Balancing Act
Half awake, I stumbled out of my bedroom early one summer morning to find my grandfather standing on his head in the middle of the carpeted living room. Pitaji, as he was universally called, was comfortably contorted into a yoga pose while everyone else slept or scurried about their morning routines. This had been his ritual for decades, but my seven-year-old eyes widened as I watched for the first time. On his many subsequent visits to our Bombay home, I knew to tiptoe around when I heard the slow exhalation of pranayama practice, or caught him frozen in meditative silence, his shimmering silver hair oiled and neatly side-parted, thick spectacles by his side. Snail-like, Pitaji retreated into his own private yoga studio whenever he needed to, wherever he was. No dim lights, soft music or fragrant candles necessary.
While the youngest among us looked forward to his visits the most, the stories he spun entangled anyone in the vicinity. With a booming voice that belied his medium build, he brought to life tales of Tarzan in the jungle and the adventures of mythological characters, a web of stories he knew and those he’d invent in the moment. But there were some we only heard when we were much older. Those of his perilous escape from Lahore to Shimla in 1947 when British-occupied India, including his homeland of Punjab, was split along religious lines into two countries resulting in one of the largest and most horrifically violent mass migrations in human history. We learned of how he drove his pregnant wife and four children to safety on the other side of the impending border, of his dutiful return to wrap up the office, and of the kindness of Muslim neighbours who helped him, a Hindu, escape along with a Sikh friend. The family home, just as it was, was gifted to a Muslim family forced to flee in the opposite direction.
Pitaji spent the rest of his working life in a transferable job with the same insurance company (now under Indian, not British, management). The family crisscrossed the country, moving from city to city, and adapting to different dialects, cultures and customs along the way. They inhabited post-colonial India with ease, fluent in English and several Indian languages, and comfortable in both Indian and Western contexts. Pitaji’s books went along with them, evidence of his earlier years as a teacher of mathematics and his ongoing love of English literature. During my growing years, at a time when grandparents’ homes had no toys and the black and white television had only evening programming, I was captivated by that burgeoning bookshelf in their post-retirement Calcutta home.
Unlike Pitaji, I grew up in independent India. The colonizers no longer occupied our land, but had taken up residence inside our heads. By my first day at school, English slipped off my tongue easier than Hindi did, and no Punjabi emerged at all. My sister and I enjoyed daily Indian meals, deftly tearing a bit of roti with one hand, wrapping it around spiced vegetables and dipping the entire parcel in steaming dal before devouring it. But we used cutlery for rice, and our tables were set the proper British way. Diwali and Navratri were vibrant festive celebrations once a year, but daily life involved no Hindu rituals. The chants that wafted out of the yoga ashram on the first floor of our apartment building were a greater novelty than the hymns we rattled off each morning in our colonial-era church school. Urban Indians with such schooling are in a little club of our own—distanced from our cultural roots, while being catapulted into privilege and opportunity by the same education that distances us.
It wasn’t common in my family to leave India to study, but armed with a scholarship after high school, I found myself on a flight to Philadelphia at the age of eighteen, excited to explore the biological sciences. Grateful to belong to a progressive (read: Westernized) Indian family that supported a teenage daughter’s dreams of an academic adventure halfway across the world, I slid down a rabbit hole into the wonderland of a US Liberal Arts education. There, I found a new appreciation of my own Indianness. Today, we might call it being exoticized, but at the time I was amused by the curiosity of my peers about my blended identity. Wrapped up in the atmosphere of a 1990s women’s college campus, my friends and I rejected high heels and lipstick, believing that falling prey to fashion magazines implied being snapped and trapped by the capitalist patriarchy like powder in a compact. We glorified the intellect and with little bites of newly acquired knowledge and values adopted an adolescent, dualistic approach —Stop objectifying our bodies! Admire, instead, our beautiful, strong minds! We took to heart our university president’s declaration that “One purpose of a liberal arts educationis to make your head a more interesting place to live inside of for the rest of your life.” Years of living inside the head, no matter how delightful a place that may be, get busy. Combine that with neglecting to nurture the body, and a decade later reality presents a range of consequences. In my thirties, despite being comfortably ensconced in a life of security, love and belonging back in India, I found my way to yoga the way many in the world do: for stress relief.
