Yoga is to North America what McDonalds is to India: both are foreign implants gone native. Today, anywhere in the US, you are bound to run into neighbourhood health clubs, spas and even churches and synagogues offering yoga classes. Some 16 million Americans do some form of yoga, primarily as a part of their exercise and fitness routine. Thus, when everyday Americans talk about yoga, they mostly mean physical, or hatha yoga, involving stretches, breathing and bodily postures, or asanas. Many styles of postural yoga pioneered by India-origin teachers are thriving, including the Iyengar and Sivananada schools, the Ashtanga Vinyasa or 'power yoga' of Pattabhi Jois, and 'hot yoga' recently copyrighted by Bikram Chaudhary. The more meditational forms of yoga popularised by the disciples of Vivekananda, Sivananda and others are less popular. Americans' preference for postural over meditational yoga is not all that unique: In India, too, hundreds of millions follow Baba Ramdev, who teaches a purely medicalised, asana-oriented yoga.
By and large, the US yoga industry does not hide the origins of what it teaches. On the contrary, in a country that is so young and so constantly in flux, yoga's presumed antiquity ('5000-year-old exercise system', etc.) and its connections with Eastern spirituality have become part of the sales pitch. Thus, doing namastes, intoning 'om' and chanting Sanskrit mantras have become a part of the experience of doing yoga in America. Many yoga studios use Indian classical or kirtan music, incense, signs of om and other paraphernalia of the Subcontinent to create a suitably 'spiritual' ambience. Iyengar yoga schools begin their sessions with a hymn to Patanjali, the second-century composer of the Yoga Sutras, and some have even installed his murthis. This Hinduisation is not entirely decorative, either, as yoga instructors are required to study Hindu philosophy and scripture in order to get a license to teach yoga.
One would think that yoga's immense popularity and Hinduisation would gladden the hearts of Hindu immigrants to the US. But in fact, the leading Hindu advocacy organisation in the US, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), is not swelling with pride. On the contrary, it has recently accused the American yoga industry of 'stealing' yoga from Hinduism. Millions of Americans will be shocked to learn that they are committing 'intellectual property theft' whenever they do an asana, because they do not acknowledge their debt to 'yoga's mother tradition'. HAF's co-founder and chief spokesperson, Aseem Shukla, is now exhorting his fellow Hindus to 'take back yoga and reclaim the intellectual property of their spiritual heritage.'
The take-back-yoga campaigners are not impressed with the growing visibility of Hindu symbols and rituals in yoga and other cultural institutions in the US. They still find Hindu-phobia lurking everywhere they look. They want Americans to think of yoga, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the great Vedas when they think of Hinduism, instead of the old stereotypes of caste, cows and curry. They would rather that, to paraphrase Shukla, Hinduism is linked less with 'holy cows than Gomukhasana,' a reference to a particularly arduous asana; less with the 'colourful and harrowing wandering sadhus' than with 'the spiritual inspiration of Patanjali'. It seems that this yoga-reclamation campaign is less about yoga and more about the Indian diaspora's strange mix of defensiveness, combined with an exaggerated sense of the excellence of the elite, Sanskritic, aspects of Hindu religion and culture.