Yoga in society

Yoga plays a variety of roles in society. In classical yoga texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, yoga is understood to be political; those texts were important in stimulating Indian nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the modern era, yoga functions much like a religion. It has been accompanied by racism, both from within and from without. Practitioners often hold orientalist views of India; this in turn supports a range of social attitudes including racism. Towards the end of the 20th century, yoga as exercise was seen as a market that could be commercialised, with new products like yoga pants and yoga mats, accompanied by profitable yoga tourism. Yoga gurus have often taken advantage of their positions of power to carry out sexual abuse.

Yoga's practices depend on its social context, making modern yoga systems quite unlike its predecessors.^[1] Yoga plays a variety of roles in society, forming an integral part of India's cultural heritage, affecting such diverse aspects of life as art, dance, literature, religious ritual, and spirituality.^[2][3] It assists with physical and mental health and may have value as a therapy.^[2] In the form of karma yoga, as described in the Bhagavad Gita, it can be used politically to help to bring about social change.^[4] It offers ethical guidelines, the yamas and niyamas, on how to live well in society. Through the International Day of Yoga it has been applied to global diplomacy.^[3] Nadia Gilani writes that yoga, often practised by well-off whites for their own purposes, should be used for social change.^[5]

Modern postural yoga is mainly practised by women in the consumerist mainstream of Western society. This is in sharp contrast to Medieval haṭha yoga which was normally male, in the Indian subcontinent, and mendicant (renouncing property).^[6]

Yoga practitioners often hold orientalist views of India,^[9] in the sense defined by Edward Said in his 1978 book.^[11] The yoga scholar Anya Foxen writes that such views embody "a kind of 'Otherism'" that places the Orient "somewhere else".^[12] She associates this with a strand of "Pythagoreanizing Neoplatonis[m]" that "values the otherworldly, the ideal, the mystical, and what some might call the irrational".^[8]

The scholar of religion Andrea Jain comments that "orientalist dialectics" like Kino MacGregor's description of India as "a place where you are free to discover yourself on your own terms" give consumers permission to "purchase yoga" without worrying about its social impact or its colonial legacy.^[10] Consumers of yoga in the Western world, she writes, can "imagine themselves as materially rich but spiritually poor", and people in India as the opposite. This picture, Jain suggests, builds up and links together yoga's orientalism with colonialism, nationalism, neoliberal capitalism, and racism.^[10] The yoga scholars Suzanne Newcombe and Philip Deslippe write that authenticity-seeking yoga tourism "ironically ... often strengthens the commercialised, neo-liberal and globalised nature of the yoga industry as well [as] orientalist constructs about a mystic India."^[13]

In classical yoga texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, yoga is understood to be political; those texts were important in stimulating Indian nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries.^[16] Around the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi practised what he understood to be karma yoga, including yoga's principle of ahimsa, non-violence, in protests against the British Raj.^[15] Early in the 21st century, Hindu nationalists ran a "Take Back Yoga" campaign to assert modern yoga's roots in Hinduism.^[17] In India, the prime minister Narendra Modi's proposal for an International Day of Yoga was accepted by the United Nations, and the first such day was celebrated in 2015 with a large street ceremony in New Delhi.^[18]

In North America, several charities associated with yoga work directly to address political concerns. For example, Yoga Gives Back supports the poor in India, while the Yoga Alliance helps to make yoga available to those who would not be able to access it on their own.^[19] The yoga teacher and activist Jivana Heyman argues that an engaged yoga practice would carry the "responsibility to apply the teachings in every aspect of our lives – in our relationships, at work, and, yes, in politics."^[14]

Yoga as exercise, along with the use that some teachers and practitioners make of symbols such as Om ‌ॐ, has been described as cultural appropriation.^[20] Scholars, noting that yoga has continually developed in form and changed its contexts and goals since it originated, both in India and in the western world, and that practitioners in India have adopted western yoga practices, have debated whether the charge can be substantiated.^[21]

Yoga has been accompanied by racism, both from within and from without. In the Western world, it is largely an activity for white people,^[22] and non-whites have sometimes found it uncomfortable either to practice or to teach yoga.^[23] Modi's political use of yoga has been described as forwarding a Hindu nationalist agenda.^[24][25] Some Christians have made racist attacks on the practising of yoga in American schools, which like the Hindu nationalist position assumes that yoga is inherently Hindu.^[26] Yoga teachers such as Simran Uppal advocate an intentional anti-racist yoga;^[27] groups specifically for nonwhite participants have been created.^[28]

In the modern era, yoga functions much like a religion.^[29] Practitioners frequently assert that it is spiritual but not religious; scholars such as Paul Bramadat have suggested that this describes yoga's place as a religion-like practice which does not constrain participants to a specific religion,^[30] and allows them to ignore yoga's roots in Indian religion.^[31]

Towards the end of the 20th century, yoga was seen as a market that could be commercialised, with new products like yoga pants and yoga mats, accompanied by profitable yoga tourism and yoga teacher training.^[33][34] Scholars like Patrick McCartney have argued that purchases of yoga clothes or spiritual journeys are "political acts of consumption" because they "facilitate the assimilationist processes of an expansionist, Hindu agenda."^[33]

Yoga has both been the recipient of advertising to sell yoga classes,^[35] clothing, props, and foods such as probiotic yoghurt and low-fat cereals intended to appeal especially to female yoga practitioners, and has been used to market unrelated products as diverse as canned beer, cars, financial services, and air travel.^[36] Images of women in difficult yoga poses have featured in advertisements to convey desirable qualities.^[37]

Yoga gurus have often taken advantage of their positions of power to carry out sexual abuse. Allegations have been made against several well-known yoga gurus including Bikram Choudhury, Swami Satchidananda,^[38] and K. Pattabhi Jois.^[39] Few have been brought to trial and convicted.^[38][a]