White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Abstract

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become a normalised way to attract new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. These offerings, and what I term “museum yoga”, are commonly featured as part of an educational outreach program, yet largely unrelated to the exhibition programme. Why, or rather, how are museums doing this? That is, what does the use of media, imaging and bodily practices reveal about museum yoga and its socio-political significance in a globalised world?

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Citation: Patel, Kajal Nisha. “White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/museum-yoga [date of access]

The primary role of museums was once to collect, conserve, study, interpret and exhibit objects holding cultural, educational and symbolic value. In the 1970s however, economic interests began to merge with the cultural heritage sector. For instance, in the UK, the compound effect of neoliberal thought, and economic policy under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, liberalisation and financial deregulation has now fully taken effect. Consequently, museums are accountable to economic, political, and social policies which require them to be culturally relevant and economically viable. Policies introduced by Tony Blair’s New Labour government between 1997-2007 have increasingly required museums and galleries (hereafter museums) to be socially inclusive, relevant, responsible, engaged and purposeful. Under this directive, a socially responsible museum is measured in terms of its intrinsic cultural value; alongside its ability to attract and include more diverse and socially excluded groups. While such policies may be perceived as a positive turn for museum education, a more discerning approach is required. A museum education practice which centres critical discourse, debate and creative problem-solving is described by scholars as good practice. Until then, the museum sector cannot be described as a space for social care.

Research to evidence the positive impact of art and museums on health and wellbeing continues to emerge. While this is a welcome addition to ongoing discourses around the intrinsic value of art and culture, new strategies have repositioned museum agendas towards entertainment; and under this logic, a wide range of popular products attract new audiences via leisure and tourism. As part of this offering, museums have begun to occupy a new position, selling cultural experiences such as yoga classes while competing within the spiritual marketplace. While museums have always been a way to experience the exotic, yoga offers a much more affective and immersive way to do so with the added benefit of ‘wellness’. As Rumya S. Putcha (2020, p11) of the Institute of Women’s Studies, University of Georgia notes, “Museums and their yoga offer … an affordable way to travel to exotic places without having to leave home.”

The spiritual marketplace was conceptualised by Roof (1999) as a North American arena where religious and non-religious agents supplied new spiritual products and experiences during the 1970’s. The most successful providers adapted to an emerging market by attracting individuals who had become alienated from established religious faith groups. Religious devotees became consumers. Using market terminology, those who competed well were the ones who provided a compelling religious product in exchange for their participant’s time, money, resources and commitment. Those on a spiritual quest may have their fundamental human needs met. Roof also details how these organisations generated or preserved religious capital, legitimised through their increasing influence alongside member acceptance and income.

Through their participation with ‘neoliberal’ yoga, museums operate within the kind of spiritual marketplace described by Roof. By selling spiritual products and consumer experiences to disenchanted audiences they act as agents within the global wellness industry, forecasted to reach $7 trillion by 2025.

Besides the clear financial benefits that museum yoga can bring, it is necessary to contextualise how and why this has become such a popular strategy for audience engagement. The popular appeal of mass yoga has no doubt contributed to its ubiquitous appearance within museum education agendas. While these offerings may vary to include the pairing of art and yoga as a contemplative encounter, the spectacle of mass participation appears to entice new audiences via a unique and one-off touristic experience–the bigger, the better. This kind of performative participation is extended within the hyper-real environment of social media. Membership is enacted within the digital space and credentials are identified through certain signifiers. Identities are formed and a certain belonging is experienced within the loosely formed international network, which is commonly referred to as the yoga-tribe. 

