YOGA-ANTICOLONIAL PHILOSOPHY: An Overview

By

Shyam Ranganathan

Who Is This Book For?

I wrote Yoga—Anticolonial Philosophy: An Action Focused Guide to Practice (Singing Dragon 2024) for students of Yoga and philosophy in the broad sense. It is written for people who have a practice of “yoga” or teach yoga, or are interested in the history of philosophy and the topic of colonialism. In writing it, I tried to combine the accessibility of an undergraduate introduction with the academic rigor that is also part of such an introduction. The original philosophy and practice, Yoga, is explicated in historical context, with an emphasis on distinguishing what is actually Yoga from colonization, and the impact that Western colonization has had on what people think of as yoga. And in turn, it is from Yoga that I show we learn about proper research methodology and decolonial practice that makes a historical appreciation of the philosophical options possible. It’s relatively short, 60,000 words. The book comes with a free online course too, by yours truly.  

[Description of image below: A photo of the book’s cover. The title of the book appears on three lines across the top of the book. In the centre of the cover, a picture appears of an ornate chariot carrying two passengers and pulled by four magnificent horses. The bottom portion of the cover includes an insignia for Singing Dragon publishers and the author’s name.]

The following description is meant for a readership who has some understanding and interest in philosophy. The book is much more patient in introducing these topics to readers. It is a book that could be used as an undergraduate introduction to moral philosophy, the topic of Yoga, South Asian philosophy and Western colonialism. It assumes no background on these topics.

A theme of much of my recent work is the incompatibility of colonialism and philosophy. Colonizing traditions do not like philosophy. The Western tradition, of the three ancient traditions of philosophy (in addition to the Chinese and the Indian), is the only one that begins with a murder of a philosopher and is punctuated by famous lists of persecutions of public intellectuals. That is not normal. As I say in the book, “colonialism doesn’t like Philosophy because Philosophy raises awkward questions that colonialism can’t handle” (p.18). The major challenge posed by colonialism is that it erases philosophy and decolonial philosophy in particular. And so, retrieving this philosophy requires that we confront the normalization of Western colonization by leaning on decolonial philosophy from BIPOC traditions. It is from Yoga that we learn how to engage in this research. As a contribution to moral philosophy, it is also the paradigm example of a decolonizing ethic.   

Countering White Supremacy

Part of the motivation for writing this book was how remarkably, and demonstrably, bad most everything written on Yoga and South Asian philosophy is. Also the motivation was how amazing Yoga, the original decolonial philosophy, is. We don’t learn about the latter because of entrenched practices of colonization and oppression in the literature.

Most of what is published on BIPOC traditions on the whole, South Asian philosophy and Yoga in particular, is bad because it is actually a continuation of Western colonialism, and White Supremacy. Most people think that White Supremacy involves explicit racist beliefs about non-White people. There is a more pervasive form of White Supremacy that is institutionalized in the academy and everywhere. This consists in treating the Western tradition as the frame for the study and explanation of every other tradition. This is to treat the tradition of White people as a master explanation, as though the Western intellectual tradition is not ethnic but universal, and every other tradition is regional and intelligible in so far as it exemplifies motifs and theories from the West.

What people believe they know about yoga—and Indian philosophy—is typically a result of Western colonialism itself. And the point of colonization, or at least, how it functions, is to impose a view on its victims, to the effect of making the contemplation of other options impossible. (Residential “schools” are a great example of this. Their purpose was to impose upon kidnapped Indigenous children only one option, namely, that of the colonizer.) Victims must then either conform, resist or perish.

Colonialism is hence different from imperialism. Imperialism also consists in the imposition of power but imperialism does not erase or make impossible the contemplation of alternatives: it rather nudges and coerces the choices of vassals. In making no option but the colonizer’s contemplatable, colonialism undermines the possibilities of freely choosing.   

The White Supremacy of the literature and the world we live in that treats the Western tradition as the master explanation is the same as Western colonization as it treats Western views as the only ones that are permitted in discussion.

