Autobiography of Bhogi: Part 5: Yoga’s Power, Nature Cures, and swimming with the Übermenschen
By: Patrick Mccartney
Tags: India, Neoliberalism, Yoga, Romance, Detox

During my ethnographic enquiries into the consumptive practices of global yogis, I am often met with comments that suggest I either do not know what I am talking about or that my knowledge of yoga is exceptionally poor. This is because I too often present an argument that runs counter to the normative ideas about the history of yoga that align with popular appeals promoted through the general marketing of global yoga. Take these Indian government approved advertisements that rely upon orientalist narratives to continue to promote India as a land of sacred mystery. This is deeply problematic, particularly with regards to decolonising yoga.

A common occurrence when discussing yoga with global yogis involves an apparent ‘back to basics’ lesson by someone who might have a decade or two less experience in yoga, yet they feel I have fundamentally erred along my yogic path. The lesson normally includes appeals to authority and tradition with regard to the romanticised notions of what yoga is supposedly about. The tropes asserted run close, if not parallel, to the same tropes used by Hindu nationalists to justify their own position of reasserting brahminical hegemony.

In many ways it is, as Peter Staudenmaier explains in Between Occultism and Nazism Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era, that “analogous ideas appealed not only to occultists but to participants in the nebulous völkisch scene which overlapped extensively with the life reform movement. The plethora of völkisch groups in early twentieth century Germany cultivated a mixture of Romantic nationalism, ethnic revivalism, and opposition to both socialism and capitalism, while promoting racist convictions as part of a hoped-for Germanic renewal.” (17)

These appeals fall quite neatly into the schema involved with internalising desire; which is involved in constructing an identity that enables conformity to the normative expressions of a group; which are undeniably part of the bodily fascist, neo-liberal, biomoral regime of power; and, which sits at the core of the global popularity and consumption of yoga-inflected lifestyles. For instance, countless exchanges lead to a global yogi telling me that the definition of yoga is encapsulated in the moral-ethical yamas and niyamas, which are found in the yoga treatise of Patañjali. This is a very common assumption amongst global yogis.

However, this appeal to scriptural authority, in some ways, demonstrates a yogically-fundamentalist attitude, as there is typically no individual articulation made by my interlocutor, apart from quoting scripture, to justify or support the assertions made regarding the function, purpose or history of yoga. In some ways, we are talking about the semiticisation of yoga around the importance of one text, Patañjali’s Yōga Sūtras. This simplification for consumption is another consequence of neoliberalism that rarifies complex histories into more easily digestible and transposable signs. Is it, then, possible that neoliberalism also is quite responsible for increasing fundamentalist attitudes across different cultures and markets?

Yet, no amount of contrary textual or historical evidence one might provide is ever deemed valid enough. This is typically due to the anti-intellectual, epistemically-relative disposition that discounts a scholarly perspective as less legitimate than a ‘serious practitioners experience’. This unquestionable faith in dogma to explain all of social reality that is explained by reference to one indubitable, statically-monolithic entity or principle is one of the defining features of fundamentalism, in general; and, which is visibly present amongst many global yogis who seek to re-enchant their lives through invoking a magical realism by projecting into nature, a yogatopia, of sorts. In effect, this preference for a simpler, binary outlook to describe a complex, dynamica, objective social reality is deeply problematic.

As Yogic Heritage explain, they ‘aim to create magic in your lives’; and:

Our aim is to connect and unite this world under the umbrella of yoga, thus protecting it from the hazards of modernity and providing it the much-needed energy to celebrate and enjoy the gift of life.

Part of the reasons for this being a problem is that, as Khalikova explains, the rhetoric of the popular guru, Baba Ramdev, whose Patañjali yoga and Ayurveda empire is worth billions of dollars, we can appreciate how a ‘neo-liberal quest for health with nationalist sentiments and consumerist desires’ strengthen the individual’s body and the metaphysical body of the nation-state. By extension to the greater area of global yoga in general, non-Indians/Hindus are not immune from the nationalistic fervour inherent within guru rhetoric. Often, the ‘hard Hindutva’ of Hindu supremacism is essentialised and softened for banal consumption as ‘soft Hindutva’ through, as Aramuvadan explains, the transcoding of Romanticism via appeals to identity, community and history; which operate through reconstituted cultural memory, as opposed to documentable influence. In other words, through the clever marketing of global yoga, people’s perceptions of yoga and India are filtered to consume ideas of India’s history, present and future in a particular way that might not be historically accurate, and which might foster a Hindu supremacist agenda on the coat tails of neoliberalism’s white supremacy. And, before one scoffs at the idea that Hindu supremacists and white supremacists are not aligned, let me direct your attention to unholy alliance between Alt-reich supremacist movements around the globe and the publishing house that started in India.

Carol Schaeffer’s book is worth a read.

Global yoga is deeply embedded in the neoliberal project AND Neoliberalism is an indelible component of the Indian state’s Hindu supremacist development agenda; which operates on an almost identical logic and uses similar rhetoric as global yoga. This obfuscates the harder end of ideology through romantic appeals to holism and deep ecology that are present, also, in the utopian inspired state-building literature of Nazi Germany.