Times Now
August 1, 2026
Vivekananda carried Vedanta to Chicago in 1893. A century on, a buyer in Delhi purchases the same philosophy back, condensed into a paperback and priced at a considerable mark-up.
'Think Like a Monk' landed in India in September 2020 at number one on the bestsellers lists in India. Its author, Jay Shetty, was born in London and works out of Los Angeles. The book condenses what its publisher calls the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads, texts composed somewhere between 800 and 400 BCE, into daily practice, and it arrived on Indian shelves via HarperCollins India after Simon & Schuster bought it in New York. A buyer in Delhi was purchasing Sanskrit philosophy back, at a mark-up, in an American accent.
That is not a scandal. It is the closing of a loop that has been turning for more than a century, and Indians held the pen at both ends of it.
The First Export Was a Choice
Swami Vivekananda carried Vedanta to Chicago in 1893, and the traffic never stopped. What travelled, though, was already being reshaped by the people sending it. Mark Singleton's 'Yoga Body' documents how modern postural yoga took form in the early twentieth century as a fusion of European gymnastics and selected hatha principles. In medieval hathayoga, asana was subordinate to breath work, purification and concentration. It was Indian reformers, Shri Yogendra and Swami Kuvalayananda among them, who built posture-led systems shaped by Western science, medicine and the international physical culture movement.
Nobody stole anything at this stage. India was the co-author of its own repackaging, and had good reasons: a colonised country presenting its inheritance in terms the coloniser would respect.
Then Came the Stripping
The second stage removed the framework. In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn founded a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts and built a programme drawing on Zen, hatha yoga, vipassana and Advaita Vedanta, then presented it in entirely secular terms. 'Full Catastrophe Living' followed in 1990. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is now prescribed by physicians, taught in militaries and run inside corporations.
The gain was enormous. Millions who would never enter a temple or a Buddhist centre encountered contemplative practice. The loss is harder to see and worth naming. Traditions that carried ethical obligations arrived stripped of them, leaving technique without the demands the technique was built to serve. Ron Purser coined McMindfulness for the result, and critics have pointed out the awkward consequence: a practice originally aimed at cutting through illusion now helps people tolerate conditions that might otherwise be worth changing.
The Return Journey
The loop closed in the 1980s and after. Deepak Chopra, an Allahabad-trained physician working in America, has published more than ninety books. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a physics graduate of the same university, took transcendental meditation to the Beatles. The global yoga industry is now valued at roughly 88 billion dollars with some 300 million practitioners, a majority of them Indian.
India has embraced the returning product with real enthusiasm, and a certain amount of nationalist feeling attaches to reclaiming it. What comes home, however, is not what left. It carries positive thinking, the pursuit of self-optimisation, and the assumption that a spiritual practice should make you more effective on Monday.
The original texts are less accommodating. The Gita is a conversation about duty conducted on a battlefield by a man who does not want to fight. Advaita proposes that the self you are working so hard to improve is not finally real. Neither idea shortens well.
What sold was the part that fitted in a paperback. What stayed behind was everything the paperback had no room for.
https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle/books/how-indian-spirituality-was-repackaged-and-sold-back-as-self-help-article-155212203
No comments:
Post a Comment