Rhetorical decolonization in the context of Intellectual Property Protections is not solely an act of isolated resistance but rather a refusal of standards of white expertise, knowledge, and discovery in favor of “bio-piracy”. Bio-piracy recognizes the unauthentic nature of Western discovery and forces us to think about an alternative relationship to knowledge production that makes possible fugitive representations of resistance.

As the example of Prince demonstrates, individual resistance can have considerable structural implications, particularly in terms of the organization of institutions. The Yoga Wars, the ongoing struggle between India and the developed world over the ownership, commodification, and practice of yoga, have for the last two decades been important sites for individual and institutional (neo)colonialism and decolonization of intellectual property rights. The use of the word “piracy” to describe other than the Global South’s use of knowledge produced and protected in the Global North confronts the racial scripts that undergird contemporary understandings of (white) expertise and the “discovery” and “purification” of knowledge. Read vis-à-vis the examples provided here, flipping the script of piracy refuses to accept the notion that people of color can produce only the raw materials that are then transformed into “real” and protectable knowledge. 44 One of the first printed uses of the term “yoga piracy,” in a 2005 Washington Times article, set the terms of the conflict between India and the West over yoga. Vinod K. Gupta, head of an Indian task force on traditional knowledge and intellectual property, used “yoga piracy” to describe the predominantly Western propertization and monetization of yoga, both of which he criticized. “These [asanas] were developed in India long ago and no one can claim them as their own,” he argued. 45 In this context, alternative narratives of intellectual property infringement emerged as discursive mechanisms for inverting the racial scripts of Asians as lazy thieves who lack the intellectual capacity or work ethic to produce knowledge. The struggle to claim yoga manifested in two primary ways: the use of decolonial vernacular by lay Indians and Indian Americans to remake the very language of intellectual property and the creation of a digital database by the Indian government to protect against intellectual property rights claims in knowledge that had already been “discovered” by people of color. These two resistive moves served to decolonize and dewesternize global patent law by making Euro-American biases visible and producing new institutional structures and knowledge categories that confront them. Reframing ownership through decolonial vernacular Vernacular rhetoric—“the rhetoric of the oppressed” 46—offers a counterpoint to the rhetoric of those in power, including around discourses of race and citizenship. Significantly, even though it is the non-expert language of everyday life, vernacular rhetoric can trickle up to influence the language of those in power, changing the very words, concepts, and institutional structures that experts use to describe and manage areas of public concern. 47 For instance, vernacular discourses around yoga piracy helped Indian publics to inadvertently produce new approaches to categorizing and managing traditional knowledge, thus pushing against rhetorics of expertise that justified excluding people of color from circuits of knowledge production and knowledge ownership. 48 In effect, rhetorics of piratical theft of yoga produced new, radical, and accessible vocabularies for discussing intellectual properties that, in turn, influenced government policymakers. The use of language in the context of yoga piracy operated as “decolonial vernacular,” a practice through which quotidian uses of legal language contest (neo)colonial regimes of knowledge production. 49 One of the earliest and most famous rhetorical rescriptings of the infringement narrative came in Vandana Shiva’s articulation of the term “biopiracy” in 1997. Shiva, who was responding to the rise of bioprospecting, sought to critique “the exploitation of biological resources and traditional knowledge without the consent of local people or authorities, and without adequate compensation.” 50 She observes: “At the heart of Columbus’ ‘discovery’ was the treatment of piracy as the natural right of colonizer . . . Patents are still the means to protect this piracy of the wealth of non-Western peoples as a right of Western powers.” 51 The language of biopiracy, then, rewrites the racial scripts that Western discourses of infringement perpetuate, specifically pushing back against the relations of power that they implicate. Taking a cue from Shiva’s successful struggles to invalidate patents for turmeric and neem oil in wound healing, those who contested yoga piracy named the problematic power relations through which yoga is consistently colonized and commodified. The embrace of the concept of yoga piracy, as with biopiracy, was not an end point in the conversation about the protection of traditional knowledge. Rather, it was one outcome of a sustained engagement with questions related to the ownership of yogic knowledge, often in ways that functionally “remixed” the legal definitions in and around intellectual property and cultural property. 