Remember that scene in the “Black
Panther” film when the white man wakes up from his coma in Wakanda, and Shuri
addresses him as “colonizah”? Our Detroit audience loooved that line. The dynamics between them illustrate a classic
misogynist, colonizer mindset. “Alright, where am I?” Ross demands gruffly of
Shuri, who is clearly in power, but whom he is treating like a servant by his
tone of voice, body language, and incredulity. If you glance at the comments in
the YouTube post, you will see colonizer mindset of white folks upset at
Shuri’s use of the term, decades and generations after historic colonization of
Africa, evidence that there is no such condition as “postcolonial” to be found.
Our minds remain colonized, and colonization has become more subtle, through
institutions, economics, and multinational corporations moreso than
governments.
Meanwhile I am reeling from another exposé of harm
in the Iyengar Yoga world, and heartbroken to learn of a senior teacher’s
alleged abuses. I sincerely hope restorative and transformative justice
practice will be employed to address lingering trauma and prevent future harm.
It’s the only way to heal and go forward.
Furthermore, author Anneke Lucas uses this situation to build
the argument that the harm inflicted is rooted in the patterns and behaviors
set by BKS Iyengar himself. Guruji.
It’s not a new argument, and I’ve addressed the issue in previous
essays. Lucas’s perspective grounds itself in a larger anti-guru,
anti-lineage movement. Too many spiritual leaders have inarguably committed
harm, and the conflation of spiritual devotion with unchecked power is absolutely
toxic and nearly ensures abuse.
If it were
possible to oust all abusive spiritual leaders, would we also dismantle the
spiritual traditions? What is the role of elders, gurus, and mentors? Would we cancel
our own grandfathers? It’s one thing to write off someone we have no relation
to, as an intellectual exercise. It’s another thing to attack an entire lineage
and tradition in which a teacher has been treasured and beloved, despite harms
committed. I firmly believe we need to wrestle with the contradictions, hold
that tension within ourselves, without clinging to either/or positions that
fail to address deeper issues.
What deeper issues?
Our embrace of hierarchy as a species, for example, can
create unhealthy power dynamics. Why do we continually put certain people on
pedestals and give them power? We need to acknowledge that as complex social
beings, we yearn for leadership, and benefit from others’ experience, talent,
and genius. We need to acknowledge that at the spiritual core, we are all
equal, but we are not all equal when it comes to knowledge, experience, and
wisdom. We need to build firm containers for each others’ brilliance to be
taught and shared. We need our teachers and mentors if we are to grow, as
individuals and as a society.
The other side of this coin entails our desperate hunger for
scapegoats. “If there were no prisons, we would realize that we are all in
chains,” observed Maurice Blanchot, 20th century French philosopher.
This explains why mainstream America rejects abolition of the prison industrial
complex and the Defund the Police movement. As long as the problem remains “out
there” and not within each of us, we feel safe.
Our unprocessed trauma compels us to point fingers at the
other, and makes it unnecessary to look within. As long as lynching mobs
believed that the negro was the problem, they avoided the recognition that they
themselves, white people, created the brutal and violent racial hierarchy based
on their imagined superiority. And that the great lie of white supremacy was
rooted in their own feelings of inferiority and fear, borne of generations of their
own trauma and oppression. All too often, the oppressed, given half a chance,
become the oppressor. Their ancestors had fled the wars, genocide, starvation,
plagues, torture chambers, and class oppression of Europe, only to recreate the
trauma here in the New World, with a new underclass.
So now we come back around to BKS Iyengar.
We are not yet engaging in a robust public discussion about
the issue of race and colonization in the context of Iyengar Yoga. Born in 1918
and raised under British colonial rule, BKS Iyengar was of a generation and
temperament that swept racism under the rug. What he knew to do was the same
thing my parents, growing up under Japanese colonial rule in Korea, knew to do:
put your head down and work hard. By work hard, I mean, as if your life
depended on it. As if it’s the only thing you can do to ensure survival.
