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[webcache.googleusercontent.com]
In addition, in early years of the 20th century, an apparatus-free Swedish drill and a gymnastic routine developed by a Dane by the name of Niels Bukh (1880-1950) was introduced into India by the British and was popularized by 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’s 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 Patanjala tradition.”(See below)

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This ‘debate’ is really about two equally fundamentalist views of Hindu history. The underlying objective is to draw an unbroken line connecting the 21st-century yogic postures with the nearly 2000-year-old Yoga Sutras, and tie both to the supposedly 5000-year-old Vedas. The only difference is that, for Deepak 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 a ‘timeless Eastern wisdom’, while for HAF, ‘Yoga and Vedas are synonymous, and are as eternal as they are contemporaneous.’

The reality is that yoga as we know it is neither ‘eternal’ nor synonymous with the Vedas or the Yoga Sutras.

On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th and 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 into 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 introduced from Sweden, Denmark, England 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 5000 years worth of continuity where none really exists.

HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false-advertising campaign that has been going on for much of the 20th century.

Contrary to widespread impressions, the vast majority of asanas taught by modern yoga gurus are nowhere described in the ancient texts. The highly ritualistic, yagna-oriented Vedas have nothing to say about Patanjali’s quest for experiencing pure consciousness. Indeed, out of the 195 sutras that make up the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali devotes barely three short sutras to asanas. The Mahabharata mentions asanas only twice out of 900 references to yoga, and the Bhagvat Gita does not mention them at all.
There are, of course asana-centred, hatha-yoga texts. But they were authored by precisely those matted-haired, ash-smeared ‘harrowing’ 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 such. They undertook arduous physical austerities not because they sought to transcend the material world, but because they wanted magical powers (siddhis) to control their bodies and the rest of the material world.
The Mysore Palace mystery
New research has brought to light intriguing historical documents and oral histories that raise serious doubts about the “ancient” lineage of Ashatanga Vinyasa of Pattabhi Jois and Iyengar yoga. Both Jois (1915-2009) and Iyengar (b. 1918) learned yoga from T. Krishnamacharya during the years (1933 until late 1940s) when he directed a yogasala 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 until his death, was well-known as a great promoter of Indian culture and religion, but was also a great cultural innovator who welcomed positive innovations from the West and incorporated them into his social programs.

Promoting physical education was one of his passions and under his rein Mysore became the hub of physical culture revival in the country. He hired Krishnamacharya primarily to teach yoga to the young princes of the royal family, but also funded Krishnamacharya and his yoga protégés to travel all over India giving yoga demonstrations, thereby encouraging an enormous popular revival of yoga
Indeed, Mysore’s royal family had a long-standing interest in hatha yoga: Wodeyar IV’s ancestor, Mummadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (1799-1868), 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 gymnasium.

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 innovatory 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 learned from Sritattvanidhi, which had already cross-bred hatha 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 which had all the usual wall ropes and other props which he began to include in his yoga routines.

Sjoman has excerpted the Western gymnastics manual which was available to Krishnamacharya. Sjoman claims that many of the gymnastics techniques from that manual — for example, the corss-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. I

In addition, in early years of the 20th century, an apparatus-free Swedish drill and a gymnastic routine developed by a Dane by the name of Niels Bukh (1880-1950) was introduced into India by the British and was popularized by 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’s 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 Patanjala tradition.”

So, who owns yoga?

The shrill claims of HAF about Westerners stealing yoga ends up covering up the tremendous amount of cross-breeding and hybridization that has given birth to yoga as we know it. Indeed, cotemporary 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 all around the world.

Hinduism whether ancient, medieval or modern, has no special claims on yoga. To pretend otherwise is not only churlish, but also simply untrue.

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Paul W.
January 29, 2011 at 9:11 pm
Ajoy, my impression is that the title of the article is misleading—the question is not how Hindu yoga in general is, but how Hindu hathayoga—by far the most popular form of yoga in the West—actually is.

Even there, the claim is not that hathayoga has no Hindu roots, e.g., that none of the asanas go back to much older Hindu yoga. The claim is only that much of hathayoga, including many of the asanas, is of relatively recent and largely Western origin, grafted onto older Hindu practices.

