EPISODE 6: Re-Centering Yoga’s Philosophy with Dr. Shyam Ranganathan transcript
Harpinder Mann
I'm so excited to be joined and to help myself and to help everybody. How do you pronounce your name?
Shyam Ranganathan
Ranganathan. All the A's are, it's phonetic, it's just a lot of syllables. Ran-ga-na-than.
Harpinder Mann
Ran-ga-na-than. Okay, perfect. Beautiful. So we'll hop right into it. Our first question, and the first question I've been asking everybody I'm interviewing, because I'm finding that there's just such varying definitions that people have, is what does yoga mean to you? What is the definition that you hold?
Shyam Ranganathan
Right, great, great question. So, I'm a scholar and a historian of philosophy, so I don't, my approach to this kind of question is, well, what does it mean? Not what does it mean to me? And I think in the Western tradition, and this is something I write a lot about, one of the very core commitments of this tradition is the idea that thought is language. And so, one… but you know, our language is very idiosyncratic and personal and so one of the very bizarre outcomes of this is that people feel the the liberty to just make up definitions. So yoga becomes whatever you want it to be, right? But, if we’re historical and scholarly, we’ll just go back to the beginning, right? And then we can track shifts and trends in terms of people’s linguistic behavior. But if you go back to the very beginning, yoga is a basic ethical theory about right action and good outcome. And it was explicitly defined as a practice, as a practice of coordinating the various aspects of your life, such as your mind, body, senses, intellect, in a coordinated unit, which is the Self. So when you're practicing yoga, all aspects of your life are coordinated so that you show up, you express yourselves.
There's nothing left over. When we don't practice yoga, we're fragmented into mind, body, senses, problems, etc. So yoga is really about the unification of ourselves as a practical—as an agent. So you can find that in the Katha Upanishad, probably one of the earliest articulations of the philosophy of yoga. And then it just it continues in the Yoga Sutra. And the Bhagavad Gita, it's re-described as Bhakti Yoga, but it's the same theory. And then colonization happens about a thousand years later on, with Mughal invasions and the Delhi Sultanate. And then you start to have a shift away from the original public philosophy, which is very decolonial, to something that kind of cowers in light of colonialism, right? So you find texts like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika later on talk about yoga as this thing you do in a good country where justice is administered but in private, indoors, with a human teacher. And then yoga, slowly people are starting to use the word to talk basically about asana and pranayama. So we inherit, so most people today, that's their, that's kind of their way of talking about yoga. It's this thing you do in a gentrified context, indoors, not in public, with a human teacher, and it's then reduced to these physical practices. And, you know, when we're when we participate in the Western tradition, we think it's just all language.
People say kind of nonsense things like “yoga has changed” or “it's evolved.” It hasn't changed. Just what people are using the word “yoga” for, that's changed, right? So if you're actually going to be historical and not, you know, so confused as to think that changes in linguistic behavior mean changes in the thing that is being talked about, then you see that there's a history. There is a precolonial history to what yoga is, and then this kind of deep confusion in a colonized world about what yoga is.
Harpinder Mann
And I know for myself now, being a practitioner for over 10 years, I come across just so many people, so many students that are just like, “Oh, I'm not flexible for yoga.” Yoga to them is just They have no idea it's a body of philosophy or a spiritual path or has anything to do with morals and ethics. And we've gotten quite far from what you're talking about, that pre-colonial yoga and the way that it was practiced in every facet of life. It wasn't just something that we did for one hour on our mat and then we continue on with our day feeling like, “Ah, I'm more flexible in my physical body. Wonderful.” So if we start to even kind of go back into history, what was that history of colonialism in South Asia? How did that impact yoga? And I know this is something like we could spend hours and hours, but if there's an abbreviated version.
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, well, I mean, I think you have to look at, you know, what are the major origins of colonialism? In the global origin of colonialism, the colonialism that's gone everywhere is a tradition that has roots in ancient Greek thought. So I call this the West. So I write this with the capital W that leans on the East. I, you know, I find it kind of outrageous that we talk about the West and then we just mean white people. Or, European. But you know, Africa is in the West, and the Americas is in the West, and so this way of talking about the West where it's basically white people is colonizing. So I use… I’m specific about what tradition. It's not just, it's not even just white people, it's a specific tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. And so then as it spreads, it first… it colonizes everything around it. One of the earliest—and this becomes a tradition of white supremacy. It’s a tradition of white supremacy because it treats the tradition of white people, a tradition of white people, as the judge or explanation of everything. And very early on in this tradition, the Romans, who really kind of take it to the next level, they invent this idea of “religio,” that's where we get our idea of religion, to talk about colonized traditions that are tolerated. And so one of the ways that this tradition of colonialism is normalized is people believe that there's such things as religions. But that's just… there are, only insofar as it was made up by white people, right? So, when the British come to South Asia, they use this Persian word “Hindu,” which basically means “India,” to name this “South Asian religion” that’s indigenous and distinct from Islam.
And then, you know, now people are born, I was born thinking I was Hindu, that's what I was taught, right? Until like I became a scholar and I realized that was actually invented by white people. So part of the problem, of course, is that when you start to have these... So what's so pernicious about religion is that when you have a tradition understood as religious, it's not understood in terms of what it can contribute to life. It's understood in terms of its conformity or deviation from the Western tradition. And that’s treated as the secular tradition. That’s just “ordinary life,” and the stuff that BIPOC folks thought about, that’s like a side story. It's a mystical, it's spiritual. It's not about how we live our life in public with other people. And, you know, and then once people believe this story, they no longer relate to their tradition directly. They're now colonizing—their way to this tradition is actually mediated through white supremacy. So, you know, this is… because there are all these levels of the trauma that ends up happening because people then, you know, they'll want to stand up for the tradition and then they don't appreciate that what they're standing up for is actually largely created by the pressure of colonialism. So, how old is this history? It goes back to the Romans. I think, you know, I do talk about Mughal or Islamic colonization as kind of the first incursion of this tradition because these folks bring with them the idea of religion, right?