Perhaps they did not have the language for oppression and
exploitation. The ugliness of colonization is that it’s designed to take over
our minds as well as our resources, livelihoods, and culture, so that you
admire the colonizer, emulate them, internally reject your own upbringing, and
question your own right to autonomy and independence.
BKS Iyengar, Guruji, was indeed “the Lion of Pune.” But he
was also a product of generations of colonization. It was the particular time
and place his soul chose to reincarnate in, just as each of us have spiritually
chosen to be here now.
He was 29 when India gained independence in 1947, but a
nation does not shake off nearly a century of colonial rule overnight. Yoga as
an indigenous practice, like many indigenous arts, was in disrepute, and he
found little interest among Indians in the yogic path. Not until the Western*
elite “discovered” him did he begin to gain recognition, and even then, only
under their terms.
[*I deliberately use the term “Westerners” in this essay, as
used by many Indians, to describe white bodies of the European diaspora, and
people raised in nations established by white bodies, which lie primarily to
the west of India.]
American violinist Yehudi Menuhin hired him as his personal
yoga teacher, and began taking him on his travels. Guruji was introduced to and
embraced by European royalty. But what were the terms of that embrace? He
describes the conditions of apartheid of the nations he traveled to, without using
this terminology. He was exoticized and objectified, treated as a mascot, like
an unusually skillful servant one would show off to friends. A status symbol.
No one in the aristocratic circles of Europe wanted to house
this foreign black man. On one visit, he was stuffed ungraciously into a dusty storage
attic, into a space so small there was no room to even practice. This is one of
very few stories on record, told by his granddaughter at the 2019 Iyengar Yoga
USA convention, that mention the racism he faced. Guruji himself, just like my
parents, never ruminated on those days publicly, and never criticized his
sponsors. They say he fell out with Menuhin eventually, but I don’t know the
terms of that disengagement.
In only one interview I have seen does Guruji mention the
dilemma of racism and colonization. He describes how the slave, so to speak,
had to teach the slavedrivers. He had to find the inner strength to not only
face the colonizers, but to demand their respect as a trusted authority.
I believe that’s what accounts for his reputation as a harsh
disciplinarian in the classroom, in contrast to his playful, nurturing
personality described by his family. Guruji had to break through the tamas of Westerners' comfortable habits and entrenched minds, and the conditioning of
Westerners to habitually and unconsciously view Indians (and other Black and
Brown bodies) as inferior. Sometimes Guruji conveyed his lessons angrily, an absolutely
understandable and healthy response to the colonial condition. You could say he embodied the suppressed
rage of generations. Guruji’s anger never emerged outside the yoga hall, and I've heard no stories of private abuse. His outbursts were channeled through the teaching of āsana. Before and after class,
everyone describes him as good-humored, loving, unfailingly generous, and
affable.
Geeta Iyengar, an infant when Indian independence was won,
was of the first generation to get out from under the boot of British colonial
rule. Geetaji, bless her heart, was often openly furious with us Westerners,
and minced no words. Her voice would bellow in the hall and make us all quake:
“You people come here to take. You don’t come to learn. You don’t even read
Guruji’s books. You come for ‘points’ to take back. You go home and have workshops,
‘Teachings from Pune,’ and teach the points you get in class, and make money
from what we teach you. You don’t even care about Guruji. You don’t even practice.”
Geetaji was describing the colonial condition. Europeans,
North Americans, South Africans, Australians, and Israelis—the entire white
global colonial world—and later the Chinese, other East Asians, and practitioners from all over the world, were
constantly pouring in to RIMYI to bow before their Indian teachers, but some, to Geeta's sharp eye,
coming as “spiritual tourists,” extractors, capitalists, and egotistical power
mongers to take back trinkets of knowledge and sell them to raise their own status. Geeta was calling out
the extraction and commodification of a sacred practice.