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Paul W.
January 29, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Ooops, I should also have said that on my understanding the title is misleading in that it’s not really talking about yoga in general, but what most Westerners mean by “yoga”—hathayoga largely divorced from Hindu metaphysical beliefs or particulary religious practices. Then again, that’s just a brief title, in the form of a question, and the disambiguation comes with the answer in the article. Maybe there should have been scare quotes around “yoga,” in the title, to make it clear it’s talking about what we call “yoga” rather than what we should call “yoga.”

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Aaron
December 25, 2010 at 11:34 am
It seems the yoga industry has the same marketing plan as the martial arts industry. They both take something with some historical record and fill it out by combining it with modern methods, then obscure the modern sources to pretend there is an extremely long and unbroken line to some ancient wisdom. It seems the veneer of cultural heritage is important when you are learning something that claims to be unique, but is anything but. Both groups like to role-play being members of another culture by wearing foreign-looking clothes and using foreign terms. There is not that much difference between, for example, American catch-wrestling and Jujitsu beyond the terminology and the clothing, but you would not know that by speaking with the majority of traditional Jujitsu instructors.
Convergent sub-cultural evolution?

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) But then, the key thrust of this article by Meera Nanda is that many of the asanas known today were created by Krishnamacharya in the modern times. Are you disputing that?

2) The article you refer to seems to dispute the below stmt in this article.

Contrary to widespread impressions, the vast majority of asanas taught by modern yoga gurus are nowhere described in the ancient texts. The highly ritualistic, yagna-oriented Vedas have nothing to say about Patanjali’s quest for experiencing pure consciousness. Indeed, out of the 195 sutras that make up the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali devotes barely three short sutras to asanas. The Mahabharata mentions asanas only twice out of 900 references to yoga, and the Bhagvat Gita does not mention them at all.
For other readers, wikipedia leads to an interesting article with a bit more details.. such as numbers of asanas .. total today (200+), how many were found in that Mysore manual (122).
[www.roadtrippyoga.com]

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Ajita
February 2, 2011 at 7:56 pm
@Manas: Comment # 14:
I like to think of him as an older version of Swami Ramdev who has more recently (much to the chagrin of folks like M. Nanda) singularly led to a revival of yoga in India,”<
So Krishnamacharya was a fraud who made exaggerated claims about an unscientific ideology? Sounds about right.

“yoga, be it the philosophical aspect or the Asana aspect, is firmly rooted in and has an inseparable relationship with what is now know as Hinduism. ”

What is undeniable is that those who subscribe to the Hindu in-group in India have appropriated all of ancient Indian culture. I have no issue with revival of certain practices or even the invention of new ones by those who practice yoga, provided no pseudoscientific claims are made to sell it.

What I do have an issue with is the claim that those ideas and philosophies which were developed over thousands of years by our ancestors who were not under any one repressive, superstition-filled religious identity, are actually the property of those who subscribe to one category of this modern idea called religion. Indian culture belongs to all Indians, not just to those who call themselves Hindus.

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19
Lije
February 3, 2011 at 9:39 am
@ Manas
You said:
This needs to be thoroughly researched and presented by those without their own agendas. Whether the author of this article has any agenda or not, readers can judge for themselves after going through the articles in point-2 in my first comment. I am also loath to trusting the Eurocentrics, who have their own agendas and have set historical precedents of engineering data/history to suit their predilections (as have the Marxists)

Everybody has their agenda including the ones who say that they do not. That is human nature. And that is precisely why we (trust?--word seems to have been omitted-corboy) processes like the scientific method which can arrive at the same conclusion *regardless of what agenda* that the person who follows the method has.

On an unrelated note, hindu apologists have become smart enough to appropriate parts of science that suits them and skepticism (“Oh, that is just western agenda”) when it doesn’t. In both cases it is science and they cannot dismiss arguments that they find unpalatable as “Eurocentric” or “Marxist”.

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Indianspark
February 3, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Manas and other defenders of the faith, you need to relax instead of getting your panties in a religious twist.

Yoga is hardly the complex panacea that it pretends and claims to be. At best the meditation aspect is a relaxation tool for a few minutes a day and that can be done without the fanciful chants and sanskrit words. The more recent gymnastic nature of some of the moves have been plagiarized from other cultures.

And its probably useful if you are a contortionist without all the divine sounding bull shit.

Other than that, rolling on the floor and pretending Yoga is the best exercise is rather a big waste of time.

Work with external loads if you want real efficient exercise under a no BS coach who does not instruct you in sanskrit ! There are far more efficient ways to exercise and lead a better lifestyle than this ancient sounding needlessly complex horse shit called Yoga.

