This Theory/Asana workshop will explore the myth of Gandhian non-violence and its on-going relationship to colonial culture, i.e. how Gandhi grasped Ahimsa, a religious vow and retrofitted it as a secular concept for civil disobedience.
In popular cultural parlance, Gandhi is seen as the father of India’s independence movement and non-violence as the means of this national achievement, but between the Salt March and India’s Independence there are 17 years of anti-colonial resistance, currently unaccounted for in our collective imagination.
Gandhi employed a term initially reserved for renunciates and politicised it. We’ll tease out what he meant by non-violence and investigate the implicit hypocrisies, including Gandhi’s own relationship to race, class and empire. This will provide a mirror to reflect upon the current socio-economic climate of Yoga in the Global north and how the Yoga Industrial Complex serves to maintain colonial power with the pacification of the Western Yoga masses.
I’m particularly interested in spiritual activism and how white culture has co-opted and sanitised both Gandhian and Kingian non-violence in ways that foster complicity towards colonial imperial violence.
Through Asana we'll explore the "core" structure, activating the diaphragmatic psoas complex for both physical and pranic stability.
Sri Louise
