The dark origins behind International Yoga Day - and why things 'aren't as rosy as they appear'

Get your lycra pants on, it’s International Yoga Day. Have you posted a picture of yourself on Instagram yet?

Nowadays there’s a day for everything and a hashtag to match. But not everyone sees IYD as something to celebrate. Confronted by thousands of yoga fans, fitness professionals and activewear ambassadors taking to social media to post (and pose) for pictures of themselves performing yoga postures, Nadia Gilani, a writer and yoga teacher, usually turns her phone off and waits until it goes away.

While she doesn’t wish to be dismissive of people talking about how yoga has changed their lives (“I can’t argue with that, the same has been true for me”), she has long felt uncomfortable about how mainstream yoga has been distorted in the west and morphed, she says: “Into a new lifestyle experience that has been polished, perfumed and commodified beyond recognition.”

The aspirational #liveyourbestlife marketing telegraphed by yoga studios, athleisure brands and Instagram users featuring pictures of permanently happy, bendy women doing yoga poses in idyllic locations isn’t her reality. It’s also far from what the ancient practice was meant to be about: self-inquiry, meditation and ultimately reaching enlightenment.

There’s another reason she is sceptical about International Yoga Day. While posing against their stunning backdrops, few people in the west are aware of what the political landscape looks like in modern India and how yoga has been used to fuel an agenda that is anything but inclusive.

Putting the commodification of yoga as a billion dollar industry aside, International Yoga Day’s origins are darker and less appealing than they might first appear.

According to the United Nations website, International Day of Yoga aims to raise awareness worldwide of the many benefits of practising yoga. Celebrated each year on the June 21, the annual event was proposed by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the 69th session of the General Assembly and was endorsed by 177 member states of the UNGA.

Modi, who practises yoga everyday, said: “Yoga is an invaluable gift of India's ancient tradition.”

The first International Yoga Day first took place in 2015 with Modi leading a mass demonstration of 35,000 school children, bureaucrats and soldiers in the capital, Delhi.

If you’re thinking “Wouldn’t it be great if our own politicians were as down with downward dog?”, if only it were so straightforward.

Yoga is not only India’s most significant cultural export, conquering the world and in turn arguably being conquered by capitalism, but it has also been used to promote a nationalist political ideology: Hindutva, the concept of “Indian cultural, national, and religious identity”.

Modi is the leader of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which many worry is angling toward a Hindu nation, far removed from its previous secular constitutional order. Minority religious groups in India are thus facing marginalisation, particularly as Modi’s rhetoric is frequently founded in Islamophobia.

Brian Cooper, the director of Yoga Alliance Professionals, the UK’s leading professional body for yoga teachers and trainers, says: “People should be aware that politically in India, things aren't quite as rosy as they appear to be.”

While India is a multicultural society with millions of Muslims, Christians and tribal groups, he says: “There is a worrying move towards a single culture society. A single ethnic group.

“It's not a nice atmosphere if you're living in India and you're not a Hindu.”

The secularisation of yoga in the west means we find it hard to see how it could be used to suppress other cultures. Yoga is often translated as meaning yoke, or union, after all.

While the roots of yoga predate India as well as Hinduism, and has been practised by lots of different philosophies and religions, ultimately it is a religious practice, says Rose Busto, a yoga teacher and academic at SOAS. “It's rooted in religion. You don't have to be an advocate of religion, you don't have to believe that religion, but you have to respect it. It is a religious tradition and if you strip that off what are you left with? Physical exercise with no acknowledgement of the roots of it.”

And it has without doubt been used by the BJP as a ploy to whip up Hindu pride and marginalise the country’s 175 million Muslims.

So much so that some Muslim organisations say yoga is essentially a Hindu religious practice and that chanting “Om” or performing Surya Namaskar (Salutation to the Sun God) is against monotheism that Islam preaches.

Angered by the debate around the establishment of the day in 2015, an MP from Mr Modi's party advised Muslims opposed to sun salutation to “go drown in the sea”.

Most mentions online of International Day of Yoga state it is held on June 21 because of the summer solstice, but Mark Singleton, an academic at SOAS and author of The Yoga Body, which traced the modern origins of the physical practice, says it is an open secret that June 21 is the death date of Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of the RSS, the political body behind the BJP, based on the ideology of Hindutva.

“I can see the positives of a day promoting the benefits for physical and mental health and understand that while there doesn't appear to be any political content in breathing and stretching, there is if you look beyond it.”

For him, Modi’s diplomacy for yoga is an exercise in soft power that not only enhances the image of India abroad, but also promotes India as a Hindu state.

For Gilani, the lack of awareness around the short history of International Yoga Day is further proof of how people involved in yoga in the west have gone so far in their exoticisation of India that they “totally disregard what’s going on in modern day Indian politics”.

When Covid hit last year, Gilani started sharing her thoughts and feelings around yoga on her Instagram account, taking aim at things like misuse of the word “Namaste” on t-shirts, the wearing of Mala beads and tattoos of Sanskrit and Hindu gods and, of course, the bendy pictures of handstands on beaches.

Writing about International Yoga Day on her instagram has resulted in abuse from both Hindu nationalists and white teachers in the West. It’s proof to Gilani, who is writing a book due to be published by Bluebird next spring, that talk about yoga and the dark side of wellness needs to happen.

“It feels as though people think their yoga is going to break when someone like me challenges it. I’m simply telling the truth. It’s clearly hard for some people to hear. But I’d argue it’s not me being the violent one here – International Yoga Day itself represents violence for so many reasons.”

So territorial and controversial has the popularity of the practice become that there are teachers of South Asian origin in the US who are attempting to “decolonise” yoga as an industry that has become centered on white elites.

Yoga though has always existed in myriad forms. And in its two and a half millennia history what it does and how you do it has changed vastly. That’s no more true than today. “Yoga has travelled so far so fast and become a multimillion dollar industry with pressure to innovate and change and sometimes it's changed out of all recognition,” says Singleton.

That doesn’t impact its power to make us feel its positive benefits.

However, for those who wish to acknowledge them though, and even perhaps celebrate International Yoga Day, Singleton’s advice would be to learn something about the history of yoga and the recent political history of India and who is in charge. “A little bit of political literacy along with spiritual literacy goes a long way.”