So, and a lot of times people, you know, people have difficulty talking about that because Islamophobia is a real problem. And currently you have Hindu nationalists in charge in India who are Islamophobic and they want to erase, they want to erase Muslim South Asians and Indian South Asians. And, you know, that’s wrong. It’s wrong on yogic grounds. They are people, you shouldn’t treat people that way. But because there is this kind of nutty Hindu nationalism, people don’t want to talk about the history of Islamic colonization. And I think the reason it's important is because it brings with it the idea of religion, and the reason that's important is that's just like the oldest version of white supremacy we have in the world. So slowly from around the start of the second millennia, you have… Well, first of all, you have a rupture between classical South Asia and this new thing that South Asians increasingly don't have direct access to because what they're increasingly dealing with is their world mediated through this colonial incursion. And then when the British come, they just take over and they take it up a notch. And you can see, like, if you were to actually do the history of philosophy, you can see the changes in what people, in the kind of intellectual activity people were doing. It became less about public engagement, more about escape, and in a way more Western. So, these themes are actually from Plato and Western philosophers. And as colonization starts to take over, you have a gradual westernization of South Asia. And so unless you're lucky to inherit a pre-colonial South Asian tradition, and there are some, I mean, I was fortunate enough to inherit that, you are largely dealing with the tradition that has been altered by external influence. And there’s a lot of trauma that comes with that. It’s a traumatic place to start out with. So, you know, there’s a history. It’s at least, I mean if you look at the global history of white supremacy, it's a couple millennia old. If you look at the impact on South Asia, it’s about a millennia old.
Harpinder Mann
As you were talking, so many questions arose for me. That distinction of talking about, and I read a couple of your papers and I can see how you have the W leaning a little bit towards the right to delineate that difference. And you're saying at that point of the Western colonizing that also includes countries and regions like Africa and other regions. And then you also then use that to say that's an indication of white supremacy. How do those two... am I confusing them?
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, sorry. So just talking about the West, as though we only mean white people or Europe is a kind of white supremacist discourse because of it erases BIPOC folks, right? The geography of the West includes places where you have a ton of BIPOC people come from. So this discussion happens in politics all the time. You'll hear about world leaders talk about the West and they basically mean white people countries, right? Europe, Western Europe, especially, North America. Right. They don't mean really Mexico or South [America]. Like it's really just code for white people countries. And the ones that are especially far from Asia, etc.
And, you know, I think that that's a remarkable erasure. You know, Europe is in the West, but so are lots of other places too. And what that way of talking does is that it doesn't allow us to appreciate the real origins of colonialism. It makes it seem like it's just a geography, right? It's not. It's a specific, like, if we're thinking about the impact of this tradition, the white people tradition that politicians talk about when they talk about [the West], that's a very specific cultural trajectory. So, you know, I think that's important to—you also appreciate the ways in which Europeans were colonized, right? Like all these Pagan folks doing their own thing, not being colonizers, right? That they get swallowed in the expansion of “Capital W leaning on the East” Western colonialism. So it kind of starts first in Europe and the surrounding regions, Palestine, Northern Africa, and then it spreads to the Middle East. It just becomes normalized after a while, right? So by the time Islam comes about, that idea that there's secular philosophy, and then there's religion, which is whatever white colonizers were taught, that's normalized. And so when Islam is born, it’s born within that context of Western colonization. And then it just starts pushing further in all directions. It's hard for people to think historically when they are in this colonial mindset because they believe everything that colonization produces and they use this as, you know, so colonization produces the idea that there are religions and so then people use this idea of religion to try to understand history. But that's like people using race, right? The concept of race was created by European colonizers in the modern period. Nobody really thought about race before that.
All of a sudden, there were black people and white people, and then there were all sorts of attempts to try and organize these in hierarchies. And now we're saddled with these concepts, but there was a time when that would just not have made any… nobody would have known what you were talking about, right? But because we don't, because we buy or believe these things, we have a way to read back in history things that are just made up.
Harpinder Mann
Thank you, yeah, for further explaining that. Is it a few hundred years then between the Mughal colonization and the British coming in? Is that a history of a few hundred years?
Shyam Ranganathan
I mean, it's hard to get exactly, but the British… No, it's more than a few hundred years. The British colonization also kind of ramps up. It first starts off as like the East India Company. It happened like that in Canada too. There was like the Hudson Bay Company. And then at first they’re doing trading and then slowly they start ramping up. In India they basically start buying kingdoms, right, because it was already a feudal system. From ancient times it was a feudal system and on the ground the leaders might not change but who they paid upwards their tributes, that could shift and change. And so the British just kind of inserted themselves in that structure and started buying up and taking over, like they did both [with] various rulers until they basically owned almost all of it.
So it was like, you know… it didn’t happen all at once. But yeah, I think it's easier to kind of think about these things in terms of the impact as opposed to the start. Because the starts are often kind of vague and murky, but at some point you can see the impact that these events have had, right? And those are pretty stark. If you think historically, the before and after is very… they’re very different.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah. Do you mind telling us a little bit about that before and after for those that might not know?
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, sure. The before of South Asia pre-colonial, it was what I call secularism one. It was an environment where there was no official position and people were free to adopt philosophical views that they wanted to. And the way you got along publicly was by disagreeing. You didn't think that you had to share values. You thought that you had to be able to defend your position publicly to people who disagree. And so, South Asia was a tradition of rich philosophy. And philosophy was taken very seriously. And people's traditions were always connected, you know, whether they could fully articulate it or not was a different story, but they were connected to these philosophical commitments. So, for instance, people don’t… so if you look at the so-called Gods, the Devtas, the early ones were just the forces of nature. So they weren't kind of supernatural, they were completely natural. And then you get this shift to deities that have to do with ethical theory. So Shiva is this kind of ideal experiencer and Shakti is this range of experiences. And the Shiva and Shakti get associated with teleological ethical theory. So teleological ethical theory is concerned with the outcome.
