Is Guruji the Problem?

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, 20^th 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.