Be yogic about how much you don’t know about yoga — a lot.
It’s easy to count the number of Indians in a yoga class in America. Often, I’m the only one. Instead, I’ve taken to counting the number of Sanskrit tattoos. In a class of around 25, I typically spot around ten. Only one of them is my own.
I go to yoga classes six days a week. I’ve frequented over ten yoga studios in Boston in the past three years. A few months ago, I became certified to teach through a 200-hour yoga teacher training course, and I often teach yoga at my office.
The number of other Indians I encounter at studios or in a yoga class is slim. In a given week, there might be two or three fellow South Asians, but mostly that number is zero. Among the top #yoga Instagram posts, fewer than one in ten feature someone of identifiable Indian descent. Combing the magazine covers of Yoga Journal, the most recent evidence of an Indian on the front cover seems to be 2009. Ten years ago. Yes, there have been people of color in these photographs. But, no, it’s not the same thing.
I’m Indian, and a pretty identifiable one at that. My particular chocolate-shaded skin leaves little room for doubt. I notice when teachers look at me before chanting Om, or glance my way before reciting the Sanskrit name of the pose. During my teacher training, I was unsurprisingly the only Indian person in the group of 22. Sure, many of them had been to India. In fact, most of my own teachers in Boston have lived in India or spent significant time training with gurus there. But, no, it’s not the same thing as being Indian.
The problem goes beyond butchered Sanskrit pronunciations and yoga pants with Ganeshas on them. Which, for reference, is offensive to many followers of Hinduism. Images of Gods, Goddesses, and the Indian flag aren’t typically worn, especially below the torso. Which is not to say that yoga is equivalent to Hinduism. That’s a whole other worrisome issue; India’s current political milieu has its own misguided agenda to Hindu-ize yoga and alienate millions of other Indians who share the same ancestral claim to the practice.
For one thing, most people in the world (everywhere, including India) don’t know much about yoga’s history. It isn’t just about the physical postures, the asanas. Nor is it about dogmatic meditation techniques. It is now more widely known that yoga is one word to encompass a universe of meaning. Defined as “to bind” or “to be in union”, yoga applies that idea at the micro and macro levels — binding the hands together; binding the mind and heart together. But, it’s not just about the word.
The earliest known archeological evidence of yogic tradition traces its origin back 5,000 years to the Indus Valley civilization, in what is modern-day India. It was a syncretic compilation of chants, moral precepts, and rituals. It continually evolved through the ages, incorporating physical postures for rejuvenating the body, dismissing obsolete ideas no longer germane to society. It was systematized by important scholars and gurus who anchored the amalgam of teachings into a structure that could be assimilated by all. The eight branches of yoga, guided by Patanjali, came to dominate the definition of yoga: an attitude about the world, beliefs about ourselves, physical postures, breath-work, sensory withdrawal, concentration, meditation, enlightenment.
So, sure, yoga was originally conceived of in India. However, through the 1800s and 1900s is when much of the yoga we know and love today came to be, mostly asana practice. Yoga doesn’t owe its copyright purely to India. Prominent practitioners of asana from the Western world were influential in charting the course of the physical practice. It wasn’t initially intended that asana would diverge from the larger tree of yoga as it has largely come to do, but that’s what happens when cultural forces change and migrate. Yoga has always been adapting itself to the society that ascribes to it; and this time is no different. The spiritual grounding to the physical component waned as it traveled and was adopted the world over.
Then, is yoga an Indian thing or a sort-of-Indian thing that has taken on a life of its own? The answer is that it’s not about India, and it’s not about hating #whitepeopledoingyoga . It’s about power, and about taking ownership of and responsibility for understanding what yoga is. You don’t need to read ten books about it, but one or two wouldn’t hurt. Be yogic about how much you don’t know about yoga — a lot.
Which brings us back to today in the United States. Yoga clothes that look like swimsuits, monikers of deities without an awareness of their significance, and a general misappropriation of an incompletely understood idea. I’m not saying asana shouldn’t be your go-to workout. I’m not arguing that you cannot chant in a class. I’m also not arguing that only Indian people can do yoga. I’m arguing that the Indian-ness of yoga shouldn’t be ignored. There is a reason why Indians feel marginalized in this multi-billion-dollar industry that glorifies so many things that we don’t identify with, but that we might want to participate in and change.
Cultural appropriation is offensive when it is about one-directional power. The West has yet again reaped the benefits of a globalized trend, at an emotional cost to Indians who feel alienated. The most sought-after yoga teachers are of Caucasian descent, the famous books written about yoga are authored by old white men, the brands that carry the industry forward are steeped in allegations about racism and discrimination. Mired by the barriers to entry, I personally know many Indians whose stories about yoga are not heard and are downplayed. Moreover, I anecdotally know even more Indians who try to bring back a smidgen of spirituality to their practice, but are met with unease and rejection.
Don’t get me wrong. Being Indian doesn’t entitle you to ownership of yoga. There are hordes of Indians who are ignorant about the history of yoga too. But, this piece is not about them. For the people of Indian origin who do care about integrating asana practice with the other aspects of yoga, it is jarring to witness a haphazard interpretation of our spiritual background. It’s not hypocritical to invest in understanding the ancient texts that you are chanting in a yoga class, despite not being Indian. It is, however, hypocritical to rebuff an Indian person who tries to bring in more Indian-ness to their practice.
I love my yoga teachers in Boston who take the time to explain to their class, regardless of how it might be judged, the context of a pose or a story. I appreciate when they ask me if they pronounced or spelled something correctly (they know that I can read Sanskrit). I value their experiences in my home country where they learned to contort their bodies, breath into their discomfort, and realize how far away from enlightenment they are.
What I really would like though, is to read and watch more Indian people doing yoga in America. Yoga has been in my life since I was ten years old, and it was always so much more than asana. But, I don’t have many role models of Indian descent when it comes to yoga; I don’t know any who have the influence that compares to other teachers. Shaping cultural symbols through experience is power. If you look closely enough, the problem isn’t really the dearth of Indians in the West who love yoga, it’s that we are marginalized. There are millions of Indians doing yoga — it is important to give us the space to influence its evolution too. The way to give power back to Indians about yoga is not to silence the authentic non-Indians, but to share the stage with us.
Read a book about yoga by an Indian person, follow an Instagram account that belongs to a brown-skinned yogi, go read that book about the history of yoga I told you to get earlier. Take a class by an Indian person and ask them about their journey. Be critical. Don’t give them power because of their skin, but because of their story.
