The “yoga and cultural appropriation” debate took its current shape in the United States in 2008-2010, when the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) launched its “Take Back Yoga” campaign. The campaign argued that yoga’s Hindu spiritual heritage was being systematically excised from popular Western yoga marketing. The arguments were articulated principally by HAF co-founder Aseem Shukla and managing director Sheetal Shah, with response from Yoga Journal and from religious-studies scholar Andrea Jain of Indiana University. This article sets out the principal positions and identifies what each side gets right.
The HAF Take Back Yoga position
The campaign launched publicly in 2010, building on a 2008 Washington Post On Faith essay by Shukla titled “The Theft of Yoga”. The principal claims:
- Yoga has Hindu roots: the textual tradition (Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the Upanishads, the hatha-yoga corpus including the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and Gheranda Samhita) is unambiguously a Hindu tradition. The argument that yoga is generically Indian rather than specifically Hindu does not hold up against the textual evidence.
- The Hindu identity is being elided: commercial yoga marketing in the United States and Europe routinely describes yoga as “ancient”, “Indian”, or “spiritual” while avoiding the word “Hindu”. HAF argued that this is a deliberate marketing decision that strips the practice of its religious context to make it palatable to non-Hindu consumers.
- The practice has been commodified: the reduction of yoga to physical exercise, separated from the eight-limbed framework of yama, niyama, and meditation, distorts the practice it claims to represent.
- Acknowledgment is the remedy: the campaign asked not that non-Hindus stop practising yoga but that practitioners and businesses acknowledge yoga’s Hindu origins explicitly.
The Yoga Journal and scholarly response
The principal counter-arguments came from two sources. Yoga Journal, the largest English-language yoga publication, was directly targeted by HAF for the absence of “Hindu” in its editorial content; the magazine responded that “yoga” today is a fluid tradition with practitioners from many religious backgrounds and that imposing a single religious identity would alienate the broader community. The religious-studies critique, articulated most fully by Andrea Jain in her 2014 book Selling Yoga, made a different argument:
- Yoga has always been remade: the tradition has been continuously reformulated through its history. The hatha tradition of the 15th-17th centuries is not the yoga of Patanjali; the modern postural yoga of Krishnamacharya, Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois is not the hatha tradition of Svatmarama. There is no single original yoga to “take back”.
- The “Hindu” frame is itself modern: the concept of “Hinduism” as a single religious identity coalesced largely in the 19th century in response to colonial classification. Reading “Hindu” back into pre-modern yoga texts is historically anachronistic.
- The HAF position uses Christian categories: Jain argued that HAF’s claim to a single doctrinally consistent Hindu yoga in opposition to “secular” Western yoga adopts a Christian (specifically Protestant) framework for thinking about religion and practice.
Where both sides have a point
The debate is more illuminating when each side’s strongest version is taken seriously rather than dismissed:
- HAF is right that the Hindu identity has been elided: a non-Hindu reading Yoga Journal or attending a typical Western studio in 2010 could easily come away believing that yoga is generically “Eastern” or “spiritual” with no specific Hindu content. The avoidance of the word “Hindu” in commercial yoga is real and is not accidental.
- HAF is right that the textual tradition is Hindu: the Yoga Sutras, the hatha corpus, the Bhagavad Gita’s exposition of karma-jnana-bhakti yoga, and the Upanishadic sources are all Hindu texts. Calling them “Indian” without further qualification undersells what they are.
- Jain is right that the tradition has evolved: the modern postural yoga of the studio class is a 20th-century synthesis, not an unchanged ancient practice. Claims about “5000-year-old yoga” applied to vinyasa-flow classes are historically loose.
- Jain is right that “Hindu” is a complex category: the term covers a broad range of practices and beliefs, and claiming a single Hindu yoga as the authentic original requires more disambiguation than HAF sometimes provided.
The Indian government response
The Indian government has taken a position on the question of yoga’s identity that overlaps with but is distinct from HAF’s. The Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Homoeopathy), established as a separate ministry in November 2014, treats yoga as a heritage practice of Indian civilisation; this framing emphasises Indian origins without making the explicitly Hindu claim. The successful UN resolution declaring 21 June as International Day of Yoga (passed December 2014, first observed June 2015) used the Indian-civilisational frame and was supported by 177 co-sponsoring states. The Indian state’s position is therefore closer to “Indian heritage” than to “Hindu religious practice”, which is a distinction that matters in how the debate plays out in policy terms.
A defensible reading
For what it’s worth, the most defensible reading distinguishes two questions that the popular debate tends to conflate. The first question is historical: what tradition does yoga come from? The answer is unambiguous: yoga’s textual and contemplative roots are in the Hindu tradition broadly, with significant contributions from related traditions (Buddhism, Jainism). Naming the tradition is not optional. The second question is normative: what should non-Hindus do about this? Different practitioners can land in different places. Acknowledge the origin clearly, practise the form that suits one, and decline to claim “ancient authenticity” for whatever one ends up doing. A studio class that names the tradition (the asanas have Sanskrit names, the source texts are Hindu, the philosophical context is Hindu) is doing more justice to the practice than one that elides the context to seem maximally inclusive.
Common questions
Is it appropriative for non-Hindus to practise yoga?
HAF’s stated position is that practice itself is welcome; the concern is with mislabelling and with the commercial elision of the Hindu identity. Most Indian and Hindu commentators take this view: practise yoga widely, acknowledge what it is. The contested cases are commercial branding (yoga studios named after Sanskrit terms with no engagement with the tradition) and academic settings (university yoga programmes that are silent on the Hindu sources).
What about yoga in Christian or Muslim settings?
Both Christian and Muslim religious authorities have at various points objected to yoga practice by their adherents, on the grounds that the practice carries non-Christian or non-Muslim religious content. From the HAF perspective, these objections paradoxically support the underlying claim that yoga is intrinsically Hindu; from the secular-yoga perspective, they support the position that the practice can be detached from its religious content.
Does the debate matter outside the United States?
The “Take Back Yoga” debate was primarily a US conversation, shaped by US religious-pluralism dynamics. The equivalent question in the United Kingdom, Australia, and continental Europe has been less politically active, though similar arguments have been made by Hindu diaspora organisations in those countries. In India itself the question takes a different form, more often about secularism and Hindu identity within a Hindu-majority polity than about appropriation.
What does the academic mainstream say?
The academic mainstream in religious studies (Mallinson and Singleton, Andrea Jain, Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body, Karen Pechilis’ work on Hindu women teachers) tends to support the historical view that modern yoga is a 20th-century synthesis with substantial input from Indian traditions and from Western physical culture. The mainstream is generally sympathetic to acknowledging the Hindu origins of the textual and contemplative core, while careful about claims that modern postural yoga is straightforwardly Hindu.
One limitation worth noting
The debate as discussed in popular media has been more polarising than the underlying scholarly positions actually are. HAF and Jain agree on more than the public framing suggests (both accept that yoga is rooted in Indic religious traditions and that the modern form is heavily commercialised); they disagree on how to weight the historical evolution and on how to characterise the resulting tradition. A reader who only encounters the popular framing risks mistaking what is essentially a disagreement of emphasis for a disagreement of substance.
For background see the Hindu American Foundation Wikipedia entry and the published work of Andrea Jain at Indiana University.
