PODCAST: On Debrahminising Yoga with Bess Prescott and Roshni Lakhani

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On Debrahminising Yoga with Bess Prescott and Roshni Lakhani

What if everything we knew about yoga was built on a system of caste apartheid? If the very philosophies and practices we engaged in for our personal and collective liberation were actually deeply unjust and harmful for many?

Can we still practice and teach yoga?

Where do we go from here?

These are questions that we’re exploring today in this thoughtful, heartfelt and somewhat controversial interview on the podcast with Roshni Lakhani and Bess Prescott.

Roshni (she/her) is a scholar, educator, and facilitator, specialising in the intersections between language, caste, and power in South Asia. Raised in a caste-privileged Gujarati Hindu family in London, Roshni has been immersed in Sanskrit and South Asian spiritual traditions from a young age and holds a BA (Hons.) in Sanskrit and South Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London, and advanced language studies in Pune and Kerala, India.

Bess (she/her) is a yoga practitioner and teacher interested in the intersection of yoga, human rights, history, ethics, politics and environmentalism. You might know her as the co-founder of Creature Yoga, in Byron Bay. Bess is deeply curious about how yoga can do good in the world, how it has contributed to harm, and how as teachers and practitioners, we can be aware of tradition while refusing to uphold dogma, hierarchy, patriarchy and caste apartheid.

This was such a fascinating episode, and opened my eyes to so many things, and I cannot wait to share it with you.

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Follow up resources provided by Bess:

• Interrogating Yoga training with Roshni and Bess
• Are you looking for me? poem by Kabir
• The work of Johannes Bronkhorst, particularly Buddhism in the Shadow of Brahminism
• Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste (2022): An urgent call to action to end caste apartheid, grounded in Dalit feminist abolition and engaged Buddhism
• The Trauma of Caste (w/Thenmozhi Soundararajan) from the Conspirituality Podcast
• The Trauma of Caste with Thenmozhi Soundararajan from The Love of Yoga Podcast
• Annihilation of Caste by Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar (1936): A lecture that was never permitted to be given due to its incendiary nature, this book was self-published and immediately became the eye of a storm. Radically against the Brahmanical caste system and Hinduism, it argued for a society based on equal opportunities for all. You can find PDF copies of this floating around the internet.
• India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart documentary