The Hindu ascetic as fitness instructor: Reviving faith in yoga

Indian ascetics have recognized both the boom in the fitness industry in India and the global market potential for yoga and ayurveda. Swami Ramdev's yoga programme on Aastha channel broadcast daily on Indian television and available to diasporic and Western viewers is dipping in to this new era of the fitness consumer. Drawing from available nationalist and cultural repertoires, this new-age fitness guru imagines a new India embodied in the discipline associated with the practice of yoga and offers yoga as the effective ‘Indian’ antidote to both modern lifestyles and modern pharmaceuticals. His cures for consumerism denote a longing to transform discourses of health into commoditized regimens of medicalized self-help. He prescribes yoga not only as a personal self-care and spiritual development regimen, but as a way to create a nation of fit/healthy citizens. Such television-mediated religiosity variously aids the ideological work of Hindutva both within and outside India.