52 In a Times of India article titled “Kissa Copyright Ka,” a series of individuals engage with the concept of commodification of traditional knowledge. 53 Supreme Court of India lawyer Ashok Jain said: Copyright is an ambiguous area. Anyone can claim copyright if he has developed or innovated a skill. For instance, Bikram Choudhury can be granted copyright on the 26 asanas developed by him. However, nobody can get a copyright on the “original” yoga asanas as written in ancient texts . . . Legally, Indians don’t have a monopoly over ragas, curry or yogurt . . . we’ve only inherited them. The government of India should be filing for cultural patents . . . The cost of filing patents is nothing. We must take action now. 54 Here Jain uses his legal knowledge and scientific know-how to complicate understandings of intellectual properties and cultural properties, reading copyright as an “ambiguous area” that can be stretched to protect cultural knowledge. He translates his argument into accessible vernacular, framing the claims made by artists in the rest of the article. Notably, he moves fluidly between discussing copyrights and patents, intellectual property, and cultural property. In a maneuver that illustrates the possibilities of vernacular rhetoric, he argues that asanas ought to be protected by copyright law, an area of law intended to protect creative works. He then argues that India should file for “cultural patents.” While interesting, these arguments, like Prince’s name change, are not legally cognizable. Though at the time, a series of asanas might have been considered a chorographic work, administrative clarifications and legal rulings in both the United States and India have concluded otherwise. Moreover, because yoga is not an invention under the terms of the U.S. Patent Act, it cannot be the subject of a “yoga patent.” Nonetheless, the term “cultural patent,” 55 which both the blog SpicyIP and my own research confirm is repeated in Indian popular discourse as a result of “doctrinal confusion” 56 about different types of intellectual property law, creates rhetorical space for imagining the mechanics of the protective public domain that Laura Foster theorizes. 57 Combining international law’s notions of cultural property—as, for instance, articulated by UNESCO—and patent law’s notion of patentable inventions, the term “cultural property” is a productive malapropism, a confusion of related but different legal concepts in the context of intellectual property that helps to envision the legal intersections through which cultural property can be protected. The subsequent embrace of the term “yoga piracy” and the creation of the TKDL are arguably an outgrowth of such productive malapropisms, which gave rise to linguistic play as rhetorical resistance within intellectual property discourses. Such forms of discursive reworking facilitate definitional evolutions that Halbert argues are necessary for resisting intellectual property maximalism. 58 They also confront rhetorical maneuvers that Endres contends use strategic definitions to render minoritarian groups invisible in legal contexts. 59 Misuse prompts redefinition, which implicitly critiques the (neo)colonial processes through which intellectual property law emerged. The eventual affirmation in both the United States and India of the non-copyrightability and nonpatentability of yoga, as well as the embrace of the TKDL as prior art, demonstrates the efficacy of such definitional challenges. Legal misuse, then, is not simply dismissible; it is discursively reconstitutive, a productive rhetorical move that aids in eroding the power of racial capitalism and propertization. “Kissa Copyright Ka” is rife with similar examples of decolonizing vernacular through misuse. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, director of the National Mission for Manuscripts, for instance, calls for World Heritage protection by UNESCO. Jiggs Kalra, identified as “gourmet guru,” begins by citing the patenting of neem oil and turmeric and ends with this legally invalid claim: “I patent all my recipes after someone tried to steal them three years ago. But what if tomorrow, some foreigner files a patent for dhokla, tandoori chicken, mutton vindaloo?” 60 Sonal Mansingh, a dancer, analogously notes: “Even Bach and Beethoven never filed for patents. It’s the Americans who are trying to patent everything as their intellectual property.” 61 Ritu Kumar, a fashion designer, notes that she files for copyrights on her garments and that “[w]hile in Europe and the US, [her] distributors file for patents in their respective countries.” 62 Once again, the doctrinal confusion that Shamnad Basheer identifies juxtaposes legally sound and legally unsound arguments about intellectual property and cultural property law. The value of such a move is not that it makes a legally actionable claim for protecting yogic knowledge. Rather, as Gerard Hauser points out, vernacular rhetorics actively create publics and script the conceptual possibilities within which policy is made. 63 The rhetorical significance of intellectual property’s productive malapropisms is that they discursively invent and circulate the radical possibility of delinking decolonially in public culture. In Walter Mignolo’s words, they help us “build knowledge and arguments that supercede the hegemony of Western knowledge.” 