Devastation in the wake: What would it take to 'decolonize' yoga?

My brown body doesn’t belong here. My brown body craves belonging.

I remember the day — it was a cold day in New York, and drizzling. It was hard to leave the confines of my overheated, and subsequently cozy West Harlem apartment to make it to the class at 10am on a Saturday. I walked into a storefront studio right off the street, and was hit by the overpowering scent of a sandalwood and vanilla air freshener plugged into the wall near the entrance. 

Smelled like my mother’s puja room, if there were cupcakes being baked in it. 

That morning, coming in from the rainy street, the group gathered around the edges of the mirror lined studio, as the instructor fiddled with the iPod to get the right music. Thin white women, in stretchy pants, now ubiquitous and almost exclusively known for their affiliation with yoga. The music she chose sounded like it was being played on a synthesizer -- tinny and slow. 

I wanted to run from there.

I wanted to stay and fill the room. 

I wanted my large brown body to disappear. 

I wanted to be seen. 

None of these things happened though. Feeling queasy throughout the class, I said nothing to anyone, and left as quickly as I could, walking home in the rain, hardly noticing the water or the chill creeping into my bones.

This is not the first or last disorienting experience I’ve had when it comes to yoga in the US. Nor was it a particularly harmful experience, compared to some. But it was one in which the dissonance was sharp, impossible to ignore. I felt discombobulated and couldn’t properly articulate why, to myself or to others. 

It’s been years since, and I’ve been on my own journey with embodied practices of healing and that moment stands out as a point of pivot in which I could not ignore the complicated dissonance I felt, of familiarity and foreignness. Of seeking belonging and finding exclusion.

It is this dissonance that I’d like to explore — what was it about? How can I understand it?

I have hesitated for years to write about yoga, specifically the Western phenomenon. I have many friends, white folks and people of color alike, who practice yoga, and I haven’t wanted to wade into the fray and risk fracturing any relationships. I haven’t wanted to open myself up for conversations with them about why their practice is so meaningful to them, how they believe in “decolonizing” their yoga practice, or worse, hearing about how yoga helped them lose weight and/or achieve their fitness goals. It’s always felt like participating in the complicated tango of neo-colonial capitalism — a dance that happens on the edge of a sharp knife in which white folks take something from a some place they have subjugated, tell a tale of cultural appreciation, so that appropriation looks like support, at least not violent theft, and then sell it back to any and all of us, changed, but validated. 

Over the years since that yoga class I’ve read many many articles, mostly by white women, about yoga and how much they love it, and what it has given them. Each time I read such a piece, I quietly seethe. My writing is focused on politics and policy, this is out of my wheelhouse, I remind myself, in an effort to quell my stemming rage. 

But here I am, nonetheless. 

*****

To understand how all of this works, let’s start with the colonial enterprise, because in the end, understanding how it worked then and how it manifests now serves as a crucial lynch pin. 

In 1757, when the British East India Company established their dominion over the country, their interests were manifold, but mostly were anchored in their desire to have a trade monopoly. They chose South Asia because of the vast amounts of raw materials that could be found there. “Raw materials” is code for “things we might extract at little to no cost, and sell for a mint.” And that is exactly what they did. Colonization and the subsequent extraction of raw materials provided employment for a large segment of the British middle class, who came to the subcontinent as mercenaries of the Company, sent money home and bolstered this economic and social standing of their families and communities. 

One notable phenomenon endemic to colonization is the flattening of “the colony.” At the time of the British conquest, what we now know as India didn’t exist. It was, instead, a constellation of kingdoms and fiefdoms, with hundreds of languages, religious practices, and distinct cultures with distinct historical trajectories. The flattening of what comprised India, as the colonizers understood it when they arrived, was not merely ignorance, it was functional. Their understanding of the orient (to use Edward Said’s term) was both constructed for and by their practice of colonization. As Said wrote, “the scope of Orientalism exactly matched the scope of empire.”

Homogenization, reducing a wildly diverse region to “the natives,” was a prerequisite to infiltration and commodification of the country and its resources. Important to our story here, however, is that this scope was shaped not only by the British colonizers but also by the upper caste Hindus who colluded with them to create, then parse, the nation we now know as India. As someone who comes from a Hindu Brahmin (upper caste) family, this was never a story I learned in all the tales I’ve heard about the fight for Indian independence from the British.

