Yoga has,
in recent times,
been an object
of ideological contention. The modern spread
of yoga begins in the 19th century as part of a deep
and profound
reformulation of
various Indian
traditions as they
jostled with a new context of
knowledge
The paradox of the Yoga debate
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
There is a curious paradox in the contemporary discourse surrounding yoga in India. On the one hand, there is the almost matter- of-factness about the United Nations resolution on yoga. As many as 170 countries signed the resolution as much of an international consensus as you can get. The objectives of yoga are prosaically stated: yoga will foster better global health; will promote lifestyles devoid of excesses of all kinds; and promotes a holistic approach to health and well being. It reflects the almost casual way in which the practice of yoga has been globally enshrined in more forms than can be imagined. On the other hand, there is an excessively misplaced undercurrent of anxiety that there might be something sinister about the promotion of yoga, especially by the state. The importance of yoga, its health benefits if properly done, its claims as a form of knowledge, and more ambitiously its ability to create a new ethic of the Self, are too obvious to need any restatement. It is difficult to take seriously arguments that oppose the greater dissemination of yoga. But the exaggerated anxieties about yoga reveal much about the politics of knowledge, and also illuminate our knowledge of politics.
Yoga has, in recent times, been an object of ideological contention. The modern spread of yoga begins in the 19th century as part of a deep and profound reformulation of various Indian traditions as they jostled with a new context of knowledge. The importance of Swami Vivekananda in this endeavour cannot be exaggerated; and critiques by modern scholars of yoga are oftenas we shall seea way of getting back at him. His Raja Yoga acquired the status of a modern canonical text; he revived wide public interest in Patanjali, and squarely made a claim for yoga as a distinctive contribution to knowledge. There have been waves of dissemination and innovation since. A key and somewhat under-studied figure in this history is Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the guru of the great BKS Iyengar, responsible for Indias biggest knowledge export. Krishnamacharya is widely credited with articulating and consolidating a modern canon of postural yoga. The rich history of yoga dissemination and its mutation into different formshas been well articulated in numerous books. But the transformation of yoga has embroiled it in the politics of knowledge in many different ways. The first issue has to do with the identification of yoga with Hinduism. In the United States, the
teaching of yoga in schools was legally challenged. The San Diego Superior Court Judge, John S Meyer, issued a ruling that in a sense reflects the modus vivendi that characterises contemporary representations of yoga. He ruled that yoga was a religious practice, but not in the way taught by Encinitas Union school district. Such a construct, that yoga can be taught in a way that cleanses it of all religious odour, is a workable institutional solution. This cleansing is reflected even in language: to make yoga instruction palatable in American schools, the padmasana was apparently renamed the crisscross apple sauce position. That is the spirit behind the UN declaration.
But, in many ways, it has only raised questions about the identity of modern yoga. What does yoga do for the identity of its adherents? In contemporary times, the identity functions of yoga have oscillated between two poles. Asana yoga and the protocols evolved for mass yoga education have been represented as a form of knowledge detachable from theological or metaphysical moorings. This has elicited charges of betrayal from two different constituencies. On the one hand, Hindu groups in America often talk as if dissociating yoga from Hinduism is akin to a form of theft; it allows for the easy appropriation of something that is central to the identity of Hindus, understood in a broad sense. Yoga is used to consolidate identities in India as well (which we will come to later). On the other hand, there is a scholarly charge that this construction of yoga is somehow inauthentic, driven more by considerations of consumerist modernity, allied with entrepreneurship and a patchwork of ideologies from modern gymnastics to theosophy. Much of the effort from otherwise erudite scholars like David Gordon White to Wendy Doniger has been to knock modern yoga down a perch or two. It is worth engaging with these argumentsbecause they are symptomatic of the politics of yoga in relation to its traditions.
