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2018-02-13 23:56:32 UTC
WHITE CHRISTIANS HAVE NOT GIVEN UP "THIEVERY" EVEN IN THE 21st CENTURY
http://indiafacts.org/yoga-colonized-subject/#.WoGW8nptMVw.twitter
Yoga as the Colonized Subject
Sri Louise @SriLouise
Commentary | 12-02-2018
While certain Yoga practices were only intended for the Sannyasin, the
Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita are replete with discussions of Yoga that
have been held in the hearts of “mainstream” Hindus for thousands of
years before Americans capitalized on its commodification.
ithin the serene, spare yoga studios across Europe and America, Yoga has
become so assimilated into everyday language and activity, that to the
predominantly Caucasian practitioners, the idea that violence and
privilege have created their practice, might have never even occurred.
My own teaching practice has become a pedagogical experiment in shedding
light on the continuing historical imbalances that shape our lives. In
the summer of 2015, I facilitated a week long workshop titled Yoga &
Whiteness: Mapping the Self Construct or Outing the Hippie Woo-Woo
Colonial Crap at Impulstanz, Vienna.
When I asked participants whether anyone in the room had ever heard of
the European Scramble for Africa or the Berlin Conference of 1894, only
2 of the 20 plus students raised their hands. I did something similar
during a Yoga workshop at FRESH in San Francisco, where we sat in a
circle and I asked participants to name the Indigenous people that
preceded them in the territory where the students were born. No one in
the room knew. Eerily, our ignorance allowed for the collective erasure
of Native lives to be immediately visible in that unnamed space.
Without understanding the History of Imperial Occupation, students lack
the means to deconstruct the colonial views inevitably internalized in
the process of becoming American, or in this case European.
In Yoga & Whiteness, I showed a video titled, 13 Depressing Photographs
That Will Make You Lose Your Faith In Humanity. Each photo depicts how
Indigenous peoples were forced on display for the Colonial Gaze.
These human zoos occurred in both North America and Europe. One image
depicts Ota Benga, a Congolese man, shown at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. He
was coerced into carrying around orangutans and other apes while being
exhibited right along side them. To understand the relationship between
Whites and the scramble for Africa, here is an account of Belgian
colonial terror in the Congo.
The 13th image in the series is that of an African girl, probably
Congolese, exhibited in a human zoo in Brussels, Belgium, in the year
1958. The image also shows a white boy on the other side of the
enclosure and I asked the Europeans, what does this white boy
internalize about the situation? What does he come to believe about his
own self-concept? About his Ethnic position in the world? About White
Supremacy?
The image made me think of an orientalist postcard included in the
Smithsonian Exhibit titled, The Art of Transformation: 2000 years of
Yoga. The media fact sheet for the show, classifies the gallery in which
this particular photo is exhibited in as, Yoga in the Transnational
Image, 1850-1940.
“The Gallery explores the exoticized “yogis” that dominated public
discourse and popular representations between 1850 and 1940. Highlights
include an albumen print of “Yogis” staged and photographed by Collin
Murray ( for Bourne and Shepherd) and Thomas Edison’s Hindoo Fakir, the
first movie made of an Indian Subject.”
Here is a link to the film, it does not show an Indian subject, but
rather the objectified representation of the Indian “subject” imagined
by the white mind.
The Smithsonian exhibition was curated by a white woman, whose use of
the word transnational obscures the power differential that is the
engine behind Colonial rule and extraction. Whether intentional or not,
the effect is the same. The curator uses a word that describes something
that extends beyond national boundaries, suggesting some kind of mutual
participation in the construction of identity, but included in this
gallery are images that have been produced solely by the gaze of whites,
for their exotic entertainment, highlighting “the micro politics of
desire” as proposed through the “libidinal economy.”