The globalization of yoga offers an interesting example of how this worked.

When British rule began in 1773, the people who do hatha yoga, the kind of yoga that is predominant in most Western practices, was disparaged by both the British and many wealthy, upper caste Indians. The hatha yogis were associated with dark magic, sexual perversion and considered to be violent marauders because they were often armed, which was a problem for the British because they disrupted the trade routes used by the British in Northern India. As a result the British government banned hatha yoga and promoted the kinds of Hindu worship practices that were more acceptable to them, namely the kinds of Hinduism practiced by the upper caste and upper class Indians, many of whom were happy to collude with the British insofar as it reinforced their socio-economic superiority. 

This is why we have to complicate the claims on modern yoga practices made by contemporary Hindu fundamentalist organizations like the Hindu America Foundation (HAF). The HAF, a known Hindu-nationalist and casteist organization, created a campaign called Take Back Yoga. The goal of the campaign was, surprisingly, not to take issue with the commodification of a religious practice, but to ensure that despite commodification, yoga is always seen as a singular Hindu practice. 

HAF’s co-founder Aseem Shukla told the NYTimes that, “In a way, our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”

It’s particularly rich that some of the most ardent voices claiming oppression by cultural appropriation are in the direct lineage of those Hindus that threw those hatha yogis right under the colonial bus when it came to securing their supremacy in the eyes of the colonizers. 

So how can we reconcile the issues of colonialism and cultural appropriation when we see some loud Hindu voices claiming that there is one story of yoga, and it is theirs? 

One way is to notice when they speak, and when they stay silent.

*****

In 2010 a group of queer and trans people of color in Seattle started a yoga collective exclusively for people of color led by queer and trans people of color. The collective called itself POC Yoga and met sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly. A beloved community of yoga practice, the group was a safe space for people of color regardless of their age, ability, body size, gender, and experience level. As so many of us can attest, POC only spaces can feel like vital refuge from the relentless white supremacy that we navigate daily. 

In October of 2015, someone posted an advertisement for the class on Nextdoor, and within days a conservative talk show host Dori Monson, aired a discussion in which he focused on the premise of POC Yoga which requests, “white friends, allies, and partners are respectfully asked not to attend.” Monson called the classes “racist” and “exclusionary.”

What follows is the stuff of nightmares. Following Monson’s show, the leaders of POC Yoga started receiving hate calls and death threats. They received more than 200 phone calls and hundreds of emails full of vitriol and rage. Teresa Wang, one of the leaders of the group, hurried to install a security system for her home, and the group shut down all classes, filed a police report, and soon after, an FBI report. POC Yoga ended.

In 2019, Laura Humpf, a white woman who runs the studio where POC Yoga was held, started an “Undoing Whiteness” yoga class which was focused on white people wishing to “unpack the harmful ways white supremacy is embedded” in their “body, mind and heart.” While the studio closed in 2020, it’s unclear if a class exclusively for people of color was ever offered there again after 2015. 

A couple of things stand out as significant about this incident. First, that however well-intentioned the effort to work with white people, the POC yoga class was lost to the community while even more time and resources were allocated to white people. In response to white supremacist violence faced by people of color, the time and energy was focused (exclusively, it seems) on white people.

And second, despite the media attention that the story got, I couldn’t find a peep on any corner of the internet from HAF or any other such group that purports to ensure an upper caste and Hindu-centric story of yoga. No matter how much they talk about non-discrimination when it comes to centering themselves, they were notably silent in this case. I guess it didn’t help the brand.

*****

What does it mean, then, to “have control of the brand of Yoga?” And if it’s not any particular group of Hindus, who is it?

According to the Global Wellness Institute, the “global wellness market” is three times larger than the pharmaceutical industry, coming in at $4.5 trillion. Of this, the yoga industry comprises just under $38 billion, expected to reach more than $66 billion by the year 2027. This year the Global Wellness Institute is hosting its 2021 summit in Tel Aviv, where the cost of attendance as a delegate is just over $4500. At the Global Wellness Summit you can learn about the new trends in the industry and network with industry executives. One of the topics covered in their annual report called The Future of Wellness names one of these impending trends as “Adding Color to Wellness” and an analysis of which companies are doing the work targeting people of color with their wellness offerings. This seems to be particularly important given that second to North America the fastest growing yoga market is Asia-Pacific. 

