How yoga ended up pretty British 😳

Sep 24

7 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

I'm going to be honest with you. After I wrote the email below, I asked ChatGPT to check it for spelling and grammar ONLY. Because my grammar is genuinely awful and I've made my peace with that 🫣. It checked it, then rewrote the whole thing and told me it had "improved" some parts.

So I went back and said "No fam, that's not what I asked. Just spelling and grammar please". It apologised, and then rewrote it again, this time in a much politer and more "accurate" way, with extra bits it had pulled off the internet. At this point I started wondering if it was just me 🤷🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️. So I said, bru, I've asked you repeatedly not to change anything and you keep doing it. I may have threatened to dump it like yesterday's newspaper. It apologised again and we sort of made up. You could say that I had to have a little chat with Chat 🤦🏾‍♂️

The reason I'm telling you this is that every version it gave me had the same pattern. Whenever I made a valid point, it added a "perhaps" or "some would argue" until the whole thing was so neutral it ended up agreeing with the very narrative I'm arguing against 😏.

What's below isn't generic yogic wisdom you'll find online or from an AI 🤖. It's my interpretation, for sure, but it comes from years of study, and my argument is that most of what we think of as yoga in the West, the poses and the philosophy, has been shaped far more by Western, and specifically British, ideas than we like to admit. But saying that is almost far too risky for Chat.

So it's me being "controversial". Not ChatGPT. But because Chat is scanning it to send back to me, a grammatically improved version, it still feels like it's the one doing the writing. Baffling. To me anyway.

I'll hold my hands up on one thing though 🧐. My first draft called yoga a Western "invention", and ChatGPT was right that it's too strong a word. Credit where it's due Chat. On the rest, though, I don't think it was giving me the balanced version of history, just the most common one, and the history, it turns out, backs me up rather more than it backs the chatbot.

Academics will argue with some of this, and on a couple of details they'd have a fair point. I've put those at the bottom, because I'd rather show you where the arguments are than pretend there aren't any. But the broad shape of it holds, and plenty of scholars have been saying it for years. They just don't use emojis.

Anyway, here's the blog ChatGPT didn't like 😬

Question from a student:

Why are the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras so much more common in yoga teacher trainings, yoga book clubs (yes that's a real thing) and yoga magazines than the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, which you say is the birth and origin of yoga? 🧐

My answer:

To answer that, you have to go way back to the dark days when the British ruled India. I'm going to simplify this, but here's something most people don't know. The first English translation of the classic Bhagavad Gita (back in 1785) was paid for by the East India Company (operating under the British crown 🇬🇧), and the preface was written by Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India. He basically recommended it because understanding Indian thought would make it easier for the British to rule India. In his own words, it "lessens the weight of the chain". That's not me being cynical. It's in the preface.

So in 1785, the East India Company (the Brits) edited the Bhagavad Gita. Not the words so much as the packaging: which text got translated, how it was framed, and a note at the front about how useful it would be for ruling India. And in 2026, ChatGPT edited me. Colonialism, still happening fam 😳😏

So the Europeans, especially the British, started analysing and translating yoga and Hindu texts in an effort to understand the culture. The more you understand a culture and give it room to breathe, the more control you maintain, thought the Brits 🇬🇧. And they found that the more religious-sounding the text, the more fascinated they were, and the more it looked like a religion, the more you could build temples around it and sell books about. And in some respects, the more structured and systematic a book was (like the Gita), the more the Brits thought they understood it, because it was, well, very British. They read these texts through a Christian lens, and although the two were massively different, they saw parallels. Respect the religions, they thought, and you get respect from the masses and you maintain your control.

Now, the Gita was already a big deal in India, with commentaries going back over a thousand years. The Brits didn't make it important. They made it THE important one, and read it their way. The Yoga Sutras are an even better example, because they'd largely faded from practice in India by the time Europeans picked them up and gave them a second life.

These books (specifically the Gita and the Yoga Sutras) were studied, commented on and spread throughout India and eventually into the West, and plenty of Indians went along with it, partly to look respectable and polite to the British and partly for their own reasons.

But a text like the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra was a different story. While the text itself was written down later than the Gita, the tradition it comes from places what it talks about (a conversation between the first yogi Shiva and his wife Devi/Parvati) before everything else in Indian thought.