The libidinal investment is one of psychological gain and the
psychological gain is one of superiority. A show curated by whites,
mainly patronized by whites, conveniently obscures the colonial gaze by
referring to the gallery as The Transnational Image. 1850-1940 spans the
culmination of British Colonial rule in India. Perhaps if the exhibit
had not whitewashed the colonial history in India, it could have been an
invitation for Euro-American “Yogis” to gain congruency around our
Colonial assumptions and entitlements in Yoga, especially with regards
to “ownership”. After all, Americans own the stolen land upon which we
now live…
If we could name the space where Yoga now resides, we might call this
gallery 1947-2015 Yoga in the Transnational Image. Still we would have
to reconcile what Champa Rao Mohan sites as ” the excruciating state of
inbetweenity…where identities remain clouded in uncertainty because of
the complex amalgam that constitutes them.” American “Yogis” have
enjoyed an unimpeded foray into the identity and business of Yoga for
over a hundred years, but alas, as with all colonial enterprises,
resistance is inevitable and a new South Asian intervention “reversing
the white gaze” has thrown a wrench in the North American Yoga
Industrial Complex. Since 2008 the on-going debate over who “owns” Yoga,
and what exactly defines Yoga has dominated the Yoga discourse. The
answer depends wholly upon the subjectivity granted to the topic.
Dereck Beres is a North American self-styled, Yoga entrepreneur. He
recently wrote a blog post on International Yoga Day. His thesis?
Indians, or more specifically, Hindus, only want to reclaim Yoga after
the West turned it a billion dollar Industry. For Dereck, International
Yoga Day is about India harnessing the monetary value of Yoga for
itself. I call this Colonial shaming. The “colonizer,” who extracts
great profits from Yoga, chastises the “colonized” when they want to
reclaim their own spiritual resources for themselves…
Dereck defines Yoga, not from an Indigenous perspective, but rather
quotes another white male subject, Mircea Eliade when he writes, “If the
word ‘Yoga’ means many things that is because Yoga is many things,”
which is code for I am therefore not constrained by what “Hindus” think
Yoga means and am justified in giving it my own meaning. But even more
unnerving than the above is the following quote, “It’s hard to separate
the spiritual from the physical, especially when the physical bodies
traveling to India arrive with wallets. Most incredible about this claim
of ownership is that for quite some time, mainstream Indian civilization
wanted little to do with yoga.” Dereck presents the Westerner as being a
victim of Indian greed, only seen for their wallets. How’s that for
inverting the colonial dynamic?
When you look at the semantics of the divide between Indian/Desi Yoga
and American Yoga, words tell an interesting story. Originally, the
debate began in 2008 when Sheetal Shah, senior director at the Hindu
American Foundation, asked Yoga Journal why it had never linked Yoga to
Hinduism. Yoga Journal responded by saying, “because it carries
baggage.” This reply prompted Ms. Shah to launch Take Back Yoga, which
was intended to highlight Yoga’s roots. Where Hindu’s use language like
origin or heritage, American “Yogis” revert by colonial default to
ownership, so that the debate concerning cultural roots, swiftly becomes
a struggle for proprietorship, especially on the part of Western Yoga
Entrepreneurs desperate to maintain their investments.
From Dereck Beres and Leslie Kaminoff to Matthew Remski and Carol
Horton, “Yogis” across North America will insist that no one can own
Yoga, so maybe the question should be changed to whether someone can
appropriate Yoga and what is the relationship between cultural
appropriation and neo-colonialism? What are the entitlements that the
colonizer has over the colonized subject, in this case, the colonized
subject being Yoga itself?
Leslie Kaminoff also parades this colonial trope in his article Who
Own’s Yoga when he asserts, “The India of 1925 had long rejected her own
gift, and Yogis were held by most of society in the lowest esteem
possible, associated with street beggars, fakirs, criminals and frauds.
The tireless work of Krishnamacharya and his contemporaries resurrected,
in decades, what it took India centuries to discard.”
One way to understand India’s relationship to Yoga is by appreciating
the Ashrama system, or the four stages of Hindu life, Brahmacarya,
Grhasta, Vanaspratha and Sannyasa. Certain Yoga texts and practices were
only intended for the Sannyasin, the one who renounces the material
condition for the sole pursuit of self-knowledge. While Yoga conceived
in this way was never intended for the mainstream, the Ramayana and the
Bhagavad Gita are replete with discussions of Yoga that have been held
in the hearts of “mainstream” Hindus for thousands of years before
Americans capitalized on the commodification of what it now refers to as
Yoga.
