Studying at the source: Ashtanga yoga tourism and the search for authenticity in Mysore, India

Based on a critical reading of the history of Ashtanga yoga, participant observation, and interviews with Americans attending the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in Mysore, this article explores the notion of authenticity within Ashtanga yoga itself and amongst yoga practitioners journeying to India hoping to find an authentic travel experience. Many of these tourists assume that the yoga experienced in Mysore is more genuine than that practiced in the West due to its location and groundedness in a distinct lineage. These yogis also desire a travel experience that matches their definition of the ‘real’ India, a narrow conception that spurns Western aesthetics, rejects technologies of modernity, and scoffs at local Indians who seek commodified relationships with tourists. Acknowledging that authenticity is ‘ultimately a discourse of power’ (Korpela, M. (2010). A postcolonial imagination?: Westerners searching for authenticity in India. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(8), 1299–1315. p. 1311), I suggest that the perceptions of authenticity that inform both the Ashtanga practice and the travel expectations of yoga tourists function to maintain Orientalist imaginings of a timeless, exotic, and mystical India defined in opposition to the materialistic and rational West. Consequences of these discourses include a rejection of the syncretic evolution of yoga, a denial of India's vibrant postcolonial present, and the construction of Otherness.