And so there's two main versions. You could be a virtue ethicist that thinks that the right thing to do comes from being a good person. And so you find a lot of Shiva and Shakti associated with virtue theory philosophy. You could also be a consequentialist who thinks that the right thing to do brings about some good outcome. And so you find a lot of Shiva, Shakti... And then if you look at procedural ethical theories where it's not about the outcomes but the way you do things, right? Then you're in the realm of Vishnu, LaksHarpinder Manni, Adi Sesha. In fact, one of the things I point out is if you look at the three Priyas at the start of book two, there are three Priyas that are listed as the basis of yoga as an armative practice. There's devotion to Ishvara, then there’s Tapas, and Swadhyaya. And so there’s… Ishvara Pranidhana is devotion to sovereignty. But sovereignty, Ishvara in Yoga Sutra has two essential traits: it's not stuck in its past and it can determine its own future. And then when we're devoted to sovereignty we have to practice that ourselves, not being stuck in the past determining our future. So Tapas is this practice of unconservatism and Swadhyaya is this practice of self-governance. But then when you look at this very, you know… what is that supposed to do? That's supposed to get us out of being… when we practice that we're no longer externally influenced, we're autonomous and living our own life. And, you know, there's a very famous tableau that Hindus are used to looking at, which is this ocean of external influences. And then there's these three things floating above it. There's Adi Saisha who is devoted to sovereignty and Vishnu. Tapas is presented with past activities, like the mace and the disc. And so he's not being constrained by his own past. And then LaksHarpinder Manni is depicted as a lotus that sits on herself. She's self-governing, Swadhyaya. And so, you know, now when post-colonially we look in a colonized world, we look back at this and it's religion and mysticism. If we go back, they were simply communicating their philosophical commitments. And then the stories of these very deities, like the Mahabharata, etc. These are explorations, moral philosophical explorations, about how these values fair in different contexts. So, you know, it was philosophy all the way down. And the most important philosophical topic was dharma, which is their word for the right or the good, which is what we call ethics. So everybody had a different view about dharma, and they got along by disagreeing. So that's the pre-colonial.
So when the British decide that there is this thing “Hindu,” one of the things I point out is that if we just look at what they labeled as “Hindu,” it's this secular history of people just having different philosophical commitments, disagreeing. And then what happens once the label sticks is that people no longer relate to the history directly, it’s mediated by this idea that there's a religion. So then what ends up happening is South Asians try to confabulate, create stories about their shared religion. It's at the same time that Buddhism becomes a religion. Buddhism was just a view about dharma as was Jainism as a view on dharma, right? But it's in this environment, right, then Sikhism becomes a religion, right? It's why… well, it's all, I mean, the Muslims are already there. They believe they have religions, right? And a lot of, they believe they have a religious identity. And then that creates an environment where everybody else seems like they've got to have one too. And so people start creating all these stories about their religious identities, which would simply not have occurred had there been no Western colonization. They would have just been talking about dharma and they're disagreeing about it. So what we find now then in South Asia, this kind of hyper nationalism that's tied to religious identity, is completely a creature of colonialism, right? And you know, in South Asians, they don't, as people who are carrying the trauma of colonialism, they don't… they've internalized it. And then they don't know how to really deal with the world of diversity because colonialism is anti-diversity. And so what we find now then is a continuation of the Western tradition, not actually South Asia on the whole. You can of course find exceptions.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, thank you for going into that detail because I find for my book on the chapter of colonialism, it's just been incredibly difficult going into the history, trying to understand what is pre-colonial yoga, how has yoga been colonized and changed. And I think that's such a valuable understanding of even knowing [when] British comes in, labels a group of people as Hindu, that becomes a form of religion. Other religions also spring up. And being able to kind of even go before that and understand it as being different philosophies and people are open to just debate one another and think about the morals and the ethics and that being that yoga in action. So I think that's very valuable to have that understanding because that answers my next question that I had, is what is pre-colonial yoga? And is there more that you want to say to that? I feel like we have to.
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, sure. Yoga is just one option among many. And it's the view that we find Pancha, Yoga Sutra, Gita, and then explored in literature like the Mahabharata, the Gita is part of the Mahabharata, but even other stories. Almost all the stories of Vishnu have some kind of yoga element to them. And, you know, the essence of yoga is, well, it's a theory about the right of the good. And there are three famous ones that were also there in South Asia, but they're famous in the Western tradition. There's virtue ethics, the idea that you have to be a good person in order to know what to do. And if you're not a good person, you have to go find a good person to tell you what to do. There's consequentialism, the idea that the right thing to do brings about a good outcome. So you have to have some account of what a good outcome is.
Then there's deontology that says that there are lots of good things to do, but only some of them are the right thing to do. Karma yoga and the Gita is actually a version of deontology: lots of things to do, but something is the right thing for you to do and you should work on that. Yoga is a fourth account of the right of the good that's not… is unheard of in the Western tradition. And every other, all the other ethical theories have some way of talking about the thing to do in terms of a good outcome. But yoga is the opposite of virtue ethics. So virtue ethics says you have to be a good person in order to know what to do. So the good comes first and it brings about the right. Yoga says you start with the right. And you start with the right by being devoted to the ideal of the right, Ishvara. And then you practice being that sovereign thing. And then the perfection of that practice is the good outcome. So it's a radically different way of thinking about activity where you don't have to be good at it to do it correctly. And success is not the criterion of… a successful outcome is not the criterion of whether you're actually going about the practice correctly.
