Remembering BKS Iyengar: India's greatest cultural ambassador

I learned more about BKS Iyengar in California than in Calcutta. I knew vaguely that yogashalas existed in India but dhanurasanas were not really very much a part of our middle-class Macaulayputra upbringing. I just never grew up with yoga. But because I was Indian, Americans didn’t even ask if I knew yoga. They would ask what kind of yoga did you grow up with? Iyengar? Ashtanga? Jivamukti? My TOEFL and GRE homework had certainly not prepped me for that. [caption id=“attachment_1672867” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] BKS Iyengar. Image courtesy: Facebook[/caption] In 2005 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors even declared a BKS Iyengar Day in the city much to my embarrassment. I was embarrassed because I knew so little about the man who in terms of impact was probably India’s biggest cultural ambassador to the West. Only classical music fans and some hippies appreciated Ravi Shankar. Only literary types got into Salman Rushdie. But Americans of all kinds did yoga. It’s unfair to his very long and very illustrious career, but this Padma Vibhushan’s obituaries will mostly laud him as the man who took yoga to the West. And it really took off beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. It’s a 5 billion dollar industry according to The New York Times — one of the original Indian success stories in chasing the American Dream. Yet the relationship between the West and India via yoga remains as Facebook would say “complicated”. Elizabeth Kadetsky wrote a book about Iyengar called First There is a Mountain. She says Iyengar became popular in the West thanks, in part, to the patronage of violin maestro Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin, incidentally also invited Ali Akbar Khan to New York and changed the course of Indian classical music. Iyengar taught Menuhin to stand on his head and Menuhin’s push helped Iyengar get a leg up in the West. That western embrace helped make his reputation back in India. As a passenger on a train told Kadestky on learning that yoga was popular in the West — “Yes, and so it will come to India. All things come here backwards.” Yoga might trace its roots to Patanjali but it has made its way back to India through more convoluted routes. And while America embraced yoga it did not mean it embraced Indians. Kadetsky noticed an unspoken segregation even at the Iyengar Institute in Pune though Pune citizens were very proud of their native son. “The westerners were not interested in the city, in India, or in learning Marathi or Hindi — they just were interested in Iyengar,” she says. At the same time some of the Indians were bemused by people like her. They found it eccentric that she had come all the way from New York to study something that was in their backyard. It is Iyengar’s great fortune and enormous achievement that as a man from a poor family, the 11th of 13 children, racked by all kinds of diseases from influenza to tuberculosis, he rose to the heights he did. “He did not just practice yoga. He marketed it, he packaged it, he documented it with books like Light on Yoga. He continued to practice into his 90s and even explored how disabled people could practice yoga after he had an accident himself. He became a yoga entrepreneur, not shy to tout the sexual benefits of doing yoga in order to attract students in the West. “I thought until and unless I win them over, there won’t be any other way,” he told IBNLive . However that success story is not without a price tag. Yoga is ferociously competitive now. Yoga schools in the US routinely sue each other. “It’s ridiculous that teachers get so possessive about techniques,” says Kadetsky. “After all it is not a competition for customers.” Gurus frown on other gurus as if there is a fight for who owns yoga. And in the process, the real Iyengar could get lost. Here was a man who almost by sheer power of his personality helped bridge east and west with yoga and built a yoga empire. But to run that empire he was surrounded by a coterie of protective handlers and relatives, who doled out perks like petty satraps. Kadetsky remembers how she had a hard time getting a response from anyone at the Institute when she sought permission to use some of his writings in the book. Ultimately, frustrated, she wrote a letter to Iyengar himself. In two weeks she got a letter in his quirky English saying “Use whatever you want.” That she says is the real Iyengar she met in Pune, far less protective about his art than his gatekeepers. He would suddenly say, “Hey, so you want to ask on short question?” and then expound on everything from yoga to colonisation to his heart attack. She remembers his tough love in class as he barked, “Sorry to tell you, you are like donkeys! Extend the inner leg in downward dog.” She writes about the first time she saw him in New York. He looked smaller than in his pictures. He had a hefty belly and flashing eyes and heartily tucked into gelatinous rice puddings and oily curries at an Indian buffet. “I imagined the food sinking into his big belly. I saw it undulating on its way there, sprouting bacteria as it swam,” writes Kadetsky. She was baffled — the buffet laden with refined carbohydrates and sugar and oil seemed to run counter to ideas she had about vegetarianism, purity and yoga. But that is the real surprise of a legend like Iyengar. Every time you think you have figured him out there’s a twist in the asana. Today the story of yoga is at a curious juncture. In India, says Kate Churchill, the director of the yoga documentary Enlighten Up, power yoga studios are cropping up in cities like Mumbai. “And they are becoming popular because Madonna does yoga. It has nothing to do with India,” says Churchill. “Whereas if you go to a power studio in the US they will stay it’s a 5000 year old tradition.” Personal instructors come to homes and offices in India to teach yoga now and brag it’s absolutely “authentic top notch yoga” learned from American DVDs. Meanwhile in America, the Hindu American Foundation launched a campaign to Take Back Yoga and reclaim its Hindu roots instead of treating it as just a form of exercise while evangelical Christian groups want it banned for public school gym classes because they consider it part of a heathen religion and a Southern Baptist preacher practically likened it to the work of the devil. But then again, arch conservative and the very all-American Sarah Palin does yoga. Iyengar would probably have a good chuckle because he thrived amongst all these contradictions. Kadetsky remembers being at his school during the height of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. She found that Murli Manohar Joshi’s daughter was a big patron of the institute and it made her worry whether her yoga fees very helping fund the Ayodhya movement. But as she tried to figure out the relationship between yoga and Hindutva, she found to her surprise that modern yoga had been nurtured and kept alive by the wealthy and powerful Parsees. They were the ones who in some sense “adopted’ Iyengar after Mehli Mehta, father of conductor Zubin, introduced him to Menuhin. In a way that makes it an all-Indian story. The poor Brahmin from Bellur, supported by wealthy Parsees, befriended by an illustrious Jewish violinist, who takes yoga to a largely Christian country and then brings it back to his homeland. And along the way becomes an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. RIP Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar.You deserve your asana among the greats.