The year 2015 was a year of extraordinary ferment in yoga’s changing practice, and increasing propertization, around the world. On June 21, International Yoga Day, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his newly appointed Minister of Yoga declared their intention to get Geographical Indication trademark status for yoga to establish its Indian origins. This followed continuing efforts by the Indian government to compile a digital archive of yoga postures or asanas as part of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, whose original intent was to prevent its cultural theft and appropriation by the West. May 2015 saw the latest court ruling in the Bikram Choudhury copyright case that has roiled the yoga community for more than ten years since Bikram Yoga first laid copyright claim to yoga as intellectual property. Nor was cyber-yoga quiet in these heritage claims. Earlier in the year, there was a high-profile attempt by YogaGlo, the largest online yoga company in the US, to secure a patent for its yoga videos. Meanwhile, yoga has been at the center of a series of disputes over its religious origins – ranging from two legal cases, one in the US, the other in India, attempting to ban yoga in public schools (on the claim that “it’s too Hindu”), to an effort by the Hindu American Foundation to “Take Back Yoga” from celebrity culture (on the claim that “it’s not Hindu enough”). And all of these legal disputes over yoga’s cultural authenticity or historical origins say nothing about the rash of distinctly non-Hindu yoga styles to have mushroomed in secular (Stiles Yoga) as well as Christian contexts in the US (Praise Moves). If 2015’s diversity was any guide, contemporary yoga practice may not even have to be Indian any more to be culturally meaningful to its global practitioners. Perhaps yoga in the twenty-first century need no longer be defined by its geographical origins or its physical connection to place.
Who owns contemporary yoga? Is yoga a religion? An exercise brand? A commodity? A cultural resource to be propertized? Is cultural property, in fact, at the heart of yoga’s transformation in the modern age? Are the anxieties about yoga’s origins – geographical, religious, national – driving its diverse expressions and heritage claims of ownership in an era of increasing commercialization? It certainly seems so. The irony is that most of these disparate ownership claims over yoga as cultural property are premised on two disputable ‘facts’: a) that yoga asanas, or modern postural yoga – seen as the bedrock of contemporary yoga – have existed since time immemorial (they have not); and b) that yoga is essentially part of, or has always been part of, Hindu Vedic orthodoxy (it is not).
This chapter will focus on a small handful of these legal cases and narratives to map the changing landscape of cultural ownership debates around yoga. It will end by drawing on interdisciplinary research behind a major art exhibition on the visual genealogy of yoga – Yoga: The Art of Transformation – to show two things through the visual historical record. First, that modern postural yoga or asanas, especially the standing asanas, as we know them, are not as old as we think they are. For example, the Surya Namaskar (the ‘sun salutation’ asana sequence at the heart of the California public school case mentioned above) is, as anthropologists and historians have shown, an early twentieth-century ‘invented tradition’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s definition of the term (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). And second, the exhibition shows that yoga has roots not in Hindu orthodoxy but in heterodox Saiva and Tantric traditions. In fact, the earliest visual evidence we have of a sequence of standing asanas is from a sixteenth-century medieval Sufi text written in Persian and translated from the Sanskrit: namely, the extraordinary Bahr-Al-Hayat. Yogic practice, it seems, especially those practices that we can trace historically through the visual record, has always been global, heterodox, and plural.
Even with tangible or built heritage, cultural property and heritage protection discussions can go around in circles, feeding off each other like a Jungian ourobouros chasing its own tail. Nowhere is this circularity, this rehashing of old arguments, more visible than in ownership claims over intangible, emergent, and evolving cultural practices like yoga. As we now know from contemporary yoga the world over, this centuries-old form of mind-body discipline is nothing if not adaptive to current contexts. An entire literature has emerged to describe what Mark Singleton (2010) calls the changing forms of ‘transnational Anglophone yoga,’ or what Joseph Alter (2004) terms contemporary yogic heteropraxy. But yoga’s own etymology may be instructive in pointing to a peculiar irony within these transformations. The Sanskrit word yoga means union or link (between mind and body) and it is etymologically related to the English ‘yoke,’ which in this case refers to the union between mind and body in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Yoke could, however, also be interpreted to mean yoked to history, chained to a pre-determining past. And indeed, twenty-first-century yoga practice, in all its diversity, seems mired in its preoccupations with distant pasts, yoked to its own heritage claims of singular authenticity and classical origins – all of which puts yoga at the very epicenter of cultural property debates in this anxious age.
Even compared with other years, 2015 was uncommonly busy for these propertizing claims over yoga’s past. So perhaps it is as good a place as any to start discussions of yoga as cultural property. I should begin with the caveat that like most history, this chapter is fiction. It is not a lie or alternative fact; it is an honest, even accurate, account of these heritage stories and narrative claims. But in the process of telling and re-telling and recovery of heritage, in particular intangible heritage, as property, there are gaps that become visible, contradictions that reveal themselves as fault-lines, and unintended consequences of making this heritage legible, or visible, or even commercially viable. So it is with contemporary yoga’s heritage claims. Heritage, after all, is just one form of social remembrance and reflection upon the past, not always the most effective. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida reminds us in Archive Fever (1998), archival remembering is often as much about forgetting as it is about remembering. In the act of seeing, each seer creates an image and forgets the rest; in the act of remembering, each account selects memories and erases others; in the act of telling, each teller creates a set of stories that persist as original, authentic and true.
