Yoga , Its brief History & its Modern day Commercialization with the Issue of BRANDING THE YOGA.

1. BRANDING
YOGA

2. What Is Yoga ?

3. A Physical, Mental & Spiritual
discipline that originated in Ancient
India.

4. What is the
present situation ?

5. SITUATION ANALYSIS
Yoga is practiced by about 16
million people in America
Getting those Yoga
Practitioners that the roots of
Yoga came from the Hindu
Philosophy
Campaing is run by HAF (Hindu
American Foundation)
Campaign ran the gamut &
Various reactions from
High profile Yoga
personalities

6. Objectives of the
Case !

7. • Yoga & it’s Spread in America
• To present the Idea of Branding Yoga
• Whether it has Hindu roots ?

8. We will Focus On:

9. • HAF Campaign
• YOGA Commercialization

10. Biography of :-
• Bikram Choudhary
• Tara Stiles

11. History Of Yoga

12. The earliest records of apparent yoga practice were
found in Indus Valley archaeological relics that dated to
the third millennium B.C.E.
The Bhagavad Gita (circa 300 B.C.E.), part of an epic
known as the Mahabharata, was a philosophical
cornerstone for yoga.
The Yoga Sutras, a series of aphorisms authored by the
Indian philosopher Patanjali, were also among yoga’s
most important precursors.

13. All of these texts were also sacred to Hinduism.
Some historians argued that yoga predated
Hinduism.
Yoga was associated with quieting the mind,
transcending the physical self, and attaining
communion with the divine.
Modern-day yoga reflected a plethora of ideas that
teachers of yoga had passed down to their students
over thousands of years.

14. Arrival of Yoga in
America

15. The story of American yoga began in the mid-19th
century, when Indic and Hindu literature fascinated
American Transcendentalist .
In 1893, Swami Vivekananda, one of the first Hindus to
bring yoga to the U.S., represented India and spoke
about Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in
Chicago.
One Student of Swami Vivekanand, Sara Bull, set up
conferences to introduce Vivekananda’s ideas to
Harvard professors; others helped establish the first
American Vedanta Society in New York.

16. In 1947, Indra Devi, a 48-year-old former Latvian film
actress, arrived in the U.S. and opened a Hatha yoga
studio in Los Angeles that quickly attracted a bevy of
stars. She also wrote several books about yoga,
targeting American women and linking yoga to health
and good looks.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Richard Hittleman, an
American from New York City, began to teach Hatha
yoga, focusing first on its physical elements and then
moving toward yoga’s more spiritual aspects.

17. In 1966, B. K. S. Iyengar published Light on Yoga, which
Yoga Journal claimed was “still considered to be the
Bible of serious asana practice.
In 1968, the Beatles made a highly visible trip to India
to visit the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and
studied transcendental meditation, or TM.b TM
became extremely popular in the U.S.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Maharishi and Chopra
partnered to focus on mind-body medicine. They used
a holistic approach, eliminating the division between
mind and body—a way of thinking that became
increasingly popular in the U.S.

18. Biographies of some
Famous Personalities
who planted the roots of
Yoga in America

19. Bikram Choudhary
• Born in 1946 in Calcutta, India.
• Started Studying Yoga under Guru Bishnu
Ghosh at age Four.
• National India Yoga Champion 1959 –
1963 (4 times).
• Moved to Japan in 1970 & Invented
TORTURE CHAMBERS.
• Moved to U.S. in 1971.
• Started 90 mins Classes with Nominal
fee.
• In 1979, Bikram obtained his first
copyright, for his book Bikram’s
Beginning Yoga Class

20. • By 1984, admission to classes at his Beverly Hills studio cost $20 per
person, a 10-class package cost $100, and the studio was taking in roughly
$1,000 a day.
• In 1994, he started Teacher training courses & by the time 2000 it was
generating 200 teachers a year.
• In 2002, he sent several cease-&-desist letters for his Yoga style copying.
• By April 2003, Bikram had more than 700 studios in 220 countries.
• Open Source Yoga Unity (OSYU), based in San Francisco, California, filed
suit against Bikram, claiming that his copyrights and patents were invalid,
and that yoga could not be copyrighted.
• By 2011, some 5,000 Bikram Yoga studios had opened around the world.
• Bikram’s business earned him about $5 million a year, according to one
estimate.

21. Tara Stiles
• Born in 1981, illinois.
• As a preteen, she discovered meditation.
• After graduation, moved to Chicago to
study ballet & Landed a contract with Ford
modelling Agency.
• Through the Ford Agency, she moved to
New York in 2000.
• She decided to practice yoga alone in her
apartment in New York.
• In 2007, Stiles left Ford & started
promoting Yoga through FACEBOOK video
lectures.

22. • Women’s Health and the Huffington Post hired her as a blogger.
• In 2008, Stiles opened her own studio, Strala Yoga, in New York’s
NoHo district.
• Stiles’s yoga was highly secular
• Stiles created controversy because she was “making yoga cool,”
• In 2010, Chopra and Stiles also released a yoga iPad app, “Authentic
Yoga,”
• Stiles’s book, Slim Calm Sexy Yoga, was published in the summer of
2010
• Stiles did not patent her yoga classes

23. HAF Campaign

24. In 2009, the advocacy group Hindu American
Foundation (HAF), concerned over yoga’s
commercialization and disconnect from what it claimed
were its Hindu roots, launched a campaign called “Take
Back Yoga—Bringing to Light Yoga’s Hindu Roots.”
The goal of the campaign was not to convert yoga
devotees to Hinduism but to have them acknowledge
the connection between them.
HAF began to present the paper in settings such as the
2009 Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions
in Australia.

25. On April 18, 2010, Aseem Shukla, a member of HAF’s
board, wrote a piece for the Washington Post’s On Faith
column, entitled, “The Theft of Yoga.”
In November 2010, the New York Times ran an article
on the front page of its Sunday edition about HAF’s
“Take Back Yoga”
In March 2011, Sheetal Shah of HAF, Tara Stiles, Dr.
Edwin Bryant of Rutgers University, Dr. Virginia Cowen
of the City University of New York, and Edwin Stern,
founder of Ashtanga Yoga NY, participated in a
discussion at Princeton University called “The Politics of
Yoga.”

26. Take Away from
the Case

27. • Yoga has Indian Roots.
• But are the roots attached to Hindu
Philosophy also ?
• How Yoga has evolved from Private practice to
Branding of Yoga !

28. These slides were created by SOHIT KUMAR, as
part of an internship done under the guidance
of Prof. Sameer Mathur
(www.IIMInternship.com)