No one denies that Hinduism’s most sacred and ancient
texts, including the Bhagvad Gita, describe different
kinds of yogic practices. But what does this ancient and
sacred tradition of yoga have to do with what people all
around the world do in yoga classes in gyms and fitness
centres today?
To most Indians, such questions are nothing less than
sacrilegious. Yoga is for them what apple pie and
motherhood are for Americans: a living symbol of their
way of life.
Indians tend to affirm their claims on yoga by trotting
out the familiar icons of the ‘5,000-year-old Vedic
tradition,’ which supposedly stretches from the
Pashupati seal of the (actually very un-Vedic) Indus
Valley civilisation to the Bhagvad Gita and the
venerable Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Yoga, Indians like
to solemnly declare, is ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’ and all
the great yoga masters, from Swami Vivekananda to BKS
Iyengar to Baba Ramdev of our own time, have only
restored or reinstituted an ancient practice. It is also
commonplace to hear Indians—even those who are not
particularly spiritual themselves—blame Americans and
other ‘decadent’ Westerners for reducing their
spiritually rich tradition to mere calisthenics.
Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the
saffron flag over American-style yoga, which consists
largely of yogic asanas and
stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby, Hindu
American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal
campaign to remind Americans that yoga was made in India
by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but
Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who
learned to discipline their bodies in order to purify
their atman.The
purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all yoga,
including its physical or hatha
yoga component,
is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of life that goes
all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.
There is only one problem with this purist history of
yoga: it is false. Yogic asanas were
never ‘Vedic’ to begin with. Far from being considered
the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were
in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and
reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit
only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis.
Moreover, what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring
to the separation of asanas from
their spiritual underpinning, did not start in the
supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas and
gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian
nationalists seeking to counter Western images of effete
Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha
yoga took
on many elements of Western gymnastics and
body-building, which show up in the world-renowned
Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from
honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to
modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as
‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual
integrity.
It is the hidden history of modern postural yoga that is
the main theme of this essay. But first, some background
on the great ‘take back yoga’ movement.
Yoga is to North America what McDonald’s is to India:
both are foreign implants gone native. Not unlike the
golden arches that are mushrooming in Indian cities, the
urban and suburban landscape of the United States is
dotted with neighbourhood health clubs, spas and even
churches and synagogues offering yoga classes.
Some 16 million Americans do some form of yoga,
primarily as a part of their exercise and fitness
routine. When everyday Americans talk about yoga, they
mostly mean hatha
yoga,
involving stretches, breathing and bodily postures.
Many styles of postural yoga, pioneered by India-origin
teachers—the Iyengar and Sivananda schools, the Ashtanga
Vinyasa or ‘power yoga’ of Pattabhi Jois, and ‘hot
yoga,’ recently copyrighted by Bikram Chaudhary—thrive
in the United States. The more meditational forms of
yoga, popularised by the disciples of Vivekananda,
Sivananda and other swamis,
are less popular. Americans’ preference for postural
yoga over meditational yoga is not all that unique: in
India, too, hundreds of millions follow Baba Ramdev,
India’s most popular tele-yogi, who teaches a
medicalised, asana-oriented
yoga with little spiritual or meditational content.
By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the
origins of what it teaches. On the contrary, in a
country that is so young and so constantly in flux,
yoga’s presumed antiquity (‘the 5,000-year-old exercise
system’, etcetera) and its connections with Eastern
spirituality
have become part of the sales pitch.
Thus, doing namastes,
intoning ‘om’ and chanting Sanskrit mantras have become
a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many
yoga studios use Indian classical or kirtan music,
incense, signs of ‘om’ and other paraphernalia of the
Subcontinent to create a suitably spiritual ambience.
Iyengar yoga schools begin their sessions with a hymn to
Patanjali, the second-century composer of the Yoga
Sutras, and some have even installed his icon. This
Hinduisation is not entirely decorative either, as yoga
instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy and
scriptures to get a license to teach yoga.
