Bikram Choudhury (born 1944) is an Indian-American yoga guru, and the founder of Bikram Yoga, a form of hot yoga consisting of a fixed series of 26 postures practised in a hot environment of . The business became a success in the United States and then across the Western world, with a variety of celebrity pupils. His former wife Rajashree Choudhury assisted him in the yoga business. In 2009, he began a series of copyright claims to protect the series of postures of Bikram Yoga; this was ultimately unsuccessful, and other studios continue to teach the series. Choudhury was the subject of civil suits alleging sexual assault and discrimination against racial and sexual minorities. In 2017, a court awarded $7 million to his former lawyer, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, who gained control of his yoga business when Choudhury fled to India without paying her. Since then he has continued to train yoga teachers outside the United States in countries including Spain and Mexico. Life and work Early life Bikram Choudhury was born in Calcutta, British India in 1944. He claimed to have begun studying yoga under Bishnu Charan Ghosh, and to have won the National India Yoga Championship for three consecutive years in his teens. However, the first ever Yoga competition in India took place in 1974, long after he had left the country. Recent evidence from interviews for the podcast series "30for30" on Choudhury (2018, ESPN) and from Jerome Armstrong's book, Calcutta Yoga, have proven his claim of winning the National India Yoga Championships to be false and also that he did not start his training under Ghosh at the age of 5 but rather in 1962 when he was 18. His initial focus was on bodybuilding and massage. A few years later, during 1969, Bikram completed in six months his training on Asanas under Ghosh and other senior teachers, but he did not get the chance to finish his training on Pranayama (breathing exercises), Bandha (bodily locks) or Dhyāna (focused meditation) before Ghosh died in 1970. Choudhury developed a 26-posture series, by piecing together existing sequences from over 500 poses and variations created by Ghosh, and put it into his signature series which takes about ninety minutes to perform. The heat in which Bikram Yoga is practiced is, according to Choudhury, meant to mimic the climate of India. Choudhury was closely associated with the United States's competitive yoga from its