Transmission of Yoga in Contemporary India: The Lakulish Yoga University

Contemporary discussions of yoga in the West emphasize participation and market value: a 2022 Yoga Alliance study reported 38.4 million practitioners in the United States and expenditures exceeding $21 billion. Western yoga is concentrated in urban studios competing through style diversity, aestheticized bodies, and luxury or urban chic settings. This growth has fueled scholarship in the emerging field of Yogic Studies.

By contrast, with a few notable exceptions, research on yoga in India has remained largely historical or philological. Contemporary practice is often reduced to an instrument of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's soft power, obscuring the diversity of institutional and devotional contexts in which yoga is transmitted. My research addresses this gap through a case study of Lakulish Yoga University (LYU), founded in Ahmedabad in 2013.

In just over a decade, more than 180 yoga programs have been created in India, either in new private universities like LYU or in reinforced departments of existing institutions. These sites must negotiate competing demands: the regulatory framework of the University Grants Commission, the Hindu nationalist politics of the BJP, and the sectarian commitments of sponsoring religious organizations. Such pressures manifest in annual reports, curricula, hiring, and student experiences.

Based on fieldwork conducted at LYU in 2023 and 2025, my paper examines how the university mediates between devotional lineage, state politics, and processes of secularization and commercialization. LYU originated in a Śaivite community that revived the cult of Lakulish in the 1950s. Its founding guru, Swami Kripalvananda (1913–1981), first envisioned a yoga university; his successor, Swami Rajarshi Muni (1931–2022), realized this project with support from then Chief Minister Modi, who inaugurated LYU in 2013. Today, in the wake of Rajarshi Muni's death, administrators, swamis, faculty and students shape the university's evolving identity at the intersection of lineage, politics, and neoliberal reform.