It’s time to reclaim yoga from the Indian PM, who is using it to mask an agenda of ethno-nationalist state violence.
Op-Ed written during Modi’s visit to the US. See related video news interview.
“‘Om-washing’: Why Modi’s yoga day pose is deceptive“
Sood, Sheena. 2023. “‘Om-washing’: Why Modi’s Yoga Day Pose is Deceptive” in Al Jazeera. (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/22/om-washing-modis-yoga-day-pose-of-deception) June 22, 2023.
This lecture was recorded for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies on the 3rd of May, 2023. Watch on YouTube here.
We often hear about yoga’s deployment in corporate settings, educational institutions, and elitist networks. However, in recent years, we have also witnessed a global uptick of yoga’s deployment by far-right governments and political institutions.
Omwashing Yoga: The Far-Right’s Weaponization of Spirituality Toward Ethnonationalism brings a critical lens to the use of yoga by far-right political forces. To make sense of how yoga and mindfulness programs are routinely deployed by government and authoritarian leaders in police academies, detention facilities, prisons, militaries, and law enforcement programs, I use a critical feminist and decolonial lens, as well as a combination of archival research, content analysis, and autoethnography as a yoga teacher, to explore how Indian, Israeli, and US state institutions co-opt Asian spiritual traditions to advance their cultural and political agendas. Peeling back the sociological, historical, and political roots and consequences of the decision to militarize yoga in these contexts, I examine the ethical stakes, political purposing, and consumption of yoga amidst its widespread notions of purity, peace, and positive health. By using yoga to sanitize their reputation, I argue that far-right regimes are allied in a practice of omwashing, or in using yoga as an imperial, colonial and ethnonationalist tool to divert the public gaze from their supremacist agendas.
This research illuminates how the depiction of yoga as a “peaceful” practice that can be deployed to help soldiers combat “stress” and cultivate “calmness” serves to promote the dangerous practice of “spiritual bypassing” and legitimize state-sanctioned violence against the marginalized “other.” By using yoga to sanitize their reputation, these far-right regimes are allied in a practice of omwashing, or in using yogic culture as a colonial and ethnonationalist tool that diverts the public gaze from their supremacist agendas.
May 2023. “Omwashing Yoga: Weaponizing Spirituality Toward Ethnonationalism,” SOAS University of London Centre of Yoga Studies, London, England.
Welcome to In Our Experience, a podcast exploring the many ways of living well with Nourish Yoga Training.
—In Our Experience podcast
Read or listen to the podcast episode here.
2022. Guest Presenter. “Yoga’s Liberatory Potential and How We Can Access It,” In Our Experience with Nourish Yoga Training. 2022, February 28. (https://nourishyogatraining.com/13-yogas-liberatory-potential-and-how-we-can-access-it-with-sheena-sood/)
Rawlf interviews yoga teacher and independent scholar Sheena Sood about ways to decolonize yoga, embody community-based yoga, and Sheena’s critique of the militarization of yoga and her support for political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and the MOVE organization in Philadelphia.
—No Quarter Buffalo Podcast
No Quarter is an anti-fascist podcast created in so-called Buffalo, NY: anti-racist, anti-colonial, feminist, revolutionary, leftist, and egalitarian.
Listen this podcast episode here.
2021. Guest Presenter. “War and Peace.” No Quarter Buffalo Podcast. May 17, 2021.
In our interview this week, Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.
What about when other supposed zealots show their sell-out colors?
—Conspirituality Podcast
Conspirituality is a study of converging right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.
Episode 50 of the Conspirituality Podcast
2021. Guest Presenter. “Sellouts and Zealots (W/ Sheena Sood)” Conspirituality Podcast. May 6, 2021.
Bringing together a diverse chorus of voices and experiences in the pursuit of collective bodily, emotional, and spiritual liberation, Practicing Yoga as Resistance examines yoga as it is experienced across the Western cultural landscape through an intersectional, feminist lens.
Naming the systems of oppression that permeate our lived experiences, this collection and its contributors shine a light on the ways yoga practice is intertwined with these systems while offering insight into how people challenge and creatively subvert, mitigate, and reframe them through their efforts.
From the disciplines of yoga studies, embodiment studies, women’s and gender studies, performance studies, educational studies, social sciences, and social justice, the self-identified women, queer, BIPOC, and White allies represented in this book present an interdisciplinary tapestry of scholarship that serves to add depth to a growing assemblage of yoga literature for the 21st century.
—About the book, Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom
Sood, Sheena and E. Morales Williams. 2021. “The City of Radical Love: A Philly Story of Oppression, Resistance, and Healing” in Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom, Edited by Cara Hagan, Routledge, New York.
Sheena Sood, PhD, Philly-based healer, writer, educator, and activist scholar of South Asian descent, talks with J about the painful history of caste and politicizing yoga towards healing justice. They discuss Sheena’s writing on Spectacles of Compassion, Decolonizing Yoga, Collective Healing, as well as some of the current politics behind the protests in India, International Yoga Day and the Modi government, and the radical possibility for a liberatory yoga of true compassion, solidarity and equity. This episode is sponsored by Karmasoft.
—J. BROWN YOGA TALKS PODCAST
Candid conversations between J and other independent yoga revolutionists. From yoga philosophy to the business of yoga, J and his esteemed guests always have something interesting to say.
View the episode on the J. BROWN YOGA TALKS PODCAST here.
2021. Guest Presenter. “Caste, Decolonization, and Liberation” J. Brown Yoga Talks Podcast. Feb 22, 2021.
Support the inaugural abcdyogi online magazine themed on EARTH PRTHVI. This zine is a collaboration by 35+ South Asian creatives and holds practices, essays, illustrations, poetry, photography, and more focused on Grounding.
—ABCDYogi
“Embodying Yoga Liberation: Growing Roots in Philly.”
Sood, Sheena. 2020. “Embodying Yoga Liberation: Growing Roots in Philly.” Abcdyogi.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi participates in the mass yoga demonstration at Rajpath on the occasion of International Yoga Day, in New Delhi on June 21, 2015. Image taken by the Government of India via Wikimedia Commons.
Although Modi, like his ally President Trump, takes to using Twitter to mimic solidarity, connection, and empathy with his followers, we must not confuse Modi’s spectacle of compassion with actual compassion.
“Spectacles of Compassion: Modi’s Weaponization of Yoga”
Sood, Sheena. 2020. “Spectacles of Compassion: Modi’s Weaponization of Yoga,” Jadaliyya. (https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41048/Spectacles-of-Compassion-Modi-and-the-Weaponization-of-Yoga)
The Race and Yoga Research Working Group examines the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, able-bodiedness, and age in yoga. In addition to viewing yoga through the lens of intersectionality and Women of Color / Third World Feminisms, this group focuses on somatic theories to explore the praxis of yoga programs. Race and Yoga explores programs offered in yoga studios and other non-traditional settings, such as prisons. Although statics on annual income, educational level, and the ratio of female to male yoga practitioners in the United States are readily available, there is a dearth of information on racial demographics and how race influences interpersonal dynamics within these spaces.
—About UC Berkeley’s Race and Yoga Research Working Group
Read the full journal article here.
Sood, Sheena. 2020. “Towards a Critical Embodiment of Decolonizing Yoga,” Race and Yoga, 5(1): pp. i-x. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9bx1x7wc