Here again we can see the dance up close, in which white folks take something from a place they have subjugated, tell a tale of cultural appreciation or sing the praises of profit margins, so that appropriation looks like support, and that which was stolen is sold right back to us.

The same month that the organizers of POC Yoga began getting death threats, Michelle Goldberg published a piece in New York Magazine (now The Cut) called “The Brutal Economics of Being a Yoga Teacher.” In this piece, Goldberg explains how difficult it is to make a living as a yoga instructor. Her case is compelling. She argues in such a lucrative industry, the (mostly) women who are yoga teachers (not to be confused with the Insta-celebrities) struggle to make a livable wages while doing grueling work, as the studios they work for profit handsomely from their labor.

Notably, Goldberg does not mention race, India, colonization or any offer any consideration of cultural appropriation. In this piece, ostensibly about the brutal economics of yoga instruction, there is no mention of the brutal economics of this kind of appropriation for billions in profit. Never mind the global structures, there is also no mention of the fact that it’s almost exclusively young, cisgender, non-disabled, white folks making money from the the idea that yoga is a singular practice, uncomplicated and spiritual, that can be applied to any and all people that want to improve their mind-body connection in these stressful times. 

This is what feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls a “consumerist, proto-capitalist, feminism” in her book Feminism Without Borders. Mohanty names that this kind of analysis, which I see often when it comes to thinking about who makes money from yoga, focusing on financial equality for women, without an intersectional or transnational understanding of identity. When it comes to yoga, refusing this intersectional lens renders the argument not only incomplete, but harmful.

*****

Colonization and its global impact has made possible so many pieces of my day-to-day life. What makes yoga different from eating fruit farmed by indentured Mexican and Central American farmworkers? What makes it different from owning a cell phone made of material mined, at cost of great harm, by people in the Congo? This is the trap. And on one hand, indeed it is a trap that we can all fall into. Moral equivalencies are tricky, but they are not always false. 

So, then, how do we live inside a capitalist, neo-colonial hellscape and not completely allow our moral misgivings to be subsumed by inevitability? For this, I have that loathsome, but ubiquitous, thing, a checklist:

• Complicate your convenient moral equivalencies. One way to do this is to read a lot about things you know less about. Particularly read and learn about colonization, caste and Brahmin supremacy if you do yoga.  Here’s an article to start with. Here’s an organization to learn about.

• Make whatever interventions you can. Keep making them, even if you fall off the wagon. Really the only offense is to turn away from the devastation because it becomes too painful or too difficult to bear. Most everything else is a win.

• Give some money, real money, whatever that is to you, to those most impacted, and fighting to change systems. 

• You can march, and sign petitions, and call your reps. Particularly relevant here are the myriad ways that the US participates in neo-colonial practices. 

• Locate yourself, honestly, in the scheme of power. Black feminist standpoint theory, and ethnography teaches us that our location matters in terms of what we can see about the world and what we can’t. 

There is no pat checklist for us, as it’s becoming clear. This is the due diligence of working against the invisibilization of the devastation. But the structure is often what makes the devastation invisible to the individual. In many ways, the appreciation-appropriation dichotomy obfuscates and makes a transnational political phenomenon about individual choices. 

In fact, it is the opposite. There’s more work to do. Find out where your yoga pants were made. And what about the mat, where is the rubber waste that allowed for its creation? Which words are uncomfortable in your mouths, and why might that be (when you can easily say Tchaikovsky). Who are the people teaching you yoga? What is comfortable in their mouths and why? Who is in the room (or Zoom) with you, and who is not? Who are the people that own the studios you attend? Who profits the most?

This is a lot of work, and I’m not saying any of us will be able to completely avoid participating in any harm. But we should know. We should also share what we know with others. The great torment of capitalism is that it touches everything, making hypocrites out of all of us. We cannot allow that to make us disaffected.

Perhaps the central issue isn’t appropriation, in the narrow sense. More than individual choices, I care about structures. I care about devastation in their wake.

I care about following the money. The big money - the billions and trillions. It is almost impossible not to participate in a kind of appropriation in this globalized world, so to say “stop doing yoga” would hardly be useful. But when you practice something you don’t know much/enough about, at the very least you should know whether, or to what extent, you are part of the devastation.

That is due diligence.