As stories go, this one may in fact be somewhat static and repetitive, and replete with predictable plot-lines about ancient pasts. At one level, this is because of the things I study (invented traditions that hark back to classical golden ages and medieval decline), the cultural biographies I trace, and the international regime of heritage policy that makes it difficult, sometimes even impossible, for intangible cultural heritage to move easily, cross borders, and transcend boundaries – despite all assurances to the contrary – whether these boundaries are social, museological or legal. My heritage story may lack good plot-lines but it has a supporting cast that includes the entire family of cultural and intellectual property cousins (trademark, patents, copyright) rubbing up against each other to protect the protagonist, modern yoga, in its various identity claims as Indian, or as Hindu, or even just as exercise regimen.
2015 was rife with these propertizing claims over yoga’s origins in its changing practice around the world. Yoga is now the ultimate global commodity, and everyone seems to want in on its ownership, from the Indian government to gurus in swank California studios, as yoga gets caught in a web of claims and counterclaims, and problems of visibility and legibility even as it spins into orbit in the heritage pantheon.
To begin with, as mentioned earlier, in one of the more public claims at the national level, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi announced that he wants to claim Geographical Indication status for yoga to establish its Indian origins and thus prevent its appropriation by or in the West. This follows continuing efforts by the Indian government to compile a digital archive of yoga asanas, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, in an effort not only to avoid its cultural theft by non-Indian nationals but also to establish its ‘correct’ practice amongst the same audiences. At the other end of the global spectrum, there are efforts by international multilateral organizations, such as UNESCO, to push for yoga to be considered an Olympic sport, replete with all the competitive nationalism that they may inspire. 2015 also saw the latest court ruling in the Bikram Choudhury copyright case that has shaken the yoga community since 2002 when he began to make copyright claims for his sequence of Bikram Yoga. Earlier in the year, there was a high-profile attempt by YogaGlo, the largest online yoga company in the US, to secure a patent for its method of filming yoga classes, which may have been unsuccessful in proving innovation but remains notable in that the patent was requested in the first place. Meanwhile, yoga has been at the center of a series of disputes over its religious origins – including two legal cases, one in the US (US v. Sedlock), the other in India (All India Muslim Personal Law Board campaign), attempting to ban yoga in public schools on the claim that ‘it’s too Hindu,’ and an effort by the Hindu American Foundation to Take Back Yoga from celebrity culture, on the claim that ‘it’s not Hindu enough.’
In turn, everyone seems to be not only defending their version of authentic yoga, but offending, getting offended, and drawing lines of ownership and communities of belonging and ‘right practice’ – Hindus, Indians, sadhus and Nath yogis, the wealthy, the poor, Christians, women who pray, women who don’t. And all of these legal disputes over authenticity say little about the rash of distinctly non-Hindu yoga styles to have mushroomed in secular as well as Christian contexts in the US. If this diversity is any guide, contemporary transnational yoga practice no longer has to be Indian or look Indian to be culturally meaningful to its practitioners. Could it be that yoga’s cultural identity in the twentieth century is both deeply defined by geography but no longer determined by its origins? Is it possible that contemporary yoga has, in fact, been unyoked from place?
How did this come about? This zeal for moral certainty about what cultural property belongs to whom, and where it is literally, physically, from. Was it always thus? After all, medieval yoga in the twelfth century was marked by a remarkably fluid transcendence beyond regional boundaries and sectarian lines. Given this continuing diversity of contemporary practitioners, who owns twenty-first-century yoga? And, as I posed earlier, what is yoga exactly? Is yoga a religion? An exercise brand? A commodity? A cultural resource to be propertized? Is cultural property, in fact, at the heart of yoga’s transformation in the modern age? Are the anxieties about yoga’s origins – geographical, religious, national – driving its diverse expressions in an era of increasing commercialization and propertization? It certainly seems so.
What follows is a very short attempt to tease out some of these longer (and more historically entrenched) arguments and newer heritage claims. This chapter will attempt to map some of the more recent cases, tracing ways in which yoga, the gentle art of transformation, was itself transformed in the twenty-first century. Drawing on interdisciplinary research behind a major 2013 art exhibition on the visual genealogy of yoga – Yoga: The Art of Transformation – it will focus on a small handful of these cases to map the changing landscape of cultural ownership debates around changing yoga, as it transformed itself in reaching out to transnational audiences everywhere. Perhaps yogic practice, contrary to current more nationalistic claims, was always already global.
