The Story of Yoga: sun salute for a colourful history well told

The Story of Yoga

Author: Alistair Shearer

ISBN-13: 978-1787381926

Publisher: Hurst

Guideline Price: £25

Every Monday evening an interesting ritual takes place in our sitting room. My wife and I practise yoga. What makes it strange is that my wife who is English has been doing yoga for over 25 years and the tutor is Brazilian and often goes to India to keep up with yoga practises but I have only just taken to yoga and that with great reluctance. This is despite the fact that I was born in India and lived there for the first 21 years of my life. And while I am beginning to enjoy the sessions, I feel what we do is more body yoga of stretching limbs rather than the mind yoga of my Hindu ancestors. The result is that when our Brazilian tutor places a lavender bag over our eyes and asks us to relax instead of meditating, which would connect me with the one supreme consciousness that the ancient Hindu sages talk about, I am relieved the exercise is over and eagerly look forward to a glass of red wine.

What makes the yoga story truly remarkable is that even as late as the 1950s, both in the US and the UK, yoga was shunned

In many ways our Monday ritual sums up what has happened to this ancient Hindu spiritual discipline.

Once confined to the caves and forests of India it is now a $25 billion-a year worldwide wellness industry. Yoga is now so popular that there is “Yoga Behind Bars” where a UK charity runs yoga classes in 80 prisons. In Sweden it is part of the prison system with a national yoga co-ordinator training prison guards to be teachers. At the other end of the scale in the US, in keeping with its reputation as the ultimate land of mammon, there is Yogic investing which promises “to move your yoga practise off the mat and into your savings account”. Indeed, Ray Dalio, the financial guru behind Bridgewater Associates which has some $160 million in assets proudly says that his success is due to practising Transcendental Meditation for 44 years, twice a day for 20 minutes. Dalio sees it is as the best investment he has ever made.

And to cap it all Indians have rediscovered yoga. In my childhood, yoga was a fringe activity. The playground of my Jesuit school in Mumbai was littered with parallel bars and we were encouraged to do gymnastics but there were no mats or yoga classes. Now the school has yoga classes and in 2015 the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi organised the world’s largest ever yoga session with 35,000 people gathered in Delhi, and sitting on mats made by the Chinese, going through a few yoga postures. He also persuaded the UN to have an International Yoga Day. For Modi, it fits in with his Hindu nationalist agenda, but it is also a classic story of Indians, having discovered that the world had taken to something Indian, deciding to use it as a useful soft power tool.

Yet what makes the yoga story truly remarkable is that even as late as the 1950s, both in the US and the UK, yoga was shunned. The US then had a racist immigration policy which excluded Indians and one influential book, Mother India (1927), written by a self-confessed racist, American writer Katherine Mayo, portrayed Indian men as paedophiles and Hinduism as an evil religion. The author had been funded by the British rulers to discredit Gandhi’s movement to free India and even after India won freedom Indians were not welcome in the UK.

BKS Iyengar, who Shearer rightly calls the Lion King of Yoga and has done more than most to popularise postural yoga in the West, recalled how on his first visit to London in 1954 the hotel he stayed in would not allow him to eat in the dining room with the other guests, forcing him to eat alone in his room. Being a vegetarian he had to survive on sandwiches and coffee; people laughed at him as “the grass eater” and he felt he was looked on as “as a slave”. But this only increased his resolve and he decided that his initials would stand for “beating, kicking and shouting”.

It was in the 1960s, with the Kennedy administration’s removal of racist immigration laws in the US as well as the rise of flower power and the Beatles going to India in search of spiritual guidance, that yoga finally emerged from the shadows as a potent force. This rise took place despite the fact that the Catholic Church made it clear yoga was an alien practice, a religious view that still prevails. Fr Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, has claimed that yoga is satanic because it “leads to a worship of Hinduism and all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation”, while Pope Benedict said in 1989 that yoga, Zen and Transcendental Meditation and other “eastern” practices could “degenerate into a cult of the body that debases Christian prayer”. In February 2015 an Anglican church in Bristol banned yoga groups from using its hall saying “its roots lie in thinking that is not compatible with the Christian faith”, while in Northern Ireland, a Catholic priest quoted Pope Francis in justification of his argument that, “Yoga is certainly a risk. There is a spiritual health risk”.

The reason yoga has been able to override all this is because you can always find a yoga to suit your tastes, and the more exotic the better. One of the most extraordinary is hot yoga done in a gym-like environment heated to 40 degrees. New yoga systems can emerge because while India has a civilisation as old as China, it has nothing like China’s written record.

So there is no proof of yoga’s claim to be 5,000 years old or even that Yoga Sutra, the one universal text on yoga, was actually written by a man called Patanjali. You may not take to the mat but this is a compelling history of how an amazing ancient art became an integral part of western life.