How the West ruined yoga by making it 'the new sexy' and India an 'exotic playground'

From a workout to a meditative routine and a tool for spiritual awakening, the global perception of yoga has shifted over the past few decades, thanks in part to celebrity fans such as Jennifer Aniston, Gwyneth Paltrow and Britney Spears.

Interest in the ancient Indian art rose significantly during pandemic lockdowns as millions of people were confined indoors and YouTube was flooded with practice-from-home instructional videos.

The perception of yoga evolved as the global wellness industry strengthened. And for some people in India, its current depiction in pop culture does not sit right.

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The influence of orientalism, cultural appropriation and consumerism on yoga is getting harder to ignore, especially for practitioners of Indian descent, said Goa-based yoga instructor Vikramjeet Singh.

"I could not access my own culture because it's been wiped out and suppressed by colonisation," he told This Week In Asia. "I've been ridiculed and made fun of. And now my own culture is being repackaged and sold to me under a different form."

In 2019, the global yoga industry was worth an estimated US$37.46 billion, and it's expected to balloon to US$66.23 billion by 2027.

The colossal revenues include not just studio memberships, classes and retreats but also accessories and products - clothes, mats, yoga props, water bottles, food and beverages - that are supposed to complete the "yogic lifestyle".

To Singh, this goes against the true nature of yoga. Despite its current capitalistic underpinning, yoga is not a shopping experience nor a product only accessible to an elite, he says.

"Yoga is a practice that has existed for thousands of years, and has always been something accessible to all," Singh said. "But today, it has become synonymous with a workout session stripped of any kind of cultural background, where you have to show up with US$100 Lululemon leggings and an equally expensive mat. That is not right."

Through his Instagram account @wanderingmat, Singh spreads awareness to his 25,000 followers of yoga's many different facets, discussing its physical benefits, history and the philosophical, political and social implications of yoga practice.

"To put it bluntly, the West has created this system where it appropriates and teaches practices from the East," Singh said.

"But there's not a single person from the East in these classes nor benefiting from the revenue generated by these classes."

And he's not the only one with a critical view of the practice today.

On social media, yoga instructors and writers such as Indu Arora and Susanna Barkataki are part of a movement questioning what is taught in classes through simple observations: do you see a diverse representation of body type, ethnicities, genders, socio-economic class and physical abilities in your studio?

Does your practice reduce your suffering and the suffering around you? Do you learn, respect and acknowledge the cultural and religious roots of yoga?

Rumya Putcha, an assistant professor of music and women's studies at the University of Georgia, said that reflections on this misappropriation can be traced back to at least the first half of the 20th century, when yoga was popularised in the West, first by American dancer Ruth St Denis, and later, by actress Marilyn Monroe as a beauty workout.

"These women were looking for a way to express their womanhood outside of the confines of Christian ideals," Putcha said. "So they explored their womanhood through orientalism and exoticism."

From then on, the West saw yoga as a physical exercise associated with cosmetics and wellness that also accounted for its popularity among women - which was not the case historically. "It became the new sexy," Putcha said, but only if stripped of its religious and cultural aspects.

"Yoga couldn't have been successful in the West if it was closely associated with a religion, especially as liberal democracies see themselves as post-religious," she said. "In modern societies, religion is often positioned as the opposite of science and so should have no part in healthcare."

This duality has shaped the way yoga has been perceived and sold since then. In 2010, Kimberly Fowler released her controversial "No OM Zone" workout DVDs and eponymous book, promising her audience an understanding of "yoga's health benefits" without the "complicated foreign terminology", without the "granola" and without the "touchy-feely aspects of some classes like chanting and fire breathing exercises".

The cultural and religious aspects of yoga even went on trial in 2015 with the case of Sedlock vs Baird in California. It was argued by the Sedlocks that the practice of yoga at school was an "impermissible establishment of religion in violation of the California constitution", but they lost the case after it was agreed that "yoga classes as taught ... [are] devoid of any religious, mystical, or spiritual trappings".

This resulted in many South Asians saying they did not feel welcome in such classes. "I used to go to yoga classes [in the US], and I could not feel that I could participate as an Indian-American," Putcha said. "I had to turn that part of my brain off."

Nikita Taniparti, a US yoga practitioner of South Indian descent, wrote on Medium in 2020: "The number of other Indians I encounter at studios or in a yoga class is slim. In a given week, there might be two or three fellow South Asians, but mostly that number is zero."

As conversations surrounding representation and cultural appropriation make headlines, people are finally starting to question these ratios.

"Since the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement and the demonstrations against anti-Asian racism, a lot of work has been done for better representation," Singh said. "But in the case of yoga, putting a person of Indian-descent on a poster is not enough. That is only token representation."

And it's not just a question of accurate representation, either. The way the Indian government actively promotes yoga to the West is also problematic.

India is often portrayed as "an exotic playground", Putcha said, as seen in Western pop culture with the Beatles' famous 1968 visit and the film Eat, Pray, Love. She said that it's an image the government has only been too happy to capitalise on, painting the country as a fusion of escapism, adventure and salvation.

In 2016, India established a visa programme targeting deep-pocketed travellers who wish to visit the country to study yoga. In the US, these yoga visas costs twice as much as a standard tourist visa.

"The places that now sell these teacher-training programmes are acutely aware of the fact that they have to perform some fabricated version of authenticity to recruit these tourists," Putcha said.

This notion of authenticity has also come under scrutiny, especially amid rising Hindu nationalism. "A reappropriation of yoga is impossible, [but] it's a scary idea," Putcha says. "It's important to find a balance between highlighting the roots of yoga and refusing xenophobic and ethno-nationalist views."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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