One place to begin unraveling these various threads is with recent governmental claims that yoga is – or should be – India’s distinct cultural property, a national resource to be controlled by the state. On June 21, 2015, International Yoga Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and his newly appointed Minister of Yoga, Shripad Yesso Naik, announced their intention to seek Geographical Indication status for yoga. Just the creation of the new Minister’s position in itself is an indication of Modi’s continuing efforts, since he took office, to have yoga recognized as an Indian practice grounded in the Hindu tradition. There has been an ongoing effort to incorporate yoga into India’s schools; to introduce it as a palliative therapy in hospitals and as a remedial program in prisons; and to include it in police academies as a training tool. Meanwhile, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which has already worked at compiling Ayurvedic knowledge to prevent patent theft, continues with a government archive documenting at least 1,500 yoga asanas – a library of videos demonstrating practitioners doing yoga the proper way, which represents a centralized response to unofficial guides with more grassroots or idiosyncratic bases. These efforts are part of the current government’s larger Made in India campaign, which includes plans to improve the country’s public infrastructure and manufacturing sector. From a cynical standpoint, all of these efforts to establish yoga’s Indianness, including Naik’s appointment, might be akin to a strategic business move – to claim a segment of what has become a lucrative multi-billion-dollar yoga industry in the US. And here lies the irony: to cash in on yoga’s transnational success story, it appears that India, from the cultural property point of view, must first show yoga to be Indian. The cultural work with a GI status or a digital database of yoga like TKDL is to produce and manufacture this yoke to Indianness, the yoke being both historical anchor as well as lifeline to aspired futures.
Seeking Geographical Indication status for yoga, however, may be neither that simple nor straightforward. Within cultural property categories, a Geographical Indication is essentially a trademark – a formal acknowledgement of the importance of geography, or location, to a specific product. Described another way, it’s a measure of the centrality of place to cultural identity, typically used in food products such as Champagne grapes or Camembert cheese. But while Geographical Indications are given by a country’s government trade office, they were essentially established by TRIPS (that is, Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, administered by the World Trade Organization) and thus there is no larger regulatory international body like the United Nations that can resolve international disputes. The US Patent and Trade Office acknowledges this vagueness and, as a result, countries with an ownership claim on this or that culturally specific product (for example, Champagne wine or Mysore silks) have no way of challenging them. This seems to be a nature of the market, with the US continuing to sell products without always verifying their cultural origins.
With yoga, on the other hand, it would be difficult to establish a concrete geographical connection or a definitive link with any one place. Unlike, for example, Champagne – which is made from grapes grown in a particular region with distinct soil content and chemistry – yoga has no terroir, i.e. it cannot be linked with either land or region.1 There are of course genealogical schools and traditions of yoga – each of which does come from specific places, and indeed, some yoga forms can be linked to a region or state (e.g. Bihar School). But practically speaking, securing a Geographical Indication for yoga would be nearly impossible, even though legal scholars point out that it is more a rhetorical claim to establish a foundational mythology that uses an idea of the law to secure the strategic fiction. Indeed, although yoga originated in South Asia, its transnational practice – including the many diverse forms that have emerged, such as elder yoga, Stiles yoga, hot yoga, doga, nude yoga – makes it difficult to argue that its Indian origins are always essential to its essence or contemporary meaning.
Moreover, even if all the conditions for Geographical Indication status were met, international enforcement would be a logistical nightmare. While protection within the country might still be within the realms of possibility, keeping tabs on every yoga studio in the world would be practically impossible. Furthermore, even though the government is providing significant resources toward the effort, it would need an effective bureaucracy to regulate yoga, which in all probability would not be easy to implement. Ultimately, it looks like little will change anytime soon for the US yoga industry and its current population of 20 million practitioners. But it is easy to understand why the Indian government would explore the possibility: yoga classes and the accompanying products are a $10 billion a year industry. Global yoga sells, and propertizing it through geography or national identity is one way of attempting to claim one’s share.
