Project: Yoga's Imaginative Power
In 1984, in his Bombay living room, my uncle stands on his head. It’s supposed to be good for his blood pressure. It’s two years since striking textile workers shunned the mills and nine years before Coca-Cola will be allowed back to India. It’s thirty years before a newly elected prime minister will declare a national Ministry for Yoga, initiate a United Nations international day to celebrate the practice, and eventually preside over the largest yoga class in the world.
When I was an eight-year old with big glasses, I only saw my uncle’s flushed face balanced beside the colonial cabinet that housed his precious store of Johnnie Walker. In this project, I peer beyond the visible contours of postural practice to understand how yoga’s growing imaginative power reshapes the meaning of Indianness in the twenty-first century. Yoking the analytical insights of literary and cultural studies to the self-reflective voice of personal essay, I offer the fresh theoretical argument that yoga’s contemporary power lies in its imaginative work.
My work on the cultural politics of yoga is at heart an exploration of the “flexibilities” needed — and demanded — of India and Indianness in a globalising world. Yoga is what I like to call a “person-making project” — a transformative form of embodied knowledge that aims, grandly, to perfect us.
Yoga is a space that links together my Indian family, my American relatives, and my Australian-growing children. It offers a powerful metaphor for connection and belonging. At the same time, yoga is also a space haunted by fierce ghosts and even fiercer ambitions. It’s a place of contest where consumer culture, Hindu nationalism, and liberal secularism contend with each other (and sometimes make new allies). It’s a place where the search for health and wellness meets questions of cosmopolitanism and national identity.
My book in progress tracks these ideas across a transnational circuit, showing how yoga has become significant to the Indian state as a national symbol while these meanings are complicated within transnational popular culture. From International Day of Yoga to yoga chick-lit to yoga terrorist novels, I show how how popular and political imagination in English creates new powers for the practice during the most globally significant transformation of its history.
I elaborate and expand on different dimensions of this transformation in a series of related essays and creative works. For the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies, I explore the question of decolonizing yoga to argue that the practice both needs, and contributes to, decolonizing projects. In an article in Race and Yoga, I show how the idea of “flexibility” can position Indians in both powerful and precarious ways. My work on yoga and sexual violation in the wake of #MeToo asks why yoga is often seen as both cause and cure for sexual injury, and evaluates the political implications of that status. In Contemporary South Asia, I argue that yoga has long been a creature “of the book” in ways that invite us to think about writing as an integral form of the practice. A creative essay in The Asian American Literary Review meditates on how new representations of yoga in popular culture rub up against lived diasporic experiences of flexible Indianness.
Yoga is an irresistible theme to write on, though it sometimes takes us to sinister and surprising places. I’ve written for general audiences in The Conversation, New Mandala, and other venues about the “difficult positions” of yoga fiction, its ties to mystery, magic and politics, and its investment in modern pursuits of perfection. I’ve explored yoga as India’s “flexible power,” reflected on its relationship to the Indian diaspora, examined its links to cultural appropriation, contemplated its contribution to “cultural health,” and evaluated its role as “India’s business.”