International Yoga Day 2023 | Take the divinity out of yoga: When yoga gurus turn abusers

A panel from 'Yogabuse: The Illustrated Women's Guide' by Wandering Hands.

This week, I began an interim yoga practice with a new teacher while my regular guru is on a long break. I addressed her as “ma’am” like I do my guru of a long time, a teacher in her 60s, with impeccable strength and grace. “Please call me Minakshi,” the new teacher told me, much older than me not just in age, but also in practice, knowledge and devotion to yoga.

It was a liberating and refreshing experience. I felt a different kind of kinship with a yoga guru for the first time — an equality almost, both of us collectively trying to perfect a posture aligned to the limits and balances of my evolving body.

The culture of worshipping a guru or any yoga instructor to the point of divinity is outdated and needs to go. To watch and hear Joanna Michelle, a mobility and flexibility coach known on Instagram for her astonishing métier as a pole dancer, recount her experience of well-known yoga instructor Gunjan Sharma sexually molesting her at her own residence at the pretext of a collaboration, brings back ugly memories of serious sexual abuse accusations against revered gurus such as Swami Satchidananda (1991), Amrita Desai (1994), Bikram Choudhury (through the 2000s) and the father of Ashtanga Yoga, Pattabhi Jois. Allegations against Jois came out of the woodwork one after another after his death in 2009. Most of the accusers of these crimes are women from the US or Europe. In lasting memory, Michelle is the first Indian woman to speak up alone against sexism and abuse within the yoga world. A few years ago, a group of Bangalore women who called themselves ‘Wandering Hands’ brought out an online comic strip titled The Illustrated Women’s Guide to YogĀbuse (2018) — their way of speaking up about a yoga studio called The Practice Room in Bengaluru. Several women who were attending yoga classes at this studio alleged sexual harassment, including charges of being inappropriately touched, by Mohan Polamar, the yoga teacher who runs the centre along with his wife. The ‘Wandering Hands' is no longer active as a collective voice against sexual misconduct within the overwhelmingly male-dominated world of yoga, but what they did is unprecedented. Among all women who have expressed outrage at being inappropriately touched or abused by godmen-like yoga gurus — whose names inspire reverence and surrender — are from the US or Europe. The several allegations against Jois should ideally be admissible as criminal offence in a court of law: Of rubbing his genitals against the womens’ pelvises while they were in extreme backbends, laying on top of them while they were prostrate on the floor, and inserting his fingers into their vaginas, an action that fellow-students thought were meant to be adjustments to their mul bandhas, the body’s lowest chakra, which lies between the genitals and the anus.

Paying heed to Michelle’s complaint — based on the report she filed at the Khar Police Station last week, Sharma was arrested and was out on bail the next day — and at least putting in place an enforceable set of rules for yoga instructors while teaching is the least a court of law or government can do to correct the sexism and sexual misconduct that has thrived in yoga establishments for centuries.

Swami Satchidananda denied all claims of misconduct; Amrit Desai, the founder of the Kripalu Centre for Yoga, eventually admitted to having sexual contact with three women. Bikram Choudhury, the heavily blinged founder  of hot yoga, has faced several civil lawsuits for sexual misconduct, including one filed in 2013 by his own lawyer, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who said that he not only harassed her but also forced her to cover up allegations of misconduct against other women. His misconducts spanning more than a decade, Choudhury is the subject of the Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (2019). He has so far denied all allegations. John Friend, founder of the US-based Anusara Yoga, and another American instructor, Rodney Yee, was accused of having sexual relations with students. Kausthub Desikachar, grandson of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the father of modern yoga, who was the guru and mentor of both BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois,  was accused of sexual, mental and emotional abuse by several people.

Not all abuse in the yoga world is sexual in nature. Some are physical and verbal abuse. During his workshops, BKS Iyengar, the guru who founded Iyengar Yoga, and who died in Pune in 2014, was known to slap and kick his students if they didn’t get a posture right. He once told  the Times of India, “It’s not you I’m angry with, not you I kick. It’s the knee, the back, the mind that is not listening.” Both Iyengar and  The legions of gurus and instructors who have come out of the rigorous and demanding Iyengar school training under BKS Iyengar are known for their brusque and rude way of teaching — as if a lesson imparted gently is no lesson at all. Krishnamacharya himself was known to be abusive and severely critical of his students, especially his two proteges, Iyengar and Jois.

These gurus enjoyed overwhelming authority, which reflects a larger problem within the culture of yoga. In traditional yogic practice, as outlined by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras, devotion to the guru symbolises devotion to the teachings, not to the man. But in practice, especially in the Western context, gurus become rock stars. And misuse of that power is easy.

For the government in power, yoga has been a cultural capital from day one, stressing its significance as an offshoot of Hindusim. Modi’s emphasis on the importance of yoga led to the UN passing a unanimous resolution making June 21 International Day of Yoga. The first International Day of Yoga celebrations in 2015 in India made history, creating the  Guinness World Records of the largest yoga session ever recorded - 35,985 people of 84 different nationalities on Rajpath, New Delhi. Referring to the importance of doing Surya Namaskar or sun salutations, a key element in Hatha Yoga practice, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, said in a speech said, “Those who abstain from the Sun God should drown themselves in the ocean or live in a darkened room for the rest of their life”. This year, International Day of Yoga is being celebrated in UP for a week, involving group events across the state involving celebrities, sports icons and gurus — and venues include madrassas and dargahs across the state.

This year, Modi is leading a congregation of his devoted expatriate fans in New York.

But the culture of guru worship continues. On one hand, most schools of yoga run on strict hierarchical structures, and most classes are not designed keeping a woman’s body in mind. On the other hand, new age yoginis, a glamorous tribe of mostly white women claim on Instagram that yoga leads to sculpted, thin bodies, besides mindful living. The Yoga Barbie has real-life inspiration (although it’s unclear why she has a chihuahua). And the establishment continues to belittle or sexualise women who pursue yoga as a committed practice. Addressing a yoga training programme for women in Thane, Maharashtra, last year, Ramdev Baba spoke to a shrill microphone: “Women look good in saris, they look great in salwar suits, and in my view, they look good even if they don’t wear anything.”

Kino MacGregor, Miami-based yoga teacher, author, entrepreneur and influencer, who learnt under Pattabhi Jois at his Mysore institution for several years before speaking out against his abuses during the #MeToo wave, has a singular way of looking at the gender divide that determine much of yoga teaching and practice. MacGregor, now in her mid-40s, writes in her blog, “For most of my life I have carried the residue of the 1970s feminism in my genes and on a subtle level fought and vied for male power while never really loving the men in my life. Yoga’s given me the gift of real and total self-adoration and in that sphere I rest as a strong woman with a sense of the beauty and power of my woman’s body. …In every handstand, arm balances, backbend, and gravity-defying lift-up I do not seek to replicate the male form, but instead to allow the flow of my female life to course through my veins, muscles, body, mind and soul.”

Equating yoga gurus to divine messengers make the yoga establishment less and less favourable for the blossoming of  the female form and female life the way MacGregor describes it. Thousands and millions congregating to perform the downward dog with our prime minister doesn’t take away the fact that the Indian yoga world is yet to be expansive and inclusive in the true sense.