Stretching into the Shadows: Unlikely Alliances, Strategic Syncretism, and De-Post-Colonizing Yogaland’s “Yogatopia(s)”

In order to de-post-colonize yoga, it is necessary to excavate deeper into the source of its nostalgic mood and narratives through understanding the “Vedic God,” which through discursive, symbolic, and affective realms is promoted and shared by the global wellness tourism industry, the Indian state, and the Hindutva parivār. By analyzing the intertextuality inherent in the creation of shared narratives and heterotopic spaces, and by anchoring these polysemous images that relate to ideal, yogic “ways of life,” we begin to understand how the rarefaction of complex signs occurs through commodification. This enables perceptibly seamless intermingling of meanings and identities through the sharing of factoids. It includes the sanitizing of Hindu supremacist ideology through promotion of a banal, affective, and tacit endorsement of “soft Hindutva.” This allows for unwitting support by global yogis through various heterotopic spaces, such as yoga festivals, social media groups, casual conversations, and in institutionalized pedagogical material of yoga teacher-training manuals.