That's not the only demand from this cultural appropriation mythicist, but it's the first, in
this piece:
If you don't like white people, stop going to a white yoga class.
First disclaimer. I'm not a yogi. I don't practice yoga to feel #blessed or to find my inner chakra.
That's good to hear, because chakras don't exist.
This is primarily because, as a brown girl raised Hindu, to me practising yoga is much more than regularly attending $20 classes wearing trendy activewear.
Yoga in Hindu traditions is more than physical exercise. It is a multifaceted philosophy, medicine system and way of life. The asanas, or 'poses', that people perform when they go to their local class are one part of several other practices – including mediation, abstention and liberation – that are considered as a philosophical school in Hinduism.
We should care....because why?
That isn't to say somehow that yoga belongs only to Hindus or to all Hindus. There are many caste and class-based critiques of yoga in India and Indian diasporas which say that yoga has often been used as a tool by communities with existing power to project a certain image of what it means to be Indian or Hindu at the expense of minority and oppressed voices.
These arguments aside - it is undeniable that yoga has Hindu roots.
We should care....because why?
The practice of yoga in western countries for white audiences began in the 1960s when Indian yoga gurus sold yoga as a way to fill a perceived gap in their audience's spirituality.
Chiraag Bhaktha, a.k.a Pardon My Hindi, documented a history of yoga products and advertisements from the 1960s to '80s in his installation '#whitepeopledoingyoga', which exemplified the 'white-fication' of yoga through images of Executive Yoga, Unisex Yoga and even Christian Yoga.
Yoga, a spiritual practice with Hindu roots, has since been distorted into something more palatable for white audiences – a way to exercise and connect with one's spirituality. Whether marketed as an exercise class or a way to connect with your spiritual self, the commodification of yoga in a way that is entirely dismissive or ignorant of its roots or connections to an existing religion is appropriation at its worst. Bhaktha puts it simply in his artist statement:
Why is copying an idea and modifying it morally bad? Are we just supposed to accept that it is?
"The act of selectively choosing what works in popular Western contexts, while ignoring aspects of yoga's core philosophy and historic practice is telling. It shows an ironic attachment of one's ego to a desire for ownership over an ancient practice of material denouncement that emerged from an altogether different, South Asian tradition."
Though, to this Hindu girl who migrated to Australia in the 1990s, the appropriation of yoga by western audiences goes further. It exists alongside a wider ignorance about Hinduism and South Asian culture which, when you've spent a fair amount of your formative years being othered, can hit home hard.
In many western countries, Hinduism is treated as a mystic and ancient tradition and India as magical - ignoring the fact that Hinduism is a living, breathing contemporary religion practised by millions of people in their everyday lives around the world, including a huge Indian diaspora in Australia.
The history of colonisation in India means that the practice of yoga in countries with colonial ties, like Australia,
Holy shit this is offensive.
Australia did not colonise India.
Australia was colonised by the same people that colonised India.
can never truly be a friendly exchange.
There's nothing to exchange. Indian people do not own the idea of yoga and they have no more moral claim to it than anyone else.
In fact, during their colonial rule, the British banned certain practices of yoga which they perceived as threatening and 'less acceptable' Hindu practices. As a policy of conciliation towards some aspects of Indian culture was pursued by the British in the later years of their rule, the Brits promoted a re-appropriated more physical 'modern' yoga which is more akin to the postural yoga taught in many classes in Australia today.
We should care....because why?
Given most classes are taught by white women, and most ads you see for yoga classes or yoga wear feature white women, white women have become the embodiment of yoga in Australia. As a Hindu woman, this places me as the "other" in a culture that is mine.
You don't own yoga culture and you have no moral claim to police its use.
As South Asian American Perspectives on Yoga in America (SAAPYA) put it brilliantly in their short film 'We are not Exotic, We are Exhausted', such portrayals of yoga can be ostracising and excluding to South Asians who are trying to navigate a dual Western and South Asian identity, especially in the context of people regularly confusing Hindu and Hindi, white people wearing bindis to bush doofs and t-shirts with images of Ganesh and Shiva on them. It also furthers the economic exploitation of the colonised by the colonisers - landing the profits from a practice that has been appropriated from the colonised in the pockets of the colonisers.
"Economic exploitation". Xena have mercy.
Sure, there are yoga teachers in western societies who have studied Hindu teachings in their certified yoga teacher courses. Critically analysing your yoga practice isn't undermining the years these yogis might have spent dedicated to learning this form of exercise, art, lifestyle – whatever it may mean to them. It's about questioning whether your practice of yoga is claiming space away from people of colour to whom yoga is more than a part of their daily routine – it's a part of their cultural and religious identity.
"Claiming space away". Xena have mercy. How can white people doing yoga take space away from you doing yoga? Has somebody put a gun to your head and outlawed what you want to do?
It's about considering whether you can practice yoga without spiritually harvesting
"Spiritually harvesting". Xena have mercy.
a culture and religion that is not yours
That's because culture and religion do not belong to anyone. They're not yours, either.
when you have no deeper understanding, or desire to understand, the historical and social roots of the culture yoga comes from.
We should care....because why?
And it's about considering whether your casually saying a few namastes at the end of your yoga class feeds into the commodification of Hindu spirituality that then makes it OK for people to Instagram memes such as 'Namaste away from me', to publish a yoga book as a white woman called 'Namaslay', and to make people of South Asian and Hindu identity feel exoticised and misunderstood.
Namaslaying it!!
I wish I did yoga so I could get in a pose and instagram this exact phrase to all my white followers.
Anyone in this thread? Maybe the "white women" yoga instructors or yoga attendees in Australia?