Padma Rao Sundarji
First, outdoor sports as a kid, then inline skating with my son. I have exercised all my life. When the weather didn’t permit it and as I grew older, I began to frequent gyms. Or, simply put on an exercise video in my living room. Then came Group X classes and the fun of training with like-minded people and to music: rock, Raga, beat, Bhangra. Even in my fifties, there is nothing to describe the joy of spin-cycling awake my slothful carcass at the crack of dawn every day.
But somehow and all through these decades, I stayed away from yoga. I concede that it may have been youthful idiocy. For and in the 1970s and 1980s, anything that came out of the West was hipper than something as home-baked as yoga.
Of course, we gradually realised that most of the ‘Western’ work-out routines like aerobics, incorporated yoga in one way or another, while giving the asanas different names. So there was the downward dog, the butterfly, the cat or the cow pose. (If India is the home of yoga, America is the mother of marketing). There’s sweat yoga, power yoga, sufi yoga. There’s even doga: for dogs.
But ironically – and hypocritically on our part – America brought yoga back to India. By the nineties, other Lulu Lemon-clad urban elite and I began to take a fresh look at the ancient form of exercise. And gradually added an hour of studio yoga to our spinning, kickboxing and step-aerobic routines.
My newfound enthusiasm soon put me on a search for the ‘real thing’. I enrolled for a beginner’s course at a well-known traditional yoga centre and soon graduated to its daily ‘open sessions’.
But in about a month, I had stopped and returned to Pilates in the old fitness studio. The ongoing yoga campaign by the Government of India made me realise why I quit.
Yoga is, without doubt, a great mind and body workout. BUT it is the WAY yoga is traditionally taught in India, all contortions through the prism of religion, that had turned me off the centre I frequented.
The open sessions were attended by all kinds of people: travellers from other countries, Sikhs, Muslims, Christian Indians, some Jewish Israelis, possibly even rationalists and atheists. But unmindful of this widespread representation of all kinds of faiths, the sessions always began and ended with prayers; in Sanskrit and addressed exclusively to our Hindu pantheon.
The Ganapathi Vandana is powerful and philosophical, as is the immense Gayatri Mantra.
But some things niggled. I am a Hindu from a traditional, not conservative, family of the freedom-fighting generation and spirit. In my grandparents’ home, my granny would commune with and grumble about the family to the entire pantheon every morning, polishing a diya here, wiping a statuette there, leafing through well-thumbed books of bhajans and muttering invocations in a reverent drone to the silent but smiling portraits on the flower-strewn pedestal. Nobody forced me to participate.
Only on the odd occasion of a festival, would we be all invited to participate and take the arti. Meekly, I would say I knew only the words of the prayers we had learned at school. “Never mind! Any prayer will do! Just sing!” my grandmother would snort. So I would find myself telling Krishna that I wished his name were hallowed and his kingdom came, his will be done. Heads around me stayed bowed in prayer, nobody sniggered (except my tiresome siblings).
It was a magnificent generation of Indians, the last of the true ‘seculars’. Nobody accused the missionary schools we attended of trying to ‘convert’ us. In truth, the latter never did. Catechism classes were not for Hindu kids, nuns and brothers hoisted the flag and sang our Sanskrit anthem lustily and proudly on all national holidays. We were not forced to sing Abide With Me, just to set aside time for a bit of spirituality, before tackling the first dreaded algebra class of the day.
But in the open yoga class, I had watched non-Hindus and many foreigners twitch, mumble and twist their tongues around those Sanskrit words. If the yoga teachers thought they were getting a solid soul-cleansing before the asanas, they was badly mistaken.
It began to annoy me intensely. Why were we all here? Primarily to exercise. So what place did prayer – be it of any religion – have, in what ought to be an hour of stretching? How could breathing have a faith? And even if one were to go by the semi-scientific theory of the benefits of the ‘Om’ mantra on the respiratory system, why could not everyone simply choose their favourite meme, or sound, or indeed prayer of their own religion if thus inclined, or none at all?
Why couldn’t a Sikh yogi mutter Wahe Guru, a Christian Praise the Lord, a Muslim the Azaan, while slithering into a Surya Namaskar or wobbling in a tree pose?