Shameless rebranding of Yoga to make it more acceptable to western culture

It is wrong to deny that yoga has its origins in Hinduism

Yoga has been shamelessly rebranded to make it more acceptable to western culture, but this is based on a lie

A 2002 survey of Americans showed that more than half the population expressed an interest in practicing yoga, and a 2004 news report claimed that there were nearly 15.5 million yoga practitioners in the country. Nearly 77% of the practitioners of yoga are women, and half of the yoga enthusiasts have a college degree.

In the small college at which I teach in rural Virginia, at which participation in at least one form of physical education is required, yoga classes are the first to fill up – not aerobic dance, not fitness walking, and certainly not weight-lifting.

Yoga Journal, the most popular magazine for yoga enthusiasts, now has a paid circulation of 350,000 and a readership of more than 1,000,000. Yoga has indeed been embraced by Americans.

But as yoga became more popular, and as the industry grew to be worth nearly six billion dollars, and as a variety of savvy marketers begin branding their “special” yoga techniques, it was hard not to notice that few yoga teachers and journals mentioned the origins of the practice and its connection to Hinduism. Yoga was “secularised” to rid it of any taint of a “pagan” tradition.

The practice, the savvy marketers claimed, was “a spiritual path, but not a religious one”, to calm the committed Christian who wanted to hang on to Jesus while doing the “surya namaskara” (obeisance to the Sun).

Hindus are an accepting lot, and they believe that each should be able to follow whatever spiritual path they chose, according to one’s “ishta” (desire) and “adhikara” (qualifications). And as one scholar elegantly put it, Hinduism itself was “a rolling conference of conceptual spaces, all of them facing all, and all of them requiring all”, enabling it to accommodate everyone in this grand cosmic munificence, label or no label.

Alas, we love to categorise, and lay claim to God, goodness, and “truth”, and when those making monopolistic claims to these began to dominate the world, and spread the idea of “religion” – branding, marketing, and enlarging market share of souls harvested and converted – we found the people of India (the new name for the old Bharatavarsha) began to be labeled “Hindus” (an umbrella term to identify all those who adhered to Indian spiritual/religious traditions, not including Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism) and their vast “rolling conference of conceptual spaces” got neatly pigeon-holed as a religion – a religion, very soon marked and demonised as “heathen”, “pagan”, “kafr”, and so on.

Thus, when a neophyte yoga student, hanging on to Jesus, anxiously queried, “Is yoga part of Hinduism?”, the savvy marketer claimed that the origins of yoga were lost in myth and mystery and that there “was no indication that it was ever part of an organised religion”, accomplishing two things simultaneously – reifying Hinduism as a “religion” in the sense of “Abrahamic religions”, and denying it as the fount and foundation of yoga.

Read full article by Ramesh Rao published in Gaurdian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/dec/02/yoga-hindu-rebranded-wrongly/print

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