[A generation later, RIMYI decided it was their turn to
capitalize on the popularity of yoga and Guruji’s reputation and legacy, and
cash in themselves. A month’s study at RIMYI went from $200 in 2005 to $450 by
2017. They started hosting mega-conventions with 1000+ students just like the
other regions of the world, and charging Western rates. They relaxed the RIMYI
admission rules, so that instead of requiring 8 years of study and letters of
recommendation, virtually anyone could come, pay the money, and take classes.
Why beat them [sic] instead of joining them? Or is this a redistribution of wealth? Reparations/compensation for generations of exploitation?]
Meanwhile, many in the first generation of foreigners
compelled to travel to India to study with Guruji directly were responding to
his particular vibration and energy field, no doubt influenced by their own
unprocessed trauma. Tada
Hozumi comments that, “The reason why (almost all) famous embodiment
teachers are white is because white people are the most dissociated people on
this earth, so the medicines themselves simply decided to travel where they
were needed.”
That is, the first generation of mostly white practitioners
in the USA and elsewhere recognized something they needed from Guruji: the way
the practice made them feel, the healing it provided, the insights they gained.
They wanted to share it with others, and took it wholesale to their white
communities. Some in the first generation went on to internalize his harshness,
and project it on to their own pupils. They said things like, “My teacher would
never allow that. Do it this way instead.” Or “You would get slapped for doing
that in front of Mr. Iyengar. Never do that again.”
Many in second and third generations of Iyengar Yoga,
however, had time and distance to process the emotional baggage of the
teachings, and develop teaching in ways not shaped by colonization, that did
not include bullying and shaming.
I fear that we are experiencing a clash of generations and
cultures in Iyengar Yoga. Second and third generations of Iyengar Yoga students,
especially those who have never studied directly with BKS Iyengar, are no
longer willing to subject themselves to the methodology of the Guru and his
“disciples.” We have language and reference points for abuse and trauma that
were not employed in popular culture a generation ago. We will not tolerate
misconduct or abuse in the yoga classroom or elsewhere. We agree that corporal
punishment has no place in the yoga classroom.
At the same time, it’s almost exclusively white folks who
are calling out the Guru and his followers. They are operating through a white
lens and the POV of the colonizer, and its residual effects and traumas, which
can last for generations. If the healing that was required in the 1970s and 80s
was simply embodiment (as a departure from dissociation), perhaps the healing
that is required in this decade is empowered embodiment to heal trauma. That
is, we are seeking somatic practices that address the harm we’ve experienced,
individually, collectively, and intergenerationally.
But we cannot do this effectively without understanding and
coming to terms with the harm experienced by the accused perpetrator, Guruji,
through the unspeakable harm of colonization. As timeless as we claim yoga is,
we cannot remove Guruji’s teachings from the context he was living and
practicing in. As Westerners, we cannot absolve ourselves of the hegemonic
imperialism of the West and the lasting effects of the brutal British empire.
Even now, we cannot escape coloniality, and our own distorted, colonized minds.
If Guruji developed his famous fire and shakti as a response
to overcoming the oppression of whiteness, then it feels disingenuous for white
folks now to blame him, as an individual, for aspects of the culture of Iyengar
Yoga they reject. It’s like blaming street protestors for making trouble,
without acknowledging the systems and institutions they are protesting, and the
reasons behind their drastic actions.
Certainly we all have free will and individual choice, but
we must contextualize our actions and decisions in history, politics, and
culture, if we are to understand it and transform it.
I will not reject Guruji, nor the tradition of Iyengar Yoga.
I straddle both worlds, as an immigrant from a colonized nation, who is now an
unwitting representative of the American empire. I identify with Guruji and
Geetaji’s anger. I recognize and resist white supremacy daily, and with every
breath. My resistance is not always pretty nor graceful. I employ the profound
tools I was taught by the Iyengars to wrestle, question, explore, evolve, to
pray, and hopefully, heal. I carry the trauma of generations of colonization,
and I hope, I also carry the healing. May it be so.
