 |
| Indian woman's head wrapped in scarf, with bindi between eyebrows, maang tikka jewelry on forehead |
by Anjali Sunita
We’ve all seen it: the deity tattoos, the turbans, self-appointed spiritual names, goddess circles, Yoga business courses, pornographic Yoga pose selfies, events described as “tribal” galore. If you like Yoga or are of Indian ancestry, you will have been berated with these aesthetics through the algorithms on Instagram or Facebook.
In the past decade, discussions about cultural appropriation have moved from academic and legal spheres to mainstream political controversy. On the far right of the cultural appropriation debate, you have defenders of artistic evolution and free market self-expression, fearing censorship by the “culture police;” and on the far left there are those seeking acknowledgment of roots and cultural values, resisting “cultural cleansing” by assimilation. Is it really so black and white?
Savitha Enner, a Maryland-based Yoga teacher who was born and raised in India until the age of 27, presents a bigger picture:
“Every country has an aspiration…and virtues, and values, and actions…the way you act usually; there is the culture. In India, one of the main values for your life is making your life sacred. That means, if I am a farmer, I am going to treat my farmland as my god, so I have rituals, pujas, prayers, festivals, a few times a year to worship the farmland, because that’s where I get the fruit of my labor. If I am a student, I have prayers, pujas, and festivals a few times a year to celebrate books, knowledge, writing instruments like pens and even computers.
If I have a job where I service the country…one of the sayings that will be put up on a building would be ‘your work is god’…even your car…because that is the mode of transportation. So pretty much anything that is useful to you is sacred. By that definition, we can extend it to Yoga…how do you treat things that are sacred to you? You are going to treat it with gratitude…humility…love…. Nobody has to tell me Yoga is sacred, or not; it just is. The more useful it is to you, the more sacred it is to you. So you do not have to ask anybody about whether I should say ‘Namaste’ or not, whether I should put up a deity or not. If you think Yoga practice is sacred to you…act accordingly, act in a way that feels that Yoga is sacred to you and it will be fine.”
Between all the pithy memes of digital activism, Indian practitioners are painted with the same brush, a monolith of cultures and perspectives. Some question whether digital activism truly honors diverse values of the diaspora and ancestors. Savitha’s perspective shows there is a wider range of response than what we see in trending click bait. The danger in it is that those who looking for a single Indian person to approve and validate their behaviors as well as those who romanticize Indian people and cultures may take her statement as justification for any action they wish to justify, rather than genuinely inquiring into one’s relationship to the sanctity of life.
Frequently online, at best, we sit at the surface. Well-wishers seeking not to offend will ask for a list, a never-ending education of do’s and dont’s. Do I or don’t I say ‘Namaste’? How do I wear and hold prayer beads? Should I wear bindis? Should I or shouldn’t I speak Sanskrit names in classes? Frequently the onus of education lands on an isolated South Asian practitioner who will be either pedestaled or gaslighted for her/his/their opinions. If the opinions are unwanted, a troll will pitch in the obligatory, “If you are so unhappy here, you should just go back home” or “Nobody owns Yoga!”.
Identities Not Trends
It is not a coincidence that a conversation that frequently begins with cultural values, meanings, and practices quickly devolves into debates over citizenship and ownership.
In an article entitled From Patañjali to the “Gospel of Sweat”: Yoga’s Remarkable Transformation from a Sacred Movement into a Thriving Global Market, recently published by Administrative Science Quarterly, Kamal Munir, Shahzad Ansuri, and Deborah Brown report, “Yoga went from a movement underpinned by a religious and meditative philosophy that took years to learn to one that advocated weekend courses to become a Yoga instructor. Yoga postures were copyrighted and franchised. The representation of Yoga in popular discourse, and the values associated with it, also underwent transformation. Its image went from pictures of Yoga gurus meditating in loincloths to athletic women in acrobatic poses that represented a blend of ballet, gymnastics, and Yoga. Many of these women emerged as the new gurus serving as role models for urban middle-class women the world over.”
Once inspired by Hindu philosophy, led by ascetics who provided an antidote to the individualism, greed, and consumerism fostered by capitalism, the meaning and values of Yoga were changed to meet the market. They outline how the Yoga movement was first “de-essentialized,” untangled from its socio-historical context, then syncretized with markets; and lastly, borrowed codes from related movements, in this case, the New Age and fitness movements. Part and parcel of capitalism, they note that "movements seeking to infuse markets with moral values often end up utilizing the market mechanism and support from mainstream actors to scale up, even if it comes at the cost of diluting their founding ethos."
