SEEING INDIA: A Hyperreal Yoga Fantasy by Rebecca Elizabeth Long Honors Thesis Appalachian State University Submitted to the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Art, and The Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts December, 2016 Dana E. Powell, Ph.D., Thesis Director Heather Waldroup, Ph.D., Second Reader Christina Sornito, Ph.D., Third Reader Sushmita Chatterjee, Ph.D., Fourth Reader Timothy Smith, Ph.D., Honors Director, Department of Anthropology James Toub, Ph.D., Honors Director, Department of Art Ted Zerucha, Ph.D., Interim Director, The Honors College ABSTRACT How does the yoga studio present India for viewing? As a yoga scholar-practitioner, I examine visual, linguistic, and embodied representations of India at a local yoga studio to address this question. The fieldwork for this ethnographic thesis spans yoga classes, yoga teacher training, and a two-week pilgrimage to India with members of this yoga studio. I pay special attention to bhakti yoga, a devotional form of yoga taught by the yoga studio as a way to offer a more spiritual and therefore more authentic yoga. Placing my experiences within a critical understanding of postcolonial yoga history, I show that yoga has been constructed to meet various ideologies and political projects, challenging the production of yoga as India’s pristine and unchanging cultural icon. I find that India is exhibited as an ultra-spiritual, pre- colonial, anti-modern location both at the yoga studio and when traveling as a yoga tourist. Using Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the hyperreal, along with postcolonial theories, I argue that the yoga studio creates a particular India for consumption that is not based in reality but is instead the product of oriental fantasies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work could not exist in isolation from the large amount of support I have received. Thus, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my committee members, especially Dana Powell for her guidance and valuable advice throughout the entire thesis process. I’d also like to thank Diane Mines for her assistance in this project, even before I really knew what I’d be writing about. The Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State has provided a wonderful environment to cultivate this thesis, and the many of the faculty and staff directly and indirectly helped this project come to fruition. Another community has made an essential contribution to this project: those at the yoga studio who took the time to share their experiences with me. I am also grateful for the yoga teachers who fostered my passion for yoga in the first place. Thank you all. AUTHOR’S NOTE This thesis has been edited from its original version, as some of my informants have expressed concerns about my public naming of the yoga studio and community which I studied. In acknowledgement of this feedback, I have adopted pseudonyms for the yoga studio and its location and slightly adjusted other identifying information. TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue................................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction: Position of Conflict ...................................................................................... 7 Namaste Yoga.................................................................................................................. 14 Consumable Aesthetic ..................................................................................................... 21 Encountering India ........................................................................................................... 28 Spirituality ....................................................................................................................... 31 Authenticity ..................................................................................................................... 41 Simulacra ......................................................................................................................... 50 History ................................................................................................................................ 55 Constructing Classical Yoga ........................................................................................... 59 Asana ............................................................................................................................... 63 American Flourishings .................................................................................................... 70 Looking ............................................................................................................................... 77 Different Views ............................................................................................................... 81 Photography ..................................................................................................................... 84 Subjectivity ...................................................................................................................... 87 Conclusion: Shantaya? ..................................................................................................... 91 Epilogue .............................................................................................................................. 95 Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 100 PROLOGUE “Feel your pelvis supported by the earth. Hips heavy, thighs heavy, knees heavy. And at the same time, allow each inhalation to create more space between each vertebra, lengthening the crown of your head to the sky.” This is it, the moment of transition from yoga student to yoga teacher, the culmination of the nine months of effort that was my teacher training program. Five of my classmates are seated cross-legged in front of me, with their eyes closed. I hope they are relaxed and breathing, though it’s likely they’re thinking about their own upcoming practicums, as I’m the first person in the group to face the teaching challenge. The owner of the yoga studio and head of the teacher training program, and another senior teacher are sitting in the corners to my left and right, taking notes as they evaluate my teaching. I try to block them out of my awareness. “Inhale space, expansiveness – sky energy. Exhale grounded, secure – earth energy. Bringing these two essential energies together in your core. Know that they are not in conflict with each other, but can coalesce into a union, right here, right now.” My voice is calm and steady. I try to remember to breathe as well. My outward appearance is completely incongruent with my inner experience, but I reluctantly step into the role of a yoga teacher for the next ten minutes. It feels like a false identity. Though I’ve come to enjoy teaching yoga much more than I thought I would, today I’m only half- heartedly embracing this task. At this moment in time, I’m no longer sure that I agree with much of what had been taught to me as yoga, and I feel uncomfortable graduating as a yoga teacher. 1 When our yoga teacher training began, each person in the class was assigned a pose, intended to be a more physically challenging one that could serve as the apex pose of a yoga class. We were to intimately acquaint ourselves with the pose, learning about it on anatomical, energetic, and metaphorical levels. Our final task was to teach this pose, putting it into a ten-minute flow sequence that included a theme, sun salutation, and preparatory and counter poses. My pose was garuḍāsana, translated from Sanskrit as eagle pose, though there is not a direct translation for the mythical bird garuḍa, vehicle of Vishnu. I learned this at the beginning of the training, along with much more information about what this pose could symbolize when I looked it up in Myths of the Asanas (Kaivalya and Kooij 2010), one of the lead instructor’s recommended sources for studying poses. Midway through teacher training, I was attending a session on Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga (a highly disciplined style of yoga with specialized sequencing of demanding postures linked to the breath) where, before practicing the Ashtanga Primary Series, I was told that this exact sequence of poses was five thousand years old.1 I had a comic image in my head of some wizened sage up in the Himalayas unrolling his sticky yoga mat outside of his cave to flow through the vigorous series of poses that comprises an Ashtanga Vinyasa practice. This seemed absurd, of course, but yoga was consistently taught to me as an ancient, Indian 1 This is a common claim among Ashtanga Vinyasa teachers. It refers to Krishnamacharya’s purportedly finding the 5,000-year-old Yoga Kurunta in a Calcutta library. Krishnamacharya then taught this text verbatim to his student, Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, who insisted that the Yoga Kurunta fully outlines the Ashtanga Vinyasa sequences taught today. As the text has reportedly since been eaten by ants, it is impossible to verify these assertions. I am skeptical of such allegations and find it much more likely that the existence of such a text was a much more recent invention that is backed by the authority of tradition. See Singleton (2010: 184-186) for a convincing explanation of this argument. However, the search for this text continues and a group of scholars believes that it may have now been located (Mallinson 2014). 2 Image 1. I