Beres’ entire post is littered with imperial perversion, but perhaps the
most dangerous is the assumption that mainstream Indian civilization
wanted little to do with it’s own heritage. He is met in the comment
section with a South Asian subjectivity that he unabashedly continues to
marginalize. You can read the whole exchange here…
It is well documented that the British sought to not just undermine the
Hindu, but to remake India in its own image as summarized by Thomas
Macaulay: “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
This was done by casting the English as superior and everything Indian
as inferior. He also stated that he had “never found one among them, who
could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia…It is, no exaggeration to
say, that all the historical information which has been collected from
all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what
may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools
in England,”
Writer Champa Rao Mohan describes the post-colonial effects of political
subjugation as follows:
“Cultural colonization accomplished what military conquest alone could
not have achieved for the colonizers. It paved it’s way into the minds
of the colonized and made them complaisant victims. This colonization of
the minds maimed the psyche of the colonized in a severe way. It robbed
then of all originality and instead, instilled in them a dependency
complex. in fact the sense of alienation that the colonized experience
and their mimicking tendency have their roots in the feeling of
inferiority that was methodically ingrained in the psyche of the
colonized through cultural colonization. The crippling effect of this
complex manifests itself in the post-independence period in the
inability of the former colonized people to stand independently on their
own and in their continuing dependence on the west for ideas and
technology. Intellectual as well as financial dependence of the third
world countries on the West has made them vulnerable to neocolonialism.”
Cultural colonization was implemented to deceive Indians out of
appreciating their own rich civilization, supplanting it with the notion
that noting of value emerged from India:
“Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and
fatalist people – genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions
and mystic belief systems. That they had no concept of nation, national
feelings or a history. If they had any culture, it had been brought to
them by invaders – that they themselves lacked the creative energy to
achieve anything by themselves. But the British, on the other hand
epitomized modernity – they were the harbingers of all that was rational
and scientific in the world. With their unique organizational skills and
energetic zeal, they would raise India from the morass of casteism and
religious bigotry.”
This lingering colonial attitude is at the heart of the current
East/West debate with respect to the origin/ownership of Yoga, and it
needs to be deeply considered and deconstructed before a truly
transnational conversation on the identity and meaning of Yoga can
occur. When Dereck Beres or Leslie Kaminoff lash out, suggesting Indians
didn’t want their own heritage, they are not forwarding the discourse,
they are throwing salt on the colonial wound.
What does neocolonialism look like in American Yoga today? Susanne
Barkataki in How To Decolonize Your Yoga Practice describes what its
like to be South Asian in the landscape of white, American Yoga:
“To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land. As a Desi,
this is the feeling I get in most Westernized yoga spaces today. Of
course, powerful practices that reduce suffering persist, despite all
attempts to end them. These facts are critical to understanding the
power and privilege we continue to possess or lack, to clarifying the
positionalities we embody as we practice, teach and share yoga today.
Dereck Beres concludes his article by using the Indigenous Ontology of
Samkhya Darshana to scandalize the defense of the colonized. He does
this by whitesplaining Vedic concepts, “This notion of ownership,
though, is rooted in the same prakrti that the purusa was to be
liberated from. It’s hard to recognize that when all you desire is
recognition.”
This is how passive aggression works in spiritual community. Technical
terms are used to silence critique. Is he really suggesting that the
desire for the world to acknowledge the historical origin of Yoga is
just some kind of narcissistic ploy for attention on the part of Hindus?
Has he really been so bold as to use the Sanskrit words of the very
people he seeks to dominate by schooling them out of their own quest for
self-determination? What is the recognition that he gains from writing
the article and why is there no stated self-awareness of his own stake
in the profits?
To suggest that Hinduism comes with baggage while not acknowledging the
Judeo-Christian baggage that most Westerners inflict upon their
interpretation of Yoga is to continue the debate and the divide by
maintaining the asymmetry in “first and third world” politics. I’ll end
with a quote from bell hooks, Waking Up to Racism: Dharma Diversity and
Race: “We cannot separate the will of so many white comrades to journey
in search of spiritual nourishment to the “third world” from the history
of cultural imperialism and colonialism that has created a context where
such journeying is seen as appropriate, acceptable, an expression of
freedom and right.”
The article has been republished from author’s blog with permission.
