The UN General Assembly, on 11 December 2014, adopted, without a vote, a resolution commemorating 21 June as the International Day of Yoga. Addressing the UN General Assembly on 27 September 2014, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi said:
Yoga is an invaluable gift of India’s ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body; thought and action; restraint and fulfilment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach to health and well-being. It is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature. By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help us deal with climate change. Let us work towards adopting an International Yoga Day.
On 21 June 2015, the first International Day of Yoga was celebrated in India and abroad. Modi led over 37,000 adepts in performing yoga asanas on Delhi’s Rajpath, thereby gleefully making it into the Guinness Book of Records.
Swami Vivekananda first presented yoga at the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 in Chicago. Yoga is ‘part of the cultural and religious heritage of India – which is rooted in the concept of vasudaiva kudumbakan, i.e. the whole world is one family’. Indeed, the Indian religious tradition is one of inclusive monotheism (see Monotheismus und die Sprache der Gewalt by Jan Assmann). This religious view holds that all religions are manifestations of the same underlying cosmic reality.
A glance at the Wikipedia entry for yoga shows that the umbrella term ‘yoga’ includes religion, philosophy, as well as physical practices. Articles in the Indian press stress either the physical value of the exercises, their role in emotional well-being, or the ‘spiritual’ (or cosmic) goal that a yogi can achieve through the practices. A quote from Vivekananda follows:
There has always been a clear duality visible in the objectives of the yogis. Some were focused entirely on the interior: on breathing exercises and mastery of the body as a route to self-understanding and spiritual liberation. Others, however, were clearly searching for the magical tantric powers that they believed yoga could unleash […] moving across a line from the search for spiritual liberation to a quest for dark and possibly demonic powers for use in this material world
– William Dalrymple, Under the Spell of Yoga
Medieval yogis were primarily interested in occult techniques to project the self outward to overcome death, enter other bodies, and effect all manner of sinister wizardry. Later, as the Mughals declined, yogis may have become warriors (or bandits), and created armies. Indeed, in 1803:
The last act was to enable the Maratha defeat at the hands of the British […] and, thereby, the British capture of Delhi, an event that catapulted the Hon’ble [East India] Company into the role of paramount power in southern Asia – and ultimately the world’
– William Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires
If this brief sketch of the history of yoga proves anything, it is that ideas hardly follow a ‘genealogy,’ as many historians of ideas would like us to believe. Ideas are not ‘memes’.
A meme is an idea, behaviour, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.
– Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Ideas are infinitely plastic. With each transmission, recipients work and rework them in an endless game of Chinese whispers.
What PM Modi has been doing is an exercise in the ‘re-invention of tradition’ – for political reasons (see The Invention of Tradition by Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger). The fact that any form of yoga so far has been a personal rather than collective endeavour underscores the difference between today and the past, and the PM’s underlying manipulation.
Is at least this re-invention benign? At the surface, it would seem so. Inclusiveness is the flavour of the day and set against religiously motivated exclusiveness. Having come to power as a ‘Hinduist’ party, the PM is signalling his readiness to be a PM for ‘all people’.
Inclusiveness, however, may be an implicit invitation to Gleichschaltung – a term the Nazis made odious (it implied that willing or by force everyone has to conform). Non-conformists are (silently) stigmatized as ‘poor team-players’ or being ‘clubbish’ and ‘separationists’. Sadgvi Prachi of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) commented:
They should connect themselves with the traditions of India, the culture of India […] there is no need for any objection. If they are objecting, then they should go to Pakistan. People who are objecting have no right to reside in India.
What is the name for this: dog-whistle politics?
This post was first published on DeepDip.
Explore more of Aldo Matteucci’s insights on the Ask Aldo chatbot.
