It is ironic that the form of yoga packaged and popularized by the West is being put forward as a gift to the world from ancient India

Cricket, a wise man has quipped, was an Indian game the British discovered. Following this, it could be said that yoga is a series of postures for physical exercise conjured up in the United States of America that Indians have lately discovered. The purist and the scholar will arch their eyebrows at such a statement, and will point to an ancient text, the Yoga Sutra, written by Patanjali sometime in the third century AD. This text consists of 195 opaque aphorisms whose meanings are obscure to all save the specialist Sanskritists. There are other claims made by those who champion the ancientness of yoga. One claim says that yoga existed in pre-Vedic times: witness the figure of a man on some Harappan seals seated in the lotus position - a basic position for the practitioners of yoga. Another claim draws attention to the use of the word, yoga, in the Rig Veda, the oldest Sanskrit text dating back to circa 1500 BC. An adjunct to this claim is the occurrence of the word in a few passages of the early Upanishads. The ancient lineage of yoga as a form of praxis to fuse together the mind and the body is indeed vast and seemingly indisputable.

Yet, some significant questions refuse to go away. That figure on the seal of the Indus Valley Civilization - is he just sitting in a way that some people do, or is he practising padmasana? More importantly, and this concerns the various Sanskrit texts from the Rig Veda to the Upanishads to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, how many people actually read the texts and deciphered their meaning, given that they were written in Sanskrit and often contained very complex meanings? Some of them do not even mention the postures associated with the practice of yoga. Yoga as a series of postural exercises and techniques of breathing - asana and pranayam - is of relatively recent origin going back to the 19th century, which caught on in the US with the growth of awareness regarding lifestyle ailments and of alternative modes of treatment and management of these ailments. The cult of yoga in the US and in the West 'democratized' yoga by moving it beyond the sacred preserve of a select and initiated band of high-caste and Sanskrit-knowing Hindu males. It is this 'democratized' yoga that has caught on in urban India thanks to teachers like B.K.S. Iyengar and mushrooming centres of the Bihar School of Yoga.

The funny and ironic thing is that the government of Narendra Modi is trying to position the yoga of postural exercises and breathing techniques as a great contribution of ancient India to the world. Mr Modi and his ilk are clearly oblivious of what the ancient Sanskrit texts - from the Rig Veda to the Yoga Sutra - meant by yoga and its profound philosophical implications. Thus a 19th-century construction packaged and popularized in the West is being put forward as a gift of ancient India. It is funny to think of the 19th century as "ancient India". Perhaps this is no reason for lament, since more risible claims have been made on behalf of ancient India.