The mechanism of colonization is what is known as interpretation in the literature. Interpretation is an explanation in terms of propositional attitudes like fears, hopes or beliefs—the attitude that a thought, p, is true. If we interpret everything using Western options, then we are imposing these options on the rest of the world as what they must contend with. An outcome of this is that we will only be able to understand what conforms to our interpretive assumptions if we employ interpretation.

Interpretation in turn is a function of the most basic model of thought in the Western tradition: the Linguistic Model of Thought (LAT). Accordingly, thought is the meaning of what one says. It is institutionalized in the ancient Greek idea of logos: one word for speech and reason. Accordingly, what one can reason about—namely thoughts—is also what one says. And typically what we say is what we believe. So this model of thought sloppily conflates the thinkable with the believable, leading to a tradition that explains everything else in terms of what it would say—what it believes. This is why the West turns out to be a global colonizing tradition. It’s idea of “understanding” is explanation in terms of what it believes. (It even typically conceives of knowledge as a kind of belief, as in a justified true belief, or some other propositional attitude as argued for by Timothy Williamson.)

I distinguish the “W” that leans on the “est” as this colonizing tradition with roots in ancient Greek philosophical outlook from the geography of the west that contains BIPOC in the Americas, Africa, and Europe (such as the Sámi).

As the West begins with language as a model of thought, it also creates a politics around the requirements of language. As language is anthropocentric and communitarian, the Western tradition grows into an anthropocentric and communitarian tradition (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Mill…): valuing humans, but humans in a particular (one’s own) community, over others. The linguistically encoded paradigm of human, in a community, is valued over alternative ways of being a person, and hence this linguistic model of thought sets up systemic discrimination: people are disvalued in accordance with their deviation from these culturally and linguistically encoded paradigms of personhood in the Western tradition.

Ableism, sexism, racism, heteronormativity and speciesism are direct outcomes of the anthropocentrism and communitarianism of the Western tradition traceable to LAT. For instance, if the paradigm model of being a person is an able, male, White, heterosexual human, then in this tradition, anything that deviates in any degree from this paradigm case is subject to discrimination as they are interpreted by beliefs about the cultural paradigms and marginalized in proportion to their deviation from these beliefs. Nonhuman persons are treated the worst, and humans that deviate from the paradigm are in proportion to this deviation marginalized.

Despite being acclaimed by leading Analytic and Continental philosophers (for a review of the literature see Ranganathan 2022b), interpretation is indefensible. The American Psychiatric Association’s DSM 5, in its chapter “Personality Disorders,” defines Narcissism as a “pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.” Interpreters are grandiose as they elevate their outlook—their beliefs—to the level of universal explanation. The emotional problems—the fragile need for affirmation and lack of empathy for others—comes along for the ride.

The basic problem with interpretation is that explanation in terms of belief does not respect logic or a reasoning to the data, as reasoning is not an explanation in terms of what one beliefs, but rather a question of inferential support. In the case of deductive reasoning, we ask: if the premises of an argument are true, does the conclusion have to be true? If yes, then the argument is valid. A valid deductive argument can be comprised of false propositions we do not believe, and an argument comprised entirely of propositions we believe can be invalid.  

In other words, logic-based understanding has nothing to do with your outlook—with any propositional attitude you may have—which means we can use it to understand new philosophy that we do not agree with, we are scared of, or hope isn’t real. But within the context of the West, what happens is that authors use their Westernized beliefs to explain South Asian and all BIPOC traditions and this consists in a reification of colonization.

There are several tangible outcomes of this. First, religion. This is literally an idea made up by White people as part of colonial bureaucracy. It was the Romans who first came up with the idea of religio to talk about colonized traditions that were tolerated as subordinated within the Roman colonial sphere. Jews were acknowledged as having religio but the early Christians were not. In time, as Western colonization spread, religious identity was generated by interpreting every other tradition on the basis of the West.

