In a school hall in Dujiangyan — the home of Taoism — hundreds of young people, from all parts of the country, elbowed for mat space, to soak in from an authentic Indian master, the finer points of Yoga, which has become the new spearhead of India’s soft-power push in China.
From a stage, an energised and profusely sweating Yoga master Zubin Zarthoshtimanesh, hollers into his microphone: “This is not Kung Fu, but yoga,” upbraiding a visiting enthusiast for striking an angled pose that the ancient Indian art of holistic wellness did not permit.
Master Zubin’s words and tone, in matching decibels and pitch, were translated in real time into Chinese by Tian Yan, a qualified yoga instructor in her own right. This was Ms. Tian’s second outing with Indian masters in Dujiangyan. Last year too, in celebration of the first international yoga day, she had bridged the communication divide between the English speaking yoga gurus and fitness conscious students, more attuned to their native mandarin than a foreign tongue.
The crammed hall where master Zuben mesmerised his audience signalled Yoga’s surging mass appeal in China. In turn, it is also mushrooming as a lucrative industry, which could be set for an exponential rise.
“We have no dearth of students, but finding good teachers is a big problem,” says Wu Haixia. Ms. Wu is the general manager of the Sacred Yoga and Dance Company, in Chengdu, a major city in southwest China.
Her fitness enterprise already has 700 branches. Each class has 40-50 students, who, with little complaint are spending around 3000 Chinese Yuan (approximately Rs.30000) every month on their training.
Ms. Wu says that during the two day yoga festival, which concluded on Sunday, she hopes to forge business partnerships with some of the visiting Indian yoga teachers. “The presence and guidance of masters from India, the sources of yoga, would elevate our business to an altogether new level,” she gushes excitedly.
Back in the school hall, preparing for his class, Uday Bhosale of the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute acknowledges that Chinese students are being deprived of the real essence of Yoga. “Our job here is to explain the bio-mechanics of yoga; of the physiological and mental processes that are involved in asanas, so that greater awareness of the uniqueness of yoga is created among the students.”
He agrees that yoga in China is gender driven — with far fewer men than women practicing the art. “It is perhaps the way we market yoga, with women always, and in my opinion, wrongly, on the forefront,” he observes. Others such as Jin Xue Yang, a young student from a neighbouring province, already five years into Yoga, says that it is unfashionable to link yoga with masculinity in her region, so far.
“Many men think it is not a manly thing to do,” she observes, pointing to the skewed male attitude towards yoga that is dominant in the area.
Officials in Dujiangyan say that the insitutionalisation of a soft-power “package,” including powerful Indian and Chinese elements is required, to root stronger cultural ties between the two countries.
Zhao Wenqiao, a senior official of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in Dujiangyan, advocates the early establishment of a “cultural park” in India and China, which covers films, yoga, Tai chi and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) within its ambit. “Hopefully, in next year’s event, yoga would be supplemented by a film and food festival as well,” he hopes optimistically.
