Overview

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.

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Reviews

Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i> Shameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor. -- E. Dawson Varughese, Manipal Centre for Humanities Shameem Black’s Flexible India provides an important, new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning Black shows how the rigidity of India’s 21st century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of <i>Yoga in Modern India</i>

Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i> Shameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor. -- E. Dawson Varughese, Manipal Centre for Humanities Shameem Black’s Flexible India provides an important, new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning Black shows how the rigidity of India’s 21st century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism. -- Joseph S. Alter, author of <i>Yoga in Modern India</i> Flexible India is a stirringly intimate portrait of both the beauty and vicissitudes of global yoga. Black expertly unfurls the complex ethical debates of modern yoga without relinquishing its generative possibilities for hope, imagination, and flexibility—a must read. -- Amanda Lucia, author of <i>White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals</i> Black’s richly-textured analysis takes us on a journey across disciplines, genres and lenses, highlighting crucial questions surrounding the meaning, value and practice of yoga, all the while gloriously centering its messy multiplicity and internal contradictions. An ambitious, skillfully-written book—and a truly edifying, rewarding read. -- Farah Godrej, author of <i>Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State</i>

Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery. -- Suzanne Newcombe, author of <i>Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis</i>

Author Information

Shameem Black is associate professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia, 2010).

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