Featured Image: Chiraag Bhakta (pardonmyhindi.com)
http://indiafacts.org/yoga-colonized-subject/#.WoGW8nptMVw.twitter
Yoga as the Colonized Subject
Sri Louise @SriLouise
Commentary | 12-02-2018
While certain Yoga practices were only intended for the Sannyasin, the
Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita are replete with discussions of Yoga that
have been held in the hearts of “mainstream” Hindus for thousands of
years before Americans capitalized on its commodification.
ithin the serene, spare yoga studios across Europe and America, Yoga has
become so assimilated into everyday language and activity, that to the
predominantly Caucasian practitioners, the idea that violence and
privilege have created their practice, might have never even occurred.
My own teaching practice has become a pedagogical experiment in shedding
light on the continuing historical imbalances that shape our lives. In
the summer of 2015, I facilitated a week long workshop titled Yoga &
Whiteness: Mapping the Self Construct or Outing the Hippie Woo-Woo
Colonial Crap at Impulstanz, Vienna.
When I asked participants whether anyone in the room had ever heard of
the European Scramble for Africa or the Berlin Conference of 1894, only
2 of the 20 plus students raised their hands. I did something similar
during a Yoga workshop at FRESH in San Francisco, where we sat in a
circle and I asked participants to name the Indigenous people that
preceded them in the territory where the students were born. No one in
the room knew. Eerily, our ignorance allowed for the collective erasure
of Native lives to be immediately visible in that unnamed space.
Without understanding the History of Imperial Occupation, students lack
the means to deconstruct the colonial views inevitably internalized in
the process of becoming American, or in this case European.
In Yoga & Whiteness, I showed a video titled, 13 Depressing Photographs
That Will Make You Lose Your Faith In Humanity. Each photo depicts how
Indigenous peoples were forced on display for the Colonial Gaze.
These human zoos occurred in both North America and Europe. One image
depicts Ota Benga, a Congolese man, shown at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. He
was coerced into carrying around orangutans and other apes while being
exhibited right along side them. To understand the relationship between
Whites and the scramble for Africa, here is an account of Belgian
colonial terror in the Congo.
The 13th image in the series is that of an African girl, probably
Congolese, exhibited in a human zoo in Brussels, Belgium, in the year
1958. The image also shows a white boy on the other side of the
enclosure and I asked the Europeans, what does this white boy
internalize about the situation? What does he come to believe about his
own self-concept? About his Ethnic position in the world? About White
Supremacy?
The image made me think of an orientalist postcard included in the
Smithsonian Exhibit titled, The Art of Transformation: 2000 years of
Yoga. The media fact sheet for the show, classifies the gallery in which
this particular photo is exhibited in as, Yoga in the Transnational
Image, 1850-1940.
“The Gallery explores the exoticized “yogis” that dominated public
discourse and popular representations between 1850 and 1940. Highlights
include an albumen print of “Yogis” staged and photographed by Collin
Murray ( for Bourne and Shepherd) and Thomas Edison’s Hindoo Fakir, the
first movie made of an Indian Subject.”
Here is a link to the film, it does not show an Indian subject, but
rather the objectified representation of the Indian “subject” imagined
by the white mind.
The Smithsonian exhibition was curated by a white woman, whose use of
the word transnational obscures the power differential that is the
engine behind Colonial rule and extraction. Whether intentional or not,
the effect is the same. The curator uses a word that describes something
that extends beyond national boundaries, suggesting some kind of mutual
participation in the construction of identity, but included in this
gallery are images that have been produced solely by the gaze of whites,
for their exotic entertainment, highlighting “the micro politics of
desire” as proposed through the “libidinal economy.”
