Legal Yoga

India is well known as the point of historical origin for the worldwide practices of yoga. In Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first speech at the UN in September 2014, he described yoga as ‘an invaluable gift’ of India’s ‘ancient tradition’. Yoga thrives in India today across a broad social spectrum, from dreadlocked, naked yogis meditating deep in the Himalayan mountains, to hot yoga studios scattered throughout India’s many vibrant urban centres. In the US alone, 36 million people practise yoga regularly and fuel an industry in America that is currently worth $16 billion annually. Yoga today is a phenomenon produced in a complex transnational relationship between the US and India. This global interconnection of histories, practices, cultures, and economies linking two liberal secular democratic superpowers is a difficult weave to unravel. This chapter selects one strand that joins both the US and India and reflects their engagements with yoga in the context of their political structures as secular democratic states. It focuses on moments when yoga has entered into the legal systems of these two countries, with particular attention to the one question that has risen in prominence in both contexts: what is the place of yoga in public education?