MOSCOW: It looks like one of the countless yoga classes that you would find in every nook and corner of India except for a couple of things. First, none of the students are Indian. Second, the instructor is not saying the usual words.
“Glookboki Dokh,” he says, as twelve students around him raise their arms up, put their heads down and take a deep breath. “Glooboki Vidokh,” is the code word for the opposite — they exhale and bring down their arms.
One may have expected it to catch on a lot earlier, considering the cultural ties that India and the Soviet Union have had, but Russia's appetite for yoga is increasing. While numbers still cannot be compared to the United States where an estimated eight per cent of the population practice yoga, the pace is picking up. A report in Russian media outlet Russia Today estimated that there were over 90 yoga studios spread across the country.
The root of all this can be traced down to the Jawaharlal Nehru Cultural Centre of the Embassy of India in Moscow, which has been offering yoga classes to Russians for more than two decades now. Manish Vardhan Acharya, the current instructor here, estimates that more than 500 Russians have studied yoga during his two years in the country. Many of them have even gone on to start their own yoga studios.
“I teach eight sessions a day in Moscow, here and at the Embassy School,” he says. “Then, during the weekends, we have programmes in other cities — Kazan, Astrakhan, Krasnodar. There, I get over 35-50 students for weekend classes. Here it's much more. Every session at the JNCC will have 10-20 students.” His students include all sorts of people — there are students, a physical education teacher, a doctor, even an opera singer.
Lena Lans is 49 and had been hearing about yoga for a while, from friends, many of whom had learnt it and turned into teachers. She found the JNCC while browsing online. “I was adamant that I wanted to learn it from an Indian teacher, which is why I came to JNCC,” she says. “I initially came for some respite from knee and shoulder pain that I had been experiencing. But now, I have been learning it for a while and I'm thinking of teaching it once I have had enough expertise.”
Alexei Kykholev's association with yoga started much earlier. He initially started learning in 2002 at the JNCC but quit after the then-instructor returned to India. He speaks not only of how much yoga has become popular in the country, but also of how it has morphed into a commercial activity. “Many Russians sell things in the name of yoga,” he says. “There are all kinds of yoga here that people in India would not have heard of. There is something called modern yoga, which is a mix of exercises, aerobics and yoga. But that's really not yoga, just something they made up.”
Kykholev, though, admits that more and more Russians have started taking it up. “There are yoga societies in Russia now and they organise something called yoga parks, where people come together and perform yoga in parks. These kind of initiatives are becoming more and more popular."