Bikram Choudhury – a famed yoga guru for more than four decades who, in recent years, has been accused of multiple sexual assault and rape – seems like an unlikely blend of two celebrities: Harvey Weinstein and Osho. Like Weinstein, Choudhury headed an empire, wielded power over many young women and, under its vicious, heady sway, is said to have assaulted and raped them. Like Osho, Bikram was an Indian immigrant, had a hypnotic effect on people, and ultimately headed a cult – the yogic was like a jail warden, his followers inmates, and they were, for no fault of theirs, punished.
The allegations and lawsuits against Choudhury have been public for more than half-a-decade, but they’ve found a new form in Eva Orner’s documentary, recently released on Netflix, called Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator. Orner begins the documentary chronologically, in the early ’70s, when Bikram came to the US. His life sounds like a dream immigrant story, a stranger at first – “I came to America with nothing, zero,” he tells a journalist in archival footage – who later made the entire country fall in love with him; the stranger became not just a citizen but also a celebrity. His first student? Elvis Presley. More big names followed: George Harrison, Richard Nixon, who, according to Choudhury, “gifted” him a green card for fixing his broken knee.
Dressed in tiny black speedos, wearing a Rolex and also a headband, Choudhury (at times, literally) towered over his students, flinging instructions, accusations and slurs at them. To mimic the Calcutta heat, where he learnt yoga, the temperature in the room was amped up to around 45 degrees – the students melted in the heat, relinquishing their brains and bodies. Choudhury, on the other hand, sat on an elevated platform, as if it were a throne, with AC ducts cooling the back of his head.
He was a teacher, a bully, a mind reader, a performer, a showman — “Do you trust me? Do you have a choice? This is like an Indian marriage: no choice” — and sometimes, he sang. And his yoga worked like mysterious magic. The students admired his teaching; they loved their teacher. In subsequent decades, Choudhury acquired a fleet of Rolls Royce and Bentley, an 8,000-square feet mansion in Beverly Hills, more celebrity clients, and profiles and interviews in prestigious American media outlets.
Bikram’s cinematography sees this new money, and the guru’s god-like status, as a dreaded presence, shooting Beverly Hills and, indeed, Choudhury from different low-angle shots, amplifying their stature, mimicking how they must have appeared to many naïve students. Orner also tells us, often in Choudhury’s own words, his self-mythologising tales: him winning the National Yoga Championship, in India, thrice in the early ’60s; his plans of competing at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as a weightlifter, which only got thwarted because of a last-minute injury; Choudhury claiming in several interviews that he slept less than “30 hours a month”, that his yoga had benefitted “half a billion people”, and how he was the “most spiritual — most pure — man ever”.
Bikram Choudhury. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/yanivnord CC BY 2.0
Perceptive interviews
Then come the accusations — and they follow a pattern. Orner is a perceptive interviewer and a patient listener, allowing us to glean important insights from the survivors’ accounts. For instance, two of them — one of sexual assault and the other of rape — who were also Choudhury’s students, wished him goodnight after the horrific incidents. Male trainers, who kept quiet even after hearing about Choudhury’s predatory ways, contemplate their complicity; one of them breaks down. Orner’s persistence helps her sketch a larger picture, whose framework is all too familiar: a powerful man, abusing his status, enabled by the system integral to his success. (Choudhury refused to be interviewed for the documentary, and he has denied all charges.)
In the past few years, numerous narratives like these have come to light and Bikram faithfully follows their trails. However, there’s a clever twist at the end of the documentary, where it cuts back to Kolkata and fact-checks all claims of Bikram: remember that Yoga Championship — did India even have one at the time? Or the Tokyo Olympics, or Nixon gifting him a green card. These revelations add an additional layer to Choudhury, of the vast disconnect between the persona and person, serving as a fine blueprint to examine sexual predators from close.
Bikram would have felt more powerful had this been the first piece on Choudhury — if it were, say, a conversation starter on the man, but it’s not. Choudhury’s story — of rise, fall, and indictment — has been covered in the form of a profile, book, investigation, and podcast. As a result, apart from the visual form and some new revelations, Bikram feels more like skimming the water than a deep-dive. Orner concentrates solely on Choudhury’s transgressions and provocative personality, leaving some crucial parts of the puzzle — such as the involvement of his wife, the other troubling parts of his character (his racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, among several others, which are cursorily mentioned) — incomplete, in effect giving the impression that we did see a story, but a part of one that has much more to reveal.
But it is still heartening that a documentary like Bikram exists. Just by being on a platform like Netflix, this story will reach different audiences, in many countries, who will watch it and become rightfully cautious. Remember, Choudhury is still conducting yoga sessions across the globe. Choudhury, as we find out from the documentary, continues to flourish, shows absolutely no remorse, and has, if anything, become more uncouth and combative. But there’s a difference this time: now, thousands, if not lakhs, will be able to see through his charade. The guru in black speedos is finally naked.