Exploring India's Bridge Position

FLEXIBLE INDIA: YOGA'S CULTURAL AND POLITICAL TENSIONS. By Shameem Black. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. Pp. 304. $35 paperback, $140 hardcover. In Flexible India, Shameem Black provides an interdisciplinary exploration of a complex practice with both liberatory as well as violent and oppressive effects. Drawing strongly on her disciplinary background in English, Black's highly readable text alternates between exploring the varied narratives of yoga presented in her primary source texts with autobiographical reflections that drive home the multifaceted impacts of yoga's “flexible forms” on an individual human. This book privileges English language presentations of yoga but places the experience of Indian citizens as its epicenter. Specifically, Black presents her own intersectional identity as having grown up in Reagan's America with a White father and a mother who was born a Shia Muslim in Khambhat, Gujarat. Black weaves narrative and literary exemplars with a rich grounding in socio-historical context to shed light on “what it means to be Indian in a twenty-first century world ... allowing the contradictory ideas of Indianness to flourish” (8). Focusing on the medium of English, Black effectively explores the effects of colonial and neoliberal capitalism in more nuanced ways than the language of authenticity or appropriation allows. In Chapter Two, Black tackles the state-sponsored promotion of yoga under Prime Minster Narendra Modi's India. Her discussion of the “resource and threat” that yoga's global popularity holds for the state of India is nuanced. There is an extensive discussion of the “Incredible !ndia” campaign, where images of global yoga practitioners promote India as a tourist destination, as well as India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) and related issues of intellectual property. She provocatively argues that the globally circulating images of Modi presiding over the mass practices of the UN's International Day of Yoga exist to “displace international frames of chaos and religious violence” that characterized Modi's previous role as chief minister of Gujarat during the years 2001–2014 (80). Following this, Black turns to how yoga is narrated in selected Indian English-language pulp fiction paperbacks, drawing out the fascinating implications of this selection of popular literature that most outside of India never engage. Here she shows how the Tantric metaphors of “right hand” and “left hand” continue to be relevant to readers of contemporary popular Indian fiction. She introduces her readers to Mohan Ashtakala's The Yoga Zapper (2015) as a way of evoking a more visceral experience of how “Incredible !ndia” propaganda, patriarchal authority, and racial hierarchies contribute to the creation of an ideal world. In contrast, she offers an analysis of Shweta Taneja's The Rakta Queen (2018), which focuses on yoga in an imaginary ashram on the borders of Nepal and China. Here, contemporary narratives draw on the sinister potential of a yoga that explicitly aims for power and violence, thereby amplifying the insights offered in a more historical context by scholar of yoga David Gordon White in Sinister Yogis (2009). Chapter Four turns to yoga in US popular culture, using the popular fiction genre of “downward dog mysteries” (a phrase borrowed from author Tracy Weber's book series), where murder mysteries intersect with the world of white, middle-class, female yoga practitioners. Here, Black reads these popular novels as an attempt to provide order to a disordered universe, where characters like Neal Pollack's yoga detective (aptly named Matt Bolster after modern yoga's most popular props) feature in adventures with titles like Downward Facing Death (2013). Here, portrayals of Indianness are largely replaced by “thin White women in Luluemon pants” (124). She then turns to yoga in the court narratives of the Encinitas School District in Sedlock v. Baird and the experience of “flying while brown” in post-9/11 United States, exploring how being of South Asian background is flexible and varied, where being Indian gives credibility in certain circumstances that are largely out of the control of anyone individually inhabiting a body of South Asian background. This theme is taken up again in Chapter Six, where the capitalist power of #Whitepeopledoingyoga is highlighted through the personalized sensitivity of Black's writing. Never preachy, her vignettes explore how, in trying to redress cultural appropriation, many reaffirm India's internal hierarchies, where upper-caste cultural ideals are privileged over more complex critiques and understanding of the multiplicity of beliefs, practices, and experiences held within a country of over 1.4 billion people. Here she also frames the Indian-American poet and essayist Reetika Vazirani's (1962–2003) deft descriptions of how yoga can be experienced by those of Indian heritage outside of India. Meanwhile, Chapter Five provides a valuable analysis of “Yoga's Precarious Work,” identifying the way that yoga “both ennobles and exploits workers” in ways that echo existing critiques in yoga studies (e.g., Klepinger 2022), though Black's arguments are uniquely accessible and relevant for general educated audiences. As an intervention to Yoga Studies as a field, Flexible India offers several unique contributions. Firstly, its emphasis on narrative and the disciplinary background within the English language and literature is distinct and unique. Although there is plenty of sociology and social history here, it also engages with fiction and story and the power and impact of narrative in ways that other methodological approaches in the field have not captured so fully. Secondly, Black's analytical focus is on Indian English (both in India and the diaspora), and not American English or “the King's English.” This is entirely fitting as India is actually home to the world's second-largest English-speaking population, following the United States of America (although most English-speaking Indians use it as a second or third language). Therefore, Black makes a strong intervention and timely rebalancing of a field of study that largely privileges Euro-American expressions, perspectives, and experiences of yoga. Black deftly argues for the flexibility of yoga as a practice and a metaphor, inviting us to see the significance of yoga in narrative in all its contradictory presentations. Her book presents the investigation of yoga in the contemporary world as a “remixed” practice of svādhyāya, a form of “self studies that teach readers to see the world from complex critical positions that dive into the depths of often inequitable histories” (209). Excerpts from Flexible India would be perfect to include in the growing number of university level classes that explore the history and contemporary practice of social yoga as well as for scholar-practitioner reading groups and in teacher training programmes. It is also an interesting modeling of how to incorporate personal reflective writing into a rigorous academic style with fully referenced critical analysis—a way of writing that will become increasingly more important as generative predictive text models transform our writing and teaching

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• Sinister Yogis

  David Gordon White•Sinister Yogis•2009

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