One would think that yoga’s popularity and Hinduisation
would gladden the hearts of Hindu immigrants.
Wrong.
The leading Hindu advocacy organisation in the United
States, the aforementioned Hindu American Foundation or
HAF, is hardly beaming with pride. On the contrary, it
has recently accused the American yoga industry of
‘stealing’—even ‘raping’—yoga by stripping it of its
spiritual heritage and not acknowledging its Hindu
roots.
Millions of Americans will be shocked to learn that they
are committing ‘intellectual property theft’ every
single time they strike a yogic pose
because they fail to acknowledge yoga’s ‘mother
tradition,’ namely Hinduism. HAF’s co-founder and chief spokesperson, Aseem
Shukla, exhorts his fellow Hindus to ‘take back yoga and
reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual
heritage.’
The take-back-yoga campaigners are not impressed with
the growing visibility of Hindu symbols and rituals in
yoga and other cultural institutions in the US. They
still find Hindu-phobia lurking everywhere they look.
They want Americans to think of yoga, the Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali and the great Vedas when they think of
Hinduism, instead of the old stereotypes of caste, cows
and curry. They would rather, to paraphrase Shukla, that
Hinduism is linked less with holy cows than Gomukhasana (a
particularly arduous asana);
less with colourful wandering sadhus and more with the
spiritual inspiration of Patanjali. It seems this
yoga-reclamation campaign is less about yoga, and more
about the Indian diaspora’s strange mix of defensiveness
and an exaggerated sense of the excellence of the elite,
Sanskritic aspects of Hindu religion and culture.
The ‘who owns yoga’ debate gained worldwide attention
last November, when The
New York Times carried
a front-page feature on the issue. But the dispute
started earlier, with a battle of blogs, hosted online
by The
Washington Post,
between HAF’s Shukla and New Age guru Deepak Chopra.
Shukla complained of the yoga establishment shunning the
‘H-word’ while making its fortunes off Hindu ideas and
practices. He accused the yoga and New Age industry,
including Indian gurus like Deepak Chopra, Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi and others, of using euphemisms like
‘Eastern wisdom’ and ‘ancient Indian’ to repackage Hindu
ideas without calling them by their proper name. Chopra,
who does indeed shun the Hindu label and calls himself
an ‘Advaita Vedantist’ instead, declared that Hinduism
had no patent on yoga. He argued that yoga existed in
‘consciousness and consciousness alone’ much before
Hinduism, just like wine and bread existed before Jesus’
Last Supper, implying that Hindus had as much claim over
yoga as Christians had over bread and wine. Shukla
called Chopra a “philosophical profiteer” who does not
honour his Hindu heritage, while Chopra accused Shukla
and HAF of a Hindu-fundamentalist bias.
NEITHER ETERNAL NOR
VEDIC
This debate is really about two equally fundamentalist
views of Hindu history. The underlying objective is to
draw an unbroken line connecting 21st century yogic
postures with the nearly 2,000-year-old Yoga Sutras, and
tie both to the supposedly 5,000-year-old Vedas. The
only difference is that, for Chopra, yoga existed before
Hinduism, while Shukla and HAF want to claim the entire
five millennia for the glory of Hinduism. For Chopra,
yoga is a part of ‘timeless Eastern wisdom’. For the
HAF, ‘Yoga and the Vedas are synonymous, and are as
eternal as they are contemporaneous.’
The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the
21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the
Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was
born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a
child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism,
in which Western ideas about science, evolution,
eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial
a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive,
multi-level hybridisation that took place during this
period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were
rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of
‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the
US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and
internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga
renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised
with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques
borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United
States and other Western countries. These innovations
were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras—which has
been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the
Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for
people who have accepted Brahmin theology’—to create an
impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none
really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part
of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient
Brahminical lineage.
Contrary to the widespread impression, the vast majority
of asanas taught
by modern yoga gurus are not described anywhere in
ancient sacred Hindu texts. Anyone who goes looking for
references to popular yoga techniques like pranayam,
neti, kapalbhati orsuryanamaskar in
classical Vedic literature will be sorely disappointed.