The libidinal investment is one of psychological gain and the
psychological gain is one of superiority. A show curated by whites,
mainly patronized by whites, conveniently obscures the colonial gaze by
referring to the gallery as The Transnational Image. 1850-1940 spans the
culmination of British Colonial rule in India. Perhaps if the exhibit
had not whitewashed the colonial history in India, it could have been an
invitation for Euro-American “Yogis” to gain congruency around our
Colonial assumptions and entitlements in Yoga, especially with regards
to “ownership”. After all, Americans own the stolen land upon which we
now live…
If we could name the space where Yoga now resides, we might call this
gallery 1947-2015 Yoga in the Transnational Image. Still we would have
to reconcile what Champa Rao Mohan sites as ” the excruciating state of
inbetweenity…where identities remain clouded in uncertainty because of
the complex amalgam that constitutes them.” American “Yogis” have
enjoyed an unimpeded foray into the identity and business of Yoga for
over a hundred years, but alas, as with all colonial enterprises,
resistance is inevitable and a new South Asian intervention “reversing
the white gaze” has thrown a wrench in the North American Yoga
Industrial Complex. Since 2008 the on-going debate over who “owns” Yoga,
and what exactly defines Yoga has dominated the Yoga discourse. The
answer depends wholly upon the subjectivity granted to the topic.
Dereck Beres is a North American self-styled, Yoga entrepreneur. He
recently wrote a blog post on International Yoga Day. His thesis?
Indians, or more specifically, Hindus, only want to reclaim Yoga after
the West turned it a billion dollar Industry. For Dereck, International
Yoga Day is about India harnessing the monetary value of Yoga for
itself. I call this Colonial shaming. The “colonizer,” who extracts
great profits from Yoga, chastises the “colonized” when they want to
reclaim their own spiritual resources for themselves…
Dereck defines Yoga, not from an Indigenous perspective, but rather
quotes another white male subject, Mircea Eliade when he writes, “If the
word ‘Yoga’ means many things that is because Yoga is many things,”
which is code for I am therefore not constrained by what “Hindus” think
Yoga means and am justified in giving it my own meaning. But even more
unnerving than the above is the following quote, “It’s hard to separate
the spiritual from the physical, especially when the physical bodies
traveling to India arrive with wallets. Most incredible about this claim
of ownership is that for quite some time, mainstream Indian civilization
wanted little to do with yoga.” Dereck presents the Westerner as being a
victim of Indian greed, only seen for their wallets. How’s that for
inverting the colonial dynamic?
When you look at the semantics of the divide between Indian/Desi Yoga
and American Yoga, words tell an interesting story. Originally, the
debate began in 2008 when Sheetal Shah, senior director at the Hindu
American Foundation, asked Yoga Journal why it had never linked Yoga to
Hinduism. Yoga Journal responded by saying, “because it carries
baggage.” This reply prompted Ms. Shah to launch Take Back Yoga, which
was intended to highlight Yoga’s roots. Where Hindu’s use language like
origin or heritage, American “Yogis” revert by colonial default to
ownership, so that the debate concerning cultural roots, swiftly becomes
a struggle for proprietorship, especially on the part of Western Yoga
Entrepreneurs desperate to maintain their investments.
From Dereck Beres and Leslie Kaminoff to Matthew Remski and Carol
Horton, “Yogis” across North America will insist that no one can own
Yoga, so maybe the question should be changed to whether someone can
appropriate Yoga and what is the relationship between cultural
appropriation and neo-colonialism? What are the entitlements that the
colonizer has over the colonized subject, in this case, the colonized
subject being Yoga itself?
Leslie Kaminoff also parades this colonial trope in his article Who
Own’s Yoga when he asserts, “The India of 1925 had long rejected her own
gift, and Yogis were held by most of society in the lowest esteem
possible, associated with street beggars, fakirs, criminals and frauds.
The tireless work of Krishnamacharya and his contemporaries resurrected,
in decades, what it took India centuries to discard.”
One way to understand India’s relationship to Yoga is by appreciating
the Ashrama system, or the four stages of Hindu life, Brahmacarya,
Grhasta, Vanaspratha and Sannyasa. Certain Yoga texts and practices were
only intended for the Sannyasin, the one who renounces the material
condition for the sole pursuit of self-knowledge. While Yoga conceived
in this way was never intended for the mainstream, the Ramayana and the
Bhagavad Gita are replete with discussions of Yoga that have been held
in the hearts of “mainstream” Hindus for thousands of years before
Americans capitalized on the commodification of what it now refers to as
Yoga.
