Yoga heritage: don’t even think about stealing it, says Indian government
The Guardian June 8, 2010
“If your preferred yoga style is among the former you could find yourself on the wrong side of an effort to define what constitutes the millennia-old …” Read the Full Article
Comments:
It is interesting how India feels a need to try to stake their claim on yoga by cataloging videos of the poses. I did not know that anyone ever doubted yoga’s heritage. Certainly no one I have talked to.
On one hand I think it is great that they are cataloging what they think are the pure poses. I would only suggest that they think of it as a cataloging of ‘yoga today’. Yoga changes every minute. Our individual and collective understand of yoga practices are always in a state of change. Imagine if this videograph project had been done 100 years ago. It would be so cool to look back at what people thought of yoga 100-years back!
On the other hand it does seem to be segmenting our the asanas as being the main practice of yoga, which is not the case. There are so many practices of yoga that one could not comprehend how to catalog them all. Perhaps this focus on the physical is an influence of the west, or perhaps it is the litigiousness attitude that the west has shared.
Regardless of how this came about, it will be interesting to see how the videographs are used in the future. Perhaps Google can help them post these resources on the web!