With all these economic and cultural resources at stake, it is not surprising that there is a debate about yoga’s true origins, and who, if anyone, it ultimately belongs to – in other words, who owns it. It is also not surprising that the global yoga market – and what Mark Singleton calls “transnational Anglophone yoga” – is replete with versions and variants of yoga that have no recognizable similarity to those in India. The Western fascination with yoga can be traced back to the 1960s, when a generation was hungry for a spirituality and practice different from their parents’ religious beliefs. Religious studies scholar Catherine Albanese (2006), for instance, suggests that metaphysical religion is at least as important as evangelicalism in shaping American religious history and practice, and in identifying what makes them distinctive.2 And in this context, at least in the US, diasporic yoga was a means by which traditional Christian thought could be blended with Eastern philosophy. Even earlier, the nineteenth-century philosopher and religious teacher Swami Vivekananda presented yoga as a system of philosophical practice that balanced Eastern spiritualism and Western materialism, a form of practice that could be seen as Eastern corrective to the excesses of Western capitalism and commodification.3
These days, however, many Americans view yoga as little more than an exercise regimen, which means that the practice has more or less been broken off from its millennia-old Hindu philosophical roots, or even from Vivekananda’s synthesis of the nineteenth century. A few years ago, yoga’s near-complete transition from spiritual practice to trendy fitness and exercise regimen was marked by a spirited debate, which flared up again in 2015. Incensed by American yoga’s lack of religious connotation or acknowledgement, Sheetal Shah, a senior director at the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), an organization devoted to celebrating this hyphenated religious identity among Indian diasporics, contacted the publication Yoga Journal to ask why it had never linked yoga to Hinduism. Yoga Journal’s unsatisfactory responses, in Shah’s view, prompted her to launch an initiative called Take Back Yoga to highlight yoga’s Hindu roots. In response to Shah’s campaign, groups across the religious spectrum questioned whether there was a place in the ancient practice for practitioners of other faiths, and whether it was possible for any religion to ‘own’ yoga in the first place (taking the example of Yahweh yoga). Others wondered if religious twists on yoga were contrary to the vision of Vivekananda, who first introduced yoga to the West in 1893 at the World Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair. Indeed, Vivekananda’s message of East meets West, body meets mind, through yoga seemed to privilege the practice for secular practitioners or those of any religious bent, rather than orthodox believers of a particular faith.
Prior to Shah’s Take Back Yoga campaign, the Washington Post published a series of dialogues between another HAF member, Dr. Aseem Shukla, and the physician-author Deepak Chopra, arguing over yoga’s provenance. While the HAF maintained that the West ignores the connection between Hinduism and yoga, Chopra and many yoga instructors have pointed to the Sanskrit invocations peppered throughout a typical yoga practice as evidence that proper dues were being paid. Moreover, Chopra argued that yoga’s connection to Hinduism might be weaker than often presumed, given that the archaeological record suggests that yoga predates early Hindu scriptures.
Today, the HAF says that Take Back Yoga is a misnomer. They say they were simply interested in highlighting yoga’s Hindu roots without insisting that it must be practiced by people of a specific religion. Even so, as described in new statements and position papers, they still seem to care deeply about the distinction between true yoga’s respect for the past and American yoga’s relatively superficial concerns. For Shah, the ultimate goal of yoga remains that of moksha, or spiritual liberation. But for many others, apparently, there’s a very different angle from which to approach the issues of cultural ownership and religious origins of yoga: its underlying Hinduism. Or not. Indeed, these differences in goals point to the multiple searches for religious authenticity that yoga gets caught up in.
If there’s a coda here, it is to suggest that while yoga does not belong to Hinduism or Hindus, the fact remains that it has been presented as such – symbolically, ritually, in yoga classes the world over – even as its philosophical base, which is of course derived from Hinduism, often gets reduced or understood strictly as exercise regimen in the local gymnasium.
The opposite claim – that yogic exercise qua exercise was far too ‘Hindu’ to be taught in public schools – also found its way through the courts in 2015, both in the US and in India. In April 2015, a California appeals court ruled that a school district in Encinitas could incorporate yoga into physical education classes, rejecting a challenge by parents who said the millennia-old discipline violates religious freedom provisions in California’s constitution, which are broader than those in the US Constitution.
The constitutional gatekeeping around public schools has managed to keep out a variety of religious activity in recent history – student prayers at football games, Bible readings in class, pictures of Jesus. Yoga was just one in a long line of practices to be accused of overly religious content (by plaintiffs) and, given the separation of church and state in the Constitution, a practice that ought to be off-limits in secular public schools. The yoga asanas taught by instructors in Encinitas’s nine schools were adapted from Ashtanga yoga, which was popularized by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, an eminent Indian yoga teacher who died in 2009. Literally meaning eight limbs, ashta anga includes among these limbs the union with the divine.
The plaintiffs, Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock, who sued on behalf of their two children, portrayed yoga in their court briefs as “a Hindu religious exercise or practice that is simultaneously physical and religious.” Court briefs argued that the Jois Foundation funded the yoga program and trained the instructors, with a ‘mission’ to disseminate his religious notions. At the heart of the California case is the surya namaskar, the sun salutation series of exercises shared by Ashtanga as well as other forms of yoga, which was taught as part of a rigorous exercise regimen to students of all ages. Somewhat ironically, the Sedlocks were (and are) represented by the National Center for Law & Policy, a group that defends the religious rights of Christians.
The Encinitas public school case itself actually began a few years earlier. After parents complained in 2012 of yoga’s religious overtones, the school district stripped the program of Sanskrit and any references to the spiritual or divine, including a description of the curriculum that said yoga brings out ‘the inner spirit of the child.’ The asanas, or as the school district calls them, ‘poses’, have child-friendly and neutral names, such as ‘the boat’ (for utkanasana) while the lotus pose (padmasana) was renamed ‘crisscross applesauce.’ A lower court found the program was ‘devoid of any religious, mystical or spiritual trappings’ although this process of renaming asanas in order to expunge yoga of all religious content is interesting in itself. The California Fourth District Court of Appeal agreed. The court’s ruling stated “It is clear that while yoga may be practiced for religious reasons, it cannot be said to be inherently religious or overtly sectarian. In the absence of evidence that the District’s program advances religion, no religious coercion is present.”
