![]() At the invitation of the progressive Maharaja of Mysore, a patron of traditional Indian arts and an avid sportsman, he ran a yoga shala at the palace, where he taught yogic physical culture to royal boys. ![]() Krishnamacharya, a brilliant scholar who had sacrificed respectability to pursue the outré path of hatha yoga, was at the forefront of this renaissance. As the nationalist movement gained steam and Indians turned away from foreign imports- replacing Western clothing with homespun khadi cloth, for example-nationalists found in the old hatha yoga the basis for a physical culture that was distinctly Indian. Indian nationalists were particularly taken with the global vogue for “physical culture,” in part because British domination was often justified in terms of physical superiority. He arrived at a time of enormous ferment in the development of modern yoga. When Iyengar was sixteen, in 1934, he was sent to live with his sister and her husband, Krishnamacharya, in Mysore, a green, temperate city not far from Bangalore. ![]() “My sisters and sisters-in-law used to say that my head would hang down on a repulsive body in such a way that they never touched me on account of my appearance,” he wrote in the essay “My Yogic Journey.” He left secondary school after failing an exam and losing his scholarship, and never received further education. Before Iyengar found yoga, he said many times, he was a sickly boy, enervated by tropical diseases. ![]() Iyengar was the eleventh of thirteen children born into a poor South Indian family after his father’s death, when he was eight years old, they neared destitution. With his mane of white hair and intense, laughing eyes topped by bushy caterpillar brows, he seemed, in his nineties, impossibly vital, as if he had actually discovered a yogic method for cheating death. Iyengar sat at the head of a table in a windowless basement library surrounded by Western students bent over research and translation projects. I’d gone there to interview him for my book about Indra Devi, an actress born in Russia, who’d studied with Iyengar’s brother-in-law, the guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. I met Iyengar in 2010, at his institute in Pune, a city about a hundred miles south of Mumbai, where students from all over the world travelled to study with the revered yoga master. Iyengar, the author of the 1966 yoga bible “Light on Yoga,” who died this week at the age of ninety-five. A central figure in this transformation was B. Until the twentieth century, educated Indians and Westerners alike tended to disdain the occult practices denoted by the term "hatha yoga." “We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult and cannot be learnt in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth,” wrote Swami Vivekananda, who did much to popularize yoga philosophy in the West with his 1896 book, “Raja Yoga.” Only in the modern era has hatha yoga been transformed into a wholesome, accessible regimen for health and well-being. There are instructions for drawing discharged semen back into the penis, so as to overcome death, and for severing the tendon connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth, and lengthening it so that it can touch the forehead. There are no sun salutations, no downward-facing dogs or warriors. Fifteen poses appear in the “Hatha Yoga Pradipika,” most of them seated or supine. Instructions for postures, or asanas, appeared much later, in medieval tantra-inflected texts, such as the “Hatha Yoga Pradipika.” Even in those works, however, you won’t find many of the positions taught today as yoga. Yoga, the sutras say, “is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness.” The total of their guidance about posture is that it should be “steady and comfortable.” This requires an imaginative leap, because the yoga sutras say next to nothing about physical poses their overriding concern is the workings of the mind. In contemporary yoga classes, teachers often speak of Patanjali’s “Yoga Sutras,” a philosophical text compiled around two thousand years ago, as the wellspring of the practice. In Eka Pada Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (bridge pose), in Bangalore, 1989.
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