Yoga Myths: "Yoga is not Political"

Recently, in a discussion between yoga teachers, someone made the following claim: “yoga is not political.” The phrase was uttered so confidently by a French colleague that it met almost no objection. Even more than that, it was received as a self-evident truth requiring no proof. That surprised me. Not because I consider yoga political in the modern, partisan sense, and not because I wish to drag a spiritual tradition into ideological disputes. Quite the opposite. What surprised me was how easily an assertion that calls for serious justification was accepted. After the conversation, I returned to the subject in private correspondence with the person who had made the claim and this article is the result of that reflection.

My thesis is simple: yoga has never been apolitical. Moreover, by its very nature, it cannot stand outside the political. Here a clarification is necessary from the start. When I speak of politics, I do not mean party struggles, state propaganda, or the daily news cycle, but rather politics in its classical sense. The word itself comes from the Greek polis — the city as a community of free citizens. Politics is the art of living together, of deliberating on the common good, of making decisions that concern every member of a community. It is the space in which a person ceases to be purely a private being and becomes a participant in a shared dharma. It is in precisely this sense that I find it impossible to speak of yoga as an apolitical tradition.

                                                 Attrib. Chitarman, Dara Shikoh with a Jewel — the prince and a yogi, c. 1630. 

                                                     Folio from the Dara Shikoh Album. British Library, Add.Or.3129, f.27v.

If there is one concept around which nearly all of Indian spiritual thought is built, it is freedom, and liberation — moksha, kaivalya, nirvana — stands as the highest goal of most Indian philosophical schools. Yoga does not promise a personal comfort or psychological well-being; its aim is freedom. But freedom never arises in a vacuum. It presupposes the capacity to think independently, to discern, to make decisions, and to take responsibility for one’s actions. Any living school of yoga is not a crowd of followers, but a community of people united by their striving for knowledge that leads to growth and liberation. Such a community inevitably becomes a space of discussion, of agreement and disagreement, of the transmission of authority, of the distribution of responsibility. In other words, it inevitably acquires a political dimension. History, of course, offers plenty of counter-examples. Within yoga there have existed authoritarian schools, cults of personality around gurus, dogmatism, fanaticism, and even outright totalitarianism. But all of these phenomena speak not to the nature of yoga, but to the weaknesses of human nature. Any tradition that loses the capacity for free thought gradually turns into ideology, and at that point, it is not politics that ends, it is philosophy itself.

Govardhan, Jahangir Visiting the Ascetic Jadrup, c. 1616–1620. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 32.5 × 19.3 cm. Musée Guimet, Paris.

The history of India is filled with episodes in which rulers turned to yogis and sages – from kings who sought counsel from forest rishis, to medieval sovereigns who invited philosophers to their courts — and the spiritual teacher has never existed outside public life. One might object that the yogi did not personally make state decisions, but influence is not reducible to administrative power, and the person who shapes a ruler’s world view often exerts a greater effect on the fate of a state than a minister. The Indian tradition offers many such figures, but just two well-known examples suffice to discern the pattern. Vasishtha — the rishi, yogi and teacher, and Rama’s counsellor  — holds such unquestioned authority in the epic tradition that King Dasharatha follows his word even on the matter of sending the young Rama into exile. After Rama’s departure and Dasharatha’s death, it is Vasishtha who holds Ayodhya together in the face of impending internal collapse, preserving the kingdom’s stability until the rightful ruler’s return. The Nāth tradition is no less telling. We have historical evidence that the great Mughal emperor Akbar visited Nāth shrines, received instruction from their teachers, and made generous donations to the sampradaya. The Nāths’ influence is not confined to medieval history though. Their largest monastery — Gorakhnath Math in Gorakhpur — still holds strong sway over the social and political life of Uttar Pradesh today, and several generations of its mahants have played a direct part in the region’s politics. To claim then, that yoga has nothing to do with politics is to ignore an entire layer of its history.

                           Kesu Khurd, Babur’s 1519 Visit to Gurkhattri, from the Baburnama, c. 1590–93. British Library, Or. 3714, f. 320v. 

                                              Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, visits the Nāth yogi sanctuary at Gurkhattri

The political dimension of yoga became especially visible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Swami Vivekananda is usually remembered as a great populariser of Vedanta and yoga in the West, but his work carried a far broader significance. In the age of British colonialism, his speeches gave back to Indians a sense of cultural dignity. His famous speech at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago was not only a spiritual manifesto, but also an assertion of India’s right to speak in its own voice. Vivekananda himself denied any involvement in politics, yet his ideas inspired an entire generation of thinkers and leaders of the national movement, including Mahatma Gandhi. Aurobindo, for his part, travelled the path from revolutionary to one of modern India’s greatest philosophers. The history of the Nāth tradition has likewise repeatedly intersected with questions of power, social order, and the defence of the state.  All of this points to one simple fact: spiritual practice has never existed in a historical vacuum.

                                                         Thomas Harrison, Swami Vivekananda, Chicago, September 1893.

A deeper argument, however, lies beneath these historical examples. Yoga presupposes a real transformation of the person. If practice truly leads to maturity, greater clarity of mind, the capacity to discern, self-mastery, cooperation with others, clear speech, and the assumption of responsibility, then influence inevitably follows. Such a person becomes someone others turn to for advice. They become capable of organising people, resolving conflicts, building communities and articulating meaning. In other words, spiritual development naturally acquires a social dimension. Politics does not begin when a person joins a party, but rather when they accept responsibility for the shared space of life. In this sense, a mature yogi is a political figure whether they wish it or not.

When people say “yoga is beyond politics”, what they usually mean is something else entirely. They mean that yoga should remain neutral, should not interfere in social processes, and should take no position. But absolute neutrality is impossible, and the refusal to take part in public deliberation is itself a political stance. Silence never stands outside history. Moreover, the claim that spiritual practice has nothing to do with public life easily becomes a convenient form of irresponsibility. If liberation concerns only my inner state, then the fate of society ceases to be my concern. Such an understanding sits poorly with the Indian tradition itself, where the concepts of dharma, artha, and responsibility towards the world have never disappeared from the horizon of philosophy.

Our tradition has produced many images of the yogi: teacher, master of physical practice, ascetic, mystic, Buddha, Zorba, tantrika, seeker… Each of these images reveals a different facet of yogic identity. Perhaps the time has come to recognise one more which has long been present, but rarely spoken of: the yogi as a political figure. Not necessarily in the narrow, partisan sense of the word, but above all in its original meaning, as a human being who takes responsibility for the life of the polis, for the shared space of human beings.