I call this Secularism₂: the secular is the Western and the religious is anything not eliminated from the outside. This is the practice of interpreting—colonizing—every other tradition (religio) on the basis of the West’s beliefs. In time, when the British came to India, the use the Persian word “Hindu” to name the entire Indigenous South Asian tradition as a religion. As I note in my Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (2018),  what the British called “Hinduism” was nothing short of the disagreements of philosophy with a masala twist. And hence the only way to represent this ‘religion’ was in terms of the disagreements of philosophy.

But notice of Secularism₂, White Supremacy, informs ordinary discussions about secularity. World religions all originate from outside of the West: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Shintoism… A belief in God, the afterlife and reincarnation when explored by Plato is secular philosophy. The same position becomes religious when from a BIPOC tradition. Similarly, the idea that reality is the evolution of matter, mind and intellect are emergent properties and consciousness is an epiphenomena, when said by Īśvarakṛṣṇa  in the Sāṅkhya Kārikā 2000 years ago in Sanskrit, is Hinduism. Said in the West by a contemporary White academic, is secular cosmology.

Under Secularism₂, the same position can be both religious and secular depending upon its racial origins. This shows that there is no essence to the religious: it’s just a means of institutionalizing White Supremacy. But there is a cost: when people believe their native traditions are religious, they too interpret it on the basis of the West, and hence they end up participating in their own self-colonization. The religious or the spiritual is what cannot be articulated on the basis of the West’s anthropocentrism and communitarianism.  

Yoga in Western contexts is interpreted as a religious or spiritual exercise, to be studied by non-philosophers who are scholars of religion (usually ethnographers and linguists). I complain in this book that this turns into an entirely ahistorical exercise of ethnographers going to yoga studios to study yoga, as though there is no colonial history to that representation. Or, it shows up in linguists trying to interpret South Asian philosophy only to be frustrated in their ability to make sense of it. What they do not realize is that no philosophy can be interpreted in so far as philosophy contains arguments, and arguments are not an explanation in terms of your beliefs. But they don’t know that because they disvalue philosophy.

Worse, this amateurism turns into a weird replica of worst student practices in philosophy: instead of learning the skills needed to read philosophy, Sanskritists try to read traditional commentaries as though they are substitutes for the much more challenging and dense original texts (how they would know that the commentary says the same as the original text is unclear as they cannot read the original texts as they confess). Yoga Studies and related fields are (with rare exceptions) a colonial Gong Show.

Another outcome is the racialization of moral philosophy. I became interested in all of these topics when I started work, as a graduate student, on the claim, ubiquitously accepted in the literature, that South Asian philosophers wrote on every topic of philosophy except moral philosophy.

If we interpret South Asian discussions of the word that they used to discuss the right or the good—dharma—we would correlate what South Asians said about dharma with what we believe. And the result is this myth that the word has many meanings as dharma labels many different things that we have diverse beliefs about. But this interpretive exercise also destroys the evidence of the rigorous moral philosophy from the tradition as it uses an antirational methodology of colonialism (interpretation) to explain the data.

In contrast, if we use logic to extract from a theory of dharma that entails its “dharma” claims, and then if we compare conflicting theories of dharma, we find that what they are disagreeing about, what the concept of dharma is, is the right or the good. I call this process of using logic as a tool of research explication. So, if we interpret, we violate Oakham’s razor, proliferate meanings of dharma and come up with the conclusion that Brown philosophers didn’t do moral philosophy, but somehow (magically) the only people who did were White thinkers: everyone else is religious. If we explicate, we see that Western philosophers dissenting about ethics, Chinese philosophers dissenting about the tao and South Asian philosophers dissenting about dharma were all involved in the same debate about the right or the good, which is to say, moral philosophy.