The four Vedas have no mention of yoga. The Upanishads and
The Bhagvad Gita do, but primarily as a spiritual
technique to purify the atman. The Bible of yoga,
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, devotes barely three short
sutras (out of 195) to physical postures, and that too
only to suggest comfortable ways of sitting still for
prolonged meditation. Asanas were
only the means to the real goal—to still the mind to
achieve the state of pure consciousness—in Patanjali’s
yoga.
There are, of course, asana-centred hatha
yoga texts
in the Indic tradition. But they definitely do not date
back 5,000 years: none of them makes an appearance till
the 10th to 12th centuries. Hatha
yoga was
a creation of the kanphata (split-eared)
Nath Siddha, who were no Sanskrit-speaking sages
meditating in the Himalayas. They were (and still are)
precisely those matted-hair, ash-smeared sadhus that
the HAF wants to banish from the Western imagination.
Indeed, if any Hindu tradition can at all claim a patent
on postural yoga, it is these caste-defying, ganja-smoking,
sexually permissive, Shiva- and Shakti-worshipping
sorcerers, alchemists and tantriks,
who were cowherds, potters and suchlike.
They undertook great physical austerities not because
they sought to achieve pure consciousness, unencumbered
by the body and other gross matter, but because they
wanted magical powers (siddhis)
to become immortal and to control the rest of the
natural world.
Far from being purely Vedic, hatha
yoga was
born a hybrid. As Amartya Sen reminded us in his recent
address to the Indian Science Congress, universities
like Nalanda were a melting pot where Buddhist Tantra
made contact with Taoism from China. By the time
Buddhism reached China through Nalanda and other centres
of cultural exchange along the Silk Route in the north
and the sea route in the south, Taoists were already
experimenting with qigong,
which involved controlled breathing and channelling of
‘vital energy’. Taoist practices bear an uncanny
similarity with the yogic pranayam,
leading scholars to believe that the two systems have
borrowed from each other: Indians learning
exercise-oriented breathing from Taoists, and Taoists in
China learning breathing-oriented meditation from their
Indian neighbours.
But this Taoist-Buddhist-Shaivite synthesis was only the
beginning. As we see below, hatha
yoga was
to absorb many more influences in the modern era, this
time from the West.
FABRICATING ANCIENT
TEXTS
The problem for historians of modern yoga is that even
these medieval hatha yoga texts describe only a small
fraction of modern yogic postures taught today. BKS
Iyengar’s Light
on Yoga alone
teaches 200 asanas,
while the 14th century Hatha
Yoga Pradipika lists
only 15 asanas,
as do the 17th century Gheranda
Samhita and Shiva
Samhita.
Given that there is so little ancient tradition upon
which to stand, unverifiable claims of
ancient-but-now-lost texts have been promoted. The
Ashtanga Vinyasa system of Pattabhi Jois, for example,
is allegedly based on a palm-leaf manuscript called the Yoga
Kuruntathat
Jois’s teacher, renowned yoga master T Krishnamacharya
(1888–1989), unearthed in a Calcutta library. But this
manuscript has reportedly been eaten by ants, and not a
single copy of it can be found today. Another ‘ancient’
text, the Yoga
Rahasya,
which no one has been able to trace, was supposedly
dictated to Krishnamacharya in a trance by the ghost of
an ancestor who had been dead nearly a millennium. Such
are the flimsy—or rather fictional—grounds on which rest
Hinduism’s claimed intellectual property rights to yoga.
This sorry attempt to create an ancient lineage for
modern yoga is reminiscent of the case of Vedic
mathematics. In that case, Swami Shri Bharati Krishna
Tirtha, the Shankaracharya of Puri, insisted that 16sutras in
his 1965 book, titled Vedic
Mathematics,
are to be found in the appendix of Atharva Veda. When no
one could find the said sutras,
the Swami declared they appear only in his own appendix
to the the Atharva Veda and not any other! This ‘logic’
has not prevented Vedic maths from emerging as a growth
industry, attracting private spending by well-heeled
Indians seeking to boost brainpower and public spending
by state governments that have introduced it in school
curriculums.
