Girls practice yoga inside their school ahead of International Day of Yoga, in Ahmedabad, June 16, 2015. REUTERS/Amit Dave
The overwhelming endorsement and even co-sponsorship by so many nations at the United Nations, Dec. 11, 2014, of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for an International Day of Yoga is the culmination of a millennial process. In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, Modi declared: “Yoga is an invaluable gift of India’s ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body; thought and action; restraint and fulfillment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach to health and well-being. It is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and nature.” He went on to propose June 21, which marks the summer solstice, for “the date is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and has special significance in many parts of the world.”
In 1893 in Chicago Swami Vivekananda took America, then India, by storm with his ‘Hindu’ message of tolerance, the-world-as-one-family (vasudhaiva kutumbakam), and went on to pen his lectures on the ‘Royal Yoga’ (raaja-yoga), through which so many practitioners worldwide have come to perceive and relate to this discipline. Indeed, even percentage-wise, there are far more ‘native’ Americans obsessed with (hatha-) yoga, in our so many obligatory fitness centers, than are Indians.
Mircea Eliade, the Romanian-born University of Chicago professor, founded the new discipline called “history of religions” and edited a prestigious and still current comparative journal by that name. His early student years in India, which included a stint as a sannyasin (renouncer), resulted in a 1933 Ph.D. on yoga. Reworked and expanded into “Yoga: Immortality and Freedom” (1968), his oeuvre had an enormous international impact and not only within academic circles. It has inspired attempts by Jewish, Christian, Muslim and other scholars to (re-) discover the elements of yoga within their own tradition.
Like the summer solstice, IDY is a turning point where a once exotic, even eccentric, still largely misunderstood ‘science’ is moving in to assume center stage, no longer simply as body-mind exercises but as a cultural phenomenon about to influence all aspects of human life, just as it had till only quite recently in the Indian subcontinent regardless of caste or creed. As our sun nears its northern zenith, Indians of all stripes may well reflect on how yoga had inspired the intellectual, artistic, social and material life of their ancestors and delve deeper into its many complexities.
In ancient times, ambitious Indian kings, after a successful reign that typically included selfish competition and even bloody warfare, would hand over the realm to a worthy successor and renounce the world to devote themselves to reclusive yoga in Hindu, Buddhist or Jain monasteries. The young Narendra Modi, who left everything to disappear, wandering the land for a couple of years, seems to exemplify, for our own times, the converse attitude of infusing worldly and even international affairs with the all-embracing spirit of Yoga.
The Prime Minister’s choice of the world’s premier political platform and the universal solar symbolism to launch his initiative reveals a deep attunement to Vivekananda’s (unfinished) project in our “land of the free.” Arriving from an India shackled by what he called “the tyranny of the sages,” the Swami was so inspired by the American aspiration for ‘liberty’ that he composed an ode “To the Fourth of July,” celebrated it humbly back in his monastery with a makeshift star-spangled banner, and eventually willed himself to death, or perhaps immortality, on that very day. In our age of competing, increasingly predatory globalizations, this age-old technique of ‘stilling the (covetous) mind’ (yoga) is India’s gift to the whole world: Freedom to be one’s true Self.
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