Most striking, keeping in mind the origins of yoga, is its presentation and performance as a spectacle of mass participation. This phenomenon appears to have been popularised after International Yoga Day (IYD) when it was announced to the world by Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi in 2015. The observance of IYD is widely criticised as an attempt to promote Hindu nationalism due to Narendra Modi’s past affiliations with Hindu nationalist groups. Various scholars (Ahuja, 2015. Black, 2023) have explained how the Indian government has exerted IYD as a soft power measure. Nguyen (2019) has described the media coverage of Modi’s yoga campaign while applying Debord (2012) and Kellner’s (2009, 2019) media spectacle hypothesis. He (Nguyen, 2019) explains how Modi’s contribution to yoga has connected global communities, while turning it into a media spectacle around the world.

With minimal resources spent, this media campaign has spread to multiple countries where thousands of Yoga students gathered at various locations for a collective performance (…) Yoga performances have been politicized for India and Modi himself.

Figure 1. Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. International Yoga Day. 2018. Source: Feminism in India, Photographer: Unknown.

​​Debord (1967) describes the spectacle as a method through which capitalism distracts and pacifies the masses. “Being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing” (Morgan & Purje, 2016). Modi’s theatre is at the level of appearances. Yoga is degraded into a virtue-signalling performance, while critical thought is replaced by spectacle. This concept of the spectacle critiques capitalism and how social relations are mediated through objects or passive exchange alongside the consumption of commodities. Entrenched in this concept are commercially sponsored museum-yoga events that connect participants (un)consciously to wider religio-political forces and histories. With so many celebrating IYD within these spaces, museum audiences can, in some senses, be described as having a ‘religious encounter’ due to Modi’s previous affiliations with Hindutva.

Bruce (2017) has mapped the rise of the most prominent Hindu-inspired new religious movements of the 1960s. He considers the growth of yoga within popular culture, and how world-affirming ideologies presided over world-rejecting ideologies. I therefore posit that postural yoga is more than a preoccupation with wellness and fitness regimes. Instead, it signals a denial of death which formed the ideological basis of these movements. Bruce (2017, p75) describes this as a secular drift: 

Where Hinduism diminishes the importance of the self, the westernised version elevates it. We are simply too important to die. … As Colin Campbell says: ‘Thus while in the Orient the great hope has always been to escape as quickly as possible from the wheel of rebirth…in the West the tendency is to seek to extend the process of rebirth’. 

With mass-yoga, fear of death can be interpreted as fear of a life not lived. Just as Debord explained earlier, being is replaced by having, and having is replaced by appearing. I therefore propose that for some, not appearing is likened to a symbolic death. With this in mind, the phenomenon of mass-yoga in museums often against the backdrop of dead animal artefacts deserves closer analysis.

Not unlike museum audiences, the most popular new religious movements in the West attracted a disproportionate number of people from better-educated, white, middle-class backgrounds. Wallis (1984) has explained how spiritual deprivation is more likely to be experienced by this demographic; particularly those living in materialistic, consumerist societies. Bourdieu (1998) has stated that those with more power in society possess more capital. Though Marx (1954) argued the same, Bourdieu goes beyond economics and into the symbolic realm of culture. His thesis is important for our understanding of desire amongst the mass-yoga participant demographic. We can extend his theory towards the possibility that through their desire for belonging, mass-yoga-enthusiasts express a symbolic belonging to a cultic milieu, as per Troeltsch’s (1976) definition. He describes the cult as “a small loosely knit group organised around some common themes and interests but lacking a sharply defined and exclusive belief system. Each individual member is the final authority as to what constitutes the truth of the path to salvation. The cult (…) is tolerant and understanding of its own members (indeed it is so tolerant that it hardly has ‘members’; instead it has consumers who pick and choose those bits of its product that suit them).” The exclusion of some individuals are expressed through the coded operations of the yoga tribe. Observing yoga at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA); USA, Putcha (2020, p9) states:

In the years since I have been following the programming at the MFA, the featured instructors have almost exclusively been white women, a statistic that is consistent across yoga spaces in the North American context (Birdee et al. 2008; Park et al. 2015).

