, hatha yoga is entirely innovative in its depiction of the yogic body as pneumatic, but also a hydraulic and a thermodynamic system.”^[11] This shows that as yogic principles shifted, discourse about evolution did as well. And yet, when the British rule began in 1773, according to sociologist and yoga practitioner Amara Miller of the Sociological Yogi, the hatha yogis “were associated with black magic, perverse sexuality (based in tantric philosophy), abject poverty, eccentric austerities, and disreputable, sometimes-violent behavior. The British government banned wandering yogis, trying to promote more ‘acceptable’ religious practices such as meditative Hinduism common among the educated and upper classes.”^[12] Meaning a quieter, more subsumed, version. These policies were supported, of course, by wealthier Indians who hoped assimilation would save them. “As the scope of colonial police powers grew in India, poor hatha yogis were increasingly demilitarized and forced to settle in urban areas where they often resorted to postural yogic showmanship and spectacle to earn money panhandling. From that point onward, “hatha yoga practices became associated with the homeless and poor, and were considered by both the British and Indians ‘not only inferior but parasitic on other, worthier expressions of yoga that foregrounded meditative traditions.’”^[13] It’s interesting to see how hatha yoga has been propagated in the West, completely devoid of any of this history of its tricky origins and complicated evolution.

Yet we must note these changes and adaptations in order to hold the multiple truths of these regions and understand South Asia more complexly. Swami Vivekananda was a Bengali Hindu monk and chief disciple of the nineteenth-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna, who was also a Bengali Hindu mystic. From his teachings, Vivekananda learned that all living beings were an embodiment of the divine self; therefore, service to God could be rendered by service to humankind, a beautiful and integral sentiment. “Our various yoga do not conflict with each other; each of them leads us to the same goal and makes us perfect; only each has to be strenuously practiced,” writes Vivekananda.^[14] I understand “strenuously practiced” as the diligence to continue evolving, to grow, to learn. And though there are many anti-casteist movements within Hinduism, it’s particularly pertinent for those who teach and engage with yoga in the West to understand that white supremacy and caste supremacy are interlinked and that yoga carries its own legacy of violence. To deny the past is to actually deny the total reality. We can’t keep living in these fractured interpretations of ourselves or our culture. Yoga has its own history that should be known by those who practice yoga. Much like our fascination with Greek or Roman mythology—how we interpret with reverence the cultures of Europe which details our attention is what I’m asking for. Yoga has evolved immensely and has had many different interpretations and schools of thought. It has depth that should be known.

*  *  *

I think how intriguing and beautiful it is that the very word Upanishad in Sanskrit is interpreted as “sitting down beside,” upa meaning “near,” ni as “down,” and shad as “to sit.” The translation bears an important remembrance. Jacques Derrida tells us that the word “archive” comes from the ancient Greek arkheion, meaning “the house of the ruler.” So, the audacity of historical authorship is such that the empire sustains a narrative of necessity. Without explaining how it plundered wealth, depleting colonized lands of their resources, only to feed their own bellies. This was done through cultural and spiritual warfare—erasing a society’s capacity to use its own knowledge is the domino slap of colonialism’s reach. So, remembrance is important, as is correcting relationship and behavior.

In the Preclassical stage, yoga was an amalgam of various ideas, beliefs, and techniques that often conflicted and contradicted one another. The Classical period is defined by Patanjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the first systematic presentation of yoga. When I lived in Montreal, I volunteered at a white-owned yoga studio. I can’t remember encountering one South Asian person in a class in the years I worked there, which is something that bothers me most about modern yoga—how much this healing modality has been stigmatized even within my own disparate communities, adding to the self-hatred that so many South Asians I know contend with. That violent severing from our cultures, a legacy known as Partition that by and large still hasn’t been faced by generations of people. One day, I was in a class with the owner of the studio, and she approached me and poked my belly. “You have a weak core,” she told me, coldly. “I know,” I said, embarrassed. That was it. She had no advice, no help—she decided it was completely normal to target the one South Asian (let alone only brown) person and humiliate them rather than give constructive feedback. I found this dismissiveness of my body an extension of whiteness, of the tonality of Bernier, who can only “categorize” other bodies. I would go on to cruelly punish my body for the next few years, obsessed with why I couldn’t just strengthen my core. All these white women could do it—what was wrong with my body?

“I think about Ayurveda . . . how there are different constitutions and what suits one may not suit another . . . but that too is part of our Indigenous wisdom, a variety of practices for all the different needs,” Lakshmi Nair said in an interview with Studio Ānanda.^* “What is colonizing about the way Western yoga is usually taught is that it treats all human bodies as if they were the same or based on some idealized human body . . . I think the Indigenous approach respects the vast diversity of creation while maintaining a grounding in the underlying Unity. The colonized viewpoint is kind of the opposite.”^[15]

This is perhaps the most depressing part of the whitefication of yoga. White bodies suddenly become the norm, while an ancient practice that was about purification of the soul to attain a sense of enlightenment and closeness to the divine has now been co-opted to become a physical practice about attaining a “hot bod.” The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it’s one of the most glaringly obvious cases. A couple of years ago, a white woman wrote a jeremiad of watching a bigger Black woman do yoga in an overwhelmingly white classroom. It felt violent, paternalistic, and fetishistic to not only speak of someone while you watch them under the guise of care, but then to write about it so unabashedly to gain sympathy for your unconscious whiteness. As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people seem to have to the other, always centering themselves in every narrative, is a very big problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga.

If white people spent more time humanizing themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity, as well. This means not treating us like we are the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy for the very definitions that were created by white people. All Black, Indigenous, and other people of color deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy.

If you are a white person who profits off yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment. Find trusted organizations and give at least a quarter of what you make to support on-the-ground work in India, either with Indian farmers or non-casteist communities that are working to protect land and water and culture. Make an effort to support organizations that are safeguarding farming rights and practices to be with the land, to help maintain its biodiversity. You must reinvest profit in the communities who have been robbed of it. There are always ways to give back, to create holistic structures of care that are oppositional to methods of extraction and depletion.

Things can change, but it takes a collective effort to actually shift society. “I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in The Serviceberry. It’s not about not using these modalities but, rather, about honoring where they come from, and creating a healed and equal relationship with them. “The currency in a gift economy is relationship, which is expressed as gratitude, as interdependence and the ongoing cycles of reciprocity,” Kimmerer writes. “A gift economy nurtures the community bonds which enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ as all flourishing is mutual. . . . Those who have to give to those who don’t, so that everyone in the system has what they need. It is not regulated from above, but derives from a collective sense of equity and accountability in response to the gifts of the Earth.”^[16]

This, I believe, is how Indians have viewed yoga. It was to share, to give, to teach. Of course, within that there were structures of power, but we have the ability to create yogic systems that are for all. That take into consideration trauma, such as rape and sexual abuse; or the consideration of community, investing in healing the community, not merely profiting from it. If we want to learn how to create good karma in the margins of colonization, outside of casteist rhetoric, at the very least we must start telling the truth about all of it.

So, are you being honest? What would it mean for us to live more honestly and in communion with each other?

Charles Eisenstein writes, “Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself which, yet, is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.”^[17] How do we become a culture that builds horizontally, with each other fully in mind? I guess we just start. Yoga is a good place to start to understand and believe in the duty we have to each other. The duty we have to our own collective evolutionary dance and motion.

Footnotes

* Studio Ānanda is an archive of wellness, as well as a social practice, co-founded by Prinita Thevarajah and me.