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A story about cultural appropriation and open-mindedness
In this episode, Matt McDermott shares his personal journey of discovering Hinduism through music, vegetarianism, and yoga. He explores the complexities of cultural appropriation and appreciation in t...
A story about cultural appropriation and open-mindedness
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And now a story. I was first exposed to anything Hindu in high school. As I recall it, I was talking with a friend of mine a year or two older than me, who I skateboarded with frequently about why he was vegetarian. He told me about this hardcore band, Shelter. They were Hari Christians. I found out their songs mentioned a book I hadn't heard of before, the Bhagavad Gita. It was a Hindu religious book. I learned I wasn't religious at all. I'd vocally renounced my Catholic upbringing years before, before being confirmed they were vegetarian out of compassion for animals, humans not needing to kill animals to nourish ourselves, he said. This appealed to me at an instinctive level, the idea that if we don't need to kill an animal to get our food, why kill them? I soon after stopped eating meat and added Shelter's albums Perfection of Desire and Mantra to my rotation of music. I distinctly remember pushing around on my board at a park singing Shelter's message of the Bhagavat to myself. But I didn't much think more about anything Hindu per se, so less actually read the Bhagavad Gita until a few years later. I first picked up a copy of the Gita, a small used copy which upon thinking back, must have been much abridged given its size, at a used bookshop in rural Connecticut that specialized in spiritual books, Beat Generation poetry and literature for philosophy, basically anything counterculture from the 1960s and 70s. This copy of the Gita was pinkish with a blue floral pattern on the COVID and I think must have been printed 30 years earlier at least. I read it alongside all sorts of New Ages books on what was then lumped together as Eastern thought, books by David Frawley, anything published by Inner Traditions. I found Hinduism Today magazine at a surprisingly well stocked magazine store and read every issue as well as all the books published by the Kwa' I Adhana. I started practicing yoga and meditation, guided solely by the contents of a white book by Vishnu Devananda. That too was published in the late 1960s. As I recall it, I taught myself to sound out Sanskrit, if not actually much understand it beyond a few words using flashcards I made myself. I learned to make vegetarian Indian food from Yamunadevi's tome like Lord Krishna's Cuisine and a book by Madhur Jaffre. By this point I was living in northern Vermont, pursuing snowboarding full time and on the side in terms of relative importance to sliding on snow. I was slowly working towards a college degree in writing and literature at A school that gave no grades and no longer exists. Through a friend from school, I met what seemed to be the entire Hindu population of Burlington, Vermont at the time. Three guys who went to a university that gave grades and had more than one building as a campus and does still exist. I cooked for them and made, I was told, I think, in genuine appreciativeness, good dal. With the same friend who had been to India many times, paying for his trips by selling jewelry from Jaipur at New Age shops across New England. I went to my first Hundu temple outside of Boston and stayed over with a Gujarati family he knew near there. Everyone was very welcoming and no one questioned why a white 20 year old guy dressed like your average late 1990s skateboarding snowboarder in and clearly not Hindu looking in any way was at the temple or in their home. When those few Hindu people I interacted with learned that I practiced yoga and meditated, no one seemed to think anything of it other than positive encouragement. That was a different time though. Then, outside of larger cities, there were no yoga studios. I learned asana from a book because there was nowhere else to learn where I lived. Internet was slow and streaming classes were something out of science fiction. Besides, yoga was thought of, if it was thought of at all by the average American as something hippies, weird New Age people or fitness freaks did. Being vegetarian was for health nuts only. To be fair on that last point, Western vegetarianism at the time seemed to view food as a sort of penance you did for being alive. Hence part of my desire to primarily eat Indian food, which was incomparably tasty, set next to sandwiches on soft bread overloaded with bean sprouts and shredded carrots. In the next five years, this would all change dramatically, which is what we're going to be talking about today. I'm Matt McDermott and this is all about Hinduism. Within a few years, yoga would become a billion dollar industry. Yoga clothes would morph from being whatever shorts and T shirt you had nearby into an entire category of the fashion industry. Yoga was about fitness primarily, if not exclusively. The meditation part was there, but marketed often as something about boosting productivity and distress reduction rather than being part of a larger spiritual methodology or worldview. Yama niyama pratyahara were usually nowhere to be found, at least outside of the burgeoning teacher training programs. Pranayama was there, but often lost its Sanskrit name. In creating that great burst of popularity, yoga was delinked from its Hindu roots even as yoga studios used murty of Ganesh's lobby centerpieces and kirtan albums were the audio backdrop. Meditation somehow didn't usually lose its connection to Buddhism. But that meditation was also a Hindu thing, and a key part of traditional yoga was never mentioned. Anything that accurately could be called Hindu or from the Hindu dharma traditions was rebranded as Indian or Vedic or South Asian. Indians sold it got people into yoga studios and into yoga pants. Hindu did not. Or so the thinking seemed to go. On one hand, I didn't deeply begrudge any of it. It felt good that something I had been part of for so long was finally being mainstreamed, even if it was far more commercialized. That it could now go nearly anywhere in the US and not much have to worry about the vegetarian food options was great. Though I seldom went to temples, my spiritual practice has always been more of an internal one rather than temple based. That there were Hindu temples sprouting up like mushrooms was comforting in a way. I didn't identify publicly as a Hindu at this time. That would come a couple years later when I came out as a Hindu, as it were, but metaphysically, the Shaiva branch of the Hindu Dharma traditions had been my worldview for my entire adult life. But on the other hand, when I first heard about HAF's take back yoga campaign, it also rang entirely true to my experience. Yoga is largely misunderstood to be practiced primarily as asana, I read, and while practicing asana for improved health is perfectly acceptable, it is not the goal