According to the chief counsel of the National Center for Law & Policy, the family is considering its legal options, on the premise that “No other court in the past fifty years has allowed public school officials to lead children in formal religious rituals.” If the school cases point to anything, it is the ironic ways in which twenty-first-century yoga’s propertization rests on identity claims that are not just nationalistic but religious or secular, as the case may be.
And finally, last but certainly not least, there is the controversy surrounding Bikram Chaudhury’s ‘Hot Yoga’ sequence of asanas and his decade-long attempt to copyright his version of yoga. On October 14, 2015, the US District of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a sequence of poses performed in a heated room – Bikram Chaudhury’s ‘Hot Yoga’ Sequence (as it is called) – was not entitled to copyright protection under the law. To the jubilation of more than six hundred yoga studio franchises of the Bikram sequence across the country, the legal case in a federal appeals court, Bikram Yoga College v. Evolation Yoga, effectively ended a decade-long battle in the courts in which Choudhury had attempted to claim monopoly over his sequence of 28 poses, repeatedly and aggressively suing for copyright infringement.
All those copyright claims took a blow when the court ruled that Chaudhury does not hold the exclusive right to teach the series of poses and breathing exercises he developed. The legal fight had in some ways epitomized the struggle between traditional yoga practice, with its focus on spiritual healing and poses that are ostensibly thousands of years old, and the modern multibillion-dollar industry that has sprung up to sell that practice to the public. Chaudhury and the Bikram College/Hot Yoga enterprise had long threatened other instructors with legal action, warning them that without his authorization, they could not use the sequence of 28 poses made famous at his Los Angeles-based studio and its franchises. Anyone who wanted to teach the sequence had to pay a licensing fee and adhere to a number of other specifications, such as the correct temperature (103˚F) and length of class (90 minutes), quality of lighting, specific training for instructors, and so on.
But in the court’s opinion, Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote, “Consumers would have little reason to buy Choudhury’s book if Choudhury held a monopoly on the practice of the very activity he sought to popularize.” “The Sequence,” as the series is known, is an “idea, process or system designed to improve health. Choudhury can copyright expressions of that idea – books, diagrams, movies – but he can’t copyright its execution any more than a surgeon can stop other doctors from mimicking his techniques.”
From all media accounts, yoga studios around the country and their practitioners were relieved at the ruling, which, they said, would allow them to continue to focus on teaching yoga, rather than worry about copyright violation of a yoga empire that was motivated by greed. Needless to say, the Bikram Yoga College made the opposite claims over the decade – that it was the unaffiliated studios and teachers of the practice who were stealing and modifying the Bikram sequence without regard to the safety or health of the hapless clients. Remarkably, each side made similar arguments and hurled it at the other – namely, that it was the innocent ‘clients’ who got hurt in this trend toward unfettered yoga capitalism and commodification.4
Over the last decade, a number of studio owners had settled out of court with Choudhury to avoid a prolonged legal battle. The California-based Open Source Yoga Unity was among the first to challenge Choudhury’s copyrights, although the cases were eventually settled out of court. In 2011, Choudhury took on Yoga to the People, a pay-what-you-can chain of studios in New York opened by one of his former students. Ultimately, that case was also settled. Yoga to the People’s owners agreed to stop teaching Bikram-style Hot Yoga to bring an end to the suit. But it prompted the US Copyright Office to issue a new policy clarifying that individual yoga poses are not subject to copyright laws, the same way a choreographer cannot lay claim to an individual ballet step.
It’s interesting to note that the legal case in question behind the recent 2015 ruling originated when Mark Drost, a former Bikram acolyte, left to found Evolation Yoga in 2008. Drost was committed to continuing to use the Bikram sequence in his own way, and when Choudhury sued for copyright infringement, he refused to settle. The opening statement on Drost’s website declared, “We wanted to establish that you can’t own [emphasis mine] yoga sequences. Traditionally, you take a teacher’s training and move forward with it.”
In the end, if the decade-long struggle over copyrighting yoga established anything, it was that cultural ownership of something as complicated as twenty-first-century yoga is no simple matter. Since copyright seems to be the chosen form of intellectual property struggle for intangible or digital heritage, as opposed to, for example, patents (which need to show innovation) or trademarks (usually pursued by corporate entities), the Bikram case also shows that copyright ownership itself can as easily be contested in principle and in practice; that intangible heritage can be propertized for infringement as easily as it can be reclaimed for the public domain. While the Bikram Yoga copyright case was neither a nationalist claim (as was the Indian government’s Geographical Indication application) nor a religious claim (as in the public school cases), it remained an individual claim outside India for a very specific transformation of yoga’s practice. As such, one can argue that these transformations of yoga as commodity – national, religious, or health care – are key to the transformative idea of yoga as cultural property. Thus at a material level, unyoking yoga from traditional forms of production seems to exist alongside its re-yoking to new forms of commodity fetishism and new relations of cultural production.
