Bikram Choudhury

If you have ever done "hot yoga," a fixed sequence of postures in a room heated to around 105°F, you have done a version of what Bikram Choudhury built into a global franchise from the 1970s. The 26-posture, 90-minute sequence is genuinely his, and genuinely popular. It is also a lineage whose founder lost a series of civil cases over sexual misconduct, left the United States rather than pay a multimillion-dollar judgment, and became the subject of a Netflix documentary, which is why most studios that teach his sequence no longer use his name. Both halves are the story.

The 26 postures

Choudhury was born in Kolkata in 1944 and, by his own telling, was a child yoga champion trained under Bishnu Ghosh (a brother of Paramahansa Yogananda).¹ He moved to the United States in the early 1970s and built a celebrity following in Los Angeles, codifying his method in Bikram's Beginning Yoga Class (1978): a fixed series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises, performed the same way every time over ninety minutes in a hot, mirrored room, with the teacher reciting a memorized script rather than demonstrating.²³ At its peak the empire ran to roughly 650 studios on three continents, with income flowing chiefly from twice-yearly nine-week teacher trainings.⁴

The cases, and the name

From 2013, multiple women filed civil suits alleging sexual harassment and rape at those trainings; Los Angeles prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges, and Choudhury has denied all wrongdoing.³ Two adjudicated outcomes reshaped the lineage. In 2015 a federal appeals court ruled that his posture sequence was not copyrightable, so anyone could teach it.⁵ In January 2016 a Los Angeles jury awarded his former head of legal affairs some $7.3 million, most of it punitive, finding the company had acted with malice after she was fired while investigating a rape claim.³ Choudhury left the United States rather than pay; a 2017 arrest warrant for contempt followed, and the business entered bankruptcy.⁶⁷ The 2019 Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator brought the accounts to a wide audience, and studios across the country spent money that year rebranding away from his name.¹ The Related coverage section links to the record.

What a hot yoga class is

The classic Bikram class is the 26-and-2: the same twenty-six postures and two breathing exercises, in the same order, for ninety minutes, in a room at roughly 104–105°F with high humidity, taught from a standardized script.⁵² Since the 2015 copyright ruling, anyone may teach the sequence, and since 2019 most independent studios market it as "original hot yoga" or simply "hot yoga" rather than "Bikram."⁵¹ Choudhury himself continues to run nine-week teacher trainings abroad.⁸

The lineage today

There is no longer a central Bikram organization in the United States; his former entities passed into the control of his judgment creditor and bankruptcy, and the studios that once carried his name now operate independently, most under new names.⁷¹ The practice, though, is everywhere. Hot yoga is a fixture of the studio landscape, and the 26-posture sequence remains its backbone. A listing that names Bikram Choudhury as its lineage is describing that specific hot sequence; many studios teaching the identical class now describe it as "hot yoga" instead, and this page explains why.

Related coverage

• Los Angeles Times, January 2016: the $6.4 million punitive verdict (atop compensatory damages) against Choudhury and his company.
• US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 2015: the ruling that the sequence is not copyrightable.
• The Guardian, November 2019: on the Netflix documentary Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator.
• UPI, May 2017: the arrest warrant for contempt and transfer of the business to his former lawyer.

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