Bikram yoga and its charismatic creator, Bikram Choudhury, are the subjects of the latest season of the “30 for 30” podcast series. Hosted and reported by the producer Julia Lowrie Henderson, who practiced Bikram daily and managed a Bikram studio for several years, the series traces the rise and fall of Choudhury and the success of his athletic, punishing, rejuvenating form of yoga, which involves twenty-six poses and two breathing exercises performed over ninety minutes in a hot studio. Bikram is designed, Henderson says, “to push you to the limits of what you can endure—to make you desperate for air and water and relief.” For thousands of people in the past four decades, the practice became a way of life, and Choudhury was a powerful, respected figure. He also abused that power: in 2016, he left the United States in the wake of multiple sexual-assault charges. Bikram “has healed and helped tens of thousands of people at minimum,” a writer named Benjamin Lorr says early in the podcast, and has also “hurt and destroyed thousands of lives.”
“Bikram” is a departure for “30 for 30,” a sports-stories podcast usually hosted by Jody Avirgan that was spun off from the ESPN documentary series of the same name. (The TV series produced the Oscar-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” in 2016.) The first two seasons of the “30 for 30” podcast, which came out last year, feature stand-alone episodes about a variety of subjects—the history of “Yankees Suck” T-shirts, for example, or of the famed 1992 decathletes Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson. “Bikram” is the show’s first venture into a serialized in-depth narrative, and, like yoga, it provides perspective on personal transformation and the connection between mind and body. Unlike yoga, it takes us to some dark places. Henderson navigates all of it with sensitivity and care.
Bikram Choudhury was born in Calcutta in 1944. During his youth, he claims, he was mentored by the yoga master Bishnu Charan Ghosh, won national yoga championships, and was an accomplished weight lifter. (The podcast questions these assertions.) In 1973, after teaching yoga in Japan and San Francisco—and claiming to have cured Richard Nixon of phlebitis—he moved to Los Angeles and opened a yoga studio in Beverly Hills. There, he swiftly brought health, joy, pain, and sweat to a glamorous clientele eager for fitness and inspiration. “Bikram” paints a vivid, often entertaining picture of personal searching in nineteen-seventies Hollywood, and the voices of interviewees from that heady time are a highlight of the series.
“Loretta Swit, Hot Lips Houlihan, came to dinner, and Loretta was so excited,” Bonnie Jones Reynolds, the wife of the “M*A*S*H” producer Gene Reynolds, says. Swit raved about Bikram; Reynolds, who’d had neck problems, went to a class and hid behind Shirley MacLaine. When Choudhury spotted her, he said, “Look at that junk body!” and promised that if she came to him every day for two months he’d give her “a new life.” “And he did,” she says. “He was just the one of the most beautiful people who ever lived on this earth.” Reynolds later co-authored Choudhury’s first book.
Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Raquel Welch, and Quincy Jones became Bikram devotees. One actor says that people in Beverly Hills, used to being catered to, went to Bikram “to get our asses kicked.” Choudhury was a giving instructor, but he could be demanding, even brutal. Like a kind of spiritual drill sergeant, he broke people down and built them back up, in a room thick with heat and sweat. We hear archival audio of him encouraging, joking, berating. As students lay resting after the workout, he would sing them an Indian lullaby. We hear this, and it’s lovely. Kids came, too—young Jason and Justine Bateman took classes alongside their father. Justine says that before class, Choudhury would pick a kid “to come give him a little shoulder massage while everybody was getting settled in.” It was a “nice thing” to get picked to “give him a little work,” she says.
Listening to “Bikram,” I often thought of Dan Taberski’s podcast “Missing Richard Simmons,” from last year, which, though flawed, did a masterly job of profiling a generous, at times manic exercise guru who earned his students’ intense dedication as his regimes transformed their bodies and emotions. “Missing Richard Simmons” seemed to suggest that Simmons had given and given until there was nothing left—so much so that he had to disappear for his own sanity. Choudhury’s story, and his relationship to his disciples, is almost the opposite.
Once Choudhury hit L.A., his profile skyrocketed, as did his yoga practice, his income, and, apparently, his ego. “From the beginning, Bikram seemed to understand just how important his proximity to celebrity was to his success,” Henderson says. He relished fun—fast food, disco dancing—and the trappings of success, wearing a Rolex and driving a Rolls-Royce. In 1984, he married Rajashree Chakrabarti, the young yoga champion of India, and showed her off on “The Merv Griffin Show.” In 1978, he published his book; in 1984, Raquel Welch published a similar one, with a video, which was, as Henderson notes, both a betrayal and an opportunity. Choudhury sued her and got a settlement that helped him build a house in Beverly Hills and expand his business. In the nineties, as yoga began to increase in popularity in the U.S., Choudhury started a teacher-training program. And, in 1998, Madonna declared her love of yoga on “Oprah.” That, according to Jimmy Barkan, a former student, was when Choudhury’s business “went nuts.”
In the two-thousands, Choudhury’s training sessions—nine weeks at ten thousand dollars a student—took off. They were held at resorts or hotels. Photographs show Choudhury leading classes, wearing a black Speedo, in front of hundreds of students. One compared training sessions to being in a megachurch. “It really felt like we were all a big family that all wanted the world to be a better place,” Jill Lawler, who went to teacher training at age eighteen, says. In class, Choudhury was inspiring, grandiose (“So your job, my job, together, is to save almost seven billion people’s life”), compassionate, jokey (“Welcome to Bikram’s torture chamber, to kill yourself for next ninety minutes”), verbally abusive, sexist. It made for a disorienting atmosphere. Trainees, driven hard in a hot room, might vomit, or worse. As Choudhury taught, “there were at least two people massaging him, one on either side, massaging his feet, sometimes also massaging his hands, and at least one other person brushing his hair,” Tiffany Friedman, a trainer, says. At night, female staff members were encouraged to visit his suite; some were allegedly raped or otherwise sexually abused. We hear painful accounts, including from Lawler, who became the sixth woman to file sexual-assault charges against Choudhury. Choudhury denied the allegations, but, in 2016, returned to India. The yoga, meanwhile, continues.
Bikram yoga is not a cult, but its story has cultish contours. We know this because cults—or the study of them—are having something of a moment. Recent months have provided us with “Wild Wild Country,” on Netflix, about Rajneesh and Rajneeshpuram; “Heaven’s Gate,” hosted by Glynn Washington, who was raised in an apocalyptic group; and “Dear Franklin Jones,” a thoughtful podcast by the audio producer Jonathan Hirsch, who grew up following Jones, also known as Adi Da, with his parents. Leah Remini’s series “Scientology and Its Aftermath” and Lawrence Wright’s reporting have vastly furthered our understanding of that institution.
These works and “Bikram” have some common elements. Many of their stories begin in times of social upheaval—the clamor of the sixties, Hollywood of the seventies—and today’s fractious political climate might seem to belong to the same trend. In these series, we often hear in people’s voices the intensity of devotion, the lingering hurt about betrayal, and the gratitude, past or present, for something that made them feel better. Sometimes, people reminiscing about a leader they used to believe in sound like a brokenhearted ex, or an angry one. Former Bikram devotees—like so many of us—have come to despise a man whose creation they love. But there is, still, a hope that the creation itself endures, and that the spirit of its message can be upheld. As Jennifer Boyle, a Bikram teacher, says at the end of the series, “Maybe there will be a day when people can do the yoga and not even know that there was ever this creepy fucking dude with a skullet behind it.”