Through all these swirling arguments of ownership and belonging over yoga, both in India and abroad, there are two presumptions that seem to lie at the very core of yoga’s heritage claims: one, that modern postural yoga – the core of exercise regimens today – is more than a millennium old, dating back intact to at least the time of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in the fifth century CE. And two, that this ancient yoga had orthodox Hindu roots and origins, not heterodox ones. The visual record of yoga, however, tells a quite different story, or set of stories, belying both presumptions.
In 2013, the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of Asian Art presented an interdisciplinary art exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation that relied on this visual genealogy to trace the story of yoga’s transformations, many of which were able to show definitively that yoga’s heritage claims are neither that old nor that orthodox.5 Visual genealogies of yoga are rarely seamless, often revealing themselves most clearly at times of change. Through what Christopher Pinney calls ‘visual eruptions’ of earlier images, they suggest that what we take for granted today in modern yoga and therefore in modern yoga’s cultural property cases – the emphases on asana (posture), vinyasa (sequential movement), and specific asana sequences (such as surya namaskar or sun salutation, the asana sequence at the center of the school ban cases) – are neither millennia-old nor rooted in ancient texts, but of relatively recent vintage. While their roots certainly run deep, modern postural yoga, and surya namaskars in particular, are in fact twentieth-century invented traditions.
This history can be fairly specific if we start looking for illustrated treatises that actually depict postural yoga or standing asanas in pictorial form as opposed to mere verbal descriptions of them in earlier texts. Interestingly, these visual depictions can rarely be traced before the twentieth century. In what follows, I offer a smattering of the key illustrated texts and media that trace this story in the visual record. One of the earliest illustrated compilations of yoga asanas, for example, is a 1907 history of fakirs in German by Richard Schmidt titled Fakire und Fakirtum im Alten und Modernen India. Fakire und Fakirtum was unusual because it included not only negative perceptions of yogis as ‘petty thieves and swindlers,’ as was common in Western popular media and travelogues of the time, but also a reclamation of classical, text-based yoga. Its comprehensive account of hatha yoga included eighty-seven watercolors of asanas drawing on artistic styles of early nineteenth-century illustrated manuscripts, such as the Jogapradipika painted in the Kangra style or the Mysore Palace’s Tanjore-style Sritatvanidhi.
Each of the illustrated asanas in Fakire und Fakirtum is isolated and labeled and identified in Devanagari script, and the watercolor medium and unpainted ground is typical of nineteenth-century Company School (kampani kalam) paintings, which native artists produced for foreign patrons. Seen individually, the paintings are elegant but unremarkable, executed in what Partha Mitter calls the “conceptual mode of art followed by Indian artists since antiquity”: shallow, flat, two-dimensional outlines of figures that lack Western perspective. But, taken together, Fakire und Fakirtum’s watercolors offer a complete visual archive of all the classical asanas outlined in medieval hatha yoga texts, such as Hathayogapradipika and Gheranda Samhita. It was thus possibly the earliest inspiration for Indian yoga pioneers like Swami Kuvalayananda and T. Krishnamacharya, who in the early twentieth century developed what would become modern postural yoga practice.
Schmidt’s Fakire und Fakirtum was a precursor of the instructional manuals of asanas published in the 1920s, when figurative, two-dimensional, conceptual models gave way to the naturalistic, objective representations of photographic realism as yoga was assimilated into the modern. A key transitional text in this visual history is Yogasopana Purvacatushka, compiled by Yogi Ghamande in 1905 – described by Mark Singleton as “perhaps the first and only self-help yoga manual to use a half-tone block print reproduction technique.” Yogasopana (literally, ‘stair-way to heaven’) includes thirty-seven detailed black-and-white line drawings of asanas, all modeled by Ghamande himself. This exquisite volume broke new ground in depicting naturalistic, muscled, yogic bodies, prefiguring photographic asana manuals by two decades, and is particularly important to a visual genealogy of yoga because it was conceived as a practical postural yoga manual in the twentieth century. Interestingly, Yogasopana was likely printed using the same half-tone block printing process used by one of the best-known early contemporary artists in India, Raja Ravi Varma – from the hypothesis that the artists may have shared space in Mysore Palace with T. Krishnamacharya’s famous yogasala (yoga hall).
As with art, so with reinventions of yoga asanas. If there is a single text (and eponymous asana series) in the early twentieth century that embodies the transformation of yoga through its intersections with bodybuilding and physical culture through an asana sequence, it is Pratinidhi Pant’s Surya Namaskars, first published in 1929 and revised and republished five times before 1940. The book’s title refers to the sun salutation exercise that may well be the single best-recognized asana sequence or yoga meme in postural yoga today – and of course is at the very center of the bans on yoga in schools, both complainants claiming (from opposite ends) that sun worship is too Hindu for public schools (California) or too Hindu for the Indian nation (India).