Charlatans like Ramdev, Bharat Thakur etc are all selling this so called deep knowledge to the credulous. Not sure why any one proud of their culture would want to defend a much hyped pop culture practice such as Yoga.

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Yoga As We Know It

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I knew it, I knew it! I have long been suspicious of the claims that my yoga teachers have made about the great antiquity of the postures that they were teaching us. Okay, so there were sculptures of yogis and Buddhas sitting in Lotus, but where were all the Downward Dogs and Warriors, Headstands and Forward Bends? Why couldn't any of the books show us illustrations or even properly referenced descriptions of these poses in the ancient sources if there were any? Well, as historian Mark Singleton has recently reported in Yoga Journal (November 2010), it's because there aren't.*

It gets better (or worse, depending on how important you think antiquity is). Not only aren't these poses--and more or less all of the others which aspiring yogis and yoginis practice so diligently in yoga studios and health clubs the (Westernized) world over--particularly ancient. They aren't even Indian. They are, you guessed it, Western to begin with. To be exact, 19th-century Scandinavian.

Everything--the five-count format, the abdominal "locks", the jump-through and the postures--appears in an early 20th-century Danish system called Primitive Gymnastics which was itself a derivative of a 19th-century Scandinavian model that, as Singleton explains,

"sprang up throughout Europe and became the basis for physical training in armies, navies, and many schools. These systems also found their way to India. In the 1920s, according to a survey taken by the Indian YMCA, Primitive Gymnastics was one of the most popular forms of exercise in the whole subcontinent, second only to the original Swedish gymnastics developed by P.H. Ling."

And guess who decided that it would be a good thing to teach this form of exercise as yoga? Right: modern yoga founding fathers Kuvalayananda (1883-1966) and T. Krishnamacharya (1888-1989), the latter the teacher of such global yoga luminaries as B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and T.K.V. Desikachar. I love it. Here we've been, for the past, oh, twenty or thirty or sixty years worrying about the effects of bringing yoga to the West, corrupting its spiritual tradition by teaching it in health clubs as "merely" gymnastics--and all along, that's what it was, exercise. To be sure, Krishnamacharya blended his gymnastics with philosophical teachings from orthodox Hinduism and Ayurveda.

But the postures we Westerners have been flocking to India to learn for the past two or three generations were arguably so appealing to those from our culture because they already were ours, just dressed up in fancy new names. Yes, these postures were appealing to the Indians, too, thus all those classes in the 1920s at the YMCA. But how many Westerners would have been so eager to spend their lives doing Downward Dog or Fish pose without the assurance that these postures came with a venerable history going back 3,000 or 10,000 or (I don't know) 100,000 years?

Singleton confesses to having experienced something like a crisis of faith at this point in his research: how could he continue teaching his own students these postures if they did not in fact have their roots in the ancient tradition of Patanjali, the Upanishads and the Vedas? He concludes that it doesn't really matter. They don't need to be ancient to be "authentic," they are simply a modern graft onto the great tree of yoga.

But I wonder. Would he have come to the same conclusion if he had found, as I just did on a search in Google books**, that Niels Bukh, the founder of "Primitive Gymnastics," was particularly inspired by his contemporary athletics promoter, Adolf Hitler, and that he expressly intended his "serial gymnastics" (shades of Ashtanga) for men?***

*Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford, 2010).
**For Singleton's book, but also for images that I might use to illustrate this post.

***Hans Bonde, "The Iconic Symbolism of Niels Bukh: Aryan Body Culture, Danish Gymnastics," in Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon, ed. J.A. Mangan (London, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 104-118.****

****[Update: In answer to my rhetorical question, yes, he would. In his book, Singleton shows in detail how the fusion of yoga with athletic and body-building physical culture was closely bound up with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideals of "manliness." He likewise, however, points to a different, contemporary culture of breathing and stretching developed by women in the West which would seem to underpin the yoga practice of many Western women today. Either way, yoga as we know it has deep roots in the West.]

Posted by Fencing Bear at 7:03 AM

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7 comments:
1. RNSOctober 1, 2010 at 8:42 AM
I have suspected as much. Thanks for the insight. I have never met an Indian who thought "downward dog" was actual yoga.