So there is a way to do it successfully where you might, in some ways, you might just be failing, right? But that's just what happens at the start of any practice. You start, you're bad at it. But it doesn't mean that it's wrong for you to practice it. The only way you're going to get good is by practicing. But what's so interesting about yoga is that that devotional practice is meaningful itself, even if you're not very good at it. So being a yogi means that you, you are not going to get distracted by your own failure as you practice, right? So you will, you will actually be committed enough and stick it out long enough to become good at it because you're not judging your success in terms of how how great your performance is. It's about your commitment, your decision to come back to that devotional practice over and over again. So it's really, so that's what yoga… it's just one option.
There are lots of options and the rest of them are not yoga. I think having this historical approach is really important because it shows that this idea that yoga is whatever you want it to be is like sheer nonsense. And it also shows that the people who thought of yoga had a really sophisticated, clear idea of what yoga is. And so we're not learning from that. That's our fault, not theirs.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, and what just strikes me in everything you've been saying is how far we've gotten from that. Where now we have the booty yoga and twerk yoga and goat yoga and have just gotten so far… and last time we spoke, I know I mentioned I was a part of a panel on yoga with some yoga scholars and one of them said, I don't see a problem with modern yoga. And I just sitting there, I was like, I just can't disagree with you more. How have we gotten to this place, either through colonialism, white supremacy, this dilution, where it was this body of philosophy, a way to make an understanding of our life to make choices and to take ethical action and not be worried about the success of it. How do we get from that place to what we have now?
Shyam Ranganathan
Well, certainly colonialism, but I think also it's really important to push back against this idea that yoga's changed or this and that. Yoga is the same thing it always is. It's just what you decide to use the word “yoga” for, maybe that's changed. But then we have to take responsibility for that. Why are we using the word “yoga” for this instead of that? What is the political purpose of taking a word that has a clear meaning in a pre-colonial context and then using it in ways that are very different. Well, I can tell you one political purpose is that it prevents us from exploring the decolonial implications of yoga. So yoga is the original decolonial philosophy. Why? Because it's about devotion to Ishvara, sovereignty. You can't be colonized if you're sovereign. And so each one of our practice of Ishvara Pranidhana, devotion to Ishvara, is a decolonial practice. And the move to modern yoga or the move to talk about yoga as a non-philosophical practice of health and well-being, that move serves to render Western colonialism and white supremacy free from BIPOC criticism. So it's racist. It's meant to support the white supremacy of the world. It's also just remarkably ignorant, right? It's a willful ignorance. Because people think that they know what yoga is because they went to yoga studio and learned from someone who's barely educated, you know, about yoga. The idea that somehow what we now understand as yoga is like, there's something there's like, that's a thing, instead of just, you know, a story told by people who are like, wildly underqualified to be talking about yoga. And then yoga studies, “yoga studies,” kind of this activity within a colonized academy, then treats that as the object of inquiry without any historical... So this is a remarkable thing. It's so ahistorical.
There's no historical appreciation of, “Well, what were the events that led to this being called yoga, right?” When I talk to people in yoga studies, I… there's a reason why they're not historical. It's that the religious studies—and yoga studies is just kind of a subset of this—is largely a reaction to an earlier attempt to study religion as theology. Theologians are really, they're concerned about these questions about what the “right answer” to say what Christianity is, right? So there's actual Christianity, fake Christianity. And scholars of religion, religious studies, they wanted to move away from that. Because they thought that, you know, there are lots of ways, first of all, that's kind of political when you decide, like, “My form of Christianity is right and yours is wrong.” But also, the history just shows that there's just lots of different stories about that, right? And we can learn something about the diversity of options.
So there's this trauma these folks have, this klesha that comes from their relationship with theology. And they're using that as a kind of cover for being ahistorical in the case of a colonized tradition. And what they don't appreciate is that in being ahistorical, they are actually participating in colonization. Like they don't see any... because I mean really, this whole thing is ahistorical, right? And the moment you become ahistorical, what's colonialism? Right? It doesn't even... “I'm not experiencing colonialism. What does that mean,” right? It just becomes all about the things that these people are observing and experiencing. So the entire… but, you know, yoga studies… in my published work, I talk about the ancestors, which is Indology, is just as bad or worse, which is it's a bunch of people without training, for the most part, without any training as professional philosophers, who want to talk about the history of South Asia, and write about South Asian philosophy, but without the skills you need to understand these reasons and arguments. So what they do is they try to make sense of it in terms of their outlook now. And there's just so many of them that this becomes normalized.
And so, you know, what we have in the academy is just a lot of people who know Sanskrit and nothing else. They just know, you know… they can read the words, but my students can read English. It doesn't mean they understand the philosophy and the curriculum written in English. That's an entirely different skill. And anyways, to close my answer to this, the reason we're here is because one of the main targets of colonialism is philosophy. You can't colonize people if they're busy asking questions and engaging in debates and being critical of stories, right? It really, the only way to get colonialism off the ground is to get people to stop asking questions and just buy it. And so, what we find in Yogaland, in yoga studies, and Indology is this remarkable anti-philosophy sentiment, right? Which is why these people don't… they don't… they don't think there's anything to learn, right? So they're just all so remarkably Western in that way. The Western tradition is the only tradition that begins with the murder of a philosopher. And, you know, these folks are kind of continuing on that project.
Harpinder Mann
Thank you. And I think what I so appreciate about your work and why I wanted to include you in the book and in this podcast is your integrity in wanting to go into the history. Because I don’t think we can talk about what is yoga today and what it was before if we don’t take a look at history. Otherwise, we can just say, “Well, things are great as they are now. Why would we want to change things?” And it's like, well, we're not actually practicing yoga. No one really has an understanding of what yoga is if we don't have people like you actually saying, “Well, it's a body of philosophy and it's a way to move through the world and our life. And it's not just a physical practice.” And I think there's just so many people that I've come across that have no interest.
