The issue is not who practises yoga, but how the global wellness economy transforms historically situated practices into depoliticised commodities, erasing lineage, labour, and conflict. A structural analysis of decolonising yoga, wellness cultural appropriation in the UK, and the certification economies that sustain it.
Walk into almost any yoga studio in London, Manchester or Edinburgh, and you will encounter a strikingly uniform aesthetic: whitewashed walls, a curated playlist hovering between ambient electronica and vaguely South Asian instrumentation, a rack of branded leggings, and a teacher who completed a two-hundred-hour certification in Bali or Rishikesh.
The class may open with a mispronounced Sanskrit invocation. It will almost certainly close with a murmured Namaste. The cost will be somewhere between twelve and twenty-five pounds. None of this is accidental. It is the output of a global wellness industry now valued at over 370 billion US dollars worldwide, with the UK studio market alone worth approximately 895 million pounds.
Conversations about cultural appropriation in yoga tend, in British public discourse, to default quickly to questions of individual ethics. Is it wrong for a white person to teach yoga? Should studios display the Om symbol? May a non-Hindu chant in Sanskrit? These questions are not without weight, but they are insufficient. They individualise a structural condition and convert systemic critique into personal etiquette.
The more pressing analytical question is not who practises yoga, but what happens to a socially embedded knowledge tradition when it is absorbed into a market architecture designed to produce scalable, brandable, exportable lifestyle experiences — and who bears the cost of that absorption.
Anti-racist yoga is not a gentler style of class. It is a critical framework for reading the political economy of the global wellness industry. It examines how historically situated, philosophically dense South Asian knowledge traditions are turned into depoliticised commodities, erasing lineage, labour, and conflict. The question it poses is not one of personal entitlement to practise, but of structural extraction: who credentials, who profits, who brands, and whose knowledge — and whose consent — was required to make the entire enterprise possible.
A Colonial Genealogy of Western Yoga
Any analysis of yoga’s commodification in the UK must begin with the colonial relationship between Britain and the Indian subcontinent. Under British rule, yogic and Ayurvedic practices were actively suppressed. Colonial administrators classified them as primitive, heathen or dangerously seditious. Ayurvedic physicians faced deliberate persecution; yoga practitioners were marginalised within an imperial knowledge hierarchy that elevated European medical and scientific frameworks as universal standards. These were not incidental prejudices. They were constitutive features of a colonial epistemology that sought to delegitimise indigenous knowledge systems to consolidate political and economic control.
The reintroduction of yoga to Western audiences in the twentieth century followed a route shaped entirely by these power asymmetries. Key intermediary figures—some Indian, some European—adapted the practice for Western consumption, often by stripping out its philosophical, devotional and ethical dimensions and foregrounding the physical postures, or asana. Indra Devi, a Latvian-born woman who studied under T. Krishnamacharya during the British Raj, is frequently credited with popularising yoga in mid-century America. She did so by removing what she perceived as inaccessible spiritual content and marketing yoga as a practice compatible with Western sensibilities. This pattern—extraction, simplification, repackaging—would become the dominant logic of the global yoga industry for the next eighty years.
What matters here is not a moralistic condemnation of Devi or her successors. It is the recognition that the conditions under which yoga entered Western markets were already shaped by colonial extraction. The knowledge travelled, but the political context in which it was embedded did not. And the communities that had preserved that knowledge, often at enormous personal and collective risk, were rarely the primary beneficiaries of its commercial expansion.
The Certification Economy: Credentialing Without Lineage
One of the most significant structural mechanisms through which yoga has been commodified is the teacher-training and certification economy. The Yoga Alliance, a US-based nonprofit, has become the de facto global standard for yoga instruction. Its two-hundred-hour and five-hundred-hour certification programmes are now the minimum credentials expected by most studios, gyms, and retreat centres worldwide. The UK yoga sector follows this model almost without exception.
The problem is not that training exists. It is that the certification economy functions as a credentialing system detached from lineage, depth or cultural accountability. A two-hundred-hour programme can be completed in as little as a month. Some programmes, marketed aggressively online, compress their hours into even shorter periods. The emphasis falls heavily on anatomy, sequencing, and class management, skills oriented towards the market, not the tradition. Philosophy modules, where they exist, are often reduced to a cursory survey of Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras or a brief overview of the eight limbs, with no requirement that the trainee engage seriously with the epistemological, ethical or devotional frameworks from which these texts emerge.
This creates a structural paradox. Western certification bodies determine who is qualified to teach a tradition whose own knowledge systems operate on entirely different principles of transmission: long apprenticeship, embodied relationship with a teacher, and a concept of readiness that is not measurable in training hours. These institutions effectively define who counts as an expert, marginalising lineage-based or tradition-rooted teachers who may have decades of practice but no Yoga Alliance registration. South Asian teachers working in the UK have described being tokenised, sidelined or held to a different standard of authenticity. In contrast, white teachers with commercially recognised credentials are platformed as authoritative voices.
The certification economy, in short, is not a neutral quality-assurance mechanism. It is a market infrastructure that privileges commodifiable, standardised, exportable knowledge and systematically undervalues another kind: situated, relational, culturally embedded.