As the South Asian tradition does not begin with LAT, they were free to adopt an explicatory approach to public interaction, that led to a thriving tradition of philosophical exploration. I call this politics based on explication Secularism₁: free open philosophical dissent. In Secularism₁, there is no common comprehensive commitment that binds social interaction. It is rather the freedom to disagree that makes social interaction possible. Prior to Western colonization, South Asians didn’t have religious identities. They had moral philosophical (dharma) identities. Afterwards, they internalize Western colonization and then confabulate about their religious identities. As I track in my open access paper, “Hinduism, Belief and the Colonial Invention of Religion” (Ranganathan 2022a), colonization and the institutionalization of Secularism₂ in colonized spaces constitutes a rupture, and the localization of White Supremacy. The resulting problems that we see in colonized spaces (like the newfangled idea of Hindu Nationalism) are hence better explained as a continuation of the Western tradition than the Indigenous.

Interpretive academic production dominates the humanities, reifies the method of colonization but also beliefs of the colonizing tradition as explanations. And so it is not really an exercise of research but political domination. In literature on South Asian philosophy it shows up in the twin narratives that South Asian contributions, like Yoga, are an exercise of religion or spirituality and not moral philosophy.

So, my work, and this book, in contrast to what is normalized, begins with contrasting an interpretive approach to a decolonial explicatory approach. And this contrast I learned from Patañjali’s  Yoga Sūtra (200 BCE—200 CE), which is the formal articulation of Yoga. There are many other important sources for Yoga (the Upaniṣads, and the Bhagavad Gītā, which I cover) but the Yoga Sūtra is the academic articulation of the philosophy.  

Interpretation vs. Explication: Anti-Yoga vs. Yoga

When I was working on my Ph.D. on moral discourse translation (Ranganathan 2007), I took up the project of translating Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (Patañjali 2008) from Sanskrit. I was blown away by what it had to teach me about my project of understanding cross cultural moral discourse.  

The Yoga Sūtra begins in contrasting explication with a failing method of explanation, interpretation, where we fuse ourselves with thoughts via propositional attitudes (like belief, fear, or hope). In fusing ourselves to thoughts, we lose our autonomy when we engage in interpretation for it is our propositional attitudes that we are then devoted to, and which influence our choices. In contrast, explication, Yoga, is the explicatory exercise of the responsible ordering of data to their conclusions so that epistemic agents are thereby autonomous from what they are contemplating. 

The contrast between Yoga and anti-Yoga (explication and interpretation) at the start is Yoga’s metaethics (YS I.2-4). Explicated, the normative aspect of Yoga’s metaethics of distinguishing options so that the agent can understand is a three-part normative ethics: Devotion to Sovereignty (Īśvara praṇidhāna), unconservatism (tapas) and self-governance (svādhyāya) (YS II). Sovereignty is defined by two traits: on the one hand, it is not constrained by its past, and hence it’s free to move forward. It is hence unconservative. On the other hand, its activities are not afflicted but rather a matter of self-governance (YS I.24). The practice of unconservatism and self-governance is what devotion to Sovereignty looks like. The perfection of this practice is autonomy (kaivalya).

If we explicate South Asian discussions of “dharma,” we find that they are reducible to four basic dharma theories:

• Virtue Ethics: the good (character) conditions or produces the right (choice, action)
• Consequentialism: the good (end) justifies the right (choice, or action)
• Deontology: the right (procedure, choice) justifies the good (action or omission)

And, unique to South Asia:

• Yoga/Bhakti: the right —devotion to the procedural Ideal of the Right—conditions or brings about the good (which is the perfection of the practice).

Prior to my work, it was normal not to explicate South Asian philosophy. It still is in most corners. However, I made sure that this attention to methodology informed my approach to editing the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics (Ranganathan 2017). And the result was that the contributions show how South Asian philosophers richly contributed to the disagreements of moral philosophy across these four theories.

All basic normative ethical theories are contributions to the controversy about the right or the good. As listed, they are mirror opposites of each other. Yoga—also called Bhakti, or “devotion” in South Asia—is the opposite of Virtue Ethics. Like Virtue Ethics, it’s a theory of moral production, but provides the inverse explanation. Unlike the other three ethical theories, Yoga does not treat goodness as a primitive notion. While both Deontology and Yoga are procedural ethical theories, prioritizing the Right, Yoga is radically procedural, jettisoning goodness as an independent moral criterion.