They have no interest in learning the history or learning the philosophy. And they're like, “I'm happy just as I am.” And that is enraging, but I also know there are people out there who really do wanna learn and are interested. So, I appreciate your work in this space.
Shyam Ranganathan
Well, thank you. The people who don't want to learn, that's actually an expression of colonial trauma. They don't realize it, but they're scared. They're scared to learn, because to learn is to leave the bounds of this colonized experience. So, they're actually willing participants in colonialism and they're scared to escape that. And so, you know, they’re still to blame. In some ways, they're still the problem. And then yoga has a long tradition of pointing fingers and assigning blame where it deserves. So, these people are problems and they are the enemies of, like, decolonization because they're actively trying to protect colonization by not departing from, you know, what it teaches us or the propaganda it gives us. But you know, I think the yoga practice allows us to appreciate is that that is a willful ignorance. It's not an accident. It's not just that they don't know any better. It's a willful ignorance. And so then the rest of us have to pick away at that and not allow it to be normalized.
Harpinder Mann
Absolutely. Do you think then yoga itself provides a path to heal and overcome these damaging colonial histories?
Shyam Ranganathan
For sure, yeah. I mean, I only really started to appreciate what was wrong with, like, the ways in which colonialism is so pervasive when I really started studying the philosophy of yoga. So colonialism is an example of egotism, asmita. And egotism, or asmita, is the internalization of observed political regularities. The definition in Book 2 is that egotism is confusing the perspective of a person with the power of the individual into single self. When we engage in egotism, we tie ourselves to certain experiences as our sense of self. There's this great paper I quote often by Grant Silva called, “Racism as Self-Love” and he talks about the example of a white person who is racist is not because they hate black people, but because they love white people. And the example is a white person who identifies with their place in a racial hierarchy of white supremacy. And that becomes their sense of self. And then when they see a black person on the street, that alarms them because it's not consistent with their sense of how they're so much more important than that black person, right? And so the racism then is generated out of this commitment to the sense of self. The yoga response is that that's not real self-love. That's egotism. That's a fake sense of self that's developed out of the conflation of your experiences with yourself. But then, when we do that, our agency is deployed to normalizing that. So if I identify, you know, in a male supremacist world, then my ego will only be happy when men are in charge and women are in the background. And then I'm going to get alarmed if I have to treat a woman as an equal. And then so my agency will then be deployed to normalizing my sense of self. And so I'm going to act in violent ways, in oppressive ways, say against one's… it's just an example. It could be anything, right? And I think the important thing is that you don't have to be white to internalize the power structure of white supremacy as your sense of self according to yoga. It just has to be your way of understanding yourself, right? So colonialism works then by creating an external oppressive environment where we feel like we have to accept that experience as our sense of self because otherwise we'd have to fight against that. And that seems scary and dangerous. But then once we accept this as our sense of self, our agency is then deployed to normalizing that.
So then we become agents of colonialism once we do this. Right? So colonialism is an intergenerational, it's traumatic, it's about passing along this egotism. And this is all in the Yoga Sutra. So what I’m doing is just extrapolating insights in the logical entailments of what Patanjali wrote in the Yoga Sutra. So when we think about contemporary colonialism, right, it's simply just that—it's just an example of that process, but there's a history to this. And yoga also teaches us there's a history to all of our decisions. And when we don't live yogically, we forget about it. It's like when we leave the pot on the stove and it's on. And we leave the room, we forget that the stove is on. There’s still a real consequence, but it will haunt us in ways because we weren't responsibly dealing with our choices and our activities. So, we've all, you know, insofar as we become these agents of colonialism, we've made decisions in the past to identify with colonial power structures because it seems too scary and dangerous to fight against. And then we internalize it and then we become agents of that colonialism. And so… but, this is not the proper life of a person. The proper life of a person is to be autonomous, to be independent. And so when people identify with their experiences, they're actually undermining their own autonomy.
So then the practice of devotion to Ishvara, right in a religious world, in a colonized world, it sounds like this is, devotion to Ishvara is about your own independence as a person and the independence of people as such. So it's already political, but importantly what it allows each one of us to do is to start to relate to ourselves in healthy ways. So when we have ego, we relate to ourselves in terms of these experiences we've internalized.
When we start to practice yoga, we start to practice self-allyship via devotion to Ishvara. And then we can relate to ourselves without the issues, right, without all of that baggage. And we start to find like, we're likable people, right? We're not those problems. And even though our past was troubled, like, we did pretty well, right? Like, as especially as you start to make progress, you show yourself as a competent individual who doesn't need that baggage to make sense of themselves. And so the yoga is all about this healing. But it doesn't mean that everything's okay. Other people are still messed up, right? And so far, they're not doing this work. And so, our own practice of self-healing has to be political and push those people. Otherwise, they're going to be problems for us, right? So, we have to nudge them, push them, get them to stop being agents of oppression.
Harpinder Mann
What I appreciate in that is that call to awareness. That awareness if there are ways that all of us can become agents of oppression, agents of colonialism. You don't have to be white to become an agent of colonialism. And having that awareness and that awareness to the practice of yoga to see ways that we may be also adding to that oppression. And I think it's important to take this in because I know even in the yoga space, there are folks that are okay being like the token, the representation, or “at least I have a seat at the table.” You're not actually changing anything. You're just also there now. And I think it's important in this conversation where it's like, “Well, say you do get a seat at the table, are you actually having the hard conversations trying to change things as well or are you just happy that you're there now too?” So how do people do better instead of becoming also an agent of oppression?
