Published on The South Asian Times.info
Not contented with making millions out of the popularity of Yoga, two Yoga teaching groups ‘Bikram Yoga’ and ‘Yoga to the People’, are now engaged in a court battle over the ownership of certain yoga postures.
“It is a shame that people should go to court for something that belongs to everyone”, commented Dr. Uma Mysorekar, a leading expert on Hindu religion who has been associated with Yoga teaching institutions for many decades. An executive of Hindu Temple in Queens, Mysorekar said, “Yoga is a spiritual science whose roots can be traced in the Hindu epic Mahabharat in which Lord Krishna prescribed the four forms of Yoga for his disciples.”
Many people including Dr. Mysorekar believe that postures of Yoga existed for centuries and have been practiced unrestricted by millions around the world.
According to court papers published on the website NYTimes.com, Bikram Choudhary, the millionaire founder of ‘Bikram Yoga’ filed a law suit in a California court against ‘Yoga to the People’ for copyright infringement. According to ‘Bikram Yoga’ website ‘Yogiraj Bikram Choudhary learned Yoga with the Bishnu Ghosh, the younger brother of Paramahansa Yogananda better known as the author of one of the most famous Yoga books of his time, “The Autobiography of a Yogi”. The website further claims, “Bikram is the most respected living Yoga Guru in the world. He devised the 26 postures sequence, which work irrespective of age groups. These 26 postures series have a profound healing power on your body and mind. Bikram has shown the light of healthy life to millions of people around the world.”
Now Bikram’s lawyers claim that he owns 26-posture sequence and the instructor’s dialogue.
It is not the first time that Choudhary has taken his competitors to court. The New York Times reported that Choudhury is in legal battle against two other studios for copyright infringement and he reached a monetary settlement with a Los Angeles studio in 2003.
According to writer Suketu Mehta the United States had issued 150 yoga-related copyrights. “In the United States alone, there have been more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks”, Mehta wrote in an article published in the New York Times and called Mr. Choudhary’s legal actions “a gross violation of the tradition of yoga.”
Yoga, popularized by Indian Gurus, musicians and proponents of holistic healing, has developed in to a hundreds of billions dollars industry in the West. It continues to be equally popular in hospitals, educational institutions, health and tourist resorts as a low cost alternative healing practice around the world.
At popular public places in India and elsewhere Yoga is freely practiced without any cost involved. Thousands of practitioners regularly attend mass yoga sessions organized by the controversial Yoga Guru Baba Ramdeo. Recently, a free Yoga for everyone was organized by a group in New York City’s Times Square.
Attempts of US teachers to patent traditional postures caused disbelief and anger in India, where it has been practiced for around 6,000 years. A few years ago huge outcry erupted in India against ‘stealing of India’s traditional knowledge’. In an effort to stop the piracy of health and spiritual traditions, the Government of India set up a team of about 200 scientists to identify all ancient yoga positions or asanas and register each one to stop "patent piracy”. According to an Indian newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, 600 asanas have been added to India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library developed by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is being made available to patent offices throughout the world so they can establish whether the claim is a genuine innovation or "prior art" from Indian systems of medicine.
