Inside America’s yoga culture wars
Opinion

Inside America’s yoga culture wars

Toronto-based yoga blogger Matthew Remski is at the forefront of an attack that weaponises isolated incidents of abuse in the yoga community. Attack on Hinduism is a byproduct.

Yoga helps in enhancing cardiovascular health: Research

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Yoga in America is a multi-billion dollar industry boasting a plethora of wildly popular franchise chains and a massive community of teachers and practitioners. It has been enthusiastically embraced by Americans and is now a staple feature of mainstream culture. Americans turn to yoga for stress-relief, physical toning, spiritual solace and to help them function more calmly and efficiently at the workplace. 

Yoga’s rapid growth has also given rise to a raging culture war between traditionalists and reactionary materialists engaged in a bitter online struggle to claim it as their own. As an American of Indian origin and a practitioner of yoga, I have witnessed some of these skirmishes first-hand. 

A few years ago, I stumbled on the Facebook page of a Toronto-based yoga blogger, Matthew Remski. He had authored what he called a “remix” of the Yoga Sutras, an iconic text in the yoga pantheon, authored by the venerated sage Patanjali. His remix was cast in a post-modern vein, targeting a mainly western audience, eager to do away with traditional yoga pedagogy and appropriate the millennia old practice for themselves.

The self-published work titled Threads of Yoga: A Remix of Patanjali’s Sutras is a classic example of performative pseudo-intellectualism, a meaningless word-soup posing as erudition. Here are some gems: 

“Dialogue eschews the comprehensive, and, continuing late into the night by flickering candles, elevates the elliptical.”

“The hermeneutic flow from de-familiarization to open-source and demystification tends to have an embodying effect.”

“External sensations of the proto-epithelium in the zygote are the stimulus for the invaginating growth of the central nervous system: we gain the capacity to feel and to think quite literally by being surrounded and touched.” 

Threads of Yoga met with a flurry of indignation from the Indian diaspora calling out the author for blatant cultural misappropriation and for blithely ignoring centuries of scholarship and academic commentary on yoga philosophy and practice.  

Later, Remski started going after iconic yoga gurus such as BKS Iyengar and Thirumalai Krishnamacharya, giants who had brought yoga to the modern world. Remski’s strategy soon became clear: weaponising isolated incidents of abuse in the yoga community to rubbish the entire system. He singled out bad apples such as Swami Satyananda from the Bihar School of Yoga and Pattabhi Jois, a senior disciple of Krishnamacharya, using their examples to not only deride the entire community of yoga practitioners, but traditional lineage-based schools (Sampradayas) in general. 

One does not see a shred of empathy for the survivors of abuse, only cheap satisfaction at scoring points against the other side. “Off the record, if I said anything about Remski, he’d try to ridicule and ‘cancel’ me,” said a veteran female yoga teacher of South Asian origin to me. “I don’t want that kind of attention.”

When called out on his alleged predatory behaviour by Genny Wilkinson Priest, a senior yoga teacher, Remski filed a defamation suit in a bid to silence her. It turned out that Genny was just one among several people that he has seemingly gone after with a vengeance. When the popular Ashtanga yoga teacher, Kino Macgregor, suffered a hip injury few years ago, Remski’s article and interview were devoid of any consideration for the injured. He exploited the teacher’s injury to make the case that traditional yogic asanas were in fact detrimental to overall health and well-being of the practitioner while casting doubt on the benefits reported by millions of adherents the world over. This is not surprising given that Remski and others like him in Yogaland tend to reduce yoga to a purely physical practice, while completely bypassing the millennia-old corpus of metaphysical inquiry that accompany the asanas. 

It’s important that victims of abuse are heard but their suffering shouldn’t be used as a blunt weapon to dehumanise an entire community. “Many Ashtanga practitioners will completely dismiss this book, not only because denial runs deep but also because of the intensity and fervour with which Remski targeted some in the community over the past few years,” wrote Ashtanga yoga teacher, Magnolia Zuniga, in an Amazon review of the book on the Pattabhi Jois scandal. “His ‘research’ felt personal, predatory and vengeful. He seemed to relish getting into word wars with community members who were clearly confused and suffering. Instead of building bridges in order to help facilitate healing he created more and more divisions.”


Also read: Not just by modern-day yoga fans, Patanjali was misunderstood even in history


Bogey of Hindu nationalism

Very predictably, Remski brings up the bogey of “Hindu nationalism”, implying that one must be an extremist simply by virtue of practising some aspect of the faith — the very same logic used by Islamophobes and anti-Semites to tar all Jews and Muslims with the same brush. Note that these are Hindus in the west, many of them second generation hyphenated Americans whose understanding of Indian politics is tenuous at best. 

While Hindu extremist groups in India have been known to target minorities, it does not give anyone licence to malign a billion plus people of faith. Besides, religious extremism is a global issue and is in no way limited to Hinduism. Singling out and stigmatising practitioners of this faith, especially in the west where they are a vulnerable dark-skinned minority, indicates a deep animosity bordering on outright bigotry.  