Branding, Aesthetics and the Visual Regime of Wellness
The commodification of yoga is not only economic; it is aesthetic. The visual language of the global wellness industry operates as a disciplinary regime in its own right, determining who is visible, what counts as desirable, and which bodies are authorised to represent the practice. The dominant image of yoga in British commercial culture, replicated across Instagram feeds, studio websites and athleisure advertising, is overwhelmingly thin, white, female, able-bodied and middle-class. This is not a reflection of who practises yoga. It is a branding decision.
Brands such as Lululemon, which has faced sustained criticism for its use of Sanskrit-derived terminology in product marketing, exemplify the extractive logic at work. Sacred or culturally significant language is repurposed as a lifestyle signifier, detached from its referential context and deployed as brand identity. The Om symbol appears on water bottles. Mantras become slogans on T-shirts. Sanskrit words are misspelt on leggings. These are not trivial commercial choices. They are acts of semiotic extraction: the cultural signifier is valuable precisely because it connotes depth, tradition and alterity, but the conditions under which it acquired that value, centuries of philosophical development, colonial suppression, diasporic preservation, are erased in the transaction.
For South Asian practitioners in Britain, this visual and semiotic regime is not merely alienating; it is structurally exclusionary. When the dominant aesthetic of a practice derived from your own cultural inheritance centres bodies and identities that do not resemble yours, and when the language of your own spiritual tradition is more likely to appear on a pair of yoga pants than in a serious pedagogical context, the message is clear: you are welcome as a consumer, but not as an authority.
Intellectual Property, Biopiracy and the State Response
The commodification of yoga has also played out at the level of intellectual property law, in ways that reveal the deeper structural stakes. By the early 2000s, the Indian government had identified a growing pattern of what it termed biopiracy: the patenting, by individuals and corporations in the Global North, of knowledge derived from traditional Indian medical and spiritual systems. By 2007, over 130 yoga-related patents had been traced in the United States alone. These included patents on specific sequences of postures, breathing techniques and therapeutic applications—knowledge documented in Sanskrit texts for centuries.
India’s response was the creation of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, established in 2001 as a collaboration between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Ministry of AYUSH. The TKDL systematically transcribed knowledge from Ayurvedic, Unani, Siddha and yogic texts into a format legible to international patent examiners. By 2010, the database had recorded approximately 1,500 yoga postures and nearly 4,800 yoga-related entries. It has been made available to sixteen patent offices worldwide, including the UK Intellectual Property Office. It has been credited with the rejection or withdrawal of over two hundred patent applications based on Indian traditional knowledge.
The TKDL is a remarkable achievement, but it also reveals a troubling asymmetry. India was compelled to translate its knowledge into the classificatory language of Western patent systems to prevent that knowledge from being privatised by others. The defensive logic is necessary and effective, but it operates within a global intellectual property architecture that was not designed to accommodate communal, oral or tradition-based knowledge systems. The very act of protection requires a form of translation that risks reinforcing the epistemological hierarchy it seeks to challenge.
Decolonising as Structural Critique, Not Consumer Choice
The language of ‘decolonising’ wellness has become widespread in UK yoga discourse, but it is not always used with the structural precision the term demands. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang cautioned in their influential 2012 essay that decolonisation is not a metaphor: it refers specifically to the repatriation of indigenous land and life, and its casual adoption as a synonym for reform or diversification risks producing what they called ‘settler moves to innocence’—gestures that alleviate guilt without altering material conditions.
Applied to the wellness industry, this caution is instructive. A studio that hires a South Asian teacher, displays a land acknowledgement and stocks fair-trade incense may have improved its aesthetic politics, but it has not altered the market structure in which it operates. The teacher-training certification economy remains intact. The branding conventions remain intact. The extraction of cultural knowledge for commercial value remains intact. These are the structures that a serious decolonial critique must address.
Several South Asian yoga practitioners and scholars in the UK and the diaspora have articulated exactly this position. Kallie Schut, a British-born yoga teacher of Indian heritage, has argued that modern yoga has been built upon a legacy of colonialism and racial hierarchy, and that cultural appropriation in the industry is not a matter of individual ignorance but of systemic design. The podcast Yoga Is Dead, co-hosted by Tejal Patel and Jesal Parikh, has examined how capitalism, white supremacy and institutional certification intersect to marginalise South Asian voices within an industry derived from South Asian knowledge. These are not calls for individual behaviour change. They are structural analyses of an extractive economy.
What the UK Wellness Market Refuses to See
The British context adds a specific layer of historical obligation. The UK’s relationship to yoga is inseparable from its colonial history in South Asia. British rule actively suppressed the practices that now generate billions in revenue for Western wellness corporations. The communities that preserved those practices through colonial persecution, partition, and diaspora are disproportionately underrepresented in the UK wellness industry’s leadership, ownership and pedagogical structures.