Therefore, while museum-yoga rhetoric espouses that a sense of community and belonging is offered to alienated individuals, the opposite effect is experienced by many. Putcha (2020, p9) continues:

Social media research reveals how…new imperial intimacies in the museum and through yoga as an activity, circulate and accrue affective power in the twenty-first century. In the last five years, hashtags like #yogaeverywhere, #museumyoga, or #yogainmuseums have gained traction and suggest that those who participate in museum yoga are not simply in search of an enjoyable experience, but also seek to capture the moment in a way that produces some sort of social capital in the process.

From The Natural History Museum (London), to the Museum of Modern Art (New York), museum yoga is commonly featured within public programs. Following ‘a morning yoga class underneath a giant blue whale in the Natural History Museum’, writer Tilly Alexander (2022) published her experience in My London. Brown (2006) describes this behaviour as typical of the entrepreneurial self-investor. Images of the same event were shared on social media by participants and museums themselves using hashtags such as #YogaExperience, #FitnessClass and #LondonYoga. Kellner (1987, p129) states:

In the society of simulation, identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that human experience is a simulation of reality.

Bourdieu explains how skills, taste, credentials, clothing and other material wealth become signifiers of individual belonging within a certain group or social class. Whereas in organised religion, rights of passage are often initiated through ceremony, prayer or ritual; in yogaland, membership and mobility can be self-initiated and leveraged through social media. Identities are formed and a certain belonging is experienced within the loosely formed international network, which is commonly referred to as the yoga-tribe. Putcha explains how performance and participation in museum yoga via social media spaces make touristic engagement possible.

In 2014, retail clothing company Lolë delivered The WHITE Tour, in five major museums across Barcelona, Montreal, New York City, Toronto and Edmonton, (Canada). It is within this grand spectacle of mass-museum-yoga that a global network of white women represent themselves as members of the #LolëWhiteTour yoga-tribe. It can be argued that a sense of individual belonging is being experienced, while a collective virtual identity is being expressed as part of a cultic milieu, as described by Troeltsch.

Figure 2: The White Tour. Grand Palais; 2013. Source: YouTube.

The museum-yoga spectacle is a reactionary and derivative response to what is trending in yogaland. These orientalist fantasies provide temporary freedom from a disenchanted world which is replete with ever-expanding obligations and needs.

The Lolë Website advertised the event as follows:

Armed with a mission to promote peace and unity, the tour offers a unique and vibrant experience for the body and soul, guided by renowned teachers and set to the sounds of a soothing symphony orchestra. Each museum location was selected for its unparalleled space and atmosphere, and will be transformed to offer the serenity of a yoga studio and to accommodate 500-1000 guests in a yoga experience like nothing else. Guests are asked to dress in white, the colour to symbolize peace.

Like many other participants, Brower (2015) shares her experience through social media spaces. Lolë’s words are echoed through Brower who describes the coded operations of the yoga tribe, wearing white to symbolise purity and peace.

More research is needed before we can truly begin to discern why so many are driven to participate in mass-yoga. More importantly, what does the performative nature of yoga en masse within museum spaces reveal about its participants' existential desire to be seen? Bourdieu’s idea of Cultural Capital reveals how, for all of the peace and love that is offered through yoga, its practitioners ignore its unhidden truth. McCartney (2019, p11) says:

It is through the very production of desire, pleasure, and the serious pursuit of leisure, which sits at the core of the global wellness industry’s logic, that citizens of Yogaland are made more malleable, docile, and uncritical; yet, also, unwitting participants in this global agenda. As Bernays demonstrates, the engineering of consent amongst groups is just as possible in times of peace, as it is in times of war. And, what is more emblematic of peace than yoga?

