Yoga and politics

Yoga is an ancient meditational spiritual practice from India. For yoga as exercise, its goal, detachment from the self or kaivalya, was replaced by the self-affirming goals of good health, reduced stress, and physical flexibility^[1] when, in the early 20th century, it was transformed through Western influences and a process of innovation in India.^[2] Around the 1960s, the practice was transformed further by three global changes: Westerners were able to travel to India, and Indians were able to migrate to the West; people in the West became disillusioned with organised religion, and started to look for alternatives such as with yoga; and yoga became an uncontroversial form of exercise suitable for mass consumption.^[3]

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Jivana Heyman notes that the foundational yoga text, the Bhagavad Gita has as its subjects politics and war.^[4] Sunila Kale and Christian Novetzke write that the Rigveda too has war as its subject, and that its use of the word 'yoga' is in the context of achieving victory through skill in multiple arts – poetry, ritual, warfare, and worship. They suggest that the plainest meaning of 'yoga' here, of "'hitching up' the horses to chariots for battle, is the seed of all the later meanings" of yoga in the political realm.^[5] They show, for instance, that 'yoga' is used in the Rigveda both for preparing for battle and for poetry:^[5]

Will he [Indra] be here for us at our hitching up (for war) [yoga], he for wealth, he in plenty? Will he come to us with prizes of victory? — Rigveda 1.5.3

(their emphasis) and

At every hitching up (for battle) [yoga], at every prize-contest we [poets] call to the more powerful one—as his comrades (we call) to Indra for help. — Rigveda 1.30.7

Kale and Novetzke show further that the Rigveda and then the Mahabharata use the compound word yoga-kṣema to indicate the joining of war and peace, meaning among other things the acquiring of power combined with its maintenance.^[6] Yoga-kṣema can thus mean peace maintained by the threat of war.^[7] 'Yoga' on its own in the Rigveda has the literal meaning of "harnessing"; the metonymic meaning of "war"; and the metaphorical meaning of controlling something "as if one were disciplining and using a horse by harnessing it for war".^[8]

Kale and Novetzke suggest that one more ancient text, the Arthashastra, should be understood as following the Rigveda and the Gita in their political interpretation of yoga. They argue that its account of political strategy, complete with observation and calculation of outcomes, inherits a view of yoga as to do with the "control of force, power, and discipline over and against another within a shared world", and that this view has always been central to yoga.^[9]

From the 1850s onwards, there developed in India a culture of physical exercise for men to counter the colonial stereotype of supposed "degeneracy" of Indians compared to the British.^[12][13] This was taken up from the 1880s to the early 20th century by Indian nationalists such as Tiruka, who taught exercises and unarmed combat techniques under the guise of yoga.^[14] Krishnamacharya combined the types of exercise that Tiruka had practised with haṭha yoga, modern Western gymnastics, and Surya Namaskar to form the kind of yoga as exercise that he taught in the 1930s in the Mysore Palace.^[15][16]

The social and religious reformer Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883), founder of the Arya Samaj, criticised Hindu ascetics who thought only of themselves as "parasitic" and egoistic.^[17] Swaminarayan (Sahajanand Swami, 1781–1830), founder of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, instructed his ascetic disciples to serve the people, putting a new cast on the idea of sevā, selfless service.^[17] Later, the philosopher-monk Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) set out the idea of "practical Vedanta"; he turned ascetic renunciation into something useful to society with his Ramakrishna Mission, committed to serving the poor with sevā "relief activities".^[17] Shraddhanand (1857–1926), a sanyassin of the Arya Samaj, became a renunciate and then went into politics, which he saw as loka-sevā, "service to the world".^[17]

From 1907, Aurobindo took part in anti-British politics, and was imprisoned in 1908 for possible conspiracy in the Alipore Bomb Case. While in jail he read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads; later, he described the jail as a yoga ashram. Kale and Novetzke call this a subversive use of a place of colonial control. Aurobindo's thought moved to karma yoga, the yoga of action. In 1909 he founded a journal, Karmayogin, which applied the Bhagavad Gita to political action. He explained in the journal that the Gita was "a teaching for life, and not a teaching for the life of a closet."^[18] In 1910 he had to escape from Calcutta as the British were trying to arrest him; he fled to French-governed Pondicherry, where he lived for the rest of his life.^[18] In the same period, the patriotic ascetic^[17] B. G. Tilak was put on trial and imprisoned in Bengal for discussing what "bomb" meant, at a time of actual bombings by anti-British nationalists in the province who cited the Gita.^[19] While in prison, Tilak too studied the Gita in detail, and like Aurobindo arrived at a karma yoga that stressed political action.^[20]

Mahatma Gandhi took up the Gita and its implied karma yoga from 1920, becoming the best known of all Indian nationalists. In 1922 the British put him in prison, where he studied both the Gita and Tilak's own prison-inspired Gita Rahasya.^[21] Non-violence, ahimsa ((Sanskrit: अहिंसा, IAST: ahiṃsā), is an ancient principle in Indian religion, appearing in the Vedas,^[22] while in classical yoga, it is the first of the five Yamas (principles of self-restraint) that make up the first of the eight limbs of yoga in Patañjali's Yoga Sutras.^[23] Gandhi encouraged nonviolent resistance as he led the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule.^[4] In 1930, he led the non-violent Salt March as an act of civil disobedience.^[24] In 1942 he urged Indians to completely stop co-operating with the imperial government, again calling for non-violence.^[25]