I walked into my first meditation class in a yoga studio so new I could still smell the fresh paint. Lush green branches tapped on wall-to-wall windows of glass that snuffed out the honking and persistent growl of Mumbai traffic. Studios were uncommon at the time, and most people practiced right where they were—in their homes, local parks, or neighbourhood community spaces. I set down my sturdy cotton yoga mat (though the studio owner, recently back from New York, offered a selection of sticky mats of PVC) and nodded to greet my fellow students. We were a motley group of ages, sizes and abilities, dressed in loose comfortable pants and t-shirts or salwar kurtas. There was no such thing as a ‘yoga body’ and there weren’t any prescribed clothes either. I shut my eyes, took in a deep breath, and exhaled.
Many of us in post-colonial countries absorb our own culture filtered by the lens of the West. Like a fledgling waiting for the mother bird to chew and regurgitate a morsel, we find it easier to consume our culture softened by Western scholars, historians and scientists, and fed to us in their language, now our language, with their added flavours and colours. Over the next few years, I read texts on yoga in English, some based on translations from the Sanskrit that I never learned. I pored through popular summaries of scientific studies, fascinated by the metabolic changes in meditating monks and the effects of bhastrika pranayama on anxiety. I believed just a little more in the chakras once I knew they corresponded to the endocrine glands and was pleased to find scientific proof of the impact of yogic practices on the parasympathetic nervous system. Western medicine, which conventionally treated the human body and mind system in disparate parts, was exploring psychosomatic interactions. Whereas my grandfather faithfully followed the centuries-old practices of the sages of the Himalayas, I needed revalidation from the sages of Harvard.
I discovered that the physical postures and breathing techniques I was learning were just a tiny fragment of this practice that serves to guide us through the human condition. From truth-telling to non-violence, moderation to self-inquiry, and selfless service to discipline, wisdom was passed from teacher to student for thousands of years, with each individual encouraged to follow the paths best suited to them. Physical postures, most easily adopted by Westerners familiar with exercise, along with breathing techniques and meditation, were packaged and commercialized into the 100-billion-dollar yoga industry of today. Many consumers, however, miss a central meaning: Yoga (pronounced Yog) means to yoke or unite, and wellness comes not just from contortions, but from the integration of mind, body and spirit. The enduring ancient teachings apply to everyone, and while it may align with the context of a Hindu or Buddhist quest for spiritual liberation, this is an inclusive and expansive tradition. Being South Asian or having an interest in Eastern philosophy is entirely unnecessary.
A few months before he died at the age of 97, Pitaji showed my 9-month-old son the delight of being able to bring his own hands together to clap. As I watched them together under the banyan tree, taking in the late morning sun, it was hard to tell who was having more fun. Pitaji found joy in new experiences, right down to his last vacation with us, exploring the mangrove forests of the Ganges river delta by boat at age 96 to celebrate my father, his youngest child, turning sixty. Pitaji’s age had only slightly slackened the physical and mental health he maintained throughout his life. He lived on his own with a helper, close to family members he met every day but never moved in with. A lifelong learner, he made new younger friends in his early nineties and persuaded them to teach him Tai Chi in the neighbourhood park after his morning walks. He’d had the same lifestyle for decades—simple vegetarian meals, respect for his body, a vibrant intellectual life of science, literature and politics, and gatherings with like-minded people. If he carried any unresolved trauma from the Partition, repeated upheavals of home, and the ten heartbreaking years spent tending to his beloved wife as she withered away from Parkinson’s disease, we saw little trace of it. Pitaji, who integrated East and West, mind and body, lived the true essence of yoga.
Thousands of miles away from my country of origin, I am on an endeavour to lead a more integrated life in this new place. I hope to find balance in my culturally blended identity and to keep learning and growing my still intermittent yoga practice. I look for teachers connected to an unbroken line of instruction from the Indian subcontinent, who refer to postures by their Sanskrit names and can help me carry on this ancient wisdom tradition. I may not find my place in the local studios of tight Lululemon and hushed concluding Namastes, but I am grateful they exist and hopeful that as the teachings expand, they will resonate with more people of diverse ages, abilities and ethnicities. Most of all, I am grateful to my grandfather for showing me that where you live or what you leave behind is not nearly as important as what you carry inside.
Miel Sahgal is a writer based in the Toronto area. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Sanctuary Nature Foundation, where she was formerly Managing Editor of Sanctuary Asia magazine. She is a co-author of ‘Totally Mumbai’, a children’s book about her hometown.