This is not simply a question of representation, though representation matters. It is a question of political economy: who owns the studios, designs the teacher-training curricula, holds the intellectual property, and profits from the retreats, the apps and the branded merchandise, and who is positioned as the authority on a tradition that, in its country of origin, was never conceived as a commodity. These questions do not resolve themselves through better marketing or more inclusive Instagram campaigns. They require a reckoning with the material conditions under which cultural knowledge circulates in late capitalism.
The UK wellness market is currently valued at tens of billions of pounds. It is integrated into the National Health Service through social prescribing pilots, into corporate well-being programmes, and into a consumer lifestyle economy that treats self-care as both personal responsibility and market opportunity. Within this architecture, yoga is simultaneously positioned as ancient wisdom and modern product, as spiritual depth and fitness trend. The contradiction is productive: it allows the industry to trade on the prestige of tradition while operating entirely within the logic of the market — a logic whose hidden costs for workers and communities are rarely counted in the wellness balance sheet.
The Limits of Anti-Racist Yoga as Practice
The growing movement towards anti-racist yoga—trauma-informed classes, sliding-scale pricing, BIPOC-centred spaces, equity-focused teacher training—represents a necessary set of interventions. These initiatives create material improvements in access, safety and recognition, and they should not be dismissed.
But they should not be mistaken for structural transformation. Anti-racist yoga, as a practice, operates within the existing market. It offers an ethical alternative to mainstream studio culture, but it does not challenge the credentialing infrastructure, the distribution of profit, or the semiotic conventions that constitute the industry’s foundation. To decolonise yoga in any meaningful sense would require confronting these systems directly: rethinking who credentialises teachers, how lineage-based knowledge is valued, how profits are distributed to source communities, and how the visual economy of wellness is governed.
This is not to argue that individual practitioners or studios should stop trying. It is to insist that the critique must be proportionate to the scale of the problem. The global yoga industry is not a collection of well-meaning individuals who need better cultural education. It is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar market that has absorbed, repackaged and resold a living cultural tradition, and the communities from whom that tradition was extracted remain structurally marginalised within it.
Toward a Political Economy of Wellness
What is needed, then, is not more anti-racist yoga classes, though those may be valuable in their own terms. What is needed is a political economy of wellness: a critical framework that reads the industry not as a collection of consumer choices but as a market system with specific historical preconditions, specific beneficiaries, and specific costs.
Such a framework would ask not only who is included in the yoga studio, but who built the studio, who owns the brand, who wrote the curriculum, who holds the trademark, and whose knowledge was required—but whose consent was not sought—to make the entire enterprise possible.
This framework would take seriously India’s TKDL not merely as a patent defence mechanism but as a case study in the geopolitics of knowledge. It would examine the Yoga Alliance not merely as a professional body but as a gatekeeper whose standards determine global norms of credentialing.
It would read Lululemon not merely as a clothing brand but as a semiotic engine that transforms sacred language into commercial capital. And it would listen to South Asian practitioners in Britain not as diversity consultants but as critical analysts of an extractive system in which their own cultural inheritance has been commodified without their structural participation.
Anti-racist yoga is not a practice. It is a reading. And what it reads, when pursued with sufficient rigour, is not a failure of manners or a deficit of awareness. It is a global market built on colonial extraction, sustained by credentialing regimes and branding conventions, and resistant, by design, to the kinds of structural redistribution that genuine decolonisation would require.
Further reading:
These articles deepen the analysis developed in this essay, connecting the political economy of yoga and wellness to broader questions of commodification, cultural extraction, embodied autonomy and structural resistance across Rock & Art UK’s archive.
Cultural Appropriation vs. Appreciation: Where Do We Draw The Line? An anti-capitalist analysis of how commodification turns cultural heritage into marketable goods, and why the framing of ‘exchange’ obscures colonial power asymmetries.
The Politics of Pleasure: Why Female Pleasure Is Still Radical. On how consumer capitalism profits from bodily dissatisfaction and transforms the feminist demand for autonomy into a branding opportunity — the same logic that drives the wellness economy.
The Politics of Queer Joy: Pleasure as Resistance A critique of how corporate branding flattens radical pleasure and community into spectacle, with direct parallels to the co-optation of yoga’s spiritual vocabulary by the wellness market.
Oral Traditions as Resistance: Memory, Heritage & Identity How oral and embodied knowledge systems challenge institutional archives and colonial epistemologies — the same struggle that shapes the TKDL’s defence of yogic knowledge.
The Politics of Identity, Bodily Autonomy, and Wellbeing A structural reading of self-care as political terrain, arguing that mental health and well-being cannot be separated from the capitalist systems that produce distress.
The Hidden Costs of Hustle Culture: Are We Trading Well-being for Productivity? On how the commodification of time and labour shapes the wellness industry’s promise of restoration — a promise that leaves its structural causes unexamined.
Ecofeminism Today: A Rising Voice in Art and Activism Connects the extraction of cultural knowledge to ecological extraction, exploring how feminist and decolonial frameworks challenge both.
A Digital Renaissance: UK Digital Creatives in the Age of Activism How digital platforms reshape cultural activism and visibility — relevant to the ways South Asian yoga practitioners use online spaces to challenge the wellness industry’s dominant narratives.
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