Beres’ entire post is littered with imperial perversion, but perhaps the
most dangerous is the assumption that mainstream Indian civilization
wanted little to do with it’s own heritage. He is met in the comment
section with a South Asian subjectivity that he unabashedly continues to
marginalize. You can read the whole exchange here…
It is well documented that the British sought to not just undermine the
Hindu, but to remake India in its own image as summarized by Thomas
Macaulay: “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English
in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
This was done by casting the English as superior and everything Indian
as inferior. He also stated that he had “never found one among them, who
could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia…It is, no exaggeration to
say, that all the historical information which has been collected from
all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what
may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools
in England,”
Writer Champa Rao Mohan describes the post-colonial effects of political
subjugation as follows:
“Cultural colonization accomplished what military conquest alone could
not have achieved for the colonizers. It paved it’s way into the minds
of the colonized and made them complaisant victims. This colonization of
the minds maimed the psyche of the colonized in a severe way. It robbed
then of all originality and instead, instilled in them a dependency
complex. in fact the sense of alienation that the colonized experience
and their mimicking tendency have their roots in the feeling of
inferiority that was methodically ingrained in the psyche of the
colonized through cultural colonization. The crippling effect of this
complex manifests itself in the post-independence period in the
inability of the former colonized people to stand independently on their
own and in their continuing dependence on the west for ideas and
technology. Intellectual as well as financial dependence of the third
world countries on the West has made them vulnerable to neocolonialism.”
Cultural colonization was implemented to deceive Indians out of
appreciating their own rich civilization, supplanting it with the notion
that noting of value emerged from India:
“Indians were to be taught that they were a deeply conservative and
fatalist people – genetically predisposed to irrational superstitions
and mystic belief systems. That they had no concept of nation, national
feelings or a history. If they had any culture, it had been brought to
them by invaders – that they themselves lacked the creative energy to
achieve anything by themselves. But the British, on the other hand
epitomized modernity – they were the harbingers of all that was rational
and scientific in the world. With their unique organizational skills and
energetic zeal, they would raise India from the morass of casteism and
religious bigotry.”
This lingering colonial attitude is at the heart of the current
East/West debate with respect to the origin/ownership of Yoga, and it
needs to be deeply considered and deconstructed before a truly
transnational conversation on the identity and meaning of Yoga can
occur. When Dereck Beres or Leslie Kaminoff lash out, suggesting Indians
didn’t want their own heritage, they are not forwarding the discourse,
they are throwing salt on the colonial wound.
What does neocolonialism look like in American Yoga today? Susanne
Barkataki in How To Decolonize Your Yoga Practice describes what its
like to be South Asian in the landscape of white, American Yoga:
“To be colonized is to become a stranger in your own land. As a Desi,
this is the feeling I get in most Westernized yoga spaces today. Of
course, powerful practices that reduce suffering persist, despite all
attempts to end them. These facts are critical to understanding the
power and privilege we continue to possess or lack, to clarifying the
positionalities we embody as we practice, teach and share yoga today.
Dereck Beres concludes his article by using the Indigenous Ontology of
Samkhya Darshana to scandalize the defense of the colonized. He does
this by whitesplaining Vedic concepts, “This notion of ownership,
though, is rooted in the same prakrti that the purusa was to be
liberated from. It’s hard to recognize that when all you desire is
recognition.”
This is how passive aggression works in spiritual community. Technical
terms are used to silence critique. Is he really suggesting that the
desire for the world to acknowledge the historical origin of Yoga is
just some kind of narcissistic ploy for attention on the part of Hindus?
Has he really been so bold as to use the Sanskrit words of the very
people he seeks to dominate by schooling them out of their own quest for
self-determination? What is the recognition that he gains from writing
the article and why is there no stated self-awareness of his own stake
in the profits?
To suggest that Hinduism comes with baggage while not acknowledging the
Judeo-Christian baggage that most Westerners inflict upon their
interpretation of Yoga is to continue the debate and the divide by
maintaining the asymmetry in “first and third world” politics. I’ll end
with a quote from bell hooks, Waking Up to Racism: Dharma Diversity and
Race: “We cannot separate the will of so many white comrades to journey
in search of spiritual nourishment to the “third world” from the history
of cultural imperialism and colonialism that has created a context where
such journeying is seen as appropriate, acceptable, an expression of
freedom and right.”
The article has been republished from author’s blog with permission.
Featured Image: Chiraag Bhakta (pardonmyhindi.com)