In the so-called west, yogis are perceived as gentle, retiring, and chaste people. More, they are considered to be exemplars of benevolence. Unusual and perhaps even weird, they are still beyond reproach. As David Gordon White endeavors to show in his book about yogis, they are perceived rather differently in India and South Asia, where they originated a few millennia ago, and where they are still thriving.[1] Striving to make his point clear, this is what he says in the Preface to the book:

Even today, sinister yogis are stock villains in Bollywood film plots, and as soon as one ventures out from the subcontinent’s metropolitan areas, yogis are such objects of dread and fear that parents threaten disobedient children with them: “Be good or the yogi will come and take you away.” Yogis are bogeymen, control freaks, cannibals, and terror mongers.[2]

Indeed, the book is teeming with stories that support this surprising claim. Interestingly, White returns to the words from the Preface in the last pages of his book:

Far more than a literary device or marginal religious phenomenon, the person or persona of the sinister yogi is a South Asian cultural episteme. Even today, naughty South Asian children find themselves threatened by their parents that if they won’t be quiet and go to sleep, “the yogi will come and take them away.”[3]

This sort of threat has become rather rare in the west, but it still thriving on its edges. In much of Southeastern Europe, and especially in its rural areas, it is Gypsies that parents bring up with disobedient children: “Be good or the Gypsy will come and take you away.” Once again, this is a synonym for a wanderer or drifter of dubious intentions to be avoided at all times. As luck would have it, Gypsies hail from India, as well. Now that they are called Roma and protected by many a law, such threats are ebbing away, but few would be surprised by them to this day.

Footnotes

1. Sinister Yogis, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

2. Op. cit., p. xiii.

3. Op. cit., p. 252.