Surya namaskar is routinely invoked by contemporary practitioners as an ancient feature of Indian civilization, although it is thoroughly modern. While it is often difficult to trace the exact genealogy of specific sequences, historians agree that the creation of the modern surya namaskar system can be attributed to Pratinidhi Pant, who was the then raja of Aundh. Pant chose to illustrate the first edition of Surya Namaskars with monochromatic prints of schematic, two-dimensional figures performing ten asanas in the original series. Later editions include photographs of all ten asanas, evidence of the new photographic realism that was changing perceptions of yogic bodies in the early twentieth century. Either way, Surya Namaskars (the book) sits at an important historical nexus of yoga, bodybuilding and physical education in India during the early twentieth century. Pant’s project of health reform clearly fit with ongoing political, medical and cultural trends, but was also unique in its emphasis on the relationship between body discipline and nationalism in modern India. He was a devoted bodybuilder and practitioner of the Eugene Sandow method who popularized the surya namaskar asana sequence as an indigenous bodybuilding technique. In gymnasia, this sequence became a practical expression of the unique blend of yoga-physical fitness through an internal regimen of body conditioning on the one hand and indigenous bodybuilding on the other. It was only later, in the 1930s, that it was absorbed into yoga routines, in some part due to the popularity of Pant’s book.
Other illustrated yoga manuals made similar connections with Western models of physical culture, such as the Scandinavian Ling exercise system. A classic case in point is M. R. Jambunathan’s 1941 The Yoga Body Illustrated, which promised the reader ‘a strong and beautiful body’ through the practice of yoga. Among the best-known early printed asana manuals, these publications presented yoga asanas as body-conditioning techniques that could lead to bodily perfection and, therefore, happiness. Both books exemplify the absorption of postural yoga by physical culturalists in the early twentieth century, the promotion of hatha yoga exercise as part of a larger, highly aestheticized physical culture regime based on Western models. During this period, books like The Yoga Body Illustrated reflected an identifiable shift in yogic body practice – from hatha yoga’s perfection of the body (the conquest over the ‘material’) to modern fitness models based on Western ideals of physique and strength. Swami Kuvalayananda’s Yoga Mimansa, which first made the link between yoga, health and science in the 1920s was another classic case in point. And as such, these manuals anticipated by several decades all the other photographic manuals of asanas that followed: Theos Bernard’s Hatha Yoga in 1941 and, later in the 1960s, works by Indra Devi, B. K. S. Iyengar and Vishnudevananda.
Similar attempts to link hatha yoga with physical culture and muscle control occurred in the transnational context. During the first decades of the twentieth century, early proponents of yoga in the United States included Yogendra, Ramacharaka, Yogi Gherwal and Yogi Wassan, but they also extended to alternative healthcare practitioners who drew on New Thought philosophies. An early example of this therapeutic synthesis is Albrecht Jensen’s 1920 Massage and Exercise Combined. The book, endorsed by American alternative health luminary W. A. Kellogg, identified psychophysiological methods of muscle control as Indian yoga techniques. It thus recast yoga as a muscle-based physical culture for a new generation of American alternative health enthusiasts who would not have easily encountered hatha yoga through other routes.
For all their transformative potential in producing new forms of asana, static print and photographic technologies of visual reproduction were thoroughly eclipsed by the extraordinary reach of moving images and film in the early twentieth century, especially when these new media were used by a legendary twentieth-century practitioner to disseminate yoga’s dynamic potential as sequential movement and transformative practice available to everyone. Such was the case in 1938 when the Mysore maharaja, Krishnaraja Wodiyar, sponsored an early film of T. Krishnamacharya – the father of modern yoga – demonstrating a series of flowing asana sequences. For the first time in history, these yoga sequences could be showcased around the country to non-students: ‘imagined communities’ in pre-independence India, united through shared pasts and invented future.
In other words, even this first archival film on standing yoga’s origins is old but not that old. Partly filmed in black-and-white and partly in color, the archival 57-minute silent film is a composite of rare footage showing a 50-year-old Krishnamacharya demonstrating advanced postures in linked sequences that are both hypnotic and inspiring. He is accompanied by several other practitioners, young and old, male and female, including his then-student B. K. S. Iyengar. In the grainy, eight-minute opening sequence, the camera focuses on a young Iyengar, who performs a series of difficult seated asana positions, what seems to be a modified version of Ashtanga Advanced A Series, in an unidentified outdoor location. The next segment (ten minutes long) features close-ups of Krishnamacharya doing a series of seated nauli and pranayama exercises, the grace and elegance of the linking vinyasas matched only by the control required to sustain each position. In the short sections that follow, the camera moves indoors to feature two women and two children (performing asanas synchronously), ending in a sequence where Krishnamacharya demonstrates a set of balancing exercises with the children, more reminiscent of an acrobatic circus act. The film ends with a black-and-white sequence outdoors, against a backdrop of unidentified mountains, in which Krishnamacharya dazzles the viewer with a tightly choreographed series of difficult inversions and headstands.
