Flexible India

Shameem Black travels into unexpected realms of popular culture in English from India, its diaspora, and the West to explore and critique yoga as an exercise in cultural power.

Shameem Black is associate professor in the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. She is the author of Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late Twentieth-Century Novels (Columbia, 2010).

Suzanne Newcombe, author of Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis:
Flexible India offers a powerful panorama of the paradoxes and transformative potential of yoga. Never reductive, Shameem Black lays bare painful contradictions in sensitive and compassionate prose. She interrogates power imbalances, cultural appropriation, and the possibility of positive transformation through yoga with integrity and bravery.

Amanda Lucia, author of White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals:
Flexible India is a stirringly intimate portrait of both the beauty and the vicissitudes of global yoga. Black expertly unfurls the complex ethical debates of modern yoga without relinquishing its generative possibilities for hope, imagination, and flexibility. A must read.

Farah Godrej, author of Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State:
Black’s richly textured analysis takes us on a journey across disciplines, genres, and lenses, highlighting crucial questions surrounding the meaning, value, and practice of yoga, all the while gloriously centering its messy multiplicity and internal contradictions. An ambitious, skillfully written book—and a truly edifying, rewarding read.

E. Dawson Varughese, author of author of Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English:
Shameem Black invites us to reassess the idea of ‘yoga’ in the popular cultural imaginary. Her timely, thoughtful, and erudite study tackles notions of cultural appropriation, social inequality, and political critique, channeled through a wonderfully blended academic and creative endeavor.

Joseph S. Alter, author of Yoga in Modern India:
Shameem Black’s Flexible India provides an important new perspective on the complex politics of yoga in contemporary India. In a style that is lucid, incisive, and critically insightful, her analysis sheds light on how the practice of yoga, and claims to authority over its historical representation, are riven with contradictions that reinforce inequities and injustices. At the same time, yoga’s flexible multivocality animates the possibility of practice that transcends entrenched forms of exclusion, exploitation, and alienation. With deep empathy and critical reasoning, Black shows how the rigidity of India’s twenty-first-century modernity can be understood in terms that work out the tensions of nationalism and the contortions of neoliberalism.