The thousands-years-old practice of yoga is synonymous in most people’s minds with sacredness, serenity, and the highest of human ideals. This is generally true whether one is a practitioner or not. Imagine then, how traumatic it must be to have one of the world’s leading practitioners rage to your face, “Women are b*tches and whores. They’re here for one thing, to spread their legs.” This is the over-the-top nightmare in which Pandhora Williams found herself while attending a Bikram Yoga training course in 2010 for which, by the way, she paid $11,000.
Those weren’t the only insults celebrity yogi Bikram Choudhury, hurled at Williams, one of the only Black women in his training class. “We don’t sell love here” he reportedly barked at her. Then, “Get out!” Choudhury proceeded, according to Williams, to issue a directive to the rest of the students, which numbered in the hundreds, “Get this Black b*tch out of here. She’s a cancer!”
Williams and other women such as Sarah Baughn, Larissa Anderson, and Choudhury’s former legal advisor Minaskshi “Micki” Jafa-Bodden appear in the new Netflix film, “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Preator,” which charts the rise of the iconoclastic (and apparently quite perverse) Choudhury into the upper echelons of America’s celebrity yoga culture, to his fall under numerous sexual assault allegations as the #MeToo movement began gaining its greatest momentum. Choudhury has reportedly worked with numerous celebrities including Quincy Jones and Madonna.
Born in India, Choudhury studied with famed yogi Bishnu Ghosh before arriving in the United States in the ’70s. He has reportedly stated that Elvis Presley was his first client and that Richard Nixon gifted him a green card after he cured the disgraced 37th president’s bad leg. That assertion was investigated by the producers of “Bikram” and found to be most likely untrue. Though he put them forward as his own copyrighted creation, the twenty-six positions associated with Bikram Yoga were stolen from Choudhury’s mentor.
What is not apocryphal, is Williams and many others finally spoke up about Choudhury’s sexual, verbal, emotional, and physical abuse even as his brand flourished in Bikram Yoga franchises all over the country. Multiple lawsuits were waged against him; one by Williams herself for his verbal abuse and by Jafa-Bodden, who was sexually harassed, physically assaulted and had her pay withheld when she confronted him about the charges made against him.
It is the sexual assaults that take up the bulk of the time in the Netflix documentary. Sickeningly familiar, they are many and they are all the more shocking because of the context. Like Catholic sex scandals, they tend to more deeply wound the sense of spiritual order.
The figure of Choudhury is also familiar, so much so at this point it’s almost archetypal. He is overwhelmingly talented, overwhelmingly energetic, overwhelmingly megalomaniacal and greedy like so many who have been revealed in recent years to be high-profile serial sexual predators. Like them, he also has a preternatural proficiency at harnessing his natural abilities and transforming them into the type of power needed to gain access to women who would otherwise be inaccessible to him, and to cross social boundaries without reprisal.
“Bikram” shows Choudhury as a cross between a grifter and cult leader; one who had a talent for choosing marks who possibly carried within them a kernel of masochism. Since much of his belittling of others was done in front of an audience, slight sadism may have been a factor as well. In “Bikram,” Choudhury comments to one attendee, “You need a pedicure,” as he corrected their position. To another, he loudly inquired if they were doing something about their big stomach.
Choudhury’s teacher training courses lasted nine weeks in a hotel where all attendees were obligated to stay. There were two daily mandatory one-and-half-hour hot yoga classes, which Choudhury conducted from his throne on a platform in front of his hundreds of students, belting out directions and insults at the sweltering throng of apprentices. The room was a blistering 104 degrees. “Bikram” exposes Choudhury’s secret for literally keeping himself (and himself alone) cool; a strategically placed air conditioner.
When Choudhury did alight from his platform, he strolled through the class and corrected hot-pants-and-bra clad students in often uncomfortably intimate ways. It was during one of these class corrections where he pressed his groin area against Baughn, who went on to sue him after he also allegedly attacked her in his hotel room.
“Bikram” illustrates how Choudhury, like many abusers, isolated his students thus making it easier to victimize those he chose to. The structure of the business trapped aspiring yoga teachers under Choudhury’s rules if they wanted to teach under his brand. It’s why many overlooked the abuse. As one former student stated, “If we didn’t go back or started speaking out, we would be professionally exiled.”
In one sequence, Anderson recounted being violently assaulted by Choudhury in his home while his wife and children slept upstairs. It is her behavior afterward though, that will leave viewers’ mouths agape.
Near the beginning of “Bikram,” a former student who declares that Choudhury’s machinations cured her arthritis in her hip, explains, “People found this yoga sometimes at their most broken.” Even as Choudhury used the sacred to heal physical wounds, it was just that emotional brokenness he counted on to indulge his proclivity for the profane.