[Of the major initiatives
that Prime Minister Narendra
Modi has introduced since taking office, few have generated as
much static as Yoga
Day, which will feature a vast, 35 -minute public demonstration of
poses by more than 35,000 government employees, students and other citizens.
Though the Western world regards yoga primarily as physical exercise, Indians
are more apt to see its postures and Sanskrit chants as freighted with
ideological or religious meaning.]
By Ellen Barry
 |
|
Government
employees participating in a yoga class recently at the Morarji Desai National
Institute of Yoga in Delhi. CreditKuni Takahashi for The New York Times
|
In his bag he carried a
photocopy of a memorandum advising senior officials to familiarize themselves
with certain postures ahead of International Yoga Day on June 21, a Sunday,
when they will take part in a mass outdoor yoga session scheduled to begin at 7
a.m. The session is intended to qualify for the Guinness Book of World Records,
the memo says, warning, “If some officials turn up without practice, there will
be risk of the record claim being affected.”
At the front of the room,
the instructor was folding and unfolding himself like a pocketknife, and
pointedly reminding the class that they would soon be performing under the
scrutiny of “Modi-saab.” When he asked the students to press their faces to
their knees, Mr. Sahukar — whose professional duties, he noted later, include
“a lot of sitting” — could keep silent no longer.
“It’s not touching!” he
exclaimed. “I can’t bend anymore!”
Of the major initiatives
that Prime Minister Narendra
Modi has introduced since taking office, few have generated as
much static as Yoga
Day, which will feature a vast, 35 -minute public demonstration of
poses by more than 35,000 government employees, students and other citizens.
Though the Western world regards yoga primarily as physical exercise, Indians
are more apt to see its postures and Sanskrit chants as freighted with
ideological or religious meaning.
Preparations for the
event set off a chorus of criticism, mostly from a handful of Muslim activist
groups that say they should not be compelled to chant “Om,” a sound sacred in
Hinduism, or perform the sun salutation, which they say violates the
monotheistic nature of Islam. Mr. Modi’s officials have hurried to address
those complaints, assuring the public that participation in Yoga Day is
optional and that it focuses exclusively on health, not religion. “Om” is not
part of the Yoga Day protocol, nor is the sun salutation. This decision so
incensed one right-wing member of Parliament that he suggested that those
displeased by the sun salutation“drown in the sea.”
Behind the headlines,
there is little doubt that the yoga campaign amounts to a cultural challenge,
in a capital city powerfully shaped by its British and Mughal past. New Delhi’s
elites are mostly Anglophiles, fond of their whisky and butter chicken; its
clerks spend their days in dim warrens of paper files, tensed against the next
supervisory tongue-lashing. Many rank-and-file civil servants have bellies like
first-floor balconies.
Shripad Naik, India’s
first minister overseeing yoga and traditional medicine who has helped organize
this month’s celebration, said it was time to clear away the vestiges of a
Western lifestyle left behind by colonial powers.
“Earlier, our people used
to get up before sunrise and sleep before sunset, but now our lifestyle has
changed. They are going to the pub, they will go in the middle of the night, at
12 or 1, and eat chicken and many, many new dishes,” said Mr. Naik, who, like
the prime minister, rises before dawn and practices yoga daily. He recommends
going to sleep by 9 p.m., gets his news from the Hindi-language press, and
proudly declares that he has never had an injection.
“There will be a
lifestyle change,” he said. “Our style will come.”
Mr. Modi is not the first
Indian leader to promote yoga. Indira Gandhi was so devoted to her yoga
instructor, Dhirendra Brahmachari, that he accompanied her
family when they traveled, and became known as the “flying guru.” In the late
1970s, Mr. Brahmachari hosted a weekly television show, and yoga was included
in some school curriculums. But after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination his influence waned, and he withdrew behind
the walls of his ashram.
Mr. Modi has no guru of
that importance, but since the 1980s, has consulted regularly with H.R.
Nagendra, a Bangalore-based guru who focuses his practice on achieving samadhi,
a state of profound meditative absorption. Mr. Nagendra said Mr. Modi draws
from the thinking of various popular teachers, including the popular
gurus Baba Ramdev, Shri
Shri Ravi Shankar, Jaggi Vasudev and Mata Amritanandamay.
The strains of yoga
arising now are, in many cases, intermingled with Hindu
nationalist thought. Sun salutations and Sanskrit chants are
part of the daily, military-style drills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,
the right-wing Hindu group that started Mr. Modi on his political career. The
daily shakhas, as the drills are known, were designed to “create an all-Bharat
national consciousness.” Bharat is the Hindi name for India.
“It is the extreme stress
that that takes place, the stressful life, the wrong lifestyle, which makes
them go for homosexuality,” he said. “We work to reduce the craving at the
deeper levels. one you do that, your desire to have sex or excessive sexual
indulgence is gone.”
At events, Mr. Modi often
shares the dais with Baba Ramdev, who presides over an ayurvedic medical empire
and has preached against influences he describes as foreign, among them the
English language, chemicalpesticides and fertilizers. Mr. Naik, the
yoga minister, himself learned yoga through the R.S.S., and said he hoped that
the widespread practice of yoga would lower rates of violent crime.
“You see these rapes
happening, all these bad habits. When he is doing something positive, the bad
will be out of him,” he said.
As for government
workers, Mr. Naik said, they will become more productive and less corrupt.
“There will be a definite change in the way the bureaucracy functions,” he
said. “When they are thin, all their energy will go into producing better work.
There is no need to do it forcefully, once we have put them on the right path.”
Last week, that process
seemed likely to be a long one. At the morning session recommended for
bureaucrats, the instructor issued a series of staccato commands: “Touch the
nose to the toes! Open the knees! Don’t raise your buttock! Stick the buttock
to the floor! Stick the buttock to the floor!” His students assumed expressions
of intense concentration, apparently focused on not tipping over.
Kuldip Kumar, 38, a clerk
in the administration of All-India Radio, gave a little smirk when asked why he
had attended the practice session, his first in 25 years.
“There is a stick hanging
over all of us,” he said. “When the prime minister comes, if officials do not
show up, of course it is bad for their career. The attitude is, we have to beat
them with a stick to get the job done.”
Others, filing out, said
they had been inspired by the asceticism of Mr. Modi, who famously kept to a
nine-day religious fast throughout a jam-packed visit to the
United States last fall. (“Even Obama had to bow down when he saw Modi so
energetic,” one of them said.)
Shiv Visvanathan, a
sociology professor, said many of Mr. Modi’s most prominent initiatives as
prime minister, like the national cleanup campaign known as “Swachh Bharat
Abhiyan,” involved asking citizens to look within themselves and change their
habits.
“He is looking for a new
kind of cultural revolution,” Dr. Visvanathan said. “I like the comic part of
it — the fat cops, the bureaucrats, doing exercise. Here is India, getting fat
on hamburgers and milkshakes. Modi is the Benjamin Franklin of India in many
ways.”
Bal Mukund Singh, the
yoga instructor, ended the class by urging his students to become Hanuman, the
monkey god, and then watched as they dispersed to the offices where they would
spend their days handling dusty file folders and eating fritters. When they
were out of sight, he checked off the characteristics he had observed, things
like “big tummy, rigid body, less flexibility, stress, tension,
depression, diabetes.” Still, he said cheerfully, these
are good days.
“They heard it on TV and
they are running toward the yoga,” he said. “The prime minister is the king. If
the king does something, that is very effective. And this time, our king is
doing yoga.”
Suhasini Raj contributed
reporting.
