180 EpilogueThe man driving the motorbike is Biswanath Ghosh, nephew of Paramahansa
Yogananda and son of Bishnu Ghosh.
This young “sideshow” Bikram, with his tiny Speedo and his bed of nails, is the
perfect contemporary incarnation of the Yogi ascetic. Four decades later, the pic-
ture is even more iconographically mind- boggling : Choudhury, the founder of
Bikram Yoga, teaches his classes clad in his signature Speedo (now often leopard-
print) and a diamond- encrusted Rolex, managing to evoke the ascetic- turned-
capitalist Maharaja. In the figure of Bikram Choudhury, we encounter a sort of
postmodern Yogi— a superman who eats a single meal a day (chicken or beef
only), drinks nothing but water and Coke, and needs only two hours of sleep per
night.^3 Indeed, through a complex set of calculations that account for the time
an average human being spends sleeping, Choudhury has determined that he is
approximately 220 years old.^4
As it is commonly recounted, Choudhury’s biography is really more of an
auto- hagiography in its own right, except that his miracles usually involve cur-
ing celebrities and inventing the disco ball. When not in his teaching uniform,
Choudhury adopts the style of Michael Jackson’s glimmering gangster, codi-
fied somewhere between “Billie Jean” (1982) and “Smooth Criminal” (1987),
which seems fair given that Choudhury claims to have launched Jackson’s career.
Benjamin Lorr, in his memoir- cum- ethnography of the competitive Bikram Yoga
community, reports having stood behind Choudhury “when he thought he was
off- mic and heard him muttering to himself over and over that he is ‘Bikram, a
gangster like Cagney, like De Niro, like James Caan, like my most favorite Mr.
James Caan, Sonny Sonny Sonny Sonny Boy’ while rubbing his hands and cack-
ling to himself.” This seems like an unethically personal detail to reveal, except
that Lorr claims to have heard the same speech broadcast to an audience of hun-
dreds on several other occasions.^5 Choudhury’s behavior would seem insane if it
were not so effective. His persona is a study in self- invention.
Here is yet another story. Bikram Choudhury was born in Calcutta in
1946.^6 We know little about his parents, except that they were the exacting
type and threw their child into an intense yogic regimen at the tender age of
three. He was handed over to Bishnu Ghosh, Yogananda’s younger brother,
soon thereafter— at the age of five or six, by most accounts. It was 1952, the same
year that Yogananda took his final samādhi. Ghosh was by this time like a more
finely muscled version of his older brother, performing superhuman feats that
included stopping the heart, allowing an elephant to walk across his chest, and
bending heavy iron bars. Under Ghosh, Choudhury’s training intensified. He
won the Indian National Yoga Competition at the age of thirteen and held the
title, undefeated, for three years until he retired at the request of none other
than the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar himself. After this he ran marathons, lifted