Why Indians should stop apologising about yoga
Imagine modern-day Rome celebrating Roman numerals in a soup of controversy, bitterness and rejection. Or dark potions brewing in local media and intelligentsia if Cairo chose to mark ancient Egypt’s contribution to chemistry. Or Greeks crestfallen about celebrating classical tragedy, or Brits apologetic about giving the world machine tools or the English language.
Will the Chinese cringe in pain about celebrating acupuncture?
But India is different. Murmurs started right after PM Narendra Modi last year got the UN general assembly to declare June 21 as International Yoga Day with the record support of 177 countries — 47 of which are Islamic nations — within just 100 days. Fears of forced cultural homogeneity have snowballed into religious and political resistance, in spite of foreign minister Sushma Swaraj clarifying that the grand show was not compulsory.
“We are inviting everybody, but it is not mandatory for anybody,” she had said.
But AIMIM boss Asaduddin Owaisi called yoga un-Islamic even while the spiritual mentor of the subcontinent’s Islam, the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary, being perfectly fine with it. Assam’s Muslims, at least those represented by All Assam Minorities Students Union, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and Badruddin Ajmal’s All India won’t participate today. Mizoram churches will stay away. In Uttarakhand, the Congress government won’t participate.
The problem is not really with yoga, which has been internationally recognised as medically beneficial.
John Denninger, director of research at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of Harvard Medical School’s teaching hospitals, has been leading a five-year study into how yoga affects genes and brain activity of the chronically stressed.
“In a study published last year, scientists at the University of California at Los Angeles and Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn found that 12 minutes of daily yoga meditation for eight weeks increased telomerase activity by 43 percent, suggesting an improvement in stress-induced aging,” Bloomberg Business reported in 2013.
According to a Scientific American report, Chantal Villemure and Catherine Bushnell of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, using MRI scans, have detected more gray matter in certain brain areas of those who regularly do yoga.
There are hundreds of other scientific studies. From Manhattan to Tehran and London to Lahore, there are enough yoga mats to fly a few nations to the moon.
Although certain Hindu rituals use yoga, it would not have been endorsed and practised across nations, cultures and religions if it were narrowly religious.
Clearly separating yoga from religion, Jiddu Krishnamurti says: “The word ‘yoga’ is generally understood as bringing together, tying together. I have been told by scholars that the word 'yoga' doesn't mean that at all…What it means is unitive perception, perceiving the whole thing totally, as a unit, the capacity, or the awareness, or the seeing the whole of existence as one.”
The problem lies elsewhere.
India is just 70 years out of invasive rule, which started with the creation of the Delhi Sultanate by former Turkic slave Qutbuddin Aibak in 1206 and lasted about 750 years. It is enough time to brainwash a people into either being oblivious to or feeling apologetic about all that existed before this time.
Much of education and political discourse of independent India bears marks of this. The subliminal message has been that good things like arts and architecture arrived with the Mughals, scientific temper with the British.
Why just yoga? Even if the government tries celebrating Indian origins of mathematics or giving the world zero, there will be accusations of cultural nationalism and jingoism.
The dark magic of conditioning works at levels much deeper than you realise. That India is trying to break the walls of prolonged historical conditioning by publicly and collectively doing the sirsasan or shavasan is an important first step.