Shyam Ranganathan
Amazing. So, absolutely. Currently, we have this nonsense tokenization in all sorts of areas of life and in business and staffing. And it is true, like there is this business angle that when you bring, when you allow for diversity, you do allow for new knowledge, new problem solving skills. And so there's obvious organizational benefits to not simply having people from the same cultural background and the same experience. So clearly there's all that. But that doesn't mean that in rendering your participation diverse, you've gotten rid of white supremacy or colonialism, right? So for me, I think I found that having a seat at the table is actually a concerning thing. If you got invited, why? Right? And I think, I think… Well, the thing we should all be doing is just doing the work all the time. And so if someone asks us to participate, we just show up as ourselves, right? So yoga simplifies life, because I'm always doing the same thing. I'm always engaging in this devotional practice. So if I show up, I'm doing that, that too. I don't, I don't have to kind of think, “Oh, what am I going to say to these people now that they’ve invited…” right? I'm, I'm the same guy, I'm still doing the same thing, right? But I think the alarming thing in, well, yoga is this weird par—Yogaland is this weird, parasitic place where whatever goes on outside is then… people try to kind of replicate it. So there's like trauma-informed physiotherapy. And so then people start talking about trauma-informed yoga, right? As though you needed to teach yoga about trauma. Yoga is about curing your traumas. So there's this kind of nonsense replication. And then I think in this nonsense replication in Yogaland of external things going on, there’s this nonesense idea that somehow simply diversifying racially or say on the basis of sex or gender or… that that's the magic pill. But, as this is why yoga is so important, most people given the choice, will choose colonization because it's scary to do that. It's frightening to become an activist, to stand up, right?
So there's no reason to believe that the Black, Indigenous, People of Color folks that you want to be part of… that simply because they're Black, Indigenous, or People of Colou, that they haven't internalized white supremacy. In fact, if they've gotten far, they probably have as a strategy to not get in the line of fire, to not be the person that others make an example of. Right? So that doesn't mean that I don't think that, you know, we should… I mean, if we're not something weird is going on, right? So there's some kind of gatekeeping mechanism that's keeping it to only like… so that clearly has to go. But simply thinking that because, “Oh, I've got a Hindu here, right, who's going to talk about her or his tradition, that then I really know, right?” That's the kind of the nonsense, right? Like, I don't know what I know just because I was raised a Hindu. I had to do a ton of research and work across multiple traditions to come to an understanding of the history of my tradition that was taken away from me by colonialism. And what we have in Yogaland is this stupid idea that because someone was raised in South Asia, or is South Asian, they know, right? That's just to deny the reality of colonialism, right? That's just another way to say it didn't happen. And so, yeah, there's just all sorts of levels of naivety. And if we really want to get rid of the white supremacy and colonialism, it's up to each one of us to do that work. And that means that, you know, white folks could be far, like… there's no reason that a white yogi cannot be kind of more qualified to teach and transmit this knowledge than someone whose internalized white supremacy as a Person of Color.
I recently did a little talk about it, and reminded of Malcolm X's distinction between the “House Negro” and the “Field Negro.” And the House Negro identifies with the master, because it's worked out well for the House Negro, right? Like he gets to wear the clothes, he gets to eat the food, and then the Field Negro is like doesn't have any of that. But at any rate, I'm not the first person to kind of notice this. And I think when we are radically not racist, then we don't think there's any magic to the color of your skin, right? So, being white doesn’t make you racist and being Brown doesn't make you anti-racist. I think to believe that naivety is a kind of weird racism, right? Oh, they're white, they're clearly racist. Oh, that person's dark, they're clearly not. Pure nonsense.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah. And I think that's maybe going to the extreme other end where we're just like, “Oh, we got to fix this really quickly. So how can we fix it quickly? Let's just bring in someone that looks Brown or Black. And now we've done the work.” And it's like, well, we haven't done the work. The work actually takes sitting down with self-inquiry and having conversations and how this is so ingrained into each one of us, into society, into all the systems that we exist in. And I find in the world that we live in, no one feels like they have time to do that work. We just got to find a quick sort of band-aid and let's move it forward. And I think it takes that time and the effort and actually becoming decolonial and decolonized.
Shyam Ranganathan
Right. Well, that's because the effort is our own. It’s not… there’s no… We have to fix ourselves, otherwise we are agents of oppression, right? And so to think about, “Oh, the solution will be, I’ll have a Brown person next to me,” is to not do the work. Is to not really appreciate… I mean, even to think that that tokenizing effort is a solution is to have already failed to appreciate how this works. This works because we buy the power structures, right? And unless each one of us… unless as individuals, we're not balking that and doing something else, we just reproduce it. So, but also I think this is part fashion. It's fashionable a bit right now to do this kind of thing. And so people are responding to that. And, you know, South Asians have decided, “Oh…” and I get it. Like when I, when I got into Yogaland, I was, it's not like I hadn't experienced racism, but people would tell me things like, “Yeah, we go to these yoga conferences and that's just all white people standing up and they have no clue what they're talking about,” my South Asian friends would tell me.
And like, this is nonsense. And then I started going to some of these things. And it's true. Like, people will just get up, white folks get up, start talking, and they have no clue. They're just basically rebranding whatever feels good to them as yoga. And then I could kind of see why my South Asian friends were like, you know, you would think that they should give some room for us, because, you know, if everybody's just going to talk, whatever comes to mind, at least this is our tradition. And so there's some chance of us actually saying something accurate.
And so I am sympathetic. I think that's true. When the choices between just kind of people talking out of their butt, right, if that's what it's going to be, yeah, you should have some South Asians around. Because at least if they do that, it's more likely to have something to do with yoga than not. But that's still more likely not, you know, to actually know is a lot of work. And, you know, I think for those of us South Asians who are in this, we have to have enough respect for the history to want to do the learning. And that's not an overnight thing. You know, I entered university when I was 19, I just turned 50, and I'm still learning, you know, but that entire time was my research, right? Every year I was learning more.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, and Thank you for, yeah, that reminder where this work and the learning Wwll take years and years and it's not something that's gonna just happen like I snap my fingers and all of a sudden now I know. And I think that also… I think just adds a lot of grace to where it's like, you don't need to all of a sudden know.