64 Decolonizing vernacular around biopiracy gave rise to notions of cultural patents and yoga piracy, both of which were precursors to important structural interventions in intellectual property rights, such as the TKDL. This predecession is no coincidence: decolonizing vernacular in the Yoga Wars shifted the rhetorical culture around intellectual property and traditional knowledge in ways that facilitated new ways of thinking, including about the racial scripts around creatorship. The term “yoga patent” is not a one-time misspeak. The concept pervades Indian and US newspaper articles on yoga piracy over the years. “India to Protest Grant of Yoga Patents by US,” proclaimed the front page of a 2007 issue of the Times of India. “Patenting Yoga: The Issue Steams Up” reads the headline of an article in the Delhi Times. “Yoga Wars: India Blocks Patents on Poses!” announces NPR. “India Patents 1,300 Yoga Moves,” declared RIA Novosti. Yoga patent language became internationally pervasive in the 2000s, intermingled with discussions of copyright, cultural property, and intangible cultural heritage. Though these claims are frustrating to intellectual property experts, they created a rhetorical culture in which the TKDL could easily emerge. The TKDL, created in 2001 and spearheaded by Gupta, made information about multiple types of traditional knowledge available to the public as prior art, a designation that would block patent claims. The database also includes a catalog of asanas, which though now publicly available, do not effectively block any intellectual property claims. 65 Nonetheless, structurally speaking, conversations about yoga patents are both descriptive and proscriptive in the context of the TKDL. They describe the motives for creating a catalog of yoga poses and information that blocks patents on traditional knowledge. They also help make visible the overarching desires among Indian publics, notably to find a legally enforceable way to make yoga patents a reality and thereby protect traditional knowledge. Such productive malapropisms actively refuse the citizen scripts of the hyperracial infringer. The concept of yoga piracy implicitly declares the existence of a creator who exists outside the intellectual property imagined by modernity/coloniality, who made their work in a manner that demands legal and cultural protection. It also asserts the existence of a counternarrative of history, one that makes space for the “illicit” development models of the Global South and creates the possibility of a framework in which infringement is not a moral evil or threat to the developing world but rather the natural consequence of neoliberal racial capitalism. The notion of yoga piracy does not negate the possibility of Indian intellectual property infringement or undo perceptions of India’s noncompliance with TRIPS. It does, however, refute narratives of bad global citizenship in “discursive spaces for the disempowered” 66 and broader public spaces. Liang points out that one of the ways that US anti-piracy operates is through a redemptive narrative of citizenship in which Americans are posited as hardworking innovators, ideal citizens against which Asian infringers are compared. 67 Yet terms such as “yoga piracy” and “yoga patents” suggest not only that Indians make and circulate knowledge that is so valuable as to be worth stealing but also that they are entitled to protection for that information. Indians are not simply lawless intellectual property anti-citizens; they are makers of “pirate politics” 68 who are perhaps unwittingly part of, playing on Martin Fredriksson’s phrase “the multitude of resistance.” 69 Indian publics participate in the project of combating racialized understandings of infringers, particularly by creating conceptual space for so-called illicit economies and building rhetorical and cultural schema for Asians to be read as creators, citizens, and persons. The TKDL serves such a purpose by making Indian knowledge known to the world as prior art. 70 Reframing the public domain through dewesternizing restructuring The language of piracy was effective in the Yoga Wars because it created a shorthand for referring to the racially bankrupt (intellectual) property relations through which Westerners exploited yoga. It also created productive space for protecting yoga. As yoga legend B. K. S. Iyengar stated, “Yoga is an essential part of our heritage, and India has to protect it.” 71 Conceptually, yoga piracy identifies Indian yogis as bona fide creators—not anti-innovative pirates—whose work can and should be protected from commodification that takes it out of the public sphere. The term “yoga piracy” critiques the underlying knowledge production regimes and racial scripts through which Western legal systems create ownership rights in traditional knowledge. Instead of ceding control to intellectual property advocates to identify and racialize agents of infringement, the phrase rejects that framework, positing that Westerners are the thieves who are taking information from the developing world through contrived doctrines around expertise. This view not only claims space for Asian creativity but identifies infringement as a practice of asserting whiteness as (intellectual) property while taking traditional knowledge from racial and colonial Others.