Yoga also includes a non-ideal politics, which involves transforming the public world into something safe for people to participate in, the ideal normative ethics and metaethics. It begins with its first implementation with the disruption of systemic harm (ahiṃsā), that allows social facts (satya) of people not being deprived of their requirements (asteya), personal boundaries respected (brahmacarya)  and no appropriation (aparigrahā)  (YS II.30). MK Gandhi credits Patañjali for his politics of direct action. Gandhi was of course very influential on ML King. The idea that justice involves reclaiming and occupying public space, while disrupting oppressive conventions, has become a mainstay of progressive politics. A politics of direct action along with a radical solidarity with people regardless of their empirical traits is traceable to the Yoga Sūtra. 

A person, on a Yoga account, is something that thrives given their own unconservativism and self-governance. In being devoted to Īśvara, Sovereignty, we are devoted to what is essential to persons. And hence this devotional practice constitutes a politics of solidarity with all people. But persons, so understood, cuts across sex, orientation, gender, ability and species. Nonhuman animals and the Earth are persons, on the Yoga account, as they are the kinds of things that thrive when they are not imprisoned in their past and free to determine themselves going forward. 

So whereas the LAT-based anthropocentrism and communitarianism works on beliefs about persons based on what a culture values, Yoga identifies persons in terms of what would make them thrive. No set of empirical traits that define a person as a person is best understood normatively. A person is the kind of thing that is best explained not in terms of external causality but choice and responsibility. When people are healthy, their choices and actions are the explanation of their life. There is no one picture of what that looks like for to be a person is to be a quirky individual making personal choices. Insofar as we take this practice of responsibility as our own practice, we correct our personal boundaries and allow others to do the same. Contrary to colonial “yoga,” which is all about ableism and prescribed bodily activity, actual Yoga is anti-ableist as ability is not an essential trait of persons. An interest in one’s unconservatism and self-governance is the essential trait.

The importance of moral theory to discussions of Yoga cannot be overstated. Yoga, the classical philosophy, is often articulated as part of a criticism of the other conventional moral theories. According to these classical sources, conventional ethics is the ethics of good character (Virtue Ethics), good outcomes (Consequentialism)  and good rules (Deontology). Such conventions are perfect systems for moral parasites to game: they want others to participate in such systems as they, the parasites, siphon off the excess utility of such systems. And moral conventionalists for their part are inclined to be part of moral conventions, while being taken advantage of, because of their investment in being good, aiming for the good and doing good. What they are not inclined to consider is disrupting such conventions as this disruption would be a departure from the good.

The Yogi in contrast is not concerned about being good, aiming for the good, or doing good. They are rather concerned with procedural devotion to the Ideal of the Right. What this devotional practice allows is for the yogi to engage in disruption, not for selfish gain, but out of a politics of solidarity with people, which is their devotion to Īśvara.

The concern for conventional morality of the good provides perfect cover for the normalization of colonization. As colonization is sets in, mora conventionalists are inclined to participate in it as it becomes the context in which to be good, aim for the good, and do good. And this inclination to tow conventional lines, as noted, shows up in the meta-discourse about possibilities.  In contexts of oppression, the meta-discourse identifies the oppressive option as the only option.

This book contrasts the narratives of Western colonization and White Supremacy with the rigorous moral philosophy of the South Asian tradition, of which Yoga is an important option. In colonized spaces, we find what I call WAC: Western appropriated culture. This includes the appropriation of the word “yoga” and South Asian cultural elements to recreate Western political institutions traceable to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.