It's okay to take that time. It's okay to not rush these things. Because there's a lot that gets unpacked and unraveled in that work. And that kind of adds now to my next question of, so how can people begin this work of understanding this complex history? How do they begin decolonizing themselves, their understanding of yoga, their practice, their study?
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, so what I was going to say to the previous observation, which is kind of a segue to what I would say to this, is that that great, that kind of gentleness with ourselves, to not have all the answers all of a sudden, is really an important part of devotion to Ishvara, because as we are devoted to sovereignty, it's a practice, it's not about the outcome.
And so part of that practice is coming to terms with your ignorance, the ways in which you made assumptions but you really didn't have any reason to make those assumptions. And also that you need answers but that's going to be a result of the practice. So you can't speed that up you can maybe just speed up your practice by being more serious about it. So that's the number one thing people need to do to decolonize themselves and open themselves up to learning. And in the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali says that Ishvara was the first teacher and I think that's because in order for us to learn, learning is always about increasing our own independence from ignorance. And we only ever learn when we've done the work ourselves. People can lecture us, they can try and give us propaganda. That's not learning. Actual learning is when we've done the work ourselves and then we know because it's something we can do. So, taking this devotional practice seriously is the first step. It's helpful to find someone who's been doing this work for a long time. And I'm sad to say that I can't really point to anybody else because this work isn't work that gets passed down from teacher to student in settings of colonialism.
So you have to have a really weird learning trajectory, right? So I don't, you know, I don't have a yoga teacher. I don't have a Swami or guru. Like I look at these people and I'm never impressed, like, how do they know? So for me, right, it was really, I did everything from scratch, the ground up. But you don't have to completely reinvent the wheel. You can find stuff that I've written. But none of this is going to make any difference if you're not actually doing the work. So I'm always happy.... I'm doing this to share the result of my research.
That's why I started Yoga Philosophy. That's why I teach. But, you know, the value and what I have to share won't be anything appreciable if you're not actually doing the work yourself. And if you're not doing that work yourself, you'll never learn anything, right? So I think it just comes down to our own commitment to this devotional practice.
Harpinder Mann
And I know for my own practice and study, knowing that it does take a while to find teachers and people who want to study and teach yoga in this way. So, if someone is wanting to understand these complex histories, I would definitely recommend you as a resource. And I know you sent me a bunch of things that I was able to read and look over. Although at times I was like, “Some of these are big words.”
Shyam Ranganathan
[Laughs] I think you can do it.
Harpinder Mann
And I was like, “Okay, I put my little scholarly hat on in trying to understand this.” I know I’ve definitely learned a lot from you and I'm excited for people to also be able to turn to you as a resource in doing this work. A question that also came up to me, and this is from much earlier before that I didn't get to touch on, is why do you think yoga has now been reduced down to asana? Why is it the way it is now?
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, so this is not a new thing, right? So I think that's... so you can already see this in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which is around 1400 CE. So, recently I draw a distinction between Capital Y “Yoga” and small y “yoga.” So Capital Y “Yoga” is a full devotional practice, which is just how you live your life. And then small y “yoga” are ways in which you can implement that. So, you know, asana could be a small y “yoga” way for you to practice Tapas and Swadhyaya, unconservatism, self-governance, as you're devoted to sovereignty.
So, a good breathing exercise. So all these things could be ways to practice yoga. What happens then in time is that there's a kind of severance between the philosophy and the small y “yoga” things and then people talk about the small y “yoga” things as though they're simply Yoga on their own. And that severance is colonialism because the Big Y “Yoga” is decolonial, so what colonialism does is it discourages that kind of courageous devotion to Ishrava and it encourages hiding. And that's exactly, like if you were to read that, like I'm amazed like people will quote this Hatha Yoga Pradipika book. I'm like, what's this? I have a historian of philosophy. It's not a, it's not really a very famous philosophical text. But and you know, if you look at, say, Yoga Alliance, it's on the list of things that they think students of yoga are supposed to know. It was influential later on. And I remember reading it for the first time. And I was just shocked because I think what I knew about yoga was like this historical thing. You go out, you live your life publicly. And if other people are against you, you have to fight them. You can’t let them… we’re always making choices and we can’t allow others to dominante us, that’s irresponsible, right? So each one of us has to stand up for ourselves. And in doing that, we stand up for individuals and people to live, kind of, non-oppressed lives. And here you have this text that talks about going to a nice place, finding a human teacher and doing something in secret. Because if you talk about it out in public, it'll lose its power.
And so now yoga is a spiritual practice, something you do in a yoga studio with the yoga teacher in a gentrified neighborhood. That's the Hatha Yoga Pradipika right there. So it's not an overnight thing. It's been going on for centuries. I think about teachers like Krishnamacharya, who’s a Ranganayakiamma. I never appreciated how lucky I was because the Ranganathani Vaishnava tradition is a pre-colonial South Asian tradition. And it's a it's a tradition based on yoga. So there, there's a kind of, if you can get rid of all the colonization, there's actually a lot there, kind of directly teaching us about yoga philosophy. So when I think about Krishnamacharya, right, he is a thought founder, father of modern yoga. He taught a lot of the very famous yoga teachers, but he wouldn't have thought that yoga was just asana, right? That wouldn't have been him, but he would have thought, “Oh, I'll get you started on—because you're a kid or you're just starting out—I'll get you started on this and we could talk about other things too.” And then what people did even though they had an opportunity to learn about… they just took the stuff they wanted, which is the asana, right? Because this colonial mindset had already set in. So even though there would have been kind of new opportunities to kind to learn and I'm not saying that Krishnamacharya was somehow a genius about all these things, but there was at least an avenue to learn about yoga, Big Y “Yoga.”
