WHY?
ADA Yoga exists to reclaim and reframe “yoga” by centring Adivasi and Dalit experiences and voices at the forefront of yoga spaces, education, and the global conversation. Here, yoga is held for those historically marginalised across India and South Asia. Yoga that ignores caste is classic spiritual bypassing. We are here to shine a light on Yogas dark side through truthful awareness, meaningful action, strong alliances, and the ancestral memory that keeps us rooted in who we are and why we serve. Yoga must become truly caste-aware — not just a feel-good practice, but a space where collective healing and real accountability stand side by side, for ALL. Yoga must be reclaimed as a tool for repair, dialogue, collective peace, and justice — not a practice that hides behind silence, ignores caste realities, and feeds suffering for some and ‘bliss’ for others. If you practice, teach, or profit from yoga, this is your call to act — and to stand with us.
WHO?
We are Adivasi, Dalit, Bahujan, and nomadic communities together form an interconnected fabric of South Asia’s original peoples, caste-oppressed, and historically marginalised groups who have faced systemic exclusion, exploitation, and erasure for centuries. These titles are not rigid — they often overlap, and many communities and tribes identify with one or several of these terms, depending on local histories and struggles. They include Adivasi — the Indigenous peoples deeply rooted in land and forest; Dalit — those forced to the bottom of the caste hierarchy and treated as “untouchable”; Bahujan — the political identity uniting all non-dominant caste communities as the true majority; and nomadic tribes whose ways of life have long existed at the fringes, sustaining folk culture, crafts, oral traditions, and ancestral healing.
Despite the diversity, these communities share an unbroken lineage of survival, cultural resilience, and resistance against caste hierarchy, land dispossession, and systemic marginalisation — a struggle that continues today as they reclaim voice, dignity, and justice together.
About the founder Khushbhu Adivasi
Khushbhu Adivasi is an educator, cultural worker, and community advocate born into the Kalbeliya Sapera tribe — an Adivasi, nomadic, and socially Dalit community mostly in Rajasthan, India, historically criminalised under colonial and caste systems yet globally romanticised for its music, dance, and folk spiritual traditions.
Khushbhu is the first young women in her tribe’s community to have had access to formal education, brought to Australia as a child for that purpose, and now stepping into a larger role as a bridge-builder and truth-teller. She has spent years moving between worlds: reconnecting with ancestral lands, supporting her family’s community, and now is obsessed in giving voice to the untold realities of Adivasi and Dalit lifeworlds like her tribes within global yoga, wellness, and cultural spaces.
With lived experience of navigating caste, landlessness, and generational trauma, Khushbhu’s work bridges the gap between personal storytelling, folk wisdom, and structural critique. She has developed ADA Yoga — Adivasi Dalit Aware Yoga — as an initiative to reframe yoga and South Asian wellness as collective, caste-conscious, and reparative practice rooted in community trust and justice.
Khushbhu leads workshops, offers lived education, supports and networks community-led projects that centre Adivasi and Dalit wellbeing, education and livelihood.
Khushbhu’s deepest inspiration is her mother, whose life embodies both the ancestral strength and the struggles that continue to shape Adivasi and Dalit communities today.(Photos of Khushbhu and her mother Papolli)
visit her crafts livelihood project that is a tribute to her mother. @masapera.co
