Suman K Sharma
Is yoga a sectarian, ‘Hindu’, practice or a way that has been developed in India over the past several millennia to improve human body and mind? The apex court of the land is pondering whether it would be appropriate for it to direct that yoga should be taught as a compulsory subject in the country’s schools. Incidentally, the Supreme Court of the United States of America has ruled that yoga is not a religious practice.
We are talking in the context of school children. So let us leave alone the philosophical aspects of yoga – the yoking of mind and body, union with the Supreme and so forth – our boys and girls will have time enough for such esoteric issues when and if they grow up in good health. It is the aasanas (bodily postures) and the pranayama (breath control) that are our present concern.
Yoga is indigenous and there can be no doubt about that. The first ever image of a yoga-mudra comes from the Indus Valley Civilisation in the form of a soap-stone seal of a man sitting in the padma aasana. Yogis find a mention in the Rig Veda and much later, in Rishi Patanjali, we had a great exponent of the extant as well as the arcane practices of yoga. A text, Hathayoga Pradipika, which could have been authored between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, describes fifteen yogic postures to strengthen the body.
Then came the British Raj and along came its opposition by the resurgent nationalists. Wendy Doniger, the author of On Hinduism, says, ‘under the British Raj militant yogis engaged in exercise regimes to make them tough, in order to oppose the British.’
The contrast between the alien ruler and the native must have riled the resurgent nationalists a great deal. The Angrez was rosy-cheeked and imposing in his presence. We Indians in comparison were generally sallow and not as physically strong as he. One can only imagine how bad young Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi and his friends at the school must have felt about that taunting ditty – ‘Behold the mighty Englishman/He rules the Indian small/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.’
Dietary preferences apart, it was the exercise regime practiced by the Tommies that kept them fighting fit. Doniger appears to endorse Mark Singleton’s claim that in the nineteenth century ‘a transnational, Anglophone yoga arose…, compounded of the unlikely mix of British body-building and physical culture, American transcendentalism and Christian science, naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics and the YMCA, grafted onto a rehabilitated form of postural yoga adapted specifically for a Western audience’ (p.120). If the Raj in its panoply laid the foundations of the modern physical culture in India, it had its self-serving purpose too – for did not the native soldiers of its army have to be physically strong to defend it? Our own social reformists took up the cause with some verve. Swami Vivekananda said famously that a youth could get closer to God playing football rather than reciting Bhagwad Gita. In 1915, SC Vasu came out with a translation of the Hatha-yoga Pradipika leaving out certain portions of the original which fell short of his scientific temper. Swami Kuvalyananda and K. Ramamurthy (who won world-wide acclaim for his powerful demonstration of the nauli technique of strengthening the abdominal muscles when he had a three-ton elephant and a motor car driven over his body.
Because of the pride in our heritage or for more pragmatic reasons – ‘yoga is a multi-billion industry today’ – some of us may not perhaps agree with Wendy Doniger’s assertion that ‘The British passion for physical culture spilling over into the Hindu world, rescued (emphasis added) physical yoga from the opprobrium into which it had fallen and made it once again respectable’ (On Hinduism, p.121). But nobody can deny that the yoga that is being practised in institutions, inside private homes and outside in municipal parks has indeed brought a salutary effect on people’s health and well being.
To say that the stretching-and-relaxing and breath-control yoga routine should be discarded because it is a ‘Hindu’ practice would be as wrong as saying, for instance, that vegetarianism should be avoided by the non-Hindus because it is a percept followed by staunch Hindus. The sticklers to secularism can make suitable variations where a seemingly religious element becomes a part of the yoga regime. Sri Sri Ravi Sankara’s Art of Living yoga exercises include incantation of Om which is said to induce a calming effect on the body. Those who have objection to Om are advised by the instructors to replace it with any other suitable word for a similar effect. The Supreme Court is right in its meditative approach towards the issue. Yoga is beneficial to a person’s health, but for the state to impose it under force of law would be counter-productive. One is reminded of the times when, in the euphoria of the newly gained freedom, the policy makers in New Delhi tried to impose Hindi in the South. There were not only violent agitations against the move, but a whole generation refused to have anything to do with the Rajbhasha.
It would therefore be wiser of the government to confine its role to being a facilitator – standardizing the yoga regime, providing trained instructors and spreading awareness about yoga, so that more and more people, particularly schoolchildren, may derive benefit from it.
Follow our WhatsApp channel