People chose the small y “yoga” for these colonial reasons. And it's easier to market. It's harder to sell independence. It's easier to sell a technique of wellness that people want because they think it's going to make their life better. You can charge, like, it's just amazing. Like, people will pay a ton of money if you tell them, “I will teach you something that will get you what you want.” And I'll pay thousands of dollars, maybe millions, but teaching people the philosophy so that they end up creating their own success… “Oh, well…” It's almost like any money is too expensive for that. That's like the remarkable thing. Like what would really be helpful to you? “Oh, too expensive. I can't afford that.” So, but this is part of the sickness of the colonial mindset. Always looking for, instead of dealing with ourselves as people who need to be independent, we're always looking for some way out of a problem. And it's never about us. It's never about ourselves.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, I think that's a really good point on returning to oneself. And kind of leads back to the conversation we've been having around that self-inquiry instead of looking for some sort of quick fix. I feel like a lot of us in the Yogaland, yoga industry space probably have enough techniques to last lifetimes.
But are we spending the time to learn about the history and the philosophy? I think that's what's missing. And this then leads into one of my last questions is, what changes and hopes do you wish to see in Yogaland, in the yoga industry or in the space in general?
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, I try not to have such wishes and hopes. It's not really part of my practice. I think about myself as kind of showing up and doing what I can in terms of my practice and that shifts and changes. You know, when you think about the practice personally, it's something you have to manage in your life. And so, but, you know, I think one of the things that I've learned is that when you really do show up and you really are practicing and you're sharing this, you have… there are ways to make connections with others. Because this is a very personal thing. And insofar as it's personal, it's something we can share with other people. And so, you know, these connections of solidarity with other people who realize that this work is their work is really powerful. Because it's really going to be that that changes things. It's going to take enough people who are doing the work to increasingly shine a light on how this kind of monetized self-help industry really is a deviation. And I think it's going to take, people are going to have to be creative about how they actually properly monetize this, right? This is not… no part of this is martyrdom. So we, all of us who are actually serious about sharing this have to learn how to make a living while actually sharing the real thing and that's harder. It's easier to make money off of snake oil, right?
It's easier to, it's easier, like, telling people to eat well and exercise. People don't want to do that, right? It's easier to, like, sell them weird potions and things that they think that they can drink is going to fix everything. So, yoga is built like that. It's like, eat well, exercise well, get good sleep, like, “Whoa, hold on here, right?” We're gonna have to learn how to be successful sharing that kind of knowledge with folks.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, absolutely. And I know in spaces, I've been in students I've taught where they're like, “Oh, I heard about this specific technique, can you teach it to me? Is this gonna fix my core or whatever's going on?” I was like, “Well, let's back up and let's talk about some other things.” Like, “No, I want to learn that.” I'm just like, “Okay, where did you hear this?” “YouTube.” I'm like, “Okay.”
Shyam Ranganathan
[Laughs] YouTube!
Harpinder Mann
It's just really interesting being in this space. And one of my teachers talks about yoga teachers become like service providers. So whatever the student is wanting, the student being the customer, they're right. So if they want something, let me get that for you, let me modify it for you. And I think for us in this work is how do we stay in integrity to our practice and to what's true to us instead of just conforming as soon as we see a change or a student wants something in particular where it's just like, well, let me go back to my values and let me go back to my practice.
Shyam Ranganathan
Right, no, that's great. I mean, this is the conflict in the Yogaland is that yoga is dressed up as an educational product, but the way people make money is off out of fulfilling customer expectations. You can't teach… The student—this is just the reality—if someone's a student, they don't know. They don't know what's actually of value. That's why there's a student, right? But because the industry makes money off of the customer being... there's a deep conflict. And I think the flip side of it is also that the most people that... sorry, most people involved lack knowledge because they've lacked a seriousness for learning. So they're actually not really in a position to teach either. And so the real trick is, you know, once again, right, that we ourselves have to be doing learning.
We ourselves have to be practicing. And then sharing that as the product that we can sell as education. And, you know, it's not like teachers can't make money, but it does seem easier not to do it, right? I think that's just it, it's just easier. So at least for the moment, I think that if people are seriously courageous, the one thing that I've seen is that it makes you distinctive, right? Because you're actually doing the practice while everybody else is selling tricks or something, right?
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, no, I can definitely see that. But I have also found in doing this self-inquiry work how much it's had me pause and stop and change the way that I teach and the way that I do things.
And I think doing this work is going to require that where you just realize, oh, maybe that thing I was doing isn't the right way to do it anymore. Yeah, for sure. And knowing that that's a part of it and that's okay. Right. And being okay with that change.
Shyam Ranganathan
Yeah, yeah. Don't try and be like others in this world. This is just like one of the things very early on I'm like, don't even try. It won't work out well for you if you actually care about the practice.
Harpinder Mann
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time. I know I have learned so much and put so many pieces together and I know everyone that's going to listen to this or read it in the book is going to gain so much from it as well. Where can people find more of what you have to say and teach if they're looking to connect?
Shyam Ranganathan
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for these great questions and the wonderful conversations. So my website, YogaPhilosophy.com (one word). You can start there. And you can sign up for my emai list. I’m also on Instagram: @YogaPhilosophy_com. I do a lot of philosophy there. So those are kind of the ways that you can start to engage with my products. I have a lot of free courses. You can find those also at YogaPhilosophy.com. So those are places to start.
Harpinder Mann
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much and thank you everybody for tuning in. I'll catch you for the next episode. Bye. Well, thank you so much, and thank you, everybody, for tuning in. I'll catch you for the next episode. Bye.