B. K. S. Iyengar, Who Helped Bring Yoga to
the West, Dies at 95
By ELLEN BARRYAUG. 20, 2014
NEW DELHI — B. K. S. Iyengar, who helped introduce the practice
of yoga to a Western world awakening to the notion of an inner life, died on
Wednesday in the southern Indian city of Pune. He was 95.
The cause was heart
failure, said Abhijata Sridhar-Iyengar, his granddaughter.
After
surviving tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria as a child, Mr. Iyengar credited
yoga with saving his life. He spent his midteens demonstrating “the most
impressive and bewildering” positions in the court of the Maharaja of Mysore,
he later recalled.
A
meeting in 1952 with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, an early yoga devotee,
proved to be a turning point, and Mr. Iyengar began traveling with Mr. Menuhin,
eventually opening institutes on six continents.
Among his devotees were the novelist Aldous
Huxley, the actress Annette Bening and the designer Donna Karan, as well as a
who’s who of prominent Indian figures, including the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar
and the Bollywood siren Kareena Kapoor. He famously taught Queen Elisabeth of
Belgium, 85 at the time, to stand on her head.
In a 2005 book, “Light on Life,” Mr. Iyengar mused about the
vast changes he had seen.
“I
set off in yoga 70 years ago when ridicule, rejection and outright condemnation
were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India,” he
wrote. “Indeed, if I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the
great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with
less derision and won more respect.”
The
news about Mr. Iyengar — or “guru-ji,” as many here called him, using a
Sanskrit honorific — rippled through India on Wednesday morning. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi said on Twitter that he was “deeply saddened” by Mr.
Iyengar’s death and offered “condolences to his followers all over the world.”
Mr.
Iyengar’s practice is characterized by long asanas, oor postures, that require
extraordinary will and discipline. A reporter who watched daily practice in
2002, when Mr. Iyengar was 83, said that he held one headstand for six minutes,
swiveling his legs to the right and the left, and that when he finished, “his
shoulder-length hair was awry, he seemed physically depleted,” but he wore the
smile of a gleeful child.
Ms. Sridhar-Iyengar said her grandfather recognized early on
that yoga, up until then viewed as a mystical pursuit, “had something for
everybody, not just the intellectually or spiritually inclined.”
“He felt satisfied,” she said. “Even at the end, even a few
weeks before, he said, ‘I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.’ He took yoga to the
world. He knew that.”
Bellur
Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born on Dec. 14, 1918, into a poor family
in the southern state of Karnataka. The 11th of 13 children, he was born in the
midst of an influenza outbreak. Three of his siblings died before reaching
adulthood, and he watched his father, a teacher, die of appendicitis when he
was 9 years old. Mr. Iyengar himself contracted tuberculosis, typhoid and
malaria; by the time he began studying yoga, at 16, he was painfully frail.
“My arms were thin, my legs were spindly, and my stomach
protruded in an ungainly manner,” he wrote. “My head used to hang down, and I
had to lift it with great effort.”
His
first teacher was his brother-in-law, a Brahmin scholar who had set up a school
of yoga at the Jaganmohan Palace, and who sometimes denied his student food if
his performance was deemed inadequate. Mr. Iyengar, then a teenager, was the
youngest member of the Maharaja of Mysore’s entourage, and was asked to
demonstrate his ability to stretch and bend his body for visiting dignitaries
and guests.
Mr.
Menuhin, who visited India in 1952, heard of his practice and penciled him in
for a five-minute meeting, and was so instantly impressed that the session went
on for more than three hours. Mr. Iyengar recalled, in an interview with CNN,
that “the moment I adjusted him and took him, he said, ‘I’ve never felt this
sense of joy, elation.’ ”
The violinist later brought Mr. Iyengar to Switzerland, where he
introduced him to other prominent Westerners who became his followers. In his
first visit to New York in 1956, Mr. Iyengar said he encountered little
interest in yoga. It was not until the next decade that he began to attract
crowds.
“We were just coming out of the ’60s change-your-consciousness
thing, and many of us were in our heads, and wanting to meditate, and reach
Samadhi,” or enlightenment, Patricia Walden, a longtime student of Mr.
Iyengar’s, said in an interview in 2000. “Iyengar was, like, ‘Stand on your
feet. Feel your feet.’ He was so practical. His famous quote was, ‘How can you
know God if you don’t know your big toe?’ ”
Were it not for his celebrity in the West, Mr. Iyengar would
hardly have gained a reputation in India, said Latha Satish, who heads a major
yoga institute in the southern city of Chennai.
“He
was at the right time at the right place; he would not have survived here,” Mr.
Satish said. In India, he said, “everybody was interested in Western education;
yoga was not so popular.” Mr. Iyengar’s trademark improvisations — like the use
of blocks, blankets and straps to assist in holding difficult postures — were
adopted “because of the need of students abroad,” he said.
Mr.
Iyengar’s survivors include a son, Prashant; five daughters, Geeta, Vinita,
Suchita, Sunita and Savitha; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Past
students recalled Mr. Iyengar as warm and charismatic, but also strict.
Elizabeth Kadetsky, who wrote a memoir of the year she spent studying with him,
recalled that she was standing on her head in a class when he “took his fingers
and shoved them in my upper back, and bellowed, ‘In the headstand, this portion
of the back is not straight.’ ”
As
his influence spread, she said, he was fiercely competitive with other leading
yoga gurus, and would get cranky when asked about their methods.
“He
demanded loyalty,” she said. “One had to be 100 percent with him.”
By
the time he reached his 80s, Mr. Iyengar had become accustomed to the kind of
reception usually reserved for pop stars. As power yoga became a
multimillion-dollar industry, he occasionally cringed at the commercialization
of the practice, and wondered whether it would survive its own popularity. But
the pleasure he took in the practice was unaffected.
At
the end of a session in 2002, he lay on his back, knees bent so that his calves
were beneath his thighs, arms out to either side, weights holding him down. He
lay still for 12 minutes, perfectly immobile except for the twitch of a pinkie.
Asked what he was thinking, he replied, “Nothing.”
“I
can remain thoughtfully thoughtless,” he said. “It is not an empty mind.”
