Careful Universalism: Hegemony, Consent and Yoga’s Soft Power in a Platformised Public Sphere

This article examines how yoga is mediated as Indian soft power and how practitioners and trainers across eight countries interpret, negotiate or resist those mediated constructions. Rather than treating yoga’s global visibility as automatic evidence of soft power, the article operationalises soft power as mediated attraction: the production of legitimacy, voluntary uptake and favourable association through journalistic framing, official diplomacy, platform visibility and practitioner reception. The study draws on a qualitative, interpretivist design combining a purposive corpus of 70 media texts sampled around the International Day of Yoga between 2015 and 2025 with 18 semi-structured interviews with practitioners and trainers in India, Hong Kong, the USA, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. The theoretical framework places Gramsci’s concepts of hegemony and consent at the centre, while drawing on Nye’s soft power, Schiller’s cultural imperialism, Appadurai’s global cultural flows, and recent platformisation scholarship to explain how attraction, value capture and visibility are co-produced. Frame analysis identifies five recurrent repertoires: Civilisational Gift; Inclusive, Secular Health; Depoliticised Physical Regime; State Spectacle and National Belonging; and Commodified Lifestyle. Interviews suggest a negotiated position described here as careful universalism: support for universal access to yoga and secular, low-barrier staging, combined with origin credit, contextual sensitivity and consent-based devotional practice. The article argues that yoga’s soft-power value is most durable when media and institutional framings combine origin acknowledgement with inclusive access, and most fragile when spectacle, aestheticisation or market capture displaces consent.