Remski does not stop at Hinduism and Yoga. He’s gone after Buddhism with the same maniacal zeal and using the very same tactics described above: maligning practitioners of indigenous and pre-modern spiritual traditions through the lens of postmodernism and reactionary materialism, and singling out isolated incidents of abuse in an attempt to “throw out the baby with the bathwater” as the saying goes.

Remski’s latest project is the ‘Conspirituality’ podcast that was ostensibly created to debunk conspiracy theories but in reality is an extension of his old project: debasing people of faith and casting aspersions on their ethics and critical faculties. He co-hosts the podcast with two former yoga teachers turned podcasters — Derek Beres and Julian Marc Walker — who cheer him on without reservations. 

A recent guest on their podcast was the Indian-American Dalit rights activist, Thenmozi Sounderrajan, founder of Equality Labs, an advocacy group that seeks to bring awareness to caste discrimination, but has been found to be motivated by far less worthy intentions. 

During the podcast Remski and Sounderrajan engaged in what appears to be a gleeful hate-fest about India, Yoga and Hinduism in general. At one point, Remski’s co-host Julian Marc Walker sneeringly remarks that traveling to India for yoga training entailed a set of “rigid patriarchal rules” that included, “stand up straight, clean your room, eat your dal and do your bhakti.” It was also claimed that tech pioneers like Steve Jobs and iconic authors such as J.D. Salinger were responsible for spreading “Soft Hindutva” in the west because of their interest in Indian philosophy.

It’s surprising that Barack Obama was not accused of disseminating ‘soft Hindutva’, given that he invoked Swami Vivekananda’s historic 1893 Chicago speech when he visited India on the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015. 

For her recent article in NPR about a deceased yoga teacher Guru Jagat who was drawn into absurd conspiracy theories, journalist Emily Guerin disappointingly went to Remski, a podcaster with questionable credentials, who said that “yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common, making it easy to slide from the former into the latter”. Remski exploits Jagat’s tragic story to not only distort yoga philosophy but ridicule a global community of yoga teachers and practitioners by implying that they are more susceptible to conspiracies than the average person because of their interest in “yoga philosophy.” However, yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common, Remski said, making it easy to slide from the former into the latter.


Also read: Yoga and Kama are not said in same breath in India today. But it should


Not a new phenomenon

Casting sinister motives on Yogis is not a new phenomenon. Mabel Potter Daggett in her 1911 essay, ‘The Heathen Invasion of America’, singles out yoga as a gateway into full-blown heathenism. According to Daggett, “Yoga, that Eastern philosophy, the emblem of which is the coiled serpent, is being disseminated in America. Literally yoga means ‘path’ that leads to wisdom. Actually, it is pricing the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and death.” 

“Daggett’s opposition reflected a growing unease among the American Protestant establishment regarding the spread of Hindu spiritualism in American society, specifically among elite American women in major cities like New York and San Francisco,” said Vishal Ganeshan, an Indian-American attorney and curator of popular substack ‘Hindoo History’, which chronicles the history of Hindus in America, primarily through archival newspaper clips. “Although the actual number of attendees/adherents was fairly small, the Vedanta Societies established in these cities by Swami Vivekananda proved to be immensely popular among the social elite, hence the strength of the backlash,” Ganeshan adds.

Weaponising the ancestral pain of Dalits for political gain is an old project of the Indian left, and furthermore, Dalits are moving in increasingly large numbers towards a BJP that resonates with their economic aspirations. However, these age-old fault lines are now being used in American yoga spaces to malign ordinary people who may find respite in yoga practice and philosophy. ‘Stochastic terror’ is the term that leaps to mind when I think about this trend. Wikipedia dictionary defines it as “The use of mass public communication, usually against a particular individual or group, which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but happen seemingly at random.” 

Indeed, the rising surge in hate crimes directed at Hindus in the west has been covered by several media outlets including, most recently, The Washington Post

Hindus on American campuses and in public areas have to allegedly contend with slurs like “ugly Hindu”, “dirty Hindu”, “cow piss drinker” while their temples are desecrated and vandalised. When they protest, they are dismissed as “Hindu nationalists.” 

One doesn’t have to go very far back to locate hate crimes targeting Hindus in America. A hate group that called itself the “Dotbusters” attacked Indian immigrants in New Jersey from 1975 to 1993. They derived their name from the bindi (dot) that Hindu women wear on their foreheads. Men were beaten into a coma with baseball bats and metal pipes, women threatened and harassed in public areas, and their homes and places of worship vandalised. One source told a reporter he knew kids who went “Hindu hunting” at night.

While Indian-Americans are playing an increasingly prominent role in American public life, holding top positions in iconic tech companies, and in government, media, science and finance, racist attacks on Hindus who display clear religious markers has not gone away. 

Vikram Zutshi @vikramzutshi is a journalist, filmmaker and cultural critic. He runs The Big Turtle Podcast and edits Sutra Journal. Views are personal.

(Edited by Prashant)