About
Mainstream narratives about yoga in the U.S. often describe how the practice promotes physical and spiritual wellbeing. But, yoga practitioners and scholars rarely question who has had access to the practice since its arrival in North America, and thereby its purportedly healing and liberatory properties. Relatedly, they fail to critically interrogate the representation of the prototypical yogi in contemporary America: upper and middle-class white persons, particularly white women.
Race and Yoga is the first scholarly journal to examine issues surrounding the history, racialization, sex(ualization), and inclusivity (or lack thereof) of the yoga community.
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020
South Asian Voices on Yoga
Introduction
Introduction: South Asian Voices on Yoga
Lakshmi Nair and Arushi Singh offer a summary of the personal narratives and peer reviewed essays by South Asian writers featured in this issue within the context of the events of 2020.
Creative Work
Articles
Travelers, Translators, and Spiritual Mothers: Yoga, Gender, and Colonial Histories
Analyzing the work of women traveling to India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this essay explores the intersections of gender, race, and colonial history and connects them to contemporary cultures of yoga. It suggests that analyzing gender in colonial contexts provides a way to understand the dynamics of yoga cultures more fully, and to place them within a historical and cultural frame. As a mind-body practice that was initially becoming consumed by Western audiences and by women in the late nineteenth century and that continues to be a potent and popular practice globally, yoga in its various forms and representations can reflect how the dynamics of colonialism endure and are culturally sustained.
Choreographing Tolerance: Narendra Modi, Hindu Nationalism, and International Yoga Day
This essay considers the significance of Narendra Modi’s yoga agenda against the backdrop of increasingly violent right-wing Hindu nationalist policies and interventions under his administration. One of Modi’s first official acts after being elected Prime Minister of India in 2014 was to urge the United Nations member states to declare June 21st International Yoga Day. In his speech, he argued that yoga has the capacity to unite both the self and the world. Though Modi espouses unity through yoga, he has arguably been one of the most divisive Indian leaders in recent memory. How do we reconcile the contradiction between “Modi the yogi” who proposes to unify the country and “Modi the Hindu nationalist” who has been actively responsible for dividing it along sectarian lines? What is the function of International Yoga Day within the broader context of Modi’s anti-Muslim politics, both past and present? Why has yoga, in particular, become a central tenet of Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda? Drawing on Wendy Brown’s (2006) theorization of “tolerance,” I consider how Modi’s yoga agenda has further entrenched the binary of the tolerant, “civilized” Hindu and the intolerant, “irrational” Muslim Other within the Indian national imaginary. In contrast to the notion of Muslims as militant, ideologically rigid, and intolerant (of difference), yoga performs the Hindu nation as flexible, yielding, open, and tolerant. With its benign, benevolent associations with health and well-being, mind-body harmony, and peace, Modi has mobilized yoga to obfuscate the increasing violence, inflexibility, and intolerance of difference under his administration. This essay concludes by thinking about the complicity of the liberal Hindu citizen in the rise of Hindu nationalism and the Hindu supremacist state.