The Politics of Yoga

From social justice to fascism

If yoga is political, as often contended, what does it stand for? The sheer volume of modern practitioners – at least tens of millions, and probably more – suggests the vaguest of answers, from “anything” to “nothing”.

Since many turn to yoga for temporary respite from worldly concerns, the latter view is common. A vocal contingent regards that as selfish, saying yoga’s goal of alleviating suffering has social corollaries, so resisting injustice becomes an imperative. The only problem is that people disagree about what this entails.

The inevitable outcome is polarised discourse, particularly online. What began as a vogue for policing infractions denounced as “cultural appropriation” has morphed into prescriptions for how to respond to the latest news cycle, as if the performative posting of slogans amounted to activism. This trend has metastasised since 2020, fuelled by Covid-era disputes and some of the more unhinged things yoga teachers share on social media – perhaps most infamously QAnon conspiracism.

Documenting new lows earlier this year, the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz coined the term “YogiNazis” to describe spiritual influencers who “view the annihilation of the other as a form of personal growth”. One Israeli yoga teacher quoted in the article shared her urge to “destroy Gaza. From infant to old woman”, which she justified by saying: “One can be a person filled with values and love, and at the same time… you stand firm against your enemy and you know what must be done with them”.

YOGIC VALUES

A forthcoming book lobs rhetorical grenades into this fractious environment.¹ Provocatively titled Fascist Yoga, it argues white supremacists have hoodwinked the masses about modern practice, which serves to recruit them to far-right politics. The author, Stewart Home, is an anti-fascist agitator who used to go to classes at his local gym before deciding yoga was an inferior form of exercise.

Investigating teachers’ claims about the discipline’s history, Home discovered it was rife with cult dynamics, abuses of power, sexual assaults and even the occasional neo-Nazi. There were also historical connections to fascism. Heinrich Himmler used yogic ideas from the Bhagavad Gītā to rationalise killing as a higher calling, while other early Western proponents of yoga were Nazi apologists.

If these findings sound shocking, that reflects an assumption that yogic practices cultivate qualities such as compassion. However, as the acerbic scholar Agehananda Bharati observed 50 years ago: “You don’t learn ethical behavior through yoga and meditation any more than you learn loving your neighbors by playing poker or cello.”

Raised in Vienna as Leopold Fischer before World War II, Bharati became a monastic yogi in India, and later a professor in the United States. “I have witnessed, with much initial dismay,” he recalled in a book from the 1970s, “that some of the best mystics were the greatest stinkers among men. Self-righteous, smug, anti-women, anti-men, politically fascist, stubborn, irrational”, so “the improvement of the human race is something that must be achieved by means other than mystical”.

In other words, yogic attainments – from physical contortions to steadiness of mind – are no indication of moral priorities, so ethical conduct is not automatic and needs to be cultivated. Traditional ways to approach that can sound otherworldly. Since yogic liberation depends on transcendence of personal identity, practitioners prioritise restraint of self-centred urges, abstaining from harming, lying, stealing, sex and attachments. Those who conquer desire to sit in trance-like states – the original practice – are said to resemble “a piece of wood”, or appear “as if dead”.

Most pre-modern yoga texts have little to say about worldly activity. Instead, they promote renunciation based on the ancient Indian doctrine of karma, by which people suffer through infinite lifetimes because of a cycle of cause and effect. This process begins with desires that inspire one to do things, and the outcomes of actions leave mental impressions that shape new intentions. Hence, getting what one wants fuels craving for more, whereas being thwarted feeds frustration and quests for redress. Seeking answers that prepared them for death without being reborn, early yogis turned their minds and senses inward and tried to do nothing.

WORLDLY PRIORITIES

The Bhagavad Gītā, a devotional text about selfless service, presents a rare alternative. Reinventing renouncing, it says one can act without attachment to results – an idea that Rudyard Kipling later borrowed to write: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same”.

The Gītā’s presentation of this outlook helps a warrior fight for justice, free from selfish motivation. It is therefore a touchstone of modern ideas about political yoga, despite ambiguities about that means. Indian resistance to British colonialism drew on the logic – non-violently in the case of Mohandas Gandhi and less so in others. For example, Gandhi’s assassin – who is nowadays revered by Hindu nationalists – said the Gītā inspired him to murder, calling his victim an appeaser of Muslims.