At first glance the Tantra was also a little bit strange and written in a random poetic language. And the biggest problem I think is that you can't build a temple or a place of worship around the Vigyan Bhairav. There are no rituals to perform and no rules to obey, just 112 ways to turn your attention inward. You can't control people through it as easily as you can the Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita 😳

Generally, I see it as more of a self-help manual once you get past the mysticism and complicated nature of how it's written and presented. But it is just the most mind-blowing text, when approached from the perspective of finding and seeking rather than control. It didn't come to the West through the British. It snuck in through a Kashmiri teacher called Lakshmanjoo, via an American writer called Paul Reps, and later Osho.

Essentially, what we read about and learn in most teacher trainings is just what Western culture has come to accept as a definition of Indian culture, and a safe way for Indians to present themselves to the world. What we read about, and what most teacher trainings teach, is what the British thought was respectable, acceptable and polite. Kind of what ChatGPT is still doing today. Oh man, I love an irony.

This is why in our yoga teacher training, and especially in the advanced training, which I just so happen to have a link to below (cheeky nod 🤦🏾‍♂️), I try to deconstruct everything you think you know about yoga.

I don't tell you you're wrong, but I do tell you that what you know is just the starting point for a deeper exploration into what yoga really is. An exploration that will completely blow your mind 🤯. An example is what I said last week, that yoga is NOT the union of mind, body and soul. It just sounds good through a Western lens.

Yoga is not what you think. The Tantras (which for me help us understand what yoga really is) were buried, partly because rebellious Tantra offended Victorian sensibilities about as much as it offended the orthodox priests, and so it was ignored for a very long time.

In a nutshell, through the lens of the first student of yoga, Parvati, yoga is a journey of self-discovery where at every turn you're reborn, and more prepared for life because of it. It's about you and what's inside of you. Not what you can find in a temple or in the hands of a guru. A good teacher can point the way, but nobody is in control of you but you.

And I'm hoping that, if you have an open mind and an open heart, we can come to understand this together, so you can get a real feel for what yoga really is, and not what we've been sold.

I've put economical payment plans in place to make life easier for anyone interested in the advanced training, and previous teacher training students get a discount, so just get in touch.

Advanced Teacher Training

Namaskar,

Zahir

P.S. Notes for the Curious 🤓📚 (For those who want to dive a bit deeper into the historical weeds)

On the age of the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra: Textual scholars usually date the written manuscript of the VBT to around the 7th-8th century CE within the Kashmir Shaivism tradition. However, like most ancient Indian wisdom, the practices, oral transmission, and core view of reality pre-date their written form by a long, long shot. Meaning, when it was written down tells you far less than you'd think.
The "Protestant" Filter: Why did the British prefer the Gita and Sutras? European scholars viewed religion through a Christian lens. They wanted a single "Holy Book" with clear moral rules and a central philosophy. The Bhagavad Gita fit that mould perfectly. Tantric texts, which are experiential, non-institutional, and body-centric, defied that category completely and were viewed with too much suspicion (and fear) 😤
It wasn't just the British TBF: 19th-century Indian reformers (like Swami Vivekananda) also heavily promoted the Yoga Sutras to the West. They wanted to prove that Indian philosophy was just as rational, elevated, and respectable as European thought. In doing so, they leaned into the texts the West could easily digest.
Why "Union" isn't the whole story: In Classical Yoga (Patanjali), yoga actually means separation: isolating pure consciousness (Purusha) from the material world (Prakriti). In Non-Dual Tantra, you aren't "joining" two broken pieces together; you're realising you were never separate from the divine source to begin with.
Where the scholars would push back (and fair enough): Tantra as a whole wasn't anti-temple. The Shaiva Agamas, which are tantric texts, still shape temple ritual in South India today. My point is about the Vigyan Bhairav specifically, which is all practice and no institution. Not every Brit hated Tantra either. Sir John Woodroffe, a judge in Calcutta writing as Arthur Avalon, spent years defending it, and his The Serpent Power (1919) is still in print. And Hastings wasn't purely cynical. In the same letter he wrote that these texts would still be around long after British rule in India had ended. He was right about that too.