Flexible India: Yoga's Cultural and Political Tensions

Synopsis

Yoga has offered the Indian state unprecedented opportunities for global, media-savvy political performance. Under Modi, it has promoted yoga tourism and staged mass yoga sessions, and Indian officials have proposed yoga as a national solution to a range of social problems, from reducing rape to curing cancer. But as yoga has gone global, its cultural meanings have spiraled far and wide. In Flexible India, Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power.Drawing on her own experience and her readings of political spectacles, yoga murder mysteries, court cases, art installations, and digital media, Black shows how yoga’s imaginative power supports diverse political and cultural ends. Although many cultural practices in today’s India exemplify “culture wars” between liberal and conservative agendas, Flexible India argues that visions of yoga offer a “culture peace” that conceals, without resolving, such tensions. This flexibility allows states, corporations, and individuals to think of themselves as welcoming and tolerant while still, in many cases, supporting practices that make minority populations increasingly vulnerable. However, as Black shows, yoga can also be imagined in ways that offer new tools for critiquing hierarchical structures of power and race, Hindu nationalism, cultural appropriation, and self-help capitalism.

Copyright:

2024

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9780231556286

Publisher:

Columbia University Press

Date of Addition:

12/19/23

Copyrighted By:

Columbia University Press

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Health, Mind and Body, Literature and Fiction, Social Studies, Language Arts

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.