or purpose of yoga. Commercialization of yoga is problematic in general, but it is of particular concern to Hindus who see yoga as being delinked from its roots. And though yoga is a means of spiritual attainment for any and all seekers, irrespective of faith or of no faith, its underlying principles are of Hindu thought, the HAF website proclaimed. This is how I already understood what yoga was and is. Several years later I would write for HAF in a guide for reporters on misconceptions about Hinduism. The popularity of yoga in the west has skyrocketed in the past several decades, today forming a multi billion dollar industry with more than 36 million participants in the US alone. But as yoga has become mainstream in American culture, all too often its Hindu roots become ignored or delinked. From yoga magazines to articles on yoga in mainstream media, avoiding or eliminating the term Hindu even when referring to definitively Hindu teachings, practices and sources of knowledge, is common practice. Replacing Hindu or Hinduism are terms such as Eastern, ancient India, Indic, Yogic, or Vedic. While these substitute terms are not entirely inaccurate, articles in these same media outlets frequently refer to or attribute directly other teachings, practices and sacred texts to the appropriate major world religion. For example, a specific style of meditation may be referred to as Buddhist, but decidedly Hindu sources of knowledge such as the Upanishads or Hindu practices such as bhakti and kirtan are not attributed to the Hindu Dharma traditions. What Haf's Tech Bank Yoga campaign was part of was the growing trend pushing back on such delinking. A swell of accusations of cultural appropriation was building long periods swell pulsing across an ocean basin centuries wide, pushed by a sense of well founded grievance in the case of Hindus at least that our culture has given you all this immense gift of a system of spiritual, physical and psychological betterment. The least you could do is to acknowledge who gave you the gift before you then resell it at an immense profit. This wave hadn't quite broken yet though. When Take Back Yoga was making headlines in the New York Times and other mainstream outlets, the wave would start barreling and breaking across a sharp reef and shallow waters shortly. For those coming in late cultural appropriation, to use the Oxford language's definition, is the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc of one people or society by members of another, and typically the more dominant people or society. By this definition, the delinking of yoga from having any ties to the Hindu Dharma traditions is cultural appropriation. What Take Back Yoga did was attempt to relink yoga and Hinduism in the public mind. It never said non Hindus can't do yoga, that people in the west shouldn't be making money by teaching yoga or selling yoga clothing, rather that you need to acknowledge where this all comes from. Do that, and reserving the right to look skeptically at things such as goat yoga and fear yoga, we're good. But the broader cultural appropriation discussion that began breaking across society roughly a decade ago went further than this. It was often far less welcoming or nuanced. At times, accusations of cultural appropriation veered awkwardly close to talking points coming from genuine bigots and cultural supremacists who would prefer if cultures never mixed at all. The fact is that the line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation and affinity is a blurry one, especially when someone is just discovering that affinity. Not acknowledging yoga as having anything to do with Hinduism in an entry level asana class at a community center in any town USA is a different thing than actively saying yoga isn't a Hindu practice or using any other word than Hindu to describe the Hindu concepts within it. In a national publication on Yoga calling asana practice yoga is tutted at as incorrect and limiting. That's pedantically true, but that ship has sailed and cultural appropriation is only on board if the person saying it refuses to acknowledge that it is more to the yoga practice than asana. Saying asana is an invention of the west, the influence of European physical movement culture in the 19th centuries more than ancient texts or traditions. That's more often usually an annoying overstatement of historical influence than an attempt to culturally appropriate asana using Hindu imagery in a yoga studio in the west by a non Hindu. If it's done in a way and in a place that would be done by Hindus, what are we complaining about? Yoga without the Sanskrit? Fortunately, this trend of never using Sanskrit names for asana or philosophical ideas seems to have waned recently and was definitely cringy to the nth degree. It was stupidity and not giving students enough credit in their ability to learn. But I don't think it was an attempt to culturally appropriate yoga. In all of this. Intent matters too. I assume good intentioned ignorance until malice or disdain is clearly shown. To this day, cries of cultural appropriation or other inappropriate usage of Hindu imagery or concepts often seem to precede any attempt to determine intent. Ultimately, there are genuine cases of appropriating Hindu ideas and not giving proper credit. Two decades ago this was rampant in the yoga industry. And it still goes on, certainly. But are we making too much of this? Are we looking to be offended? Are we leaning into grievance a bit too much? I think think the answer is definitely yes. At least sometimes the origins of ideas and practice should be acknowledged, but then when it is not, the approach shouldn't be so strident and uncompromising that it in effect shuts down the cross cultural sharing of ideas out of fear of offense and newcomers not always getting it right. I've stood on this audio soapbox for this long today and began with some of my own personal journey because I genuinely wonder and concerned that if I were starting out on this path today, would I be as welcomed as I was all those years ago? I'm not sure I would be. And in that are we turning away people who would find Hindu teachings and practices useful even if they don't quite understand all the context and nuance in cultural history at first or ever even all because we have an exaggerated concern about cultural appropriation. If this collection of practices, teachings, philosophies and methodologies for living for spiritual exploration that we call Hinduism, that we call the Hindu Dharma traditions has real value in the world for people who may never fully embrace it or call themselves Hindu, then I think we must be careful to be as welcoming of people dipping their toes in the water as I was welcomed initially. You made it to the end of this episode of All About Hinduism. Before you go, do me a favor. Leave us a nice 5 star review on whatever platform you're listening to this on. Please also subscribe or follow us so you can get all the new episodes the moment they're released. 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