Viral Post Warns West Is Erasing Hindu Roots From Yoga and Meditation

A viral post circulating this week made a pointed accusation: brands like Lululemon and Alo Yoga have systematically stripped Sanskrit terms, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and Bhagavad Gita references from yoga, repackaging a millennia-old Hindu spiritual practice as a secular fitness product. The post predicted Ayurveda would follow the same path. Within hours it was spreading across yoga communities from Mumbai to Minneapolis, not just as outrage but as a prompt for a harder question: what does crediting those origins actually look like in a Tuesday evening vinyasa class?

Nadia Gilani, the British Pakistani yoga teacher and author of the 2022 book The Yoga Manifesto, put the problem precisely: "Appropriation in yoga is the word Namaste on your T-shirt, it's wearing endless Mala beads. It's tattoos of Sanskrit and Hindu gods and pictures of handstands on beaches by bendy almost-always able-bodied people." The issue is not the use of Sanskrit itself but the way it is severed from meaning, deployed as aesthetic decoration, and then sold at a $25 drop-in rate while the tradition it came from receives no acknowledgment.

Susanna Barkataki, founder of the Ignite Yoga and Wellness Institute and author of "Embrace Yoga's Roots," teaches in the Sri Adi Shankaracharya lineage and has spent two decades building a concrete framework for what honoring those origins looks like in practice. Her book recommends that teachers add a spiritual lineage acknowledgment at the start of every class, in the same way a land acknowledgment precedes public events. The gesture is small; the signal is not. "As an Indian woman living in the U.S. I've often felt uncomfortable in many yoga spaces," Barkataki has written, describing the particular alienation of watching one's own tradition sold back as a luxury product, the Om symbol sometimes hung backward on a studio wall.

Shreena Gandhi, a religious studies professor at Michigan State University who co-authored a widely circulated paper with Lillie Wolff, wrote: "please do take a moment to look outside of yourself and understand how the history of yoga practice in the United States is intimately linked to some of the larger forces of white supremacy." The framing is contested, but the practical implication is not. Teachers and studios that have changed their approach have done so not by abandoning the practice but by citing it.

Western brands have frequently marketed yoga as secular, universal, and detached from any religious or cultural lineage, a move that erases its Vedic and Dharmic context. This commodification reinforces a long history of colonial extraction: decontextualizing a cultural system, sanitizing it for Western tastes, and profiting from it while the communities from which it originates are excluded.

What citation looks like in each context is where the specifics matter. In a class setting, Barkataki's model means naming the lineage, pronouncing Sanskrit correctly, and teaching some of the eight limbs beyond asana. In teacher training curricula, it means assigning the actual Yoga Sutras and Gita rather than paraphrasing them, and paying Indian scholars and lineage holders to contribute to the program rather than mining their knowledge for free. In studio marketing, the distinction is between "mindful movement" copy that never once mentions India and class descriptions that name the tradition directly. In product branding, a label invoking Sanskrit or Hindu imagery owes customers context, not just aesthetics.

The fear around Ayurveda mirrors the pattern already seen in yoga: appropriation follows a familiar script of decontextualization, rebranding, and eventual biopiracy. The viral post framed the problem as erasure. The practitioners doing the harder work frame it as citation: who gets named in the room, whose texts are assigned, whose labor gets compensated, and whose story gets told when a teacher steps to the front of the mat.