The Rajah of Aundh, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi, ran a semi-independent princely state within British India. He is known in modern yoga for popularising Surya Namaskar, the 'salute to the sun' practice that became incorporated in yoga as exercise,^[26] and indeed central to it: Krishnamacharya made the "flowing movements" of Surya Namaskar the basis of his Mysore style of yoga.^[27] Kale and Novetzke argue that he understood the practice as "both psychophysical technique and political strategy, a way to claim sovereignty through the governance of the self amid the liminal freedoms afforded by indirect rule."^[26]

Nazi German leaders including the SS commander Heinrich Himmler were interested in yoga.^[28] A captain in the SS, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, wrote several books on yoga, namely the 1922 Die Anfänge der Yogapraxis im alten Indien ("The beginnings of yoga practice in ancient India"), the 1932 Der Yoga als Heilweg ("Yoga as a path to healing"), and the 1934 Eine indo-arische Metaphysik des Kampfes und der Tat, die Bhagavadgita in neuer Sicht mit Übersetzungen ("An Indo-Aryan metaphysics of struggle and action, the Bhagavad Gita in a new perspective with translations"). Hauer seems to have persuaded Himmler that "yoga can internally arm us to prepare us for the forthcoming battles."^[29][30][31] The Nazi racial ideology included the belief that the "Nordic race" was distinguished by "courage, bravery, creative ability and desire, loyalty";^[32] that this race was one of the "Aryan peoples"; and that the German people was among "the most racially pure of the European peoples"^[32]

Yoga became transnational, especially in the English-speaking world, as Indian yoga gurus like K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar – both pupils of Krishnamacharya – spread their brands of yoga in the second half of the 20th century.^[33][34] Some schools of yoga in the Western world, and some practitioners, adopted a selection of elements of Indic culture, as well as the ostensibly Indian practice of yoga as exercise. This led to debate about whether the practice constituted cultural appropriation.^[35] The scholar of religion Andrea Jain argues however that charges of appropriation "from 'the East' to 'the West'" fail to take account of the fact that yoga has continuously evolved in a shared multinational process; it is not something that is being stolen from one place by another.^[36]

The Hindu American Foundation, founded in 2003, is a non-profit advocacy group that originated from the Hindu nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad America.^[37] In 2010, it began its saffronising "Take Back Yoga" campaign to counter what they perceived as attempts to deny that modern yoga was rooted in Hinduism,^[38] alleging that Americans were culturally appropriating a Hindu philosophical practice.^[39][40] This pro-Hindu argument was reinforced by a Christian perspective when in 2013 an evangelical parent argued that their child should not be forced to take a religiously-oriented yoga exercise class in school: the US constitution forbids any favouring of religion in public schools. The class survived on the assurance of the teachers that the pupils were not exposed to the history or philosophy of yoga.^[41][42]

In September 2014, the United Nations accepted India's prime minister Narendra Modi proposal that there should be an annual Day of Yoga, to be held on 21 June.^[43] The first International Day of Yoga was observed around the world on 21 June 2015. The Ministry of AYUSH made the necessary arrangements in India. 35,985 people, including Modi and dignitaries from 84 nations, performed yoga asanas at Rajpath in New Delhi, becoming the largest yoga class ever held.^[44] Modi replied to the charge that the Day was intended to promote Hinduism with the words "Yoga is not about the other life. Therefore, it is not a religious practice".^[45] However, The Week stated in 2015 that the government of India's purpose in holding International Days of Yoga was to have yoga recognized around the world as "India's cultural property",^[46] citing India's minister of yoga, Shripad Naik's statement that "We're trying to establish to the world that it's ours."^[46]

In 2015, Modi's governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched its Common Yoga Protocol, similarly supporting what what Modi and the BJP suppose to be, in the scholar Paul Bramadat's words, "yoga's inalienable Indian origins and essence."^[48] The document asserts that "Yoga is widely considered as an 'immortal cultural outcome' of the Indus Saraswati Valley Civilisation – dating back to 2700 BC – and has proven itself to cater to both material and spiritual uplift of humanity... Yogic Practice shall start with a prayer or prayerful mood to enhance the benefits of practice."^[48] As a political position, Bramadat comments that this could help to unify Hindu voters, at the cost of leaving out India's Muslims, who make up some 15% of the country's population.^[49] The connection of the Indus Valley Civilisation with yoga, based on slender evidence, is rejected by modern scholars.^[47]

The scholar Andrea Jain writes that Modi is "a vociferous proponent of yoga ... as a marker of Indian—and Hindu—identity."^[40] She argues that the Indian state under Modi has been using yoga as a "ritual instrument" to promote a conservative party line "mainstreaming both neoliberalism and Hindutva".^[50] Jain describes this as "a political, ahistorical, and essentializing strategy" which works by promoting a myth of "yoga's static Hindu essence".^[50] The scholar of religion Neil Dalal writes that the view of an ancient, pure and authentic Indian yoga is not supported by yoga scholarship. Instead, he writes, yoga has changed continually over the centuries, so talk of purity or authenticity does not make sense.^[51]