Almost every yoga class taught anywhere in the world today can be traced to one room in southern India.
Between 1926 and 1946, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught in the Mysore Palace, under the patronage of the Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV. Four of his students carried what they learned in different directions, and between them they built modern postural yoga.
That is a startlingly short chain for a practice routinely described as five thousand years old.
Krishnamacharya
He lived from 1888 to 1989, which is an extraordinary span in itself.
He was a formidable scholar before he was a yoga teacher. He trained in Sanskrit, logic, ritual and Indian philosophy, and held academic titles from several traditional institutions.
He is also said to have studied for years with a teacher in the Himalayas. Those details rest largely on his own account.
The Mysore Palace gave him a hall, a salary and students, and the students were mostly boys.
That context shaped what he taught. The Mysore period yoga was athletic, fast, and physically demanding, designed for adolescents in a palace gymnasium. The palace also housed Western gymnastic equipment and manuals, and the physical culture movement of the period was present in the room.
His teaching changed later. When he moved to Madras and taught adults and the unwell, his approach became slower and more individualised.
Both are Krishnamacharya. Which is why his students taught such different things.
Four Students, Four Traditions
B.K.S. Iyengar, 1918 to 2014, was Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law and, by his own account, was treated harshly. He was a sickly child sent to learn yoga partly for his health.
He built a method around precision of alignment and long holds. And he introduced props: belts, blocks, benches, ropes.
The props mattered more than they sound. They made postures accessible to people who could not otherwise attempt them at all.
Light on Yoga, published in 1966, became the reference text for a generation. Iyengar yoga is now taught worldwide with a rigorous teacher certification structure.
K. Pattabhi Jois, 1915 to 2009, systematised the fast, breath-linked sequences he had learned in Mysore into Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga: fixed series of postures, linked by vinyasa, practised in the same order every time.
The method spread widely from the 1970s and is the direct ancestor of most vinyasa and power yoga taught today.
It must also be said plainly that numerous students have alleged sexual assault by Jois during adjustments, over a period of years. Several senior Ashtanga teachers have since acknowledged the allegations and the failure of the community to act on them. Any honest account of this lineage has to include it.
Indra Devi, 1899 to 2002, was born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia. She persuaded Krishnamacharya to accept her as a student when he did not teach women or foreigners, reportedly at the Maharaja’s intervention.
She opened a studio in Hollywood in 1947, taught film actors, and later worked extensively in Latin America. She was the first significant Western populariser and the first woman in the lineage.
T.K.V. Desikachar, 1938 to 2016, was Krishnamacharya’s son. He developed the individualised approach of his father’s later years into what became known as Viniyoga: practice adapted to the specific person rather than the person adapted to a fixed practice.
What This Means for the Word Ancient
The postures and sequences taught in a modern class are not five thousand years old.
Some elements are medieval, from the hatha tradition. Some are modern, developed in Mysore in the 1930s. The specific assemblies are twentieth-century.
Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body, published in 2010, made this argument forcefully, pointing to European gymnastics, Scandinavian physical culture and Indian wrestling traditions as ingredients in modern postural yoga.
The picture has since become more nuanced. Jason Birch’s manuscript research has found medieval texts describing considerably more complex and non-seated postures than the four famous hatha works suggest, which pushes some of the material further back.
The current position, roughly stated, is that modern postural yoga is neither an unbroken ancient transmission nor a twentieth-century invention. It is a real tradition that was substantially reshaped in a specific period.
The Others
The Krishnamacharya lineage is not the only route, and it is worth noting the others.
Swami Sivananda, 1887 to 1963, was a physician before becoming a monk, and founded the Divine Life Society in Rishikesh in 1936. His students, including Swami Satchidananda and Swami Vishnudevananda, established schools across the West with a broader emphasis on philosophy and devotion alongside posture.
Yogi Bhajan brought a system he called Kundalini Yoga to the United States in 1968. It became widely taught, and it too has been the subject of substantial abuse allegations documented after his death.
Bikram Choudhury developed a fixed sequence practised in heated rooms, franchised it aggressively, and was found liable in civil proceedings involving sexual harassment.
That pattern is not incidental and should not be smoothed over. The transmission of yoga to the modern world runs through several figures who abused positions of considerable authority, and the communities around them were slow to respond.
Why It Still Matters
None of this makes a physical practice illegitimate.
It does mean that claims about antiquity should be treated carefully, that lineage is not a guarantee of anything, and that a student is entitled to ask where a teaching came from and who is telling them.
Krishnamacharya taught in a palace hall in Mysore for twenty years. What came out of that room reached millions of people, which is a genuine achievement, and it is a much stranger and more recent story than the one usually told.
Modern Yoga Teachers: Common Questions
Who is considered the father of modern yoga?
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, 1888 to 1989, who taught at the Mysore Palace from 1926 to 1946 and trained the teachers who shaped nearly all widely practised styles.
Who were his main students? B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and his son T.K.V. Desikachar, each of whom developed a distinct method.
Who was the first woman in the lineage?
Indra Devi, born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia, who was accepted as a student when Krishnamacharya did not teach women or foreigners.
Is modern yoga ancient?
Partly. Some elements are medieval, but the specific postural sequences taught today were substantially developed in the twentieth century.
What is Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga?
The fast, breath-linked method systematised by K. Pattabhi Jois from the Mysore teaching, using fixed series of postures practised in the same order.
Were there problems in these lineages?
Yes. Several prominent figures in the modern transmission of yoga, including Pattabhi Jois, Yogi Bhajan and Bikram Choudhury, have been credibly accused of serious abuse.
Sources consulted: Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (2010); James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (2017); B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga (1966); contemporaneous reporting on abuse allegations in modern yoga lineages.
Leave a Reply