Has the Globalisation and Westernisation of Yoga Killed Yoga? 🤯

Zahir Akram
4 days ago
7 min read

The answer is… nah, not really 🤨

About 100 years or so ago, yoga was the preserve of sadhus and fakirs - holy men who lived on the margins of society. It was raw, ascetic, esoteric, and often dangerous to the body. The yoga that you and I know - the kind that fills studios from London to Los Angeles - was born not in some uninterrupted ancient lineage, but in a cultural exchange between East and West. Westerners travelled to India seeking mystical wisdom, while Indian teachers travelled West with a blend of tradition and adaptation that would transform both worlds.

So, let’s be honest. Your favourite yoga pose - whether it’s a graceful handstand or a birds of paradise (🤦🏾‍♂️ man, i've always hated that pose) - probably didn’t exist in its current form a hundred years ago. It’s a modern creation.

It’s like pizza. Domino’s pizza is inspired by Italian pizza, but ask an Italian if it’s “real pizza” and you’ll get the lip quivering, hand gesturing, mamma mia! But, however you slice it, people love it. Modern yoga is the same. It may not be traditional in the purist sense, but it’s delicious in its own right. Sort of. Know what I mean?

1. What Yoga Looked Like Before It Looked Like Yoga

The classical yoga most people reference begins with the classical text Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (circa 2nd–4th century CE). The author, the sage Patanjali mentions asana, but only as “a steady and comfortable seat.”¹ That’s it. No Sun Salutations, no inversions, no sequences and no drishti 😳😏

The yoga of that era was primarily meditative - an inward discipline of stilling the mind (citta-vṛtti-nirodha). Physical practice was utilitarian: the body was the vehicle, not the destination 🧘🏽‍♀️

Centuries later, between the 9th and 15th centuries, a more physical form of yoga emerged: Haṭha Yoga. In the big 3 yoga books of classical yoga - 1)Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, 2) the Gheraṇḍa Saṁhitā, and 3) the Śiva Saṁhitā, we start to see posture, breath, purification, and energy control - though still nothing resembling a modern vinyasa class.²

The Haṭha Yoga Project (HYP), a five-year academic study led by James Mallinson, shows that these early physical practices were part of ascetic traditions often linked to Tantric Shaivism, not mainstream physical fitness.³

So what we do today - the structured sequences, the studio choreography, the vinyasa flow - doesn’t stem directly from ancient texts. Instead, it’s the result of centuries of experimentation, exchange, and evolution.

2. Mysore: The Cradle of Modern Postural Yoga

The modern yoga revolution arguably began in Mysore, southern India, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Mysore Palace was home to a fascinating blend of cultures. The Wodeyar Maharajas were patrons of both Indian arts and Western physical culture. Within the palace complex stood not only a yoga śāla but also a gymnasium filled with ropes, ladders, and British gymnastics manuals.⁴ 🤸🏾

Enter T. Krishnamacharya, a Sanskrit scholar and yoga teacher employed by the Maharaja to systematise yoga education. Krishnamacharya’s innovations would lay the foundation for almost all modern yoga styles - including Ashtanga (Pattabhi Jois) and Iyengar Yoga (B.K.S. Iyengar).

But Krishnamacharya did not emerge from a vacuum. The Canadian scholar Norman Sjoman discovered in the Mysore Palace archives a 19th-century illustrated manuscript known as the Śrītattvanidhi.⁵

The Śrītattvanidhi offers a surprising glimpse into the evolution of modern yoga. Its name translates to something like The Illustrious Treasure of Realities, and buried within it is something far more revealing than poetry or scripture: 122 hand-drawn yoga poses, performed by a figure wearing nothing but a topknot and a loincloth.

Some of these poses will look familiar - lotus variations, foot-behind-the-head, even handstands. Others are more acrobatic, more gymnastic. And that’s not by accident.

Alongside this text was another palace manual: the Vyayama Dipika, essentially a guide to Indian physical training and calisthenics. Together, they reveal a culture of movement that didn’t see yoga as separate from physical education, performance, or even experimentation. It was a space where yogic tradition met athletic discipline - and something new began to take shape.

This is where the story of Krishnamacharya gets interesting. Scholar Norman Sjoman suggests that Krishnamacharya wasn’t copying Western gymnastics, but he was certainly influenced by the physical culture swirling around him in Mysore. Think sequencing, repetition, progressive strength - all things we now associate with modern classes.

In that sense, modern yoga isn’t just Indian. It’s also global. A collaboration. A response to colonial contact, creative curiosity, and evolving bodies.

Even scholars like Mark Singleton and James Mallinson agree that texts like the Śrītattvanidhi and Hathabhyasapaddhati mark a clear shift. This is when yoga begins to include things like rope-climbing, squat-thrusts, and other strength-based drills - all in service of building a body capable of deeper inner work.

Jason Birch and Jacqueline Hargreaves call the Śrītattvanidhi a “beautifully illustrated royal compendium.” And it is. But more than that, it’s a snapshot of yoga at a crossroads. A moment when asana was being explored, adapted, and shaped - not by Instagram influencers or Western studios, but by curious bodies within Indian palaces, training halls, and notebooks that had no idea they were laying the foundations for what would later become “yoga class.”

Above - Gajasana or Elephant pose in the Śrītattvanidhi.

Perhaps something similar to a modern-day PLANK?