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Introduction

Yoga in the modern, globalized world has become virtually synonymous with thepractice of posture (a¯sana). For millions of people today in Europe, America, andAustralasia, the primary association of the word yoga is with stretching regimes aimed at the improvement of health, and often tied to “spiritual” development.

However, this is a situation which is quite unique in the long history of yoga.

Until recently, a¯sana was not commonly the mainstay of a traditional yoga sa¯dhana(course of practice), including the body-oriented ha&#7789;hayoga. This is not to say thata¯sana was somehow “invented” in the modern period, but that its function andM.
status is often vastly different now than it ever was in pre-modern Indian traditions.This sea-change in the predominant connotations of the word “yoga” came aboutduring a relatively short period in the early decades of the twentieth century.

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I begin with a short background on transnational anglophone yoga. A¯sana wasoften absent from early modern formulations of yoga such as those of Vivekananda,and it was not really until the 1930s that posture began to be widely accepted as aprimary feature of yoga practice. One reason for this was that a¯sana practices wereassociated with low-caste mendicants, who were anathema to caste Hindus, the newEnglish-educated Indian middle class, and the colonial authorities. Furthermore,extreme postural austerities had long been a focus of the European ethnographicgaze, and were subject to ridicule and scorn. Little was known about the deeper


meaning of yoga¯sana, but they were nonetheless often the target of censure. For thisreason, pioneers of transnational yoga like Vivekananda excluded instruction on a¯sana from their teachings, so as to make it palatable to their audience.

This same period saw the rise of a new, worldwide fervor for physical culture,which was itself closely linked to the rise of militant nationalism.

Across Europeand Asia, people were embracing new technologies for building the body in theinterests of nation. India was no exception, and the decades either side of 1900 sawa dramatic rise in the popularity of modern physical culture. Many borrowedEuropean techniques of gymnastics and bodybuilding, and merged them withindigenous practices.

One eventual result of such mergers was the now-dominant mode of postural yoga practice. There were several key players in the emergence ofa physical culture-oriented yoga, including, perhaps most importantly, Swami Kuvalayananda, Shri Yogendra, and (more indirectly) Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.

In Europe and America, the newly emerging forms of postural yoga began to beassimilated into already present traditions of women’s gymnastics. Some of thesetraditions grew out of the German Gymnastik movement, while others developedwithin “unchurched” Protestantism in the United States.

At the same time, posturalyoga innovators like Shri Yogendra were explicitly borrowing from these women’sgymnastics traditions in the adumbration of modern day, health-oriented yogapractices. I claim that the female dominated, stretching classes of today’s HathaYoga can be more profitably seen as developments within the Western “harmonialgymnastics” tradition than within Indian ha&#7789;hayoga per se.

Perhaps nobody has been as influential within posture-based, transnational yogaas T. Krishnamacharya, whose disciples (such as B. K. S. Iyengar) have been at theforefront of the popularization of a¯sana outside of India for at least half a century.

During the 1930s, Krishnamacharya developed a system of dynamic a¯sana practicewhich was to become the basis for the many variants of Power Yoga, VinyasaYoga, Vinyasa Flow Yoga, and the various aerobic practices which often charac-terize yoga classes in the United States and elsewhere today.

Known now asAshtanga Vinyasa Yoga, this mode of practice represents a powerful synthesis ofha&#7789;hayoga principles likely influenced by popular pedagogical gymnastics.

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Young Men’s Christian Association

No organization had a greater influence on the shape of physical culture in India in this period than the YMCA. Indeed, it was in the creation of hybridized, but distinctly Indian form of physical education that the “Y” contributed most signifi-cantly “to the making of modern India.”

Their physical culture programs were designed to bring about moral and spiritual reform through proper use of the body,in much the same way as “muscular Christianity” was.

These programs aimed at the even development of the threefold nature of man—mind, body, spirit—as symbolized by the famous inverted red triangle logo devised by YMCA thinke r Luther Halsey Gulick. As such they were of a piece with the “holistic” vision of many systems of early European gymnastics.

Within India, the YMCA encouragedthe development of programs which combined Indian and Western physical culture.It was Harry Crowe Buck (1884–1943) who first incorporated the practice of a¯sana into the YMCA programs in the early 1920s,17 but the YMCA’s nurturing of thespirit of cross-cultural fusion in physical exercise no doubt facilitated the experi-mentalism of early a¯sana pioneers before this time, and outside the formal confinesof the organization itself.18

The YMCA not only altered the cultural status ofphysical education in India (which had been extremely low before), but also shaped the ontological function of bodily exercise. Partially as a result of this, modern postural yoga came to be perceived as a system for the holistic development of the individual in “mind, body and spirit,” arguably a significant departure from th easpirations of traditional Hindu renouncer yogis.

