Right Hand, Left Hand: The Flexible Politics of Yoga

Hosted by ANU South Asia Research Institute this talk explores the imaginative life of yoga, a privileged symbol of India in today's world, in twenty-first-century stories. The sojourns of yoga through novels, poems, videos, and many other cultural texts bring to light fierce quests for power in a transnational landscape. This talk explores three key images in speculative fiction through which these power contests emerge: the tourist, the terrorist, and the tantrik. Seen through such images, yoga can offer a metaphor for the twinned rise of seeming opposites that shape the early decades of the millennium and peak with the global pandemic. World networks are coupled with national enclosure, endless image circulation is paired with hardened political boundaries, and tolerant universalism goes hand in hand with fundamentalist ideologies. These visions of yoga reveal political intimacies between contradictory pulls, which I gesture toward with the language of right hand and left hand. Like actual right hands and left hands, these contradictory forces belong to the same social body. The imaginative life of yoga in stories helps to illuminate key dynamics that shape ideas of Indianness today.  

Shameem Black is Associate Professor in Gender, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Her work focuses on literary and cultural studies of India and its diaspora. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders (Columbia University Press, 2010) and has published on literature, gender, and culture in South Asia, Public Culture, History and Memory, Textual Practice, and other journals.