3. The Global Body: How Yoga Modernized Itself

The early 20th century was a time of Indian nationalism and global curiosity. As Westerners arrived in India, India responded by reforming and re-presenting its spiritual culture. Yoga was part of that revival - rebranded as a source of national pride and global well-being.

Scholars such as Mark Singleton show that this period was crucial.⁷ Indian teachers began integrating modern anatomy, calisthenics, and Western ideas of health into yoga, while Western audiences projected onto it their hunger for spirituality and exotic wisdom. It was a meeting of needs: the East wanted validation; the West wanted meaning.

This merging also reshaped yoga visually. As shown in Debra Diamond’s Yoga: The Art of Transformation, early photographs of yogis circulated globally - part ethnographic study, part spectacle.⁸ The image of the flexible, serene yogi became a cultural export.

What had once been an internal, ascetic path became an external, aesthetic practice.

B.K.S. Iyengar himself, in his writings, acknowledges that his teacher Krishnamacharya constantly adapted the practice to the needs of the time - developing new postures, refining sequencing, and integrating props.⁹ When Iyengar brought yoga to the West in the 1950s, he framed it in a way Western bodies could understand: precision, anatomy, alignment, therapeutic logic. It was modern yoga’s global coming-of-age.

4. The Myth of the 84 Asanas

If you’ve ever heard that yoga has “84 classical postures,” you can thank a number of medieval texts - and modern misreadings of them.

Gudrun Bühnemann’s Eighty-Four Asanas in Yoga: A Survey of Traditions is the definitive work on this topic.¹⁰ Her research reveals that the number 84 is symbolic, not literal. Different texts depict different postures; none share a uniform canon. The Jogapradīpikā (18th century) lists 84 poses, but they vary widely from later traditions.¹¹

When modern yoga adopted this “84” motif, it wasn’t preserving a precise list - it was invoking a sense of sacred completeness. As we do with our Yoga Teacher Training manual (image below). In truth, modern yoga’s repertoire - hundreds of standing, inverted, arm-balancing, and transitional poses - far exceeds anything found in medieval sources. The myth, however, served a purpose: it gave modern yoga the aura of ancient legitimacy.

Images above from the Joga Pradīpikā - detailed in Gudrun Bühnemann’s book.

Below - Mayurasana. The Peacock pose. Proof that this pose is older than you think. Proof again that your favourite yoga pose wasn't a thing 100 years ago 😏😄

5. What the Research Says (As of 2025)

Recent scholarship continues to deepen - and complicate - the story. 🤯

The Haṭha Yoga Project (2015–2020) revealed that early textual descriptions of asanas are minimal - mostly seated or meditative - and that dynamic sequences appear much later.¹² Follow-up initiatives like the Light on Haṭha Project (2021–2024) are producing critical editions of core texts like the Haṭha Pradīpikā, revealing variations and interpolations over centuries.¹³

Jason Birch, a leading scholar of Sanskrit yoga manuscripts, has shown that the very term haṭha originally meant “force” or “effort,” not “sun-moon union” as later teachers popularized.¹⁴ The phrase “Haṭha Yoga” once implied a discipline of exertion - aligning perfectly with the physical intensity of early ascetic practice, not the serene flow of a studio class.

Even Elliott Goldberg, in The Path of Modern Yoga, notes that the proliferation of new asanas in the 20th century - many directly traceable to Krishnamacharya’s school - shows how alive and inventive yoga truly was.¹⁵

It wasn’t degeneration; it was evolution.

Summary -

In the video, I say that the yoga you do today? Yeah… it’s probably a complete Western invention.

I don’t mean the philosophy, the breath, or the inner work. I mean the style. The flows. The playlists. And definitely that fancy Bird of Paradise pose 🤮

But just because it grew in the West doesn’t mean it’s rootless. Maybe what we’ve built is a Western tree… But it’s still growing from ancient soil 🌴

Ultimately, what matters isn’t how old the pose is. It’s what it reveals about you when you practise it.

Oh - and is the Westernisation or globalisation of yoga killing yoga? No. Not at all.

If anything, it’s done the opposite.

Namaskar,

Zahir Akram

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References

Patanjali. Yoga Sutras. (trans. Edwin Bryant, 2009). Oxford University Press.
Mallinson, J. (2012) “Haṭha Yoga,” in Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Brill.
Haṭha Yoga Project. (2015–2020). SOAS University of London.
Sjoman, N. (1996). The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace. Abhinav Publications.
Singleton, M. (2010). Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford University Press.
Diamond, D. (ed.) (2013). Yoga: The Art of Transformation. Smithsonian Institution.
Iyengar, B.K.S. (1966). Light on Yoga. HarperCollins.
Bühnemann, G. (2007). Eighty-Four Asanas in Yoga: A Survey of Traditions. D. K. Printworld.
Jogapradīpikā (18th century manuscript).
Mallinson, J. et al. (2020). Findings from the ERC-Funded Haṭha Yoga Project. SOAS.
“Light on Haṭha Project” (2021–2024). JP-India.org.
Birch, J. (2011). “The Meaning of Haṭha in Early Haṭhayoga.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 131(4).
Goldberg, E. (2016). The Path of Modern Yoga. Inner Traditions.
De Michelis, E. (2007). “A Preliminary Survey of Modern Yoga Studies.” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 2(1).
White, D. G. (2012). Yoga in Practice. Princeton University Press.
Burley, M. (2000). Haṭha-Yoga: Its Context, Theory, and Practice. Motilal Banarsidass.
Mallinson, J. & Singleton, M. (2017). Roots of Yoga. Penguin Classics.