There are political aspects to the ideology of yoga. The first is the extent to which it should be made compulsory, especially over the objections of a tiny number of Muslim groups. There is certainly a long tradition of Muslim engagement with yoga, too diverse to be documented in limited space. Muslims across the world have practised yoga. Abul Fazl offers some of the richest accounts of the Mughal fascination with yoga in all its forms. But there is no doubt that in an ideologically charged context, there is a temptation to use yoga as a lightning rod for
community identity. A small number of right-wing groups among Hindus want to use yoga the way they use practically everything: as a kind of loyalty test for Muslims. This is the use of yoga as an assertion of power in its most reprehensible form. They damage the cause of yoga more than they aid it; and cast doubt over the motivations behind this enterprise. There are also some Muslim theologians who see this as a flashpoint to resist what they regard as majoritariana surreptitious Hindu influence in disguise. Both articulations can feed off each other. How significant these points of conflict will be will depend upon the larger trajectory of Hindu- Muslim relations.
Modern scholars have often needlessly politicised yoga and made the subject more trivial than it is. It is true that presentations of yoga have been refracted through different metaphysical categories. It is also true that there is a great variety of Indic traditions. Faced with an imperious homogenisation that votaries of Hindutva sometimes project, scholars understandably want to emphasise diversity, breaks and ruptures. So, on this view, modern postural yoga bears little relationship to classical yoga a break that is often exaggerated. It is true that different texts have different emphases, and different forms of yoga have been placed in different hierarchies of valuation in relation to each other. But it is rather odd to conclude from the relative lack of space postural yoga occupies in Patanjalis Sutra that the practice is of recent invention. This kind of claim misunderstands the relation between text and tradition, philosophy and practice. Modern votaries like Vivekananda and Aurobindo for example have no doubt feared Hatha Yoga, as much as they have granted legitimacy to its powers. But that is because yoga has always been, in its own self conception, conscious of its relation to the capabilities of its likely followers and the ethical contexts in which they operate.
Hindutva will probably not intellectually colonise India fully. But the fear of Hindutva has colonised scholars, and their defensive responses are to reduce Indic traditions to an aesthetic pastiche. The one difference between yoga scholarship in Indian languages or Western academic scholarship in the first half of the 20th century is this. That scholarship, while attuned to the different metaphysical representations of yoga, was in some respects open to the possibility that there might be some internal coherence to the problematic of yoga. Differences drawn from different traditions did not come in the way of mutual engagement. There is no more profound an example of this that the astonishing exchange between Gopinath Kaviraj and Acharya Narendra Dev. The latters monumental work on Buddhist thought, still unsurpassed in subtlety, had an equally subtle monograph-length introduction by Kaviraj, whose own philosophical and sectarian leanings were different. Although not directly connected with yoga (though it has piercingly illuminating insights on the subject), this was an example where standing your ground in terms of your own tradition did not preclude a dialogic engagement. In modern scholarship, there is more concern with the identity of a tradition than its cognitive content, more concern with authenticity than with truth claims. This is in part because faced with claims to homogenisation, the emphasis has shifted to an emphasis on diversity rather than knowledge claims. In part, this is understandable. But it also carries the risk, as in the work of Wendy Doniger or David Gordon White, of hollowing out the cognitive claims of a knowledge tradition such as yoga.
The 19th century purveyors of yoga like Vivekananda had their sectarian leanings and their own biases. They were also articulating yoga in a new idiom for new audiences. But it is an astonishing exaggeration to say, as White does of Vivekanandas relationship to Patanjali: Vivekananda, who did not wish to remind his readers of the links between Yoga Sutra and Indias Yogis, and who, following the neo-Vedanta strategy of employing his own powers of reason over and against the commentarial convention, placed his own authority over his august predecessors and misappropriated these verses into a nineteenth century sermon on evolutionary theory. There are more howlers in this passage than one can list: Whites charge of collective specieism is baseless. But it also assumes that commentarial convention has to be followed blindly; in fact, all commentary involves examining predecessors in the light of ones own reason. But most importantly, the ground that Vivekananda wished to occupy in Raja Yoga was the ground of experience, not reason or authority. In fact, yogas attraction is precisely the primacy of experience, not of belief or precept. Experience has to be the common ground on which argument takes place. Yogas great appeal has been its appeal to experience, independently of metaphysics, dogma or doctrine. Its authority, if it has any, derives from experience.
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