Actual Yoga is disruptive to social conventions. It’s not about fitting into a hierarchy with an enlightened guru at the top (Plato), being raised properly within an appropriate cultural milieu (Aristotle), or controlling our mind so we can accept the world as it is (Stoicism). In these Western contexts, postural or breathing exercises are taught as a way to fit into the pyramid with the guru at the top, part of the cultural knowledge one has to master to be yogic, or tasks to perform to ease anxiety and except life as is. Perhaps the greatest irony of “yoga” in Western colonization is that it is an exercise where you pay someone else to tell you what to do! In colonialism, “yoga” is a resource we take on to feel comfortable with our own oppression. Actual yoga is practicing our own autonomy as devotees of Sovereignty.

Activism is hence not a Consequentialist strategic practice in Yoga. As the yogi Rosa Parks showed, it’s deciding to do what is in accordance with this practice of Sovereignty, like sitting on a bus where one chooses and harms no one else, even if, and especially if, it disrupts harmful conventions. Consequentialist activists expend energy for ends with a low-expected utility, resulting in burnout. Yogis focus on living their own life: and the more they focus on it, the more sustainable is this life. They aren’t trying to produce any further outcome. Yet this focus on oneself as something with an essential interest in Sovereignty upsets oppression. In this focus on ourselves, we can engage in postural or breathing exercises but not as a means to any further end but as a way to practice our own unconservatism and self-governance. And this devotional exercise also serves as a politics of solidarity with all people. As I focus on my own needs for independence, I transform public space into something safe for people to practice their own independence.

Why isn’t a focus on one’s self usually a means of collective liberation? In Westernized contexts, you are redefined in terms of your propositional attitudes and these attitudes are attitudes toward the propositions we experience. Individualism here is actually about internalizing the experiences of colonization by attaching ourselves to these experiences via our propositional attitudes! Individualism in Western colonization just serves to cement the politics of this colonization. Our actual self is not defined by propositional attitudes: it’s defined by an interest in Īśvara: unconservatism and self-governance. That is the interest we share with all people. To be devoted to it is to be devoted to what is in the interest of all people.

It shouldn’t be entirely surprising that a philosophy of radical autonomy and decolonization will be found in the tradition that Western colonization says lacks all moral philosophy. But perhaps surprising is the idea that when we do learn from such erased and hidden traditions, we see that philosophy is not a side show to life. It is in the context of procedural devotion to the Right that philosophical research is a must, for that’s the only way we can understand what the options are. Understanding options is decolonial as colonization tries to enforce only one option. Put another way, the idea that philosophy is a waste of time is colonial propaganda. An actual Yoga practice, as opposed to a WAC-ky practice, shows this.

Bibliography

Patañjali. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra: Translation, Commentary and Introduction by Shyam Ranganathan. Delhi: Penguin Black Classics, 2008.

Ranganathan, Shyam. Translating Evaluative Discourse: The Semantics of Thick and Thin Concepts. Philosophy. Vol. PhD, url=<http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/thesescanada/vol2/002/NR68573.PDF>: York University, Department of Philosophy (Dissertation), 2007. 

Ranganathan, Shyam. 2017. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Ranganthan, Shyam. 2018. Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation.  New York: Routledge.

Ranganthan, Shyam. 2022a. “Hinduism, Belief and the Colonial Invention of Religion: A Before and After Comparison.” Religions 13, no. 10 (2022a). < https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/13/10/891 >

Ranganathan, Shyam. 2022b. “Modes of Interpretation.” In Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics, edited by William Schweiker, David A. Clairmont and Elizabeth Bucar, 874-886. Hoboken NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

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Shyam Ranganathan (he/him/they) is translator of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (Penguin 2008), editor of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics (2017), author of Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge 2018), Yoga—Anti-colonial Philosophy(Singing Dragon 2024), and the forthcoming Moral Philosophy and Decolonialism: The Irrationality of Oppression (Bloomsbury 2025). He is a member of the Department of Philosophy and York Center for Asian Research, York University Toronto.

[Description of image below: photo of Shyam, a brown-skinned man with very short hair. He is looking directly at the camera, smiling slightly, and his arms are folded in front of him. A window through which light is entering the room can be seen behind him.]