Golden Temple Loses Tea to Bibiji

By Kamalla Rose Kaur, Special to Sikh News Network
Posted: Thursday, October 20, 2011 | 10:11 pm

Inderjit Kaur Puri, widow of the late religious leader Yogi Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, is now the proud owner of the trademarks ‘Yogi’ and ‘Yogi Tea,’ and she is not licensing them back to Golden Temple of Oregon, the Eugene food company that partially funds his nonprofit organizations, including the religious organizations, Sikh Dharma International and 3HO (Happy, Healthy, Holy Organization), a group that teaches Kundalini yoga.

‘Bibiji,’ as she is popularly known, won her lawsuit against the food company on July 29. Her complaint was first filed in the US District Court, Central District of California on February 5, 2010, and ended on June 9, 2010, with an order to arbitrate. The arbitration landed at the Arbitration Service of Portland, Oregon, in January 2011, and ended in a favorable decision for Bibiji.

Sikhs on the Yogi's Dharma “We feel shame over how Yogi Bhajan conned young people,” said Harmander Singh of Sikhs of England, coach of Fauja Singh, the 100-year-old world record marathon runner, and London's ‘Sikhs In The City' team. “We Sikhs live by the principles of remembering God, working hard and sharing with others. Nowhere is there any promotion of… tantra and yoga gimmicks in the Sikh scriptures.” Yet Yogi Bhajan was given the title ‘Siri Singh Sahib’ by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 1971, and awarded the rare honorific title of ‘Panth Rattan,’ or Jewel of the Sikh Nation, in 1999 at Anandpur Sahib. His wife also was awarded the ‘Panth Rattan’ in 2005 at Takht Patna Sahib. According to the World Sikh Council – America Region, a coalition of 47 gurdwaras and Sikh organizations, Yogi Bhajan told one of its members: “Sikhs of India had fulfilled their mission by preserving the Divine Word, Siri Guru Granth Sahib, for three centuries; that the Guru had now come to America; that, henceforth, Sikhism would spread from here to the rest of the world; and that he was not interested in Sikhs from India… These (and other) claims by Sardar Harbhajan Singh were resented by many Sikhs and took some of the gloss off the work he had done.”

Born into the Uppal family on January 22, 1935, in Wazirabad, Gujranwala District, now in West Pakistan, Bibiji married her husband in Delhi, in 1954, and had three children.

According to 3HOhistory.com, her husband, also known as Yogi Bhajan, immigrated to Canada in 1968 and settled in Los Angeles to teach Kundalini and White Tantric yogas to the hippie counterculture of California and New Mexico. His family soon followed.

“…(The couple) created a new culture of Sikhi as founded by Guru Nanak, the first Guru of the Sikhs,” the Web site says.

Although the community kept the outward appearance of Sikhs, the bana of beard and dastaar, and now calls itself ‘Sikh Dharma,’ many of its practices, such as faith-based yoga, contradict the fundamental teachings of the Sikh faith, and has perturbed many Sikhs of Indian origin.

YOGI TEA

But in his new dharma, the yogi had found his calling. Capitalization quickly followed.

According to the arbitration documents, Yogi Bhajan was known for serving an herbal tea at his Kundalini yoga classes. It became known as Yogi Tea. As the community expanded and built ashrams throughout the United States, it was common for yoga teachers to serve Yogi Tea at yoga classes.

Yogi Bhajan encouraged his followers to support themselves by establishing businesses that employed members of his dharma. Among their early businesses was the Golden Temple Conscious Cookery Restaurants, which served Yogi Tea.

The Golden Temple Tea Company was formed in the early 1980s by three of the yogi’s followers. It began doing business as the Yogi Tea Company by selling prepackaged Yogi Tea to Golden Temple restaurants and to Golden Temple Natural Foods Stores, another new business. The company grew to eventually include natural food products, and reorganized as Yogi G.

The three original founders then donated the company to Sikh Dharma International, a non-profit corporation controlled by Yogi Bhajan. In the early 1990s, Yogi G merged into Golden Temple of Oregon, a cereal and baked-goods company, which also was donated to the dharma.

Golden Temple then sold its baked-goods business in May 2010 to Hearthside Food Solutions of Illinois for $71 million, but continues to make Yogi Tea from its factories in Ohio and Europe.

In 2009, sales of Yogi Tea exceeded $27million, the document says.

LICENSE

Yogi Bhajan initially gave Golden Temple a verbal license to the Yogi Tea recipe, and formalized a written agreement in 1993 with a trademark license. In July 2004, Golden Temple received a new trademark license from Yogi Bhajan and Bibiji’s joint living trust. The company was given rights to use his name, likeness and signature as trademarks to sell tea, cereal and herbal products.

Kartar Singh Khalsa, president of Golden Temple, told the court that the license was “devised to provide Yogi Bhajan a stream of income in the form of royalties, a portion of which Yogi Bhajan would use to fund his non-profits,” the document says.

Just days before Yogi Bhajan’s death in October 2004, another agreement extended Golden Temple’s license from 10 years to 75 years.

According to the trust, the royalties were now to be split, with 50 percent going to his wife and the other 50 percent going to his Administrative Trust, with Yogi Bhajan’s 15 personal staff members as its beneficiaries.