[Must Read] "Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality" by Andrea R. Jain

A Brief Summary of “Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality” by Andrea R. Jain

Written by Taina Rodriguez-Berardi
November 12, 2020

What do spandex-clad suburbanites, people incarcerated in the American prison system, and the 14th Prime Minister of India, Narendra Damodardas Modi, have in common?

Verily, a discerning person may observe the aforementioned subjects and respond: “Atha yoga-anuśāsanam…Attend to these teachings on Yoga.” And, yes, attention to and the teachings of yoga may bind these subjects together in one sense, but a student of Andrea R. Jain’s 2020 book, Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality, would know that the answer lay far beyond the four corners of a yoga mat. Rather than reach for the requisite riposte, Jain argues that the globally pervasive phenomenon of neoliberal spirituality is the yoke of bondage, and burden, that these three individual actors, or consumers of modern, transnational yoga, have in common.

Jain writes Peace Love Yoga in consideration of a succession of several successful international right-wing movements— the 2014 election of Modi to the prime minister of India, the 2016 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the president of United States, as well as an intensifying existential backlash to the realities of global climate change. Here, Jain parallels this rise of conservatism in the purview of the collective, to the mass formation of a neoliberal spiritual identity in contemporary consumer culture.

Jain defines neoliberal spirituality as a “deep elective affinity with the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism and tendency to wed the goal of material success to the quest for spiritual liberation, rooted in some form of ancient wisdom.” This modern manifestation of religion is founded in the belief that individuals can achieve personal development, inner-peace, and combat earth’s greatest threats (and therefore contribute to the “good” of all) by performing the “right” purchases and managing transformation at the individual level. Countless products and services lay in wait, including the multi-billion dollar yoga industry with its claims of physical, mental, and spiritual salvation and a mat, shirt, crystal, workshop, or all-inclusive retreat to serve as both a respite from worldly suffering and to signal (superficially) one’s resistance to the powers that be. But this system is only meant for people who have means to compete, or consume in these markets, and is one that ultimately perpetuates privilege, white supremacy and socioeconomic status.

While individuals may intend that their conspicuous consumption speak truth-to-power, it is more likely that without explicit activism, power is instead afforded to state administrations who govern in alignment with the neoliberal paradigm through the deregulation of economic markets, regulation of human bodies for the sake of increased productivity, and the perpetuation of divisive social boundaries. Within the complex of neoliberal spirituality, Jain most references yoga as direct instrument of a particular socioeconomic and conservative agenda.

For example, by rewriting the narrative on yoga’s origins, ontology, practices, and purpose, Modi’s operandi in the 2015 campaign for an International Yoga Day is pitched to NGO’s and a global public as a benign ambition for India to achieve cultural recognition and share a specifically Hindu product of health and wellness—a spiritual panacea—with the world. But in actuality, it is a much more subversive authoritarian play to assert yoga, and more specifically India, as a homogenous, patriarchal, Hindutva-driven economic powerhouse. Citizens are focused on and accepting of responsibility for their own well-being and self-care, and work diligently to reinforce the structures and norms of the dominant culture and ideology, making for docile automatons that reinforce Modi’s neoliberal capitalist regime.

Similarly, Jain brings to light the yoga and meditation projects prominent among prison populations in the United States, Africa, and India. Like other forms of neoliberal spirituality, Prison yoga seeks to focus on the individual’s necessity to own rehabilitation and reform rather than on the industrial prison complex or the government that employs it, or on the necessity to abolish the oppressive and racist carceral system altogether.

In all, Peace Love Yoga is a narrative on transnational yoga, and more generally modern spirituality, and how it is exploited to perpetuate the dominant culture of colonist conservatism, hierarchical social inequity and discrimination, unabashed environmental exploitation, and, more specifically, an underlying operative of neoliberal capitalism that “puts the burden for resolving those conditions on individual consumers as opposed to supporting collective dissent and radical policy changes.”