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| Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on the occasion of International Day of Yoga celebrations, New Delhi, India |
By Mohan Ashtakala
When the United Nations, under the guidance
of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, declared June 21 to be the
International day of yoga, it marked a remarkable turnaround for the ancient
spiritual practice in its home country. Modi’s request at the United Nations received overwhelming support from 177
countries.
But strangely, in
its home country of India, yoga was not valued even till a few decades ago. “In
the 1930s, under the British, yoga was not respected”, B.K.S. Iyengar, one of
the giants of modern yoga narrated. “I feel that only after yoga took roots in
the west, Indians also opened up it,” he added.
One of the
overarching goals of British colonialism was to replace traditional Indian
knowledge with an English one. The two main reasons for this: one, to generate
leaders and administrators who would be more capable administrators of the Empire and
secondly, to create a more subservient nation which would not value its own
culture and adopt the British one, and thus prolong colonial rule. An English
education would become a prerequisite for entry into the powerful and lucrative
government services, as well as the lingua-franca of mobility in the Empire.
One of the more
important decisions taken by the colonial administration was to replace
Sanskrit education with an English one. In this, they were extraordinarily
successful. Sanskrit education, once remarkably widespread throughout India,
served as the conduit for Indian traditions such as Yoga, Ayurveda and Hindu philosophical systems, but is, currently, practically dead. Furthermore, the governments that
followed Indian independence, which inherited the colonialist administration system,
viewed with suspicion most forms of Indian traditional systems of knowledge.
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| Swami Prabhupada |
While Iyengar or
Pattabhi Jois and others may get intellectual support for their work in
popularizing yoga in the West, the main proponents of yoga must be the “gurus”
of the sixties and the seventies, such as Yogananda, Swami Vishnu Devananda,
Yogi Bhajan, and Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who
introduced Bhakti yoga to the west. These teachers moved to America, set up
ashrams and schools and worked at the ground level with their American students
and followers. Their work, along with others such as Neem Karoli Baba, Swami
Radha, Amritananda Mayi and others, have been, and continue to be, much more
important in yoga’s spread.
But even more
important are the thousands of individual Western teachers, mostly women, who
invested their own money to open up of yoga studios and train teachers around
the world. Organizations such as the Yoga Alliance, among others, have been the
backbone by which this effort succeeded.
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| Swami Ramdev |
And the ripple effects of this explosion
can now be felt in India. The work of Swami Ramdev, from the mid
nineteen-nineties, has been seminal. In Haridwar, India, he has established the
world’s largest center for Yoga and Ayurveda, called Patanjali Yogpeeth. It
includes a Yoga University, an Ayurvedic hospital, a yoga hall of 25,000 square
meters, a thousand apartments for guests, conference halls, cafeterias, and several apartment blocks for permanent
residents.
India has now
embraced yoga. Examples abound: the Indian Railways, the country’s largest
employer, has made yoga compulsory for its employees; it is now being taught in
all government schools; thousands daily attend yoga camps, and even the Indian
army practices yoga. And under the leadership of the current Prime Minister,
India’s trend of reclaiming her cultural and historical heritage is now gathering
momentum.
Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper - A Novel." www.yogazapper.com
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