Swami Vivekananda introduced yoga to Western audiences in 1893 at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. However, yoga was not well known at the time and Vivekananda presented it as a philosophical practice rather than the posture-based practice it is known as today. Yoga started gaining more popularity in the US in the 1920s-1930s through Indian immigrants. The physical aspects of hatha yoga were merged with Western exercise in the early 1900s. Yoga truly became mainstream in the US starting in the 1960s through its adoption by the hippie and New Age movements and its presentation on television and in fitness studios.

1. 1.Who First Brought Yoga to
Humanity?
Option:A.Buddha
B.Patanjali
C.Hatha Yoga Pradipika
D.Shiva
Right Answer is Option D: Shiva

2. 2. Who is believed to be Father
of Yoga?
Option:A Krishnamacharya
B.Gautam Buddha
C.Maharishi Patanjali
D.Adi Shankracharya
Right Answer is Option A: Krishnamacharya.

3. 3. Over time, many new postures
have been added to the
orginalcompendium of Asanas that
yoga started with to incorporate
modern day
modern day fitness requirements. How may classic asanas were enlisted
in the intial texts?
Option:A.84
B. 108
C.33
D. 195
Right Answer is Option A. 84

4. 4. What are the 5 Elements
(pancha Bhutas) in Yoga?
Options A. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Akash.
B.Earth, Water, Fire, Air , Light.
C.Space, Asana, Anna, Kosha, Dosa.
D.Earth, wood, Eather, wind, Fire.
Right Answer is Option: A. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Akash.

5. 5. Which of these is Not the 8
Limbs of Yoga?
Options: A.Niyama
B.Samadhi
C.Pranayama
D.Samyama
Right Option is :D.Samyama

6. 6. When did yoga become
amainstream?
A. 1893
While yoga has become a mainstream path to wellness among
everyday Americans and celebrities alike, the practice was once
unheard of in the West. Many have traced the global popularity
of yoga back to a key event and critical figure: In 1893, a Hindu
monk named Swami Vivekananda addressed a large gathering in
Chicago.

7. Yoga Landed in the U.S. Way Earlier Than You'd
Think—And Fitness Was Not the Point
Over a century ago, a Hindu monk named
Swami Vivekananda spoke about yoga to a
crowd in Chicago. In the decades since, it has
gone from unknown to mainstream.
Every year on June 21, millions of flexible people in an estimated 84 countries around the world
observe the International Day of Yoga. Large crowds move through postures together in San
Francisco’s Marina Green park and on New Delhi’s Rajpath boulevard to mark the occasion,
which was first proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014.
While yoga has become a mainstream path to wellness among everyday Americans and
celebrities alike, the practice was once unheard of in the West. Many have traced the global
popularity of yoga back to a key event and critical figure: In 1893, a Hindu monk named Swami
Vivekananda addressed a large gathering in Chicago. But Vivekananda’s reception in the West
was not always as enthusiastic as some accounts suggest.

8. Yoga Landed in the U.S. Way Earlier Than You'd Think—And Fitness Was Not the Point
Over a century ago, a Hindu monk named Swami Vivekananda spoke about yoga to a crowd in
Chicago. In the decades since, it has gone from unknown to mainstream.
Every year on June 21, millions of flexible people in an estimated 84 countries around the world
observe the International Day of Yoga. Large crowds move through postures together in San
Francisco’s Marina Green park and on New Delhi’s Rajpath boulevard to mark the occasion,
which was first proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014.
While yoga has become a mainstream path to wellness among everyday Americans and
celebrities alike, the practice was once unheard of in the West. Many have traced the global
popularity of yoga back to a key event and critical figure: In 1893, a Hindu monk named Swami
Vivekananda addressed a large gathering in Chicago. But Vivekananda’s reception in the West
was not always as enthusiastic as some accounts suggest.
Swami Vivekananda, circa 1885.
Ramakrishna Mission Delhi

9. Vivekananda's Appearance in Chicago
Swami Vivekananda was born in 1863 in a well-to-do Calcutta family.
As a young man, he became a disciple of the mystic Ramakrishna and
took monastic vows shortly before his teacher’s passing. After
traveling in India for five years, Vivekananda left India to travel to the
1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago, an interfaith
conference held during the massive World's Columbian Exposition.
According to the legend that has grown around Vivekananda’s appearance at the Parliament,
despite travel difficulties and nervousness, the swami addressed the crowd as “sisters and
brothers of America” to thunderous applause. Vivekananda then rode the wave of success and
lectured, wrote books, and opened branches of the Ramakrishna Mission known as Vedanta
Societies during two separate U.S. tours.
The approval given to Vivekananda at the Parliament in Chicago was not unique to him,
however. In the account of the Parliament published by its president John Henry Barrows,
applause was also freely given to the other speakers as part of the self-congratulatory spirit of
the Parliament. And Vivekananda did not just receive praise at the Parliament. Barrows
also noted that “very little approval was shown to some of the sentiments expressed” by
Vivekananda in his closing address.