At the center of many debates around cultural appropriation is the publication Yoga Journal, as it provides a perfect example of the capitalization and whitewashing imagery associated with Yoga media, excluding or marginalizing the image of BIPOC. The very first episode of the viral podcast Yoga is Dead, Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh call out Yoga Journal’s response to the American Hindu Association, when they complained that Yoga Journal doesn’t reference Hinduism (www.yogaisdeadpodcast.com). Yoga Journal responded to the American Hindu Association saying that Hinduism “carries too much baggage.” Jesal and Tejal provide a second example of the whitewashing imagery, when Yoga Journal agreed to put Jessamyn Stanley, a full-bodied queer black femme on the cover, but then seemingly threatened by this emerging market for larger bodied BIPOC, split the cover with a skinny white woman. What rots beneath the surface of the cultural appropriation debate are untold histories. Beneath these heated protests of magazine covers of skinny white women are generations of grief and trauma resulting from both the racism in America as well as the colonization on ancestral lands.
In my life, I have witnessed marginalized groups teased, bullied, discriminated against, and physically harmed for expressions of cultural heritage, while those in the dominant group profit from those same aesthetics. My mother came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in 1969, four years after The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, which abolished laws prohibiting Asian immigration to the United States. My family stories consist of how during the years of Vietnam some anti-war American white male student protestors, protesting the university my mother attended for holding classes, dehumanized her as she tried to go to class: touching my mother’s braids; pulling on her saris; and in a terrible accent saying “What would Gaaaandy do?” meaning “Mahatma Gandhi,” as they accosted her with “Americans are dying Bitch.”
Did they view all South Asian, South East Asians as the enemy? Was my mother’s road to becoming an American inconsequential to their fights for “Americans?” A rhetorical question meant for deeper inquiry: Why did they do this? Unlike them, she pushed her way to class in 1969 with her student visa at stake, until one day a physics professor sexually assaulted her while attending a session for extra help. Unable to go back, she failed physics, and had to shift to a less prestigious university so as not to be deported.
In her later years, she has written (in her book Where Monsoons Cry) about how during her scientific career, she cried the day she put her saris in a suitcase under the bed, as they had become a spectacle at her office. Every day men would ask her how long it took her to get ready for work. Yet on any given day in a Yoga studio across America or online, a white kirtan artist is chanting poorly pronounced Hindu deity names over blaring sound systems, in a sari, with moortis on the floor near her feet. For those first generation Americans like myself, who stumble into a Yoga center to reconnect to cultural heritage, Yoga spaces can feel like looking at our lost relics. (This is usually when someone makes the argument that pointing this out is divisive, that “We are all One” before explaining some Universalist principles and transcendental philosophy.)
In a 2015 article in The Washington Post, writer Cathy Young wrote, “To the new culture cops, everything is appropriation: Their protests ignore history, chill artistic expression and hurt diversity.” Young defends cultural appropriation at large, balking at protest against it as “an obvious potential to chill creativity and artistic expression… equally bad for diversity, raising the troubling specter of cultural cleansing.” Her defense begs the question, what about the cultural cleansing marginalized people endure every day within every American institution? Are we really all “One”? Many Desis have experienced that the multicultural “melting pot” idea is a grand illusion of “diversity” and oneness. In reality, this image of a diverse country has never been about equally blending the world’s flavor into one big soup; it has been about fitting in, assimilating, into a heavily salted soup in which diverse flavors are overpowered, cooked down, or dissolved within one or two generations.
Our truths are diverse. Some people with marginalized identities choose to accept cultural appropriation because fetishization, while irritating, is preferable to bullying. David Min writes in his Duke University Chronicle column in 2019 milk before cereal, “I’m willing to let authenticity take a backseat — as bad as that sounds — when my entire existence has been predicated on finding a survival strategy to exist in this world…While I’m aware that the West’s underlying assumptions about Asians have hardly changed, this newest fad certainly makes it easier to live.” Certainly, I often think: who am I to complain about seeming trivialities when my biracial body is light skinned and I have it so much easier than my mother. However, while some might argue like Min that oftentimes our criticisms of cultural appropriation begin from both a privileged position and internal insecurity of our own identity, I will continue to argue is that our conversations about cultural appropriation are often brushing against greater social and systemic inequities.
Omissions Matter
Many of us with South Asian ancestors, born and raised outside of India, who choose to respond to the issues of appropriation, are seeing in our mind’s eyes childhood memories of micro-aggressions. In "Microaggressions in Daily Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation," Gerald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”
I have memories of my mother coming to elementary school for our social studies class, showing 2nd graders India on a map, and dressing our white teacher in a sari while placing a bindi on her forehead. This generosity was met with mixed reactions: fascination, indifference, and teasing by my classmate as she pulled on her eyes to make them squint (nonsensical given how large our eyes are). “Because of the word “micro,” many people (read: non-white people) consider instances of microaggressions to be brief and relatively harmless; but there is nothing micro about microaggressions. Many psychologists refer to the impact of microaggressions as ‘death by a thousand papercuts’ for those that experience them on a regular basis.” (Nicole Cardoza, Anti-racism Daily).