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From the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a growing awareness in Indiaof the possibilities that physical culture held to raise the nation out of the “degener-acy” in which it was perceived to have sunk, and to lead them towards autonomous rule. T

his sense of degeneracy was in large part the result of stereotypes of the“effete Indian” promulgated by the colonial powers in contrast to the idealized,European “muscular Christian.”

For example, Robert Baden-Powell, the founderof the international scout movement, considered the task of colonial education inIndia as being “that great work of developing the bodies, the character and the soulsof an otherwise feeble people.”21

Physical education programs, mainly based Ling and Maclaren, were widespread in India. However, one of the outcomes of thecolonial man-making project was the realization that the techniques and methodslearned by Indians could be turned against their rulers.22

The degeneracy myth itself became a powerful goad for Indians to build their bodies in the service of indepen-dence.

While the new Indian physical culture movement retained a permeability toWestern techniques (based on a deep appreciation for the benefits that modern exercise technology could bring them) it was often directed towards the overthrow of colonial authority.Although the move towards independence is perhaps best remembered today within the framework of Ghandian non-violent resistance, the freedom struggle also involved a substantial element of “acts and threats of violence by revolutionarygroups,” as Lise McKean has pointed out.23

Reworking and modernizing the imageof the heroic sa&#7747;nyasin (renunciant holy man) struggling to oust the foreignoppressor, authors like Bankimchandra Chatterjee did much to popularize a new movement of militant physical culturism, the breeding grounds of which were thenew akhaÝ&#7771;a-gymnasia. ...

. This physiological nationalism often referenced the mythos of the “fighting yogin” of yore, and the exercise regimes that were propagated were often referred to as “yoga.” Clandestine fighters, like SriRaghavendra Rao (pen name “Tiruka”) traveled around the country instructing potential revolutionaries in “yoga techniques”: “

"Outwardly, it was the teaching of yogasana, suryanamaskara, pranayama and dhyana,” he wrote, “[but] at its core itwas much more: preparation in physical fitness and personal combat methods ...Thus ‘yoga training’ and physical culture became household words.”25

Tirukastudied with some of the most illustrious yoga teachers of the day, including Swami Sivananda, the Raja of Aundh, and Paramahamsa Yogananda, as well aswith a range of physical culture luminaries like Rajaratna Manick Rao

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It is also possible that such modes of practice drew, in turn, from the influence of Scandinavian gymnastics in general, and in particular from the Primitive Gymnastics of the Dane Niels Bukh (1880–1950), whose system was second only in popularity in India to Ling.53

Bukh’s system offers a complete course ofstretching and strengthening exercises, graded (like the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yogasequence) into six progressive sequences. At least 28 of the exercises in the first English edition of Bukh’s manual are strikingly similar (if not identical) to yoga postures occurring in Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga sequence or inIyengar’s Light on Yoga.54

Moreover, the dynamic, “jumping” format of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is also present in Bukh’s system, alongside the deep, “rough,” ujjayitype breathing that also characterizes other forms of Asthanga Yoga.

I point thesesimilarities out not to suggest that Krishnamacharya borrowed from Bukh, but toi ndicate how closely his system matches one of the most prominent modalities ofgymnastic culture in India at the time.

ConclusionI

t would be easy to conclude from evidence of the kind presented above thatpostural yoga was “invented” or “created” during a relatively short period of timein the early twentieth century.

It seems to me, however, that this would be incorrect,and perhaps a function of a kind of categorical thinking that inhibits more nuancedhistorical investigation. Within the transnational postural yoga community, inparticular, there is a marked tendency, when faced with this kind of information,to want to know which postures are old and which are new, and to overlook largercontextual questions.

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However, transnational yoga isanything but objective. It grew, perhaps like all tradition, out of a dialecticalexchange between precedent and innovation according to the needs of the day,and it continues to mutate and develop. What is important about yoga in the modernage, however, is the unparalleled pace of change, and the quite bewildering range ofmeanings that have become attached to it since at least the nineteenth century, asyoga began to expand and adapt beyond the borders of India.