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LIFE LESSONS | INDIAN PHILOSOPHY | ORIENTALISM
What in fact is yoga?
(a note on meaning — from Patañjali to al-Bīrūnī and beyond)
What yoga really means
The true meaning of concepts has a tendency to get messy over time. Some ideas stick and others don’t. Some change altogether, and others get altogether forgotten. With yoga, it hasn’t been different.
The messiness of orientalism
When the late Edward Said published his seminal study on Orientalism in 1978, I was a student at university — and yoga was still an activity practiced only by eccentrics, like an auntie of mine who lived with her family in the forest not so far from my parents’ home. I adored her. They had recently returned from Rawalpindi, where she had taken up the weirdest combination of what I thought were uncannily strange habits: mixed-up strands of Urdū and Hindustānī in her language, vegetarianism, organic gardening, and yoga.
Said’s work was visionary. He was the first to expose how orientalism truly works — and he described it such that it became a concept beyond the mere instance that it originally referred to. After Said, orientalism was no longer one story. Orientalism became a working model to understand the dynamics of a…