We witness macro-aggressions, too, like the over 700 hate crimes that took place against Sikhs post-September 11th attacks. While this community was targeted for brown skin, turbans, and long beards, post the September 11th attacks the Kundalini Yoga industry continued to grow as mostly white Americans with beards, in turbans, profited. As of May 2021, a Dolce and Gabbana-printed cotton-blend turban sells on mytherasa.com for 635 British Pounds. It is the appropriation rooted in the inequities of crony capitalism that frequently sparks protest.
In a 2020 article in GQ, entitled Cultural appropriation: everything is culture and it’s all appropriated, George Chesterton, another defender of appropriation, seeks to minimize the inequities that are the harmful residue of colonialism when he writes, “Some believe culture is exploited like land or natural resources were exploited by colonialists, but desecrating a landscape is not the same as desecrating an idea. The landscape can be ruined, but the idea remains.” This point of view omits historical facts about the real and damaging impacts of colonialism, the loss of authentic knowledge, cultural riches, and life that have resulted from systemic violence.
I have taken numerous courses that sadly attempt to conceptualize Yoga history, for example, and completely skip the colonial periods altogether. We do not hear about how in 1773, the British banned wandering yogis (who they couldn’t land tax), associating them with “black magic” and thievery; or of the development of the “Thugee Department” of Intelligence, where British Intelligence captured such “thugs” to avoid mutiny against British rule. We do not hear about how India, once responsible for 27 percent of the world’s economy in the 1700s, was not only depleted to only three percent after the British completed their rule and looting, but how the country was made vulnerable to famine, which in combination with unceasing inhumane taxation killed an estimated 30–35 million people (asserted by Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire), threatening lineages.
How often do we consider the impact on lineages and the culture morale of the people? Instead, we hear narratives about Krishnamacarya, as the godfather of Yoga presenting yoga circus-like feats for royalty, influenced by European gymnasts. Do we ever hear how in combination with institutionalizing British healthcare system and hospitals Ayurvedic marma masters had their fingers cut off and were imprisoned for practicing their medicine? Or do we simply accept Ayurveda as “alternative” medicine? We are told that innocent gurus came to the West to spread the message of universal peace. How often are we taught that prior to Swami Vivekananda’s riveting speech that introduced Yoga to the United States at the Parliament of World Religions in 1893 that he was chased by white supremacists? Colonization has done far more than ruin landscapes. It greatly shifted the tone of how Yoga would be spread and later transformed.
This and so much more is omitted in our learning of Yoga and Yoga history in the West. I could not do justice to the vast and complex colonial history of Yoga in South Asia in this article, but simply want to point out intentional omission of certain truths. The spirit in which Yoga history is told is comparable to the spirit of the American Thanksgiving story, which claims that colonial history of this land was based upon ideals of harmony and mutual respect, when if in fact it was based upon genocide and cultural erasure.
Many Desis, those of the South Asian diaspora, don’t know (or perhaps we turn away from) the many painful aspects of our histories. We have never read about our histories in American history books. Perhaps Yoga history is so vast, varied, and ancient that it may be easier to focus on the distant past and the cultural richness that is also our history. Perhaps we are too proud. Perhaps we prefer the myth that we are a “model minority” and would prefer not to lose this privilege by upsetting the status quo. Perhaps our parents were working to survive and may not have known themselves or chosen not to teach us for our own emotional protection. Instead, we wind up in debates like Gwyneth Paltrow stating that she is responsible for Yoga’s spread — debates devoid of all context — when in fact, there are bigger elephants in the room.
I once had hoped that showing compassion, learning and teaching Yoga would counteract some of that anxiety and fragility that circulates in these conversations, but I’ve come to realize: unless you understand the functions of imperialism and colonialism either through study or through being marginalized yourself, chances are you will, intentionally or unintentionally, approach cultural, healing, natural, medicinal, and spiritual arts and sciences with a degree of entitlement and inherent racism.
To put it simply, with regards to cultural appropriation, I cannot write one more tweet or puff piece. It’s my view that learning history is essential alongside mainstream wellness education if we are ever to have genuine, meaningful, reciprocal cultural exchanges and have the courage to re-envision an equitable and honoring context for practice.
Anjali Sunita will be presenting at Accessible Yoga's Conference Online October 14-17, 2021
This post was previously shared in villagelifewellness.medium.com
This post was edited by Patrice Priya Wagner, Editor of Accessible Yoga Blog and member of the Board of Directors.
° FOLLOW Accessible Yoga on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
° REGISTER here for our next conference.
° DONATE here to help us bring yoga to people who don't have access or have been underserved, such as people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, children with special needs, and anyone who doesn't feel comfortable in a regular yoga class.
This post was edited by Patrice Priya Wagner, Editor of Accessible Yoga Blog and member of the Board of Directors.
° FOLLOW Accessible Yoga on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
° REGISTER here for our next conference.
° DONATE here to help us bring yoga to people who don't have access or have been underserved, such as people with disabilities, chronic illnesses, children with special needs, and anyone who doesn't feel comfortable in a regular yoga class.
No comments:
Post a Comment