In 2018, Brooklyn Museum hosted one of the largest yoga classes with 300-400 people in a sold out event. Sponsored by Adidas, Art and Yoga was first held in 2014 and went on to become a monthly feature, with its most recent event in July 2022. Key concerns may be highlighted here within the issue of corporate sponsorship. In 2013 one of the worst tragedies in industrial history took place. The Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladeshi collapsed, killing 1138 people with 2400 more injured. Most of the victims were young women, employed to produce garments for Western companies, one of which was Adidas (Park, 2019). The problematic nature of neoliberal yoga and its capitalist expression of empowerment and freedom is described by Jain (2020, p.174):

A desire to subvert the violence of neoliberal capitalism is expressed and then contained. In and through its creative usage of neoliberal governance, its capitalist, orientalist tropes, in its uses of neoliberal feminist discourses around empowerment and freedom. The text of spirituality provides a theoretical model and an ideological justification for a neoliberal ethic. For all the peace and love it offers through yoga, health foods, mindfulness and self governance, neoliberal spirituality plays a divisive, conservative game that thrives on nostalgia, lost cultural norms, demarcating outsiders as well as narratives about transformation, liberation and the value of self-care.

In 2020, The Imperial War Museum, London defended its controversial decision to hold yoga classes next to bombed-out car and spitfire exhibits. Despite being simplified as a cultural practice, and by now a commodifiable product, yoga is subject to an ever-present search for its ‘authentic’ form. Godrej (2016) urges us to resist any essentialist discourses which describe yoga as a pure, monolithic tradition. We should steer any debates around authenticity and instead enact a resistant, anti-neoliberal practice of yoga.

It is not my intention to explain public programming and social practice as an artform within museums and galleries. It is however important to highlight socially engaged processes that go beyond the individualistic consumption of museum yoga as a leisurely pursuit. A more responsible and collectivist approach is desperately required within the museum education sector.[1]

In response to the issues discussed above, the notion of Political Yoga exemplifies a more thought-provoking intervention that goes beyond a logic of contribution, as discussed by Morse (2019). Far from a bolt-on exercise for the museum; Political Yoga was independently initiated by Dalit artist and project manager, Sajan Mani. who applied for funding from the Cultural Education Project Fund. Launched in 2008 by the Berlin House of Representatives, this initiative was designed to support groundbreaking projects which raised long-term political awareness among children and adolescents through cultural education. Political Yoga highlights the potential for museum-yoga, while demonstrating a more conscientious approach. It is more in line with new genre public art as outlined by Lacy (1996), as it relies on relational approaches which encourage dialogue and critical reflection. The project was promoted via social media and fliers which were posted around the city. Through this engagement, participants were advised that this was not a wellness programme. It was one that confronted political ideas and therefore, potentially triggering emotions and topics difficult to discuss.

I turn back to McCartney’s revealing paper (2019), “Spiritual bypass and entanglement in yogaland”. The complexity of his arguments require a careful reading, yet his distinction on yoga fundamentalism is clear; that neo-liberal subjectivities lead yoga practitioners to unwittingly support Hindu supremacist ideology. This statement summarises the key concern which led to the birth of Mani’s Political Yoga project.

Spiritual bypassing refers to using spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings or situations. Spiritual bypassing plays a key role in the cultivation of an averted gaze away from many things considered or perceived to be ‘negative’ or ‘distracting’ by citizens during their spiritual journey through Yogaland (McCartney, 2019. p139).[2]

Political Yoga encourages critical action and debate within the museum space itself. Within my own research at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, I noticed how this derivative trend of mass yoga was being performed beneath the skeletal remains of large animals, albeit in a less than compelling way. The biopolitical regimes of neoliberal yoga are problematic and more discernment is needed if meaningful change is to occur within museums.

Endnotes

[1] The discussion of museum yoga and the ways in which it is connected to the curating/display of museum objects is beyond the scope of this article. For a compilation of some materials that could shed light on objects in museum yoga, see my personal youtube archive.

[2] This phenomenon could be related to the “juxtapolitical” (Berlant 2008 in Marotta 2021: 2), where somebody could profess verbal support for certain causes and be “adjacent to the political realm…without having to undertake the additional uncertainty and exhaustion (of)…a more intensive political involvement.”

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