Sangeeta Raju

How much unpacking we have to do as South Asian women to find our light. I can say that the Black Lives Matter movement was my initiation into a real education on race and unpacking my own relationship with it. It was not something I had personally been asked to confront until this moment. To understand where South Asians fit into this discussion of settler colonialism in North America. It was when I realized I had both the privilege to not be targeted by police every day of my life but also the misfortune of still having to be brown in North America. The Black Lives Matter movement was an invitation for me to examine race both the privileges and disadvantages as I have experienced it. As a South Asian, I realized that in my almost 30 years of life that race and ethnicity have had negative impacts on my well-being in ways that I had not previously acknowledged. It had never taken a dark violent toll on me that it has for so many in the world. My experience with being a visible minority in Canada is that I have been made to feel less by nature of how I look and what I have to offer in terms of hereditary knowledge and capabilities. I, like many other South Asians, would say “Yoga is for white people”. Imagine that! A practice that comes from your culture you think is for white people. And I don’t know where this idea came from but I know I’m not the only person who would have said that. Maybe it was an idea that white people more than other folks like to get dressed in Lululemon and work-out. For many other cultures the idea of a third place, a place that you go to outside of work and home, is a place of worship. Maybe white folks, having abandoned religion, look for a sense of community in places that are just spiritual enough.  I grew up practicing Indian Classical dance which in addition to being technically demanding is also rich with the philosophy and mythology of India and deeply integrated with the practice of Yoga. When I say India, I do not just mean Hinduism. I grew up listening to the Sufi music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. All of this hereditary knowledge and understanding of well-being and the arts was completely abandoned by me as I grew older and with that a sense of self and direction…my own spirit I had forfeited not to the white man but the white woman. The struggles of the Indian diaspora are not to be underestimated. Feelings of being too Indian or not Indian enough are things that disrupt our ability to exist in the world daily. I have been fortunate in recent years to be part of a group of South Asian women and artists who are reclaiming their hereditary practices. It has been deeply healing and has allowed me to find my voice to say things I wouldn’t usually say and use my feet to move into spaces I would not normally be in.