Ancient Indian Tradition—Or Twentieth-Century European Export?

Ancient Indian Tradition—Or Twentieth-Century European Export?

Our contemporary physical yoga practice has often been sold as a 5,000-year-old Indian tradition—unspoilt and unbroken. That it might be otherwise would hardly have occurred to me when, in early 1999, I travelled to India and searched for a guru.I’d just quit a job as a management consultant in Germany to spend the winter in Goa, a former Portuguese colony (as the enduring names of places and people attest) that now comprises the smallest of the…