Awake: The Life of Yogananda – A review
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On his recent tour of the United States, Prime Minister Narendra Modi joked during an address to members of the Congress that more people bend for yoga in the US than to throw a curveball. He followed it up by adding wryly that India had not yet claimed the intellectual property right on yoga. His words were met with rounds of appreciative laughter and applause.
If yoga is an American preoccupation today, then it is thanks to the pioneering work of the yoga guru and teacher, Paramahansa Yogananda. He propagated Kriya Yoga--the branch that emphasises the mastery of internal energy--in the first half of the 20th century that laid the foundations for yoga’s rapid and somewhat chaotic growth in the US.
For anyone practising yoga seriously or with more than a casual interest, the film, ‘Awake: The Life of Yogananda’, which released last Friday coinciding with the UN-declared ‘International Day of Yoga’ on June 21, is a must-watch. But it makes for interesting viewing even for those curious about yoga's worldwide appeal.
The film is scripted and cut like a documentary. It conveys the breadth of Yogananda’s work by taking us through the nuts-and-bolts of how a little-known ‘brown man’ from India, landing in the midst of strangers, managed to capture the imagination of an entire people, attracting much fame and praise, but also scandals and calumny.
Yogananda took his teachings to America at the start of the 1920s, a time when words such as ‘self-realisation’ were unknown in the West. Battling racism, ignorance-fuelled hostility to Yogic practices, and the lack of a spiritual vocabulary, Yoagananda managed to establish himself as a prominent public speaker and teacher.
The bulk of the film deals with how Yogananda did this, even as it weaves in the protagonist’s narration of his life story, by basing the screenplay on the iconic tome, ‘The Autobiography of a Yogi’.
Dramatised re-creation of his early years and youth are juxtaposed with archival photo and video footage from the Self-Realization Fellowship, the Los Angeles-headquartered organisation Yogananda founded. The narration is interspersed with interviews of academics, prominent yoga teachers and new age gurus such as Deepak Chopra and the lay and monastic followers of Yogananda, who discuss his contributions to Yoga.
The film builds for us the story of his childhood and the growing-up years of 'Mukunda Lal Ghosh', as Yogananda was known before he took his monastic vows, his meeting with his guru, Sri Yukteswar Giri, who would initiate him into Kriya Yoga and eventually send him to the US to spread his teachings there, and his eventual rise as one of the most well-known spiritual masters of the 20th century.
It places Paramahansa Yogananda in the lineage of famous masters in the Kriya Yoga tradition starting with Mahavatar Babaji and Lahiri Mahasaya, guru to the boy Mukunda’s parents, and Sri Yukteswar. It leaves us in no doubt from the first frame to the last that we are in the presence of someone extraordinary. We are told right in the opening sequence, in Yogananda’s words, that he was ‘aware’ right from the time he was in his mother’s womb (in the voice of Anupam Kher, who plays Yogananda competently, if in slightly accented English).
Soon after that we find out that young Mukunda was a ‘spiritual prodigy’ much as there are prodigies in other fields. The film proceeds like this, till Yogananda’s death in 1952, which he had anticipated, after having recited a poem on India at a public event in Los Angeles.
‘Awake’ picks up pace towards its close, where we see how Yogananda shifts into a higher gear of work in the last phase of his life. It shows him experiencing intense states of 'samadhi', in the midst of which he undertakes the work of ‘writing his thoughts’ including the spiritual classic, ‘The Autobiography of a Yogi’, which would catapult him into the league of masters, also omnipresent on book shelves.
'Awake' is well-made and interestingly told. But its one drawback is that it does not take us inside the tale of Yogananda’s personal spiritual development--in many ways the most important aspect of the story.
The film is not burdened by a hagiographic tone, but neither is there any critical evaluation of his work. In fact, it doesn't go anywhere in that direction. The makers, directors Paola Di Florio and Lisa Leeman, and producer Peter Rader, are quite clear about this being a big thank-you note to a master who gave his life in a very public way to taking yoga to millions who may have never known of it, but for him.
(Aarthi Ramachandran is a Bangalore-based journalist and Yoga practitioner. She is the author of Decoding Rahul Gandhi)
