How have Indian yoga and Indian yogis fared in the midst of the yoga industry’s many reinventions and expropriations of their own traditions? On the one hand, India is taking steps to safeguard the intellectual property of its yoga traditions. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) is being developed as a tool “to prevent foreign entrepreneurs from claiming Indian traditions as novel, and thus patenting it.” One of the catalysts for the TKDL was the patent granted by the United States in 2004, on a sequence of twenty-six asanas, to the Indian-American yoga celebrity Bikram Chaudhury. While the TKDL is seeking to protect India’s yoga traditions (or at least the selected traditions it considers to be yogic), the survival of its yogis is another matter. Are India’s yogis an endangered species? In fact, the Nath Yogis, India’s most visible modern-day yogi order, have been making a comeback of sorts, in no small part by reinventing themselves to conform to the expectations of their newest benefactors, urban merchants and industrialists who have seen fit to funnel some of their newfound wealth into Nath Yogi institutions. This has particularly been the case in the Shekhavati region of eastern Rajasthan, where the yogis are once again well fed, well dressed, and well housed. In return, the Nath Yogis are building ashrams, which they place at the disposition of their benefactors who come there for vedic rituals, devotional singing, and other activities that would have been utterly anathema to Nath Yogis at any other time in their history.

From David Gordon White’s Sinister Yogis, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 248.