'The Story of Yoga': Alistair Shearer focuses on growth of yoga in the West

The Story of Yoga carefully explains how this pre-eminent form of communal exercising in the West is a mere subset of a larger universe whose ultimate goal is self-actualisation

Yoga, the ancient Indian form of spiritual and physical sustenance, has been weaponised today as the pre-eminent form of communal exercising in the West. In the book under review, Alistair Shearer charts this rather rapid change and discusses what it means for a practice that has traditionally been multidimensional.

Shearer’s study is expansive, detailing the origins of yoga in the subcontinent about 5,000 years ago. The Upanishads and the Mahabharata have multiple references to yoga, but those involve detailed instructions on its performative aspect. Shearer is more interested in how the word, which translates to “union”, sits at the centre of Hindu philosophy.

Shearer’s early thesis centres on the difference between mind and body yoga. Written primarily for a Western audience, the book carefully explains how yoga, understood there as a range of breathing exercises and meditative practices, is in fact a mere subset of a larger universe whose ultimate goal is self-actualisation. 

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As an example, he cites the looser meaning today associated with “hatha-yoga”, which has come to mean intense postures and tough breathing exercises, including the practice of nauli, the cleaning of the abdomen by a circular movement of the abdominal muscles, popularised by Baba Ramdev.

The original hatha-yoga was far more rigorous, requiring practitioners to undertake, sometimes for years, “sitting, squatting, remaining standing on one leg, holding the arms in the air, sitting by blazing fires in the full heat of the summer sun or immersed in freezing water in the winter cold”.

Shearer presents yoga as the one unchanged element of Hindu culture at a time when foreign invaders transformed the social and political landscape. An interesting discussion under this rubric is the martial training, inspired by elements of yoga, that freedom fighters encouraged youths to undergo. Shearer dovetails this into a discussion on the growth of akharas, the system of male martial arts, as centres of asceticism and showmanship.

The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West | Author: Alistair Shearer | Publisher: Penguin | Pages: 421 | Price: Rs 799

From here, Shearer’s focus shifts rapidly to the growth of yoga in the West — in the US there were no more than a few hundred thousand practitioners at the end of the 20th century; by 2016 that number was 37 million. Shearer, who has studied Patanjali’s texts in the original Sanskrit, is wearied by the diluted and commercialised version of yoga practised there. 

He is appalled by the story of Bikram Choudhury, whose Hot Yoga was lapped up by Hollywood celebrities and who played a significant role in selling yoga as a “gathering of competitive individuals narcissistically striving to outdo each other”. Shearer decries the transformation of, say, surya namaskar into an “extended routine of ‘salutation to the sun’…feeding into the dominant neurosis of constant and unreflective activity”.

In an ironically funny chapter titled “Yoga Shmoga”, Shearer lists the many types of “stretch and relax” exercises that pass off as yoga these days. From Yogalates (yoga with Pilates) to Doga (yoga with dogs), there is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to yoga lessons, which don’t even need an instructor any more. “With over a million YouTube tutorials to choose from, sessions can be carried out anywhere, anytime,” Shearer writes.

Shearer cites the popularity of mindfulness as one particularly disheartening example of the piecemeal approach to yoga adopted in the west. This conforms, he says, “to a trajectory we are by now familiar with: as wisdom moves from East to West, a sacred teaching is transformed into a secular healing remedy, preferring to align itself more with science than spirit”. Shearer is emphatic that yoga divorced from its spiritual moorings is not yoga at all, but a bland simulacrum.

To be sure, Shearer is attuned to the reasons yoga’s development has taken a certain path. If yoga means surrender to a higher authority, what place does that have in modern society? Moderns, Shearer writes, are cautious of surrender on intellectual matters — and the sheer range of yoga products now on the market reflects an urge to pick and choose what works best. 

Towards the end, Shearer advises the avid Western follower to seek out the true meaning of yoga. “Yoga itself is not a religion,” he writes, “but when practised in the right spirit, it may gradually align the practitioner with those eternal principles on which all true religion rests.” Emerging from what he perceives as an essential difference between the East and the West, Shearer’s advice is better distilled as yoga paving the path to self-realisation.