At the time the film was made, Krishnamacharya was the resident teacher in the Mysore Palace, where he created his own yoga synthesis, combining hatha yoga practice, British and Swedish calisthenics, and the gymnastic and wrestling traditions of Karnataka. Moving images or silent film offered the perfect dynamic and public medium through which these vinyasas could be presented for the first time in pre-independence India. This impulse to spread the gospel of new yoga through regular demonstrations was both democratizing – it introduced yoga to unprecedented new audiences – and competitive, attracting students who might otherwise have gone the way of Western gymnastics. The maharaja sent Krishnamacharya all over South India on this ‘propaganda work,’ and the teacher’s debut on celluloid was conceived as part performance piece, part spectacular enticement to introduce yoga to mass audiences.
Throughout the film, the slow, almost languorous, aesthetic of unfolding asanas complements the camera’s rigorous focus on the practitioner; the dynamic linking vinyasas provide both sequential narrative and connective tissue for the story of modern postural yoga in India. The film achieves many things at once: it is cultural archive as well as museum artifact; live theater as well as historical documentation of a tradition in the making. In the late 1930s, it was a cinematic innovation in visualizing modern yogic practice, but also part of a larger project of public dissemination that relied heavily on a nationalist physical culture.
Located somewhere between documentary and ethnography, the film’s narrative-free sequences of asanas encode their own hidden visual histories, much like a palimpsest. It can be seen as a performative spectacle that recalls earlier performances of fakirs and yogis but was reinvented for nationalist audiences eager to see yoga as indigenous exercise. If this film footage suggests one thing, it is that new ways of representing asana led directly to new ways of perceiving yoga, and therefore, of practicing yoga, performing yogic identities and inhabiting yogic bodies.
This archival film footage was the very last exhibit in the Sackler Gallery’s exhibition Yoga: The Art of Transformation (as displayed in Washington, DC) and as such, provides an excellent endpoint for a chapter on yoga’s transformations in the twenty-first century. Indeed, one of the striking elements in the exhibition was the visual connection between at one end the static, three-dimensional portrayals of movement and hatha yogic transformation, to the other end with two-dimensional medium of archival film, which demonstrated how dynamic – how transformative – yoga could be in actual performative practice. Through this extraordinary film, the exhibition was able to suggest that twenty-first-century yoga, modern postural yoga, might have begun at that very moment – when static, individual asanas were visually and publicly transformed by a contemporary master into a sequence of asanas seamlessly woven together through a combination of breath, rhythm and yogic alchemy.
From there it’s a very short hop to new ways of propertizing yoga asanas in the twenty-first century, or at least to new ways of making these claims over modern postural yoga as property. In a world marked by increasing media cacophony and image saturation, we are reminded that these first visual representations and technologies of modern postural yoga not only transformed practice and the medium, they actually created the message. As we have seen through the various claims over yoga’s heritage as property, life does imitate art – yogic lives can and often do closely imitate yogic art. Yokes to the past can sometimes be counterproductive if they end up yoking or determining yoga’s future trajectories, even the range of its possible transformations.
Ultimately, yoga as we know it today, or rather the modern postural asana sequences that are under cultural dispute as property, do not go back to hoary antiquity – for the most part, they are no more than a century old. By using the past to solve the question of ownership, yoga has tied itself into proverbial knots, in the process stretching and transforming both history and itself. In the end, when answering the question of who owns yoga – whether the proposed owner is the nation, or religion, or an individual teacher intending to copyright the past – one can only say that it is a complicated million-dollar answer that will morph with the times, or with the particular genealogy one is able to unearth. But change that question to who owns yoga asana? And therein lies a tale, or three.
1 Terroir as a concept has been discussed in relation to cultural heritage, by this author and others, and has been applied to heritage management by Alexander Bauer (2009).
2 See for instance Catherine Albanese (2006).
3 For a more detailed version of Vivekananda’s synthesis of yoga, see Sita Reddy (2013).
4 The fact that the term used in the arguments was ‘clients’ rather than practitioners is additionally interesting, thus indicating the bias toward yoga seen not so much as neutral practice but as a commodity, which yoga’s clients had to buy into and consume rather than believe in or practice.
5 I was co-curator of the Modern Transformations section of this exhibition, and thus some of this section is drawn from my catalogue essay on Modern Postural Yoga in the beautifully produced exhibition catalogue, Yoga: The Art of Transformation, edited by Debra Diamond, Smithsonian Books, 2013. Readers are encouraged to visit the catalogue preview site and consult the catalogue for a taste of the extraordinary artworks and interdisciplinary research that were part of this exhibition at the Sackler Gallery: http://www.asia.si.edu/support/yoga/catalogue-preview.asp.
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