We have seen a number of silly episodes on college campuses this fall, and I appreciate that people have grown exasperated. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. In this case, it seems to me, the students who object to the University of Ottawa’s yoga class have a point””though perhaps not the one they think.
The problem is not that a yoga class wrongly appropriates a foreign culture. As critics of the university’s decision rightly point out, there’s nothing necessarily offensive in that. And there’s no indication that the teacher or students in this particular class did anything to mock Indian culture. I imagine most of the students didn’t think about yoga’s cultural roots at all. Probably some of them assumed yoga was a Western invention. American tourists in Italy frequently tell Italians that we invented pizza.
The problem is that yoga, in its essence, is a religious exercise.
As the article says, there are Hindus in the US trying to recover yoga as a religious exercise, which it is in India. However, it seems rather foolish to try to suppress the de-Hinduized yoga stretching classes. Let Hindus who wish to treat it as a religious exercise do so without interference, and let those who just want to stretch do that without interference.