Long before the earliest teachings on meditative discipline, the Sanskrit word yoga had martial overtones. The Ṛg Veda – India’s oldest text – used it for “yoking” a horse to a chariot to go into battle. Other ancient definitions relate to statecraft, including a “trick” employed by spies to fool adversaries.

This reveals a tradition of “yoga as politics”, to quote The Yoga of Power by Sunila Kalé and Christian Lee Novetzke. “When we refer to yoga,” they write, “we are specifically talking about a thing a person does with intention to someone or something else in an effort to apply force and thereby control that person or thing.”

A mahārāja in Jaipur (Heil Collection)

Early texts also said yogic practices generate powers, including omnipotence, which had to be renounced to attain liberation. Tantric traditions collapsed this distinction in subsequent centuries, making freedom compatible with bodily empowerment and spawning new methods that shaped the development of physical yoga.

An influential fascist named Julius Evola mined tantric texts for means of developing superhuman potency and “spiritual virility”. Although not explicitly political, his book Lo Yoga della Potenza highlighted rites that could lead a practitioner “beyond good and evil”, saying “some of Tantrism’s fundamental ideas may be considered by those who wish to deal with the problems encountered in our day and age, by assuming avant-garde positions and by attempting new and valid syntheses”.

In the 30 years since Umberto Eco called Evola “one of the most respected fascist gurus”, his work has had even more impact, inspiring – among others on the right – Steve Bannon. These sorts of currents impelled Stewart Home to write Fascist Yoga. Although Evola had no interest in the sequences of postures that have since become synonymous with practising yoga, other fascists wrote manuals. One was a retired British major called Francis Yeats-Brown, who praised Adolf Hitler’s “strong will” and the “humble” values that made the Nazi Führer “a man of wisdom”.

ACTIVIST BACKLASH

Presenting a handful of similar examples, Home suggests Western fascists created and popularised modern postural yoga. This view is misleading. It ignores India’s history of physical practice – non-seated postures were first taught in texts 1,000 years ago – and important innovations before yoga globalised.

It would in any case be logically flawed to call yoga fascist because fascists practise, or to imply without evidence that most teachers support the far right. Home stops short of doing that, focusing instead on yoga’s overlaps with Western esotericism, which fascinated Himmler and other Nazi ideologues. In earlier decades, the pursuit of yogic knowledge and powers had appealed to occult luminaries such as Helena Blavatsky – whose Theosophical Society translated texts and laid the foundations of New Age ideas – as well as Aleister Crowley, the self-styled “Beast”.

In an essay on irrational thinking from the 1950s, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno said the occult and racism functioned similarly. He argued that both attract “the semi-erudite”, who are “driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people” and thus find “a short-cut by bringing the complex to a handy formula” that only the cognoscenti know.

The emphasis in yoga texts on individual effort, purity and hierarchy can underpin that mindset, though the same traits are also more widespread. Activists often frame issues in black-and-white terms of “good” and “bad” that suggest nuanced thinking about shades of grey would enable oppression.

The Bhagavad Gītā (18.20–22) warns that fixating on a single perspective is deluded. Discerning other viewpoints is usually a prelude to fervent debate, so what the Gītā prizes instead is a clarity of vision that encompasses everything. Lofty as that notion sounds, it might facilitate descriptions of current events that most people recognise, creating space to agree to disagree, as opposed to intensifying tribal antagonisms.

One potential drawback is that strident finger-pointing feels like doing something. Like going on a march, vilifying “them” provides a sense of solidarity, particularly if “we” lack the necessary power to solve complex problems, yet find it futile to aim any lower. Yogic teachings are inadequate guides to political affairs, but they can help us to face limitations and act with detachment. We might also find meaning in smaller-scale deeds, or basic kindness. While much of what happens is beyond our control, our convictions and values still matter – as does how we engage with each other.

“Before fascism becomes a movement,” Richard Seymour cautions in his recent book Disaster Nationalism, “it must circulate in everyday life, in the nascent form of everyday paranoia and victimhood, fantasies of restitution and revenge, desire for domination, the authoritarian need to be right”. These tendencies are all too apparent today, with social media amplifying what Seymour calls “approval-seeking in-group conformity” and its attendant shadows of “malice and social sadism”.

In that sense, Home’s one-sided broadsides in Fascist Yoga reflect the very issues they seek to address. If yoga teaches anything about being political, it stems from the premise that we might be wrong.

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1. A review of Fascist Yoga will be published here soon.