SECRETS OF THE MYSORE
PALACE
New research has brought to light historical documents
and oral histories that raise serious doubts about the
‘ancient’ lineage of Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga Vinyasa and
Iyengar yoga. Both Jois (1915–2009) and Iyengar (born
1918) learnt yoga from T Krishnamacharya from 1933 till
the late 1940s, when he directed a yoga school in one
wing of the Jaganmohan Palace of the Maharaja of Mysore,
Krishnaraja Wodiyar IV (1884–1940).
The Maharaja, who ruled the state and the city of Mysore
from 1902 till his death, was well known as a great
promoter of Indian culture and religion. But he was also
a great cultural innovator, who welcomed positive
innovations from the West, incorporating them into his
social programmes. Promoting physical education was one
of his passions, and under his reign, Mysore became the
hub of a physical culture revival in the country. He had
hired Krishnamacharya primarily to teach yoga to the
young princes of the royal family, but he also funded
the travels all over India of Krishnamacharya and his
protégés to give yoga demonstrations, thereby
encouraging an enormous popular revival of yoga.
Indeed, Mysore’s royal family had a long-standing
interest in hatha
yoga:
Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799–1868), Wodeyar
IV’s ancestor, is credited with composing an exquisitely
illustrated manual, titled Sritattvanidhi,
which was first discovered by Norman Sjoman, a Swedish
yoga student, in the mid-1980s in the library of the
Mysore Palace. What is remarkable about this book is its
innovative combination of hatha
yoga asanas with
rope exercises used by Indian wrestlers and the danda push-ups
developed at the vyayamasalas,
the indigenous Indian gymnasiums.
Both Sjoman and Mark Singleton, a US-based scholar who
has interviewed many of those associated with the Mysore
Palace during its heyday in the 1930s, believe that the
seeds of modern yoga lie in the innovative style of Sritattvanidhi.
Krishnamacharya, who was familiar with this text and
cited it in his own books, carried on the innovation by
adding a variety of Western gymnastics and drills to the
routines he learnt from Sritattvanidhi,
which had already cross-bredhatha
yoga with
traditional Indian wrestling and acrobatic routines.
In addition, it is well established that Krishnamacharya
had full access to a Western-style gymnastics hall in
the Mysore Palace, with all the usual wall ropes and
other props that he began to include in his yoga
routines.
Sjoman has excerpted the gymnastics manual that was
available to Krishnamacharya. He claims that many of the
gymnastic techniques from that manual—for example, the
cross-legged jumpback and walking the hands down a wall
into a back arch—found their way into Krishnamacharya’s
teachings, which he passed on to Iyengar and Jois. In
addition, in the early years of the 20th century, an
apparatus-free Swedish drill and gymnastic routine,
developed by a Dane by the name of Niels Bukh
(1880–1950), was introduced to India by the British and
popularised by the YMCA. Singleton argues that “at least
28 of the exercises in the first edition of Bukh’s
manual are strikingly similar (often identical) to yoga
postures occurring in Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga sequence
or in Iyengar’s Light
on Yoga.”
The link again is Krishnamacharya, who Singleton calls a
“major player in the modern merging of gymnastic-style asana practice
and the Patanjali tradition.”
The HAF’s shrill claims about Westerners stealing yoga
completely gloss over the tremendous amount of cross-breeding
and hybridisation that has given birth to yoga as we
know it. Indeed, contemporary yoga is a unique example
of a truly global innovation, in which Eastern and
Western practices merged to produce something that is
valued and cherished around the world.
Hinduism, whether ancient, medieval or modern, has no
special claims on 21st century postural yoga. To assert
otherwise is churlish and simply untrue.
+++
OODE note:
Those wishing to learn more about Yoga and how it
relates to the Orthodox faith can visit this article:
Yoga and the Christian
Faith