10. Vivekananda’s subsequent lecture tours drew curiosity and interest, but also some hostility. In a
letter to one of his American students in 1897, Swami Vivekananda described himself as “a
much reviled preacher” in the United States. While he did establish branches of the Vedanta
Society on his two trips to America, they were small and often counted only a few dozen
members.
Vivekananda sitting center among a group of
men.

11. Yoga as Philosophy
The yoga that Vivekananda presented to American audiences was also different than the
versions most are familiar with today. Vivekananda largely spoke about yoga as a matter of
philosophy, psychology and self-improvement.
His published lectures in the United States are flooded with the word “power,” and in one of
them he enjoins his listeners to “Stand as a rock; you are indestructible.” Not unlike an immobile
rock, Vivekananda’s approach was devoid of the flowing sequences of asanas or postures that
are now commonly associated with the practice.
This absence would have drawn little attention at the time. When Vivekananda spoke and wrote
to Americans about yoga there was little agreement as to what exactly yoga was. While it could
easily be understood as a type of diet, system of mental concentration or breathing techniques,
it was often perceived as something magical.
Fed by fantastic accounts of Indian wonders in print and legions of stage magicians who donned
turbans and robes for their routines, most Americans at the turn of the century assumed that
yogis held supernatural powers.

12. POSTURE-BASED YOGA EMERGES IN EARLY
20THCENTURY:YOGIRAJS.SATHYANARAYAN
AAN NNARAYANAN
The rise of the now ubiquitous posture-based forms of yoga occurred in the early 20th
century, as Mark Singleton describes in his 2010 book Yoga Body. This is when Indian
traditions of hatha or physical yoga were merged with Western forms of physical culture.
One of the most important of the figures in this renaissance was Swami Kuvalayananda
(1883-1966), who helped to frame yoga and its practical benefits in medical science.
Swami Kuvalayananda.: Subodh Tiwari/CC BY –SA 3.0

13. Vivekananda himself had a complicated and contradictory relationship to hatha yoga.
In conversations with his disciples, Vivekananda revealed that in early 1890 he attempted to
study hatha yoga to remedy his poor health but withdrew before he was initiated into the
practice after a disapproving vision of his late master Ramakrishna. While Vivekananda was
dismissive of hatha yoga to his American audiences—calling it “gymnastics” and “queer
breathing exercises”—he likely taught some postures to a small group of his dedicated students
in New York. He may not have popularized yoga single-handedly, but Vivekananda was
undoubtedly important in helping set the stage for yoga’s modern iterations. According to
Suzanne Newcombe, a lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University in the UK and author
of Yoga in Britain, Vivekananda “marks a turning point in how Indian religiosity was understood
outside of India.” Vivekananda inspired and provided a model for several other South Asian
teachers to follow his example and come to the United States over the next few decades.
Among them was Yogananda, the founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship and author
of Autobiography of a Yogi.

14. Hatha Yoga Revival Arrives in U.S.
It was during the 1920s and 1930s when yoga
obtained a higher profile in America, not by Indian
teachers who came to the United States, but largely
by Indian immigrants. These individuals were already
in the country and then lost their citizenship and
rights through a series of court cases and federal
legislation.

15. Dozens of these former students, professionals and political activists remade themselves into
mystic authorities. They travelled the country, and made a living by giving public lectures,
private classes, and often personal services. The American writer Charles Ferguson wryly
described them in 1938 as traveling salesmen, telling readers that “every winter we can find
advertisements of the appearances of Yogis in the cities of the East and during the spring and
summer they work the back places.” By the end of the 1930s, the revival of hatha yoga in India
had made its way to the United States. Previous ideas of yoga as mental and magical started to
wane, and the yoga familiar to contemporary practitioners with its postures and physical
exercises began to take hold. Health and bodybuilding magazines began to tout yoga and yoga
teachers began to add asanas to their classes.
A yoga class in Big Sur, California, 1959.
J.R. Eyerman/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
Images

16. Hippie and New Age Movements
Popularize Yoga
Today, yoga in America is a pervasive billion-dollar industry practiced
by tens of millions of people and found in tens of thousands of
studios across the country. While the global spread and popularity of
yoga is not solely due to American efforts, the history of yoga in the
United States doubtlessly played a crucial role in its spread.
Starting in the early-1960s, several Americans such as Richard Hittleman and Lilias Folan used
television to present approachable and practical forms of yoga to a wide audience. Later in the
decade, members of the hippie counterculture and New Age movement further popularized
yoga and founded many of the institutions that allowed for its continued growth.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of VHS tapes and DVDs, along with the rise of the
fitness industry, made yoga a part of the routines of countless Americans in their own homes or
at their local gym.
For his part, yoga as a physical practice of getting into peak shape and contorting through
postures on matts would be a phenomenon that Swami Vivekananda would be slow to
recognize. But yoga as an influential cultural form that is embraced by the West while reflecting
